Content Marketing has played an increasingly important role in product and brand promotion in recent years. By improving visibility in front of prospective clients, it has helped businesses generate more leads.
Content marketing has been shown to be three times as effective as traditional outbound marketing methods for generating leads.
Producing videos and blog posts that are only narrowly focused on search engine optimization will not necessarily lead to success.
So, How Should You Go About It?
You need a methodical approach and the right strategies to grow your business with content marketing and improve your search engine ranking.
The following are some of the top ways to improve your content marketing strategy in 2022 and beyond.
1. Incorporate Storytelling
To connect with audiences, B2B content marketers need to create content that resonates with their target market. This can be done by understanding the needs and wants of the target market and creating content that addresses these needs.
Good storytelling is an important aspect of selling, and makes the process simpler. Every business has a story to tell, so this should be relatively easy to do.
The thing to keep in mind with B2B marketing is that even though it is aimed at businesses, people are the ones who make the purchase decisions. The people you need to impress are the key decision-makers in these companies. You need to show them how great your product is and how it will benefit them.
Without a strong brand personality, they are subject to a lot of marketing content.
If you want to increase your conversion rates with B2B prospects, try connecting with them on an emotional level and using stories to captivate them.
The three key tips to infusing storytelling into your B2B content marketing plan are:
- Get a holistic view and understanding of your client’s business.
- Map out a clear and distinct product/service journey for your clients.
- Strive to educate prospects, leads, and clients with informative and insightful content.
2. Don’t Stop At Blogging
You shouldn’t put all your eggs in one basket for a successful B2B content marketing campaign. Diversifying your efforts and going beyond just blogging will help you meet your B2B marketing needs.
Whilst B2B blogging is effective, it is not the sole solution. To make the most of your time and resources, you need to go beyond publishing blog posts on social media platforms.
In order to stay ahead of your competitors, you need to be constantly updating your approach to B2B marketing. This is because the landscape is always evolving, and you need to be able to adapt to the changes.
You need to create more value by offering other forms of social media content, such as blogging, in conjunction with your social network.
That may include:
- Creating informative, visually appealing, and educational infographics
- Leveraging video content marketing to its full potential
- Hosting informative and insightful webinars with industry thought-leaders as guests
3. Focus On Personalized Content
No matter what your area of expertise is, your potential clients will be pleased with any attempt you make to give them a personalized experience.
You will need to put in extra effort to be successful in B2B marketing. People do not want to be treated like they are all the same. They want to feel like they are special and that their business is appreciated.
Personalized content is one way to deliver that.
You should concentrate a lot of your energy on making and circulating content that is unique to your prospects and clients. This will help you to be different from everybody else and establish stronger bonds with your audience.
Creating content that is personalized to your audience will make it more interesting to them.
A salesletter also addresses how the product solves the prospect’s pain points and problems.
By analyzing your audience data, you can figure out how to deliver personalized content that will improve your B2B content marketing.
So, how can you customize your content creation?
You can categorize and personalize content based on:
a. Segments
This means that the criteria for segmentation could be based on factors such as age, income, behavior, occupation, etc.
b. Personas
If you want to create content that is personalized for your audience, you should develop buyer personas.
c. Stages
You can also sort your leads according to where they are in the sales funnel.
4. Cross-Pollination
If you’re creating content, it’s easy to get sidetracked and forget about how to promote it.
There are lots of different ways that you can increase traffic to your website. One of the most effective ways is guest posting.
Guest posting is one of the best ways to become a thought leader in your industry and promote your brand. It’s especially important for small businesses.
What is guest posting all about?
It could mean posting your original content on reputable sites like Entrepreneur.com or Business.com. It could also take the form of influencers creating content around your business on your own website or their websites.
Cross-pollinating your content will help you get it in front of more people, establish your industry authority, and develop your online presence.
Another option you can consider is expert roundup posts.
What are expert roundup posts?
An “amplified guest post” is a guest post that features multiple experts’ opinions on a single topic.
Your panel of experts can discuss your product offerings or address questions that are relevant to your industry.
5. Track Metrics And Optimize
B2B marketing cannot be turned on or off like a switch. Instead, it is a constant process that requires a lot of trial and error.
You need to be aware of how your efforts are progressing. Even if you have a good plan, it won’t matter if your audience doesn’t like your content.
There are times when your tactics will not work the way you want them to.
Clients who don’t convert may not have been ready to buy, or they may not have been a good fit for your product. Instead of viewing them as failures, look at them as an opportunity to understand your target audience and the buyer’s journey.
How can you do that?
You can improve your content marketing by figuring out which elements are successful and which ones need improvement. Keep track of metrics that give you insight into your content’s performance. This will help you know what changes to make to get better results.
You need to do research to find out which keywords to use in order to optimize your website. You can also experiment with different types of content and styles.
Here’s why you need to be tracking metrics and monitoring your results:
- You can avoid the same pitfalls over and over again.
- And you can create a content strategy that is tailor-made for your target audience.
- You can also create content that will resonate well with your audience.
The farther you go down this road, the better you will become at understanding metrics and coming up with content marketing plans that will help your business succeed.
6. Give Your B2B Content A Human Touch
A common belief is that B2B content must be uninteresting. If you are good at marketing, you will be able to have fun with your content.
You can add some human elements to your content to make it more relatable and exciting for your target audience. Try introducing your employees and telling their stories to give your audience a sneak peek into the lives of the people who work in your company. This can help to show what it’s like to work in your company and what the company culture is like.
7. Explore Different Mediums
Content marketing for businesses shouldn’t be limited to text, photos, or videos. Business audiences are used to these mediums, so it’s a good idea to explore other options.
You’ll stand out more easily.
An example of a company that does B2B content marketing effectively is Hexagon, an industrial IT solutions company.
They decided to use Augmented Reality to present their annual report to their investors. This gave their investors an experience that was extremely interactive and used compelling storytelling techniques to keep them engrossed.
8. Performance Monitoring
Despite the fact that it seems like a good idea to track key performance indicators, only around 50% of people actually did this in recent years.
There needs to be more focus on monitoring campaigns and making changes as needed in 2022.
Here are some ways that make it easier to keep a close eye on the overall success of your campaign:
a. Analyze audience behavior on your site
If your readers are not clicking on other parts of your website or taking some sort of action towards conversion, it may mean that the quality of your leads is not as good as it could be.
b. Determine your value
Google Analytics and similar tools can help you understand how much sales value is generated by each page, and more importantly, what content on that page is most effective in causing website visitors to take action that you want them to (such as make a purchase, sign up for a newsletter, etc). By tracking which pages are most effective in causing conversions, you can create a map of which content is most effective in achieving your desired results.
c. SEO and content
Analytics tools can also be used to show which pages are receiving traffic, and which aren’t. Highlighting which aspects of your content aren’t reaching your audience or search engines suggests that there is a disconnect between your SEO and business goals.
9. Big Data
Marketers are still largely in the dark about what big data is, despite it being something that’s talked about a lot. It’s also unclear how it can be used in a content marketing context.
The reason big data is such a big deal is what can be done with the data.
As we continue to collect more data, we will also rely more on artificial intelligence to help us make sense of it all. This is a trend that is expected to grow in the coming years as big data becomes more and more commonplace.
Big data analytics could help marketers identify trends and tailor their campaigns in response by automatically collecting, consolidating, and analyzing client information.
10. CM Technologies
By next year, there will be a wider range of content marketing tools available to the public.
We are talking about automation tools that use aspects of AI to help marketers connect with the right people, generate topics of discussion that appeal to them, and really help content creators hone their skills.
According to the IDG report, ‘Technology Content Marketing 2019: Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends, some of the most commonly used CM technologies by today’s content marketers include:
- Social media analysis tools
- Email marketing software
- Automation software
- Workflow/project management software
- Content optimization tools
- Content management system (CMS)
- Promotional tools
- Chatbots
- Artificial intelligence
11. Real Time Content
The idea of ‘real-time’ is something that has already been shown to be valuable in the sales world. For example, real-time stock updates are already considered to be the norm. Yet it’s something that hasn’t quite made its way fully into the marketing sector.
As digital platforms continue to develop, they are beginning to prioritize real-time content. This provides more opportunities for content marketers to take advantage of the technology and engage with audiences during the brief moments when they are interested in purchasing something.
Facebook Live is a platform that is definitely worth paying attention to next year, especially because of the updates that were implemented in September 2019.
Facebook Live Video now has a rehearsal feature that allows marketers to test out content and interactive features in advance to ensure optimal levels of engagement.
Here are some tips for getting real-time content marketing spot-on:
a. Create Google Alerts to receive notifications about new trends, news, and announcements in your industry, and always be on the lookout for new information.
b. Use common holidays and events in your content to appeal to your target audience, such as creating holiday-themed content or writing about popular beliefs and trends in their community.
c. Instead of using tools like Facebook Live, host a live Twitter feed during business events or throughout industry-related celebrations to provide valuable information for audiences.
12. Voice Optimization
Within the next two years, half of all internet searches will be done using voice commands, so it’s time to start making your content more accessible for voice search.
While marketers have been trying to make their content better since Google changed its algorithm with the Hummingbird update to go along with the shift to Web 3.0, we’re still not doing well enough when it comes to voice searches specifically. At the Google I/O 2019 conference, the keynote speaker Sundar Pichai, who is the CEO of Google, confirmed that 20% of all searches are already done by voice.
Here are three tips for optimizing your content for voice searches:
a. Don’t think. Speak
Try to think about how your audience would use voice search and what they would be looking for. Speak the phrases out loud as if you were the one doing the searching.
b. When creating content for a voice search, consider what other aspects your audience may be including in their search.
When giving a speech, it is more likely that people will search for a specific restaurant in a specific location, such as “restaurant in New York,” rather than just searching for the word “restaurant.”
c. Be sure to take into account the context of a user’s voice search when determining what other searches may be relevant.
The term ‘play center’ could be associated with other activities that are suitable for children.
Ready To Revamp Your B2B Content Marketing Strategy?
Now that you understand what a strong B2B content marketing strategy looks like, it’s a matter of how well you can integrate it into your current marketing campaigns.
The size of your business will affect how much work you need to do to improve your marketing campaign. If you are a small business, you might only need to make a few changes. However, if you are a larger business, you might need to completely overhaul your marketing campaign.
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