10 Ways to Optimize Your B2B Content Marketing Strategy

When you think of the B2B buying process, what do you imagine?

Certainly not someone responding to your cold email to set up a call and get the ball rolling, right?

Gartner’s research shows us that the B2B buying process is far from linear. In fact, it looks more like a tangled web of string lights:

Gartner

If you think this is confusing for you, just imagine how your buyers feel. It’s no wonder 77% of buyers said their latest purchase journey was “complex” or “difficult.”

Your B2B content marketing should take every stride to make your buyers’ lives just a little easier.

10 Strategies to Optimize Your B2B Content Marketing Strategy in 2020

89% of buyers expect brands to anticipate their needs and make adjustments accordingly. Your content should provide visitors with all the information they need to learn about your industry and company. It should also anticipate their emerging problems and provide nuanced answers as they arise.

1. Create Account-Specific Content

The average B2B company devotes 16% of its marketing budget to account-based marketing strategies. Almost all organizations have some kind of ABM strategy at this point: 89%.

You can thank the rise in AI accessibility for that. Automation makes it easy to identify your key accounts, build relationships with customers, and identify new potential companies for outreach.

Consider creating unique blogs, eBooks, and videos for specific accounts based on your research.

2. Research the Needs and Problems of Your Audience Deeply

B2B content writing research is an ongoing process. Buyer needs are dynamic and the buying process isn’t linear.

You can’t pinpoint everything but you can do your best to research via Twitter, market research postings, press releases, Reddit, industry blogs, and other relevant channels.

3. Add Interactive Elements to Your B2B Content Marketing Strategy

Interactive content is vital for engagement and lead nurturing. It’s a common misunderstanding that attention spans are shorter – that’s not true. People have no problem bingeing videos and blogs when they’re relevant.

It’s no surprise that 58% of buyers say they would binge your B2B content for up to 20 minutes if it’s presented in an interactive format. Ideally, 68% would like to see it organized better, such as by pain point. Over half would also like to see your content organized by vertical or industry.

AI and machine learning meet this need perfectly. Visitors can choose how to organize their content and AI will provide personalized recommendations:

Hushly

4. Personalize Every Session to Maximize Visibility of Your B2B Content Writing

Of the 84% of marketers using AI, most of them are leaning on the technology for creating personalized experiences on individual channels.

Salesforce

Features like an adaptive content hub use machine learning to study on-site behavior and provide every visitor with personalized content recommendations – whether they’re a known lead or anonymous visitor.

5. Develop More Content for Customers Specifically

Most B2Bs could benefit from improving their customer experience to build loyalty and prevent churn. Part of your ABM strategy should involve B2B content marketing specifically for your current accounts.

Business resource centers are especially valuable tools for organizing your customer-centric content such as tutorials, troubleshooting, FAQs, use cases, explainer videos, and more.

6. Promote Your Content Across the Relevant Channels

You can’t be everywhere at once. Instead, focus your resources on specific channels where you know leads will see your content.

Insights from AI-driven technology can also help you track your visitors where they go online so you can identify patterns in blogs or forums for sharing your B2B content writing.

Meanwhile, use LinkedIn retargeting to personalize your sponsored posts based on the content someone viewed while on your website.

7. Create a Social Selling Strategy to Leverage Your B2B Content Writing

As you develop your B2B content marketing strategy, include tactics for social selling in your calendar.

  • Choose specific LinkedIn or Facebook groups for sharing.
  • Brainstorm questions you could ask in captions of your posts.
  • Think of people you might tag in your post to spark conversations.
  • Consider industry influencers for sharing.
  • Look for relevant subreddits or forums for posting.

8. Craft the Right Types of Content for Your Audience

The average organization spends over $185,000 per year on B2B content marketing. While B2Bs with the most successful strategies tend to spend more, you can stretch your budget by optimizing the types of content you create.

For example, C-level employees tend to prefer video content. Meanwhile, end-users may want detailed tutorials and blogs. The key is to study your specific audience and create the right types of content for each segment, account, role, or firmographic.

9. Give Leads Plenty of Channels to Stay in Touch

Your leads might only spend 17% of the buying journey connecting with sales teams but that doesn’t mean they don’t want to connect in other ways.

Chatbots provide a low-profile alternative for leads to ask questions about your product or company. Likewise, make sure to provide a texting option for buyers to connect more casually along with a non-sales email address where they won’t feel pressured to buy.

10. Set Your B2B Content Marketing Free from Forms

An estimated 70% of B2B searches happen on mobile devices so creating a mobile-friendly website is key. Gated content behind lead magnet forms is just about as unfriendly as it gets on mobile devices.

Plus, gated content pushes away valuable leads. Instead, remove the forms and let your visitors consume your B2B content marketing at their own pace. They’ll consume more pieces of content each session, stay on your website longer, and you’ll only collect email addresses from genuine leads – not folks who only want your research.

Create a Hyper-Personalized Web Experience for Everyone

Hushly’s AI engine makes it easy for businesses of all sizes to reap the benefits of hyper-personalization. Using features like adaptive content hubs, personalized exit-intent popups, and self-nurturing landing pages, you can make sure every visitor gets the most relevant piece of content in front of their face when they visit your site.

Learn how Hushly’s innovative AI engine provides an interactive experience to guide leads down the sales funnel while you sleep.

7 Reasons Why Content Marketing is Important for B2B Marketing

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The buyer’s journey isn’t what it was even ten years ago.

B2B buyers spend increasingly more time researching online and off, self-nurturing, and connecting with potential suppliers on more casual terms.

The latest Gartner research shows B2Bs only spend 17% of their time meeting with potential suppliers. That 17% covers all suppliers too. In other words, your sales team only gets about 2% to 5% of a lead’s attention before they decide.

Gartner

Your digital experience is your main tool for earning trust and building relationships – and it all starts with content.

Here’s why content marketing is so important for B2B marketing and how you can use it to its full advantage.

Why is Content Marketing Important for B2B Marketing?

For content marketing to work, it must be 100% relevant for your unique audience segments. Research is key to understanding your buyer’s specific needs and problems. You’ll also want to set unique goals to track your progress and effectiveness.

1. It’s Vital for an Account-Based Marketing Strategy

84% of marketers using ABM say it delivers higher ROI than other marketing strategies. Account-based marketing isn’t just for connecting with new leads either – it’s vital for forging deeper relationships with your current customers and preventing churn too.

Engaging content is at the heart of every effective ABM strategy. You need relatable blogs, eBooks, case studies, whitepapers, videos, and podcasts for your various firmographics.

Keep in mind that you might not want to create ALL types of content. Instead, research what types of content your firmographics prefer. Some at the C-level might prefer videos while end-users at a company might rather absorb information through infographics.

That’s another reason content marketing is so important for B2B: It forces you to study your audience.

2. You Can Rank for More Keywords

If you want to take SEO seriously, you must publish consistent high-quality content. Brands that blog regularly earn 434% more indexed pages than those that don’t.

Content marketing is an effective SEO tactic because it boosts rankings across your entire site. Here’s a little example of how it works:

  • Develop high-quality blog content around long-tail, low-competition keywords.
  • Earn rankings for those easy-to-rank keywords.
  • Target broad keywords on your category pages, landing pages, product pages, and home pages.
  • Prove your worth to Google algorithms and searchers with low-volume keywords and your ranking will improve for broader high-volume keywords.

Content marketing isn’t an overnight solution. However, publishing regular content seriously pays off long term.

3. B2B Content Marketing Helps You Generate More Leads and Sales

Content marketing delivers 3x more leads yet costs 62% less than outbound tactics.

B2B buyers spend 45% of the journey researching alone so content is key for helping them learn about your company and products.

Make sure your content solves specific problems your audience faces. Research their conversations on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Reddit before writing content.

This level of research and quality matters. That’s why 75% of B2Bs with the most successful content marketing strategies say content is useful for earning sales and revenue. 

4. You Can Empower Leads to Self-Nurture

A whopping 84% of B2Bs with the most successful content marketing say nurturing leads is a top goal.

Unfortunately, most brands hide their best content behind a lead magnet form. That’s not an ideal situation for people arriving at your site on a mobile device.

Think with Google estimates that 70% of all B2B searches happen on mobile devices so removing forms should be a top priority in your B2B content marketing strategy.

Instead, use an AI-driven adaptive content hub with machine learning to help your visitors find the perfect piece of content. An adaptive content hub provides content recommendations – like Amazon or Netflix – so every visitor gets a 100% relevant and unique content experience.

5. Content Marketing Lets You Have Conversations with Your Audience

If your content is successful, people should feel compelled to comment, like, and share it with others – opening you up to new conversations and relationships.

Content marketing is important for B2B social selling as well. Your content, especially thought leadership content, gives you a launchpad for discussing nuanced concepts and ideas.

Email marketing is also a useful tool for promoting your content. You can study which links your subscribers click and study their behavior and interests to provide curated content in the future.

6. You Can Earn More Web Traffic

Earning more indexed pages in Google search results means you increase your chances of visibility and new audiences. Organic traffic tends to stay on your website longer and consume more pieces of content for each session too.

Searchers value content because it’s not salesy or promotional. Instead, it helps them resolve nagging issues they face each day.

Boosts in traffic can also come from sources like LinkedIn, Facebook, guest posting, and blogging platforms. The more content you publish, the more backlinks you earn to your website. Not only is that good for SEO, but it also increases your long-term visibility and traffic.

7. B2B Content Marketing Delivers Incredible Analytics and Insights

Every time someone arrives at your website, you have a new opportunity to learn about your audience based on their behavior.

AI-powered tools can help you take your insights from content a step further. When you use AI and machine learning to create a hyper-personalized experience, you can learn more about their stage of the buying cycle and interests based on their behavior.

Using analytics and insights from your B2B content marketing, you can find new accounts to target and fresh market segments as well. This can help fuel your future content marketing efforts and create a positive reward cycle.

Hyper-Personalize Your Content Marketing Experience

Crafting incredible content for your website is only half the battle. How can you ensure each visitor finds the most relevant piece of content when they arrive at your website?

Adding an AI engine to your website is fast, easy, and creates a hyper-personalized experience for every visitor.

Hushly makes AI and machine learning accessible to everyone. Learn how to empower leads with self-nurturing landing pages.