Why Is Custom Content Marketing Important for B2B?
Are you a leader in your industry and want to grow your business?
Whether you own a small business or a larger one, and whichever market your business serves, content is an essential factor in why website visitors become prospects and prospects become clients. The more engaging and trustworthy the content you produce, the more likely you will increase your organic traffic!
According to Demand Metric, 82% of consumers feel more positive about a brand after reading customized content. The more you can do to engage and build a relationship with your targeted audience, the easier it is to secure partnerships and sales.
B2B business owners know that a happy customer is a repeat customer. Renewing a client can be just as crucial as securing them in the first place. Whether for new buyers or existing customers, delivering compelling content is a critical way to keep them engaged.
What is Custom Content Marketing?
Custom content marketing is a type of marketing that is centered around the creation and sharing of online material to build credibility. It focuses on explicitly promoting a specific brand and directing and stimulating interest in its line of products or services by posting online material like blogs and videos and establishing a presence on social media.
In short, B2B custom content marketing is the science of planning, creating, and publishing written and visual content-rich online materials to attract users’ interest. It’s a process that is strategic and takes practice!
According to CMI, the goals of content marketing are often to increase the following:
- Brand awareness
- Traffic
- Qualified leads
- Sales
- Build brand loyalty
- Conversions
- Relationships
As per CMI, some B2B content marketing trends include:
- Blog posts
- Podcasts
- eBooks
- Infographics
- Informational videos
- Websites
What is Content Marketing for B2B?
Providing quality information to prospects who are searching for it can help them solve a specific business challenge. In addition, it is an excellent way to get your brand in front of the potential buyer. According to research done by Gartner, B2B sales are moving increasingly online, and B2B buyers spend more time doing independent research than engaging with sales representatives.
If your B2B company is not providing the information B2B buyers are searching for, you are missing a great opportunity of getting your brand in front of the right people. Worse… you are handing potential sales to competitors that are taking advantage of custom content marketing.
Custom content marketing allows B2B companies to show they are customer-centric and are interested in building relationships. How? By adding value to prospects during the sales cycle. Building relationships in B2B is crucial. Usually, most B2B companies have more niche target audiences than a mass market, so while the customers are fewer, the value per customer is much higher.
Today, your content needs to reach your audience in a natural way. A common way of doing this is by creating a narrative for your content, telling a story, and engaging your audience. In this sense, your content will feel more authentic, captivating, and tailored to your audience.
You want to tailor your custom content marketing to your desired target audience. Doing in-depth consumer research and monitoring the customer journey regularly are essential elements to be aware of before planning your next marketing campaign!
Benefits of a B2B Content Marketing Strategy
More leads:
- By researching consumer habits and your desired target audience and creating content to answer their questions, you can develop your audience members as leads for your business.
Increased sales potential:
- Implementing an effective content strategy for your B2B audience increases authority and trust in your brand. Thus, increasing the potential of converting a prospect into a client. To read more about “How Content Marketing Campaigns Support Sales Enablement,” check out our blog post here.
Increased brand awareness:
- One of the best channels for brand exposure is on your social media pages. Your followers follow your brand for a reason; they are a captive audience. Use social media to your advantage by planning effective and informative social media strategies to promote your content, blog posts, website launches, testimonials, infographics, etc. The more exposure your brand has, the higher the likelihood of conversion from follower to customer.
- For more insight into How to Use Digital Marketing for Brand Awareness as a B2B Brand Strategy, read our blog post here.
Excellent ROI:
- Custom content marketing is affordable, cost-effective, and supports long-term growth. Quality content and a good SEO strategy create long-lasting results that can compound over time. Once your content is created, it has unlimited potential to drive earned, organic traffic to your website. So, while the upfront costs of custom content marketing may seem costly, in the long run, compared to other paid advertisements, custom content marketing is one of the most cost-effective tactics.
- For example, each piece of content you create can eventually be recycled, updated, and repurposed for a fraction of the price it took to make. So, unlike other marketing tactics, the more you use your content, the cheaper it becomes in the long term. Once created, you can use your content assets in several ways across all platforms. For example, you can optimize a video for LinkedIn and your website, and you can turn the transcript into a blog article for your website.
More customer-centric strategy:
- A B2B strategic marketing plan can provide a more customer-centric structure to your business. Customer-centric marketing is a marketing approach designed around customer needs. This marketing approach focuses on prioritizing customers over any other factor, using a blend of intuition, common sense, and solid data about your target audience.
How is B2B Custom Content Marketing Different from B2C?
Different Goals:
- B2C has two goals: brand awareness and sales – most content development focuses on one or both goals – most B2C purchases occur in a short cycle. B2B sales take much longer – nearly half of B2B sales take seven months or more to close, and ¾ of B2B sales take four months or longer to close.
- Effective B2B content can help nurture them at each stage of the buyer’s journey to drive them forward. Thus, a B2B content marketing strategy should be helpful and focus more on the content than the marketing.
- The best B2B content will educate users, answer their questions, or solve some of the challenges they may be facing.
Different Audiences:
- With a B2C company, your audience is usually broad – anyone who might buy your product.
- But in B2B, the audience for your content is much more focused. Specifically, your content needs to target critical decision-makers who work to serve your business. In a B2B content marketing strategy, there exists a high level of importance on building and maintaining client relationships and getting referrals.
- If you are searching for the correct B2B-focused agency to help you achieve these goals, contact us, and we can get you started on your B2B content marketing strategy.
How Do You Promote Your B2B Content?
According to an IBM experience survey, 56% of marketers believe that personalized content promotes higher engagement rates. But before you begin creating your B2B content, there are a few things you need to take into consideration:
1. Create a B2B Strategic Marketing Plan
For your custom content marketing to be successful, you need to create a plan.
- Set SMART GOALS
- Determine your KPIs
- Choose your content channels
- Set a budget
- Create and distribute content
- Analyze and measure results
2. Types of Content Marketing:
What are the Different Digital Marketing Media Asset Types?
Once you have a plan about how your B2B Business is going to create compelling content, you can then decide which digital marketing media assets you want to create:
1. Case Studies
Using ase studies as a part of your custom content marketing strategy is a great way to build credibility. Check out Pace Creative’s work sample.
2. Blog Posts
Blog Posts can be a great way to educate your audience and build credibility. The trick is that the content needs to add value and be aligned with your company’s content marketing strategy. Here are few education portals we developed for our clients: Associated Spring, Grifols and Finning Canada.
3. Customer Testimonials
If you receive a positive review from a satisfied client, why not share it online and inform your followers of your success? See how we share our testimonials on social media platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn.
4. eBooks
eBooks are a fun and unique way of getting your B2B company’s strategic content to your intended audience.
Check out the strategic interactive eBook we developed for Nice In Contact! After years of being online, it still generates qualified leads for Nice In Contact’s sales team! 😊
5. Podcasts
Podcasts are another fun way to reach and create a deeper connection with your audience. With a podcast, you can give listeners a deeper look into what you are and what you do.
You can take a look at The Dance Centre podcast on The Dance Centre website – another project we loved working on!
6. Infographics
Infographics are so much fun and can be an effective tool to generate leads and build authority. We have been developing strategic infographics to general results for our clients for 10+ years!
Based on our experience, there are 5 Reasons to Use Digital Marketing Infographics for your B2B – hopefully you are now sold on adding digital marketing infographics as part of your B2B content marketing strategy. Infographics need to have the following elements to be successful:
- Tell a story
- Convey a clear meaning
- Easy to read
- Build credibility
- Visually appealing to its target audience(s)
To learn more about what makes infographics a strategic marketing asset, here is an example of an infographic we designed and developed using the 7 elements of storytelling for the City of Abbotsford as part of the economic development strategy to attract businesses to invest in the City of Abbotsford! It was very successful in engaging investors and businesses!
7. Social Media
Obviously, everyone knows how prominent social media is in today’s age. It can get your brand in front of people more quickly and easily than traditional media. Further, it gets your audience looking at your brand even if they weren’t previously aware of it.
Oncolytics Biotech engaged our team to develop a content marketing strategy along with a social media strategy. The healthcare company was doing research on the development of oncolytic viruses as potential therapeutics for use in a broad range of cancers and needed to educate and engage with its stakeholders.
8. Video Content
According to HubSpot, 54% of consumers want to see more video content from brands they support. Other valuable forms of B2B content marketing examples include instructional videos.
If you are thinking of investing in developing video content, check out our Blog Post about The Best Strategies for B2B Video Marketing. Take a look at a few videos Pace Creative created for CharliAI and Volunteer Toronto.
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Ultimately, having a B2B content marketing strategy is essential for B2B companies to stand out and build authority in their industry to stand out and get results. Today, every B2B business executive and marketing leader should actively invest in ensuring custom content marketing is working for their business.
Are you wondering if Pace Creative can provide your business with the right B2B content marketing services? Contact us to chat about improving your custom content marketing strategy!
