B2B Content Marketing Tips to Maximize ROI

Nobody can deny the critical role B2B content marketing strategy plays in today’s highly competitive environments. Creating engaging and informative content is indispensable for a B2B brand. To maximize return on investment, you need a stellar strategy, some luck, and to follow the best B2B content marketing tips that will turn prospects into customers.

Your clients are well-informed, and the sales cycle for them to make a purchase is typically much longer than on the B2C side. Therefore, you need to nurture them towards a sale with content. A study by CMI shows that 72 percent of B2B companies have content marketing as a major component of their overall marketing strategy. 

Content is only as good as the effort put into creating it. Low-value content isn’t going to get it done in today’s marketplace. As a B2B business, you must craft content that stands out from your competitors.

If you are intent on building a successful content marketing strategy for your business, read on, as this post will provide you with the B2B content marketing tips to maximize ROI and convert more prospects into customers.

What is Content Marketing & How Does it Build Businesses? 

Content marketing is creating, publishing, and promoting audience-oriented content through multiple content marketing types, including written content, videos, image-based content, audio-based content, eBooks, whitepapers, guides, etc., to capture attention and drive profitable customer action.

Content marketing efforts work best when they are focused on a particular target audience. A scattershot approach to creating content will not create the value you need to convert potential customers.

Thanks to its multidimensional nature, content marketing is a significant growth driver for B2B companies. First, it informs others about your brand, your products, and the services you offer.

Additionally, it shows your customers how your products or services can solve their problems. Content marketing also allows businesses to build solid and loyal customer relationships. Quality content can build loyalty and extend the lifetime value of a customer.

What are Top Content Types for B2B Marketing? 

Blogs 

While the talk about blogs dying off continues, they’re still among the most effective ways of reaching your target audience. A blog post will typically range from 500 to 2000 words or more. Perhaps you’ve heard the terms evergreen content, or long-form content… well, those are typically blog posts.

A blog post is one of the best ways to deliver evergreen content that has the potential to build search engine rankings and deliver organic traffic indefinitely. Content marketers understand a blog’s role in the overall content marketing strategy to deliver traffic, engagement, and convert visitors.

Blog posts work wonderfully to educate your audience and raise awareness around your brand. There are around 600 million blogs online, so standing out can be tricky. 

Here are some content marketing tips to use to create engaging blog posts:

• Write high-quality content. Content that is better at helping someone typically earns more backlinks, social mentions, and overall acclaim, which keeps it relevant for a longer period. Search engines are more apt to rank the content if it meets the needs of the user.
• Align your blog post topics with the search intent of your target audience. If you can position your post to reach the right audience, you’ll have a much higher chance of success.
• Try to create long-form content that is packed with exciting and valuable information. It is usually more engaging than short-form content when architected correctly.
• Keep your content fresh. Search engines like to see that you are keeping the content up-to-date with the latest trends and not leaving it for dead.

Top resources for creating your blog

You’ll need to be resourceful to build winning blog posts. Luckily, we’ve compiled some of the best resources to help you succeed.

Editorial calendar – Building an editorial calendar, a.k.a. content calendar, to keep your blog posting on schedule is vital for long-term success.

Blog post titles – You want to create a blog post title that will drive more clicks on your post than the competition.

Blog post outline – If you are going to outsource your content writing or you like to have something to guide your own unique angle, a blog post outline will help you create content that stays relevant and focused on a target keyword.

eBooks 

Ebooks are a powerful way to enhance your content marketing strategy by providing in-depth knowledge about your products or services, industry trends, and customer pain points. Ebooks are longer versions of blog posts packed with valuable information.

By offering valuable information in the form of ebooks, you can establish your brand as a thought leader, foster trust with your audience, and generate leads that can be nurtured into long-term customers.

Ebooks are cost-effective, eco-friendly, and easily shareable, making them an ideal medium for reaching a wider audience. Incorporating ebooks into your content marketing mix can significantly boost your brand’s visibility, authority, and customer engagement.

Videos 

Videos are extremely effective as part of a B2B content marketing strategy, as 92% of marketers claim they offer a great ROI. Video content is more engaging and can be more specifically targeted toward your ideal customer.

Video marketing typically revolves around the following in the B2B space:

Product Demos and Tutorials: These videos can help businesses showcase how their products or services work and provide customers with valuable information on how to use these offerings to solve specific problems.

Testimonials: Videos featuring satisfied B2B customers sharing their positive experiences with a company’s products or services can build trust and credibility and help to attract new customers.

Webinars: These types of videos are educational in nature and offer deep dives into subjects that are important to your target audience. Businesses can use webinars to establish themselves as thought leaders in their industry. We’ll break this down further shortly.

Corporate Profile Videos: These types of videos provide an in-depth look at the company’s history, culture, and mission statement. They can help to attract new customers by giving them a clear sense of what the business stands for and what it hopes to achieve.

Event Coverage: Businesses can create videos highlighting their participation in industry events such as conferences, trade shows, and networking events. These videos can help to showcase the company’s expertise and industry knowledge while also providing valuable insights to other businesses in the same space.

Case Studies 

Case studies give audiences the most realistic picture of how you work to resolve problems. Case studies effectively target the buyer persona of a product or service. By showcasing real-life success stories of customers who have used the product or service in question, case studies provide valuable insights into the thoughts and behaviors of that particular buyer.

These studies can help businesses better understand their customers’ needs, pain points, and motivations, as well as provide evidence of the value and effectiveness of their offering. Case studies are considered in-depth content and are developed based on audience research.

By creating targeted case studies that speak directly to the needs and desires of their ideal customer, businesses can build trust and credibility, ultimately leading to increased conversions and long-term customer loyalty.

Webinars 

Today, 61% of B2B businesses are incorporating webinars into their content marketing strategy. Why? Webinars have become a popular B2B content marketing tool due to their ability to educate, engage, and nurture potential customers.

In the B2B space, webinars work by providing valuable information on specific topics related to the industry, product, or service, which helps generate leads and drive sales. Businesses often use webinars to showcase their expertise in a particular field and provide solutions to challenges faced by their target audience.

They also use webinars to qualify leads by collecting information from participants and following up. Additionally, webinars are a cost-effective way to reach a wider audience without needing physical events or meetings.

They can be pre-recorded, live, and shared from your website or social media posts. You can gate a webinar to generate leads upon signup. This information is great for providing valuable content via follow-up and nurturing leads.

Important Content Marketing Tips 

Know Your Audience 

Knowing your B2B content marketing audience means understanding your target buyers’ specific needs, interests, and pain points. It involves researching their company size, industry, job position, goals, and challenges they face in their role.

By gaining insights into the characteristics and preferences of your audience, you can create tailored content that speaks directly to them, establishes trust and authority, and ultimately helps them solve their business problems.

This approach helps to increase engagement and conversions by creating more targeted and relevant content that resonates with your audience.

Address Audience Pain Points 

Leverage content marketing to address the pain points of your users.

1. Understand your audience: To create content around your audience’s pain points, you must have an in-depth understanding of who they are, their challenges, and the solutions they seek.
2. Identify their pain points: Conduct research, surveys, and interviews to identify your audience’s most pressing pain points. This will help you address them accurately.
3. Address the problem: Once you’ve identified the pain points, it’s time to address them head-on. Develop content that provides solutions, strategies, or tactics that can help your audience solve the problems they face.
4. Use stories and examples: Use real-life stories, case studies, and examples of how others have solved similar problems to connect with your audience, build trust, and establish credibility.
5. Be empathetic: Show empathy and understanding toward your audience’s struggles. They’re looking for someone who understands their pain and is willing to help them overcome it.
6. Keep it concise: People are busy and have short attention spans. Keep your messaging concise and to the point to make your content easy to consume.
7. Use visuals: Incorporate visuals such as infographics, charts, and videos to make your content more engaging and memorable.
8. Make it actionable: The best content provides tangible takeaways and action items. Provide clear steps on how your audience can implement the solutions you offer.
9. Test and iterate: Continuously test and iterate your content to see what resonates with your audience. Use analytics to measure engagement, conversions, and other metrics that matter to your business.

Use Guest Blogging for Link Building

Guest blogging is a powerful tool for B2B content marketing strategy and acquiring backlinks. It involves writing and publishing posts or articles on other websites relevant to your industry and including links back to your website.

This approach helps build authority and thought leadership in the industry and provides exposure to a larger audience. By contributing high-quality and relevant content to other websites, businesses can establish themselves as experts in their field, increasing their credibility with potential customers.

Guest posts also provide an opportunity to acquire backlinks to your website, which are crucial in boosting search engine rankings and driving traffic to the business website. Incorporating guest blogging into your B2B content marketing strategy can significantly impact improving online visibility and generating leads.

Stay Ahead of Trends 

B2B content marketing strategy is an ever-evolving and chaotic space that demands creativity from marketers, as something new is always coming up regularly. How quickly they learn and adapt to recent trends differentiates successful marketers from unsuccessful ones. 

Let’s overview the B2B content marketing strategy trends we expect to flood the market in 2023 and beyond.

• Authenticity will be valued increasingly, as 71% of customers say they’re tired of empty promises from brands. Therefore, data-driven storytelling will become more popular and engaging for audiences.
• AI-generated content will see a spike in its utility, although human editors and content strategists will regulate it.
• Product-led growth will be a crucial focus of brands, which involves publishing content around the audience’s pain points and preferences.
• Voice search will continue to grow, and the content must be reshaped to answer questions thoroughly yet efficiently.

Leverage Competitor Analysis

Competitive analysis is a vital tool in shaping an effective content marketing campaign. By assessing the strengths and weaknesses of competitors, businesses can identify gaps and opportunities in the market that can be leveraged through their content marketing strategy.

The competitive analysis enables businesses to understand what their target audience is looking for, where they are looking for it, and what kind of content resonates with them. This information can be used to create content that speaks directly to the needs and interests of the target audience, increasing engagement and driving conversions.

Additionally, a competitive analysis can help businesses stay ahead of the curve by identifying emerging trends and industry best practices that can be incorporated into their own content marketing campaigns.

Keep up with Keyword Research

If you covet search traffic, and you should, as it drives 1,000%+ more traffic than social media, your content strategies must include keyword research.

Keyword research is the cornerstone of any successful B2B content marketing strategy. By staying current with industry trends and consumer search behavior, businesses can create highly targeted content that connects with their target audience at every stage of the buyer’s journey.

Failing to keep up with keyword research is not an option and could result in significant losses in organic traffic, leads, and revenue. Companies must invest in keyword research tools to help with their digital marketing efforts. Google Analytics, unfortunately, doesn’t cut it as anything organic keyword related is likely reported as not provided.

You want to match search intent with your content to earn better search engine rankings. Therefore, adding SEO essentials like a title tag, primary search term, meta description, alt text, etc., is critical for any written content.

Repurpose Your Content 

Repurposing content is using existing content on other platforms to expand your reach. Content creation is time-consuming. Repurposing content is important for successful B2B content marketing as it allows businesses to stretch their content investment further.

By repurposing content, businesses can reach new audiences and reinforce key messaging through different channels and formats. This saves time, helps reinforce the company’s message, and increases its reach.

Repurposing content can also help increase engagement in existing content by attracting new users who may not have seen the initial piece. When repurposing, ensure your content remains on brand.

Here are some actionable tips:

• Define your goals, such as targeting new audiences, increasing brand awareness, etc. 
• Research the channels where you want to publish your content. The language you use on LinkedIn will differ from the one used on Facebook or Instagram. 
• Audit your content and look for themes that work well on your channels. You only want to repurpose that which achieves your business goals. 
• If you have a preferred medium, start there first, and ensure the content resonates before extending its reach.

Use a Content Calendar 

A B2B content strategy requires consistency from the content marketer, which makes a calendar vital. A content calendar should become the hub that all content flows through. Many free tools can assist in building this out, including Google Sheets with templates or task management platforms like Trello or Asana.

Here is why a content calendar can prove so valuable for marketers:

• Publishing content consistently helps your organic rankings on Google, which can elevate your brand’s voice.
• Writing content consistently that meets the needs of the user can be challenging. A calendar can also be a place to store fresh ideas to help make the writing process easier.
• A content calendar can act as more than a scheduling tool. It can be a place to curate content along the complete customer journey and track your content remarketing efforts.
• A content calendar can be a conduit for posting on social media platforms. Curated content created for repurposing can be managed in the same place as the original evergreen content.

Top Content Marketing Tools 

You won’t be as successful without employing content marketing tools to help you manage and facilitate your content marketing campaigns. We recommend the following tools to help you execute your content marketing strategies.

SurgeGraph

Cost: Premium

SurgeGraph is one of the leading tools for SEO-based content marketing. It provides several exceptional features that take your content to the next level, such as:

• Makes your keyword research efficient and effective using opportunity score, keyword clustering, keyword mapper, and planner tools.
• Provides you with a clear picture of the content your competitors publish and the strategies they use to publish it. It helps you analyze the competitor’s content and fill gaps in your content.
• Enables you to write contextually relevant and compelling content to target the right audiences. You can check your content score while writing to make modifications and answer popular questions.
• Provides a detailed map of keywords with their intent, volume, and difficulty. Allows you to manage all SEO content in one place.

OptinMonster

Cost: Freemium

OptinMonster is one of the most impactful marketing tools to help with on-site conversions. It offers many features to help marketers convert and nurture based on buyer persona.

• Helps you with lead generation and growing your email list by creating 2-step campaigns from any link.
• Enables you to personalize your campaigns according to the geolocation of the visitors. 
• Studies the user’s behavior and gives them a relevant message when leaving your site using exit intent.

Jasper

Cost: Premium

Jasper is an AI-based writing assistance tool that helps you generate content relevant to your brand faster.

• Helps you generate impactful social media content, such as Instagram posts, LinkedIn posts, and video scripts. 
• Creates website copy and ad creative for any type of content marketing campaign.
• Writes original long-form content on any topic and optimizes it with a built-in SEO optimizer. 
• Generates relevant FAQs, bullet points, and headlines for websites. The Chrome extension lets you write directly in WordPress, Shopify, etc.

You can see our complete Jasper AI review to learn more about this powerful AI content marketing tool.

Grammarly

Cost: Freemium

Grammarly is a writing tool that can help marketers create better content by providing suggestions for grammar, spelling, and punctuation errors. It also offers advice on style, tone, and readability to help make sure the content is clear and engaging for the audience.

This tool is essential for content marketers who aim to produce high-quality, error-free material that resonates with their target audience. With its powerful algorithms and intuitive interface, Grammarly makes it easier for content marketers to write confidently, ensuring that their content is polished, professional, and ready for publication.

SurferSEO

Cost: Premium

SurferSEO is an intelligent content optimization tool that helps marketers produce better content by analyzing competitors’ websites and providing them with data-driven recommendations.

The platform highlights what Google expects to see in terms of content length, keyword density, headers, and related keywords. Additionally, it provides insights into competing websites’ backlinks and domain authority.

Using this information, content marketers can optimize their pieces for readers and search engines, resulting in higher engagement rates, more traffic, and better search engine ranking.

Top Visual Content Creation Tools 

Canva

Cost: Freemium

Canva is a graphic design platform that offers a variety of templates, tools, and resources to help marketers create better visual content. With Canva, content marketers can easily create high-quality graphics, images, videos, and other visual elements essential in attracting and engaging audiences on various social media platforms.

Canva’s intuitive drag-and-drop interface makes it easy for marketers, even those with no design experience or skills, to create stunning visual content quickly.

Additionally, Canva provides a vast library of stock photos, graphics, and fonts that allow marketers to create personalized designs without investing in expensive software or equipment.

Pictory

Cost: Premium

If you want to create engaging short videos from your long-form content, there is nothing better than Pictory. It is quick & easy and doesn’t require any technical skills or experience. Let’s look at some of its most prominent features:

• Script-to-video conversion lets you swiftly create videos based on your script using your voice or AI. It is highly useful for marketers looking to generate compelling videos. 
• Blog-to-video conversion puts AI in the front seat and generates compelling videos from your blogs. Since it’s cloud-based, it can work efficiently on any computer. 
• Captions your videos automatically to extend your reach and enhance your Google & YouTube rankings. 
• Advanced AI technology helps you summarize long videos by focusing on critical points.

FlexClip

Cost: Freemium

Flexclip is an online video editor and maker that allows users to create and edit videos easily. It offers a user-friendly interface for creating, editing, and sharing videos with various tools.

Flexclip is suitable for designers, marketers, small business owners, and individuals who want to create professional-quality videos for social media, advertising, or personal use.

• Easy-to-use video creation platform that allows marketers to create engaging video content without the need for technical expertise.
• Offers numerous templates, stock footage, and audio tracks that can be customized and personalized to match a brand’s unique requirements.
• Seamless integration with social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube makes it easy for marketers to share their videos with their target audience.
• Advanced editing tools and features add captions, text overlays, animations, and other visual effects to their videos, making them more engaging and memorable.

Top Content Promotion Tools 

CrowdFire

Cost: Freemium

Crowdfire is a comprehensive social media management platform that helps individuals and businesses navigate the challenges of building a strong online presence. It offers a range of tools and features for managing various social media accounts such as Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Pinterest.

• Curates articles from across the internet and RSS feeds. It also recommends images to curate for Instagram posts. 
• Schedules your content in advance and publish it on different platforms, such as Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, etc., from one place. 
• Tailors post according to the social media platform you’re publishing while allowing you to preview and make edits. 
• Queue meter shows you the content meant for publishing in a week, which lets you see if you have enough content scheduled for the upcoming days.

Tailwind

Cost: Premium

Tailwind is specifically designed for Pinterest and Instagram. It helps businesses and individuals increase their social media presence by providing tools for content creation, scheduling, and monitoring. With Tailwind, users can schedule posts in advance, optimize their pins and images, track their performance, and monitor their competitors.

• Helps you at every step of the way and gives you multiple ideas & examples for stellar content creation. 
• Incorporates the best marketing practices into your plan to save you precious time and do impactful marketing. 
• Considers several factors, such as timings, business type, etc., to generate campaigns with the best potential ROI.
• Keeps you organized and on track with a thorough plan and consistent reminders. 

MailChimp

Cost: Freemium

MailChimp is an email marketing software tool used by businesses of all sizes to manage their email campaigns. MailChimp allows users to create and send emails easily. The software also provides detailed analytics on email campaigns, including open rates, click-through rates, and engagement levels, allowing users to make data-driven decisions about their communication strategies.

• Sends personalized and adaptable emails to customers according to their interests. 
• Sends updates to your customer’s inboxes about their purchases or account activity. 
• Lets you recapture your audiences who visit your website by sending them targeted emails to bring them back. 
• Takes data from all the relevant platforms to deliver targeted and relevant emails to your audiences.

Subscribers

Cost: Freemium

If you want to send timely and effective push notifications from your browser to alert visitors to new posts, marketing promotions, and other news, Subscribers is the way to go. Notifications are incredibly important to keep your audiences engaged and bring them back to your website.

Depending on your industry, email might not be enough to keep prospects and customers engaged, so using browser messaging and push notifications might help keep your target audience engaged.

• Reach your subscribers directly and instantly, leading to higher engagement levels.
• Deliver personalized content, build stronger relationships with your subscribers, and increase their loyalty to your brand.
• Use notifications for driving conversions. By sending timely, relevant messages to your subscribers, you can encourage them to take action and make a
• Create and send messages in a matter of minutes, rather than having to plan, build and schedule email campaigns.

B2B Content Marketing Tips Final Thoughts 

A well-structured B2B content marketing strategy can change a brand’s fortune. If you can align it with your audience’s preferences, you can build a stellar reputation in the market and earn lifelong customers.

We’ve outlined some of our favorite content marketing tips to get you started, but it’s up to you, and your desire to succeed that will make a difference.

Have a content marketing tip you think would help others with their B2B marketing efforts? Let us know in the comments, and we can add it to the list.