Content is fuel: for your pipeline, for your brand, and your business as a whole. Unfortunately, it’s also true for every other B2B brand out there, vying for attention.
The main challenge for marketers is understanding how to cut through the noise with different types of content marketing that are relevant, engaging, and enable you to connect with your audience.
This is a guide to help you understand the importance of content marketing and how to connect with your audience. It’s important to understand how to create content that is relevant, engaging, and humanizes with your audience. By understanding how to create content that is authentic, relevant, and humanizes, you can connect with your audience in a way that is both effective and efficient.
Here are six tips that will help you create a B2B content marketing plan and do exactly that.
Make your brand memorable by bringing the people behind it into the limelight.
Is there something that people in your company love doing together? Are there some behind-the-scenes images or videos that position your brand in a way that would resonate with your audience? Authentic snapshots of your employees in action across multiple types of B2B content marketing brings your brand to life and help your customers understand your company values and philosophy.
By creating a video that spotlights your day-to-day activities, you can highlight your service offering without delivering a standard sales pitch. This content adds a personal, relatable touch wherever it lives—be it on your website, social media channels, or blog. Corporate video productions can create high-quality video content that fits the image of your brand.
This approach is brand storytelling at its finest because it triggers a positive, emotional response that feeds your content marketing funnel.
No matter how relevant or authentic your website content is, e-books and infographics don’t provide the personal touch your audience wants.
It ultimately comes down to this: people crave human interaction. They want to put a face to the name—or in this case, brand.
This is where in-person events come into play in your content marketing plan. Webinars, conference video calls, and tradeshows offer the opportunity for you to communicate directly—and build a genuine rapport—with your audience.
You can gather feedback from your customers and learn about your leads’ frustrations, pain points, and needs. Once that in-person connection is established, your communication will be more valuable and more effective, too. Going forward, you’ll know exactly how to connect those leads with the right content resources without needing a content marketing agency.
It’s not just a one-way street. Think about it: when your audience meets your team, they also get to learn about your company processes, your products, and yes, even the frustrations that you face. This makes them more empathetic to you and your company, which effectively humanizes your brand.
LinkedIn’s native group search and advanced search features allow you to filter prospects by location, current/past company, industry, language, and nonprofit interests. You can also go to the ‘People’ tab of any given company page which will reveal a list of potential contacts.
If you want a subtle way of introducing yourself to a lead or prospect without directly requesting a connection, you can simply follow them without the need to message them at first. This works well, particularly for top-of-funnel prospects who might not be ready for a conversation.
Once you have connected with prospects, nurture your new relationship by sharing relevant and educational B2B content marketing with them. This establishes your brand as an industry expert and keeps you top of mind as they determine if they are ready to make a purchase.
For example, Jobber is a field service scheduling software that also creates helpful content relevant to its target audience. If they were looking to attract electrician business owners to their product, they might share their electrician salary guide with them to establish themselves as an expert in their field.
LinkedIn makes for one of the most versatile content marketing tools by allowing you to share content directly with prospects. But be careful. Make sure content is specific to their needs or your outreach will likely be dismissed as spam.
YouTube is a content gold mine. Why? A lot of companies focus their B2B content marketing efforts on web content and blog posts to rank high on Google, so this specific platform tends to get pushed back in terms of priority.
But consider this: YouTube is the world’s second-largest search engine (after Google), so it’s easy to see why it’s also one of the most valuable content marketing tools. Using YouTube in your content marketing plan creates the opportunity for your brand to get discovered and connect with millions of people.
Popular (and effective) content ideas for this platform include:
You can pay close attention to your subscribers and what content they engage with the most, learn from your favorite channels, and, best of all, optimize your videos with specific keywords, banner images, thumbnails, and video descriptions. That way, your SEO will get you more views, more subscribers, and more clients.
Podcasts are a growing trend, especially when it comes to brand messaging and impactful conversations, and you should consider adding one into your content marketing plan. Do you have a topic that is related to your product or service? Invite other relevant professionals or employees in your field to openly discuss it in a podcast. Look for topics that your audience would like to listen to and then create a podcast content strategy, tailored to and directed at them. You can even repurpose your existing B2B content marketing into this format, to help drive brand messages home.
Podcasts allow you, as a brand, to speak directly to your market with relevant topics. Not only will they allow you to bring educational value to your audience, but you can also turn listeners into clients. Plus, homepage advertising will expose listeners to your product in an effective—and creative—way, as well as offering the opportunity to offer discount codes to listeners.
B2B content marketing is an effective way to promote company events. Your event promotion strategies should seek to establish what the goal of the event is, why people should attend, what is unique about it, and who will be attending.
Clarify these essential points to the audience and make sure you speak of the event’s background and its purpose. You should always try to avoid classic marketing techniques that oversell the event or refer to it as the ‘best event ever’. Instead, you should focus your efforts on appealing to your target audience’s actual need for this kind of event. What question or problem will your event address and solve?
This way you can promote your event, before and after it has happened, setting the groundwork for future events and attracting new attendees. Not only does this grow your audience but it also helps to feed your content marketing funnel.
So, what is content syndication?
Essentially, content syndication is the process of repurposing or republishing your content on a third-party website or platform. This is a great strategy for getting your content in front of a larger, shared audience.
Content syndication benefits both your B2B content marketing and the syndicator, so be sure to find the partner that aligns with your objectives the most. With the right partnership, you’ll be able to leverage your content to grow your audience and fill your content marketing funnel by maximizing your content’s lead generation potential. It’s a win-win.
Getting your B2B content marketing to stand out from the crowd is a challenging task but with the right content marketing plan and strategies in place, you’ll start to see results. Before going to a content marketing agency, follow the steps above to spark your own content strategy that connects your brand with your target audience.