Why is great content important to a digital and traditional marketing program? To start, it helps establish your brand, build trust, improve SEO, and attract new people to your business.
Making the most of content marketing takes an intimate understanding of your audience and how they prefer to consume content, as well as dedicated time and resources for creating content and a willingness and desire to try different avenues until you find your company’s unique path to success.
In this blog, you’ll learn the important distinction between B2B content creation and B2C content creation and get helpful pointers to boost your content’s effectiveness, engagement, and longevity.
What’s the Difference Between B2B and B2C Content Creation?
Think of content marketing like fishing. With B2B, you’re focused on catching the biggest fish possible every time. You need to understand what your fish is hungry for and create attractive lures they’ll bite into if you cast at the right times and places. In comparison, B2C content is more like throwing out big nets to scoop up big schools of as many fish as possible.
B2B content creation targets individuals in niche market segments with authority over purchasing, outsourcing, and other partnership-related decisions or recommendations on behalf of a business. These individuals come from an ever-expanding variety of specialized, narrow audiences, and are the basis of personas – semi-fictional representations of your ideal customers.
Personas can be hyper-specific from chief operating officers of large health systems to logistics planners for multi-national chemical manufacturers to bursars at universities around the country. The possibilities are endless. It takes real effort and careful consideration to solidify those personas and make targeted content, but the value personas generate is unquestionable.
The primary purpose of B2B content is to generate leads. Lead generation occurs when you impress upon your personas the successes they’ll enjoy if they buy from or work with your company, and entice them to provide their contact information in exchange for content or a call or meeting. B2B content frequently consists of blogs, whitepapers, case studies, webinars, and other ‘meaty’ pieces. They’ll be read by professionals who need informative, analytical, authoritative, and insightful substance while having personality and expressing your brand’s human side through a distinct look, feel, and sound.
B2C content creation primarily focuses on brand awareness among much larger audiences. It’s big, makes a splash, and is often driven more by emotion than facts and statistics. Instead of niche groups and individuals, B2C content generates interest among larger, less targeted segments by way of geographic, demographic, geodemographic, psychographics, and behavioral attributes.
Tips to Consistently Create Fresh and Relevant B2B Content
B2B content marketing consists primarily of standalone pieces, such as blogs and whitepapers, hosted on a company website or landing page. Unlike flash-in-the-pan social media campaigns that generate a jolt of excitement around a brand, B2B content needs to offer long-term value that remains relevant, weeks, months, and even years later. With a longer sales cycle in B2B than B2C, you never know when your ideal customer will come along and what event will put them in a situation of need. Whether a new business was founded, an existing partnership goes sour, or a global catastrophe changes every aspect of our lives, your content needs to represent your brand as the right solution.
Develop Your Buyer Personas
B2B content hinges on detailed and accurate buyer personas. The more information you know about your audience, the better. A fully fleshed out buyer person includes:
- Company attributes
- Roles and titles
- Who they report to
- Responsibilities
- Common challenges
- What they value
- Age range
- Location
- Education and experience
- Watering holes
The more information you have, the better job you can do to choose effective content formats, styles, language, creative elements, tone, and more.
Vary Your Content
Consistency is great for any marketing campaign, but if that means you only ever post a bi-weekly blog following the same format with the same call-to-action each time, you’re likely missing out on potential audience members. Different people respond to different types of content. Consider transforming a long blog into a short eBook for a versatile piece of unique content that can be distributed through a variety of outlets and is easily sharable. Download Our FREE eBook feels much more valuable than Read Our Blog, and offers something tangible.
Case studies are always an excellent option for B2B content. Business success stories backed by clear data and statistics are a great chance to highlight and demonstrate proven value and expertise. Case studies help readers envision their problems being solved, satisfying those they report to, and enjoying greater success.
Pick Specific Goals
B2B content that really hits the mark starts with a clear goal and never loses sight throughout the piece. What do you want the reader to do next? Whether to schedule a consultation, register for a demo, or call to speak with an expert, you’ll need to keep this goal in mind from beginning to end. Resist urges to over-cross-promote and squeeze in every benefit, feature, and option in every piece. Readers don’t often have a lot of time, and if content pulls them in too many directions at once or doesn’t get to an obvious point quickly enough, you’ll lose them. Tell them what the piece is about and why it’s valuable. Stay true to that theme throughout, and at the end, entice them into the next step.
Research Topic and Keyword Trends
Sometimes all you need is a starting point, and the piece will write itself. But finding good topics and starting points can be challenging. Since B2B content is highly specialized, you may find yourself without readily available sources of new, engaging, valuable industry news and events. In those cases, Google Trends is a great tool for seeing what’s most important to your searchers right now and sparking ideas for new pieces that tick those boxes. When brainstorming, start plugging in words and phrases of relevant industry topics and concepts, try some adjacent topics, reword things to see if you get different results, and so on. You can even explore what keywords your competitors are using in their content and how they perform, and consider integrating them into existing pieces or developing new content to capitalize on interest.
Refresh and Reuse Old Content
Does your company have a library of blogs, sales sheets, and other marketing materials from years past? Sometimes a quick content update or visual refresh is all these forgotten pieces need to start generating value once again. Some tips for getting more life out of old content include:
- Update outdated concepts or statistics
- Ensure all links still work
- Optimize keyword usage and meta
- Optimize CTAs
- Transform content into new formats
- Rewrite old blogs and social posts in new ways
- Update the visuals with your most recent brand identity
Take Your B2B Content Further
To capture the attention of qualified leads, you have to lure them in with content that generates brand awareness, compares your offering against other options in the market, and captures readers with enticing offers and promotions. Sagefrog helps B2B companies of all sizes create and execute B2B content marketing strategies that attract your personas and make them want to be your customer.
Want help putting it all together? Contact us any time.
