Crafting a successful B2B content marketing campaign is something of a rarity in today’s digital marketing landscape. It is surprising given the wealth of data and targetting we have at our disposal that can help marketers craft a successful narrative. 

We’ve moved on from the days of trade journals, niche publications and trade shows or newsletters. PReviously B2B content marketing was reserved for strategic drops or events you would build up to in hopes of converting users during those peak interest times and trying to remain top of mind with constant sales calls. 

These methods of B2B marketing are by no means dead and continue to this day, but there is one that is far more powerful. Yet still an unknown quantity in the space. The idea of using content to market your B2B service year-round and using it to prospect leads always leaves businesses scratching their heads in 2021.

Getting started with content marketing

While there are many ways to get stuck or somewhat lost the content marketing game, I’ve found through several years of battle testing that starting with a baseline strategy is ideal for any brand looking to dip their toes into the water. 

The simplest way of starting with the content market is always to address the pain points you aim to solve with your product or service. Business owners and decision-makers may not be aware of your product, service or brand, but they are well aware of the issues they face in running a business. 

They could be using an existing product or service or be conducting tasks manually in-house or outsourcing these services. Your product or service would firstly need to be superior to each of their current solutions.

If this is the case, you can then split your content into three funnels, addressing previously mentioned situations.

Talk to implementation

 

Every business is in a different stage of implementation. We don’t know where your clients will come from; some are running tasks manually; some outsource it to agencies, and others are using a competitor to you. Creating content that targets each implementation level is a great place to show the value of your product or service. 

Manual 

When speaking to those running tasks manually, speak to how laborious the tasks can be, and mention the time and cost savings you can bring to their business with your product or service. Speak about how you can get new levels of efficiency and provide a competitive edge. 

Outsourcing

When speaking to those outsourcing a specific task, talk to the benefits of tighter quality control by bringing jobs in-house. Speak about the strategic disadvantages and dangers, opening up critical business practices to external service providers. 

Moving service providers

They say the easiest customer to convince is one already disillusioned with their current service provider, so targetted content that speaks to offering an alternative can resonate very well with a subset of your potential client base. 

The pain-point promotion 

Now that you’ve established content that reaches out to those who already at the decision making step of the buying funnel, it’s time to take a step back and target a wider audience, those that realise they have a problem but have not found a solution to a specific issue. 

Appealing to a specific pain point, a business, owner, founder, department head, or C-suite decision maker deals with regularly makes for a simple message that can pull new users into your content marketing funnel. 

When deciding on how to leverage these pain-points, you need to evaluate your product critically and ask yourself.

What issues does it solve? 

Your product or service needs to do one of the following.

  • Save time for a business.
  • Improve the efficiency of the company.
  • Make complex tasks more manageable.
  • Offload rudimentary tasks.
  • Assist with regulatory and legal compliance.
  • Reduce the cost to a business.
  • Provide a competitive edge for the enterprise. 

Let’s say your product or service offloads a rudimentary task. 

Next, you have to ask who it can help? Let’s say, for example, it can assist law firms. 

Using that information, we can now craft a compelling narrative to a specific niche using content. 

For example – How to secure a digital signature for legal documents

You would then create a comprehensive piece on “what are digital signatures”. You cover topics like

Employing a strategy like this sees you leverage your content to educate your prospects, in this case, the law firm on solutions and redirecting them to your product or service. 

You can then take this same formula and replicate it for another user base, let’s say next would be accounting firms you’d like to target.

Taking your funnel a step further

Once you’ve established your funnels and begin to measure their success, you can overlay additional considerations like the type of decision-maker you’re trying to appeal to with your content. 

As you begin to expand your funnel, you start to reach users further out of the buying cycle; you can then begin to bring them into deeper facets of the buying cycle through consumer touchpoints like adding a CRM strategy or remarketing strategy. 

Creating a baseline funnel is the foundation of any content marketing strategy. Once you establish the conversion rate and reach, you can gauge what works and what doesn’t resonate with audiences. 

Using that data, you can then start to build more complicated or niche processes aimed at high ticket conversions.