Why Content Marketing Is Important For B2B

In the B2B industry, great content marketing strategies are crucial.

Content marketing is how you attract and retain customers. The content you provide your target audience needs to inform and educate them, while calling them to action.

In a recent episode of Digital Conversations with Billy Bateman, Manish Nepal, a freelance content marketer, shared some great tips and tricks on how to set up your content marketing strategies for success.

Manish explained that due to the pandemic, there has been a greater demand for better marketing. A big part of that is content.

You need to have well-written and valuable content on your website.

Quality content is the #1 way to get on top of your customers’ minds.

What Type of Content Works Best?

Are shorter or longer articles better?

Is video content better than written content?

The answer is you need a mix of everything. You want to be able to provide different forms of content to your site visitors and customers.

Some people are more drawn to videos and others prefer reading long articles.

If you provide a variety of content on your site, you will be able to have content ready that appeals to all of your prospects.

Be Purposeful

You must be purposeful in your B2B content marketing.

You need content that is less fluff and more chalk-full of real value. The content you offer prospects should lead them to take action. If your content does not provide them with any real solutions to their problems, they will become disinterested in your product/service and move on.

General Principles of How to Create Good Content

Here are some basic guidelines of creating quality content that converts:

• Content needs to attract the right kind of visitor, so make it very clear who each piece of content will be useful for.
• Treat content like it’s a product: plan it, prepare it, package it, promote it.
• Don’t write for the machines. This means that you should not be writing content with the sole purpose of ranking higher in the algorithms. Write with your ideal customer in mind.

Manish’s EAT Framework

Manish’s EAT framework will help you know how to ship out content and scale the process to where you want it to be.

It stands for educational, authoritative, and trustworthy.

1. Educational: Educational content teaches your customers or potential customers about the industry or your product and what value it can add to their organization. ‘How to’ articles are a great example of this.
2. Authoritative: Authoritative content is used to establish your brand as an expert in the industry. When people recognize that you know the ins and outs of the industry that you are in, they will look to you for more knowledge.
3. Trustworthy: Trustworthy content serves the role of establishing credibility on what you say. This is where you use a lot of data and statistics to show the value of your product/service to prove that you aren’t making false promises.

High quality content fits into one of those categories.

With great content comes high pay-off, so it is worth your time to brainstorm what other content your audience needs.

You Need to Be the Guide

Brands should be a guide for their customers. You need to be there every step of the way to solve their pain points.

You need to find a balance between being brand centric and customer centric. Always keep in mind that the customers are the heroes, not your brand.

Chatbots

Chatbots are the perfect guides to place on your website.

The experience on your site should be similar to a customer’s experience at a store. Some people like to freely browse around on their own to see what they come across, but many people just want to find what they are looking for, which is where chatbots come into play.

A chatbot on your website can guide site visitors to where they want to go.

They can be used in both marketing and sales aspects.

Chatbots can market and promote your content. It can help them find content that is pertinent to them.

They can also help qualify visitors by asking simple questions. The bot can recognize which pages someone is looking at and with that information offer relevant content.

Bots can also ask their role, which allows the bot to provide content that is more tailored to that persona.

Chatbots can also be used for customer support. They can give great support tips and tricks.

Whatever the use case of your bot is, the most important thing to keep in mind is that if you do not already have quality content on your site, the bot will have no where useful to direct the site visitors.

Quick Recap of B2B Content Marketing

4 key takeaways:

• Content marketing is the #1 way to be on top of your customer’s minds.
• Your content should be a mix of short and long articles, blog posts, social media posts, and videos.
• Create content with a goal in mind. That goal should be to get the customer to convert.
• Implement chatbots to your website in order to navigate your site visitors to useful content that educates, is authoritative, and is trustworthy.

Want To See How Signals Can Get You More Leads?