7 Reasons Why Content Marketing is Important for B2B
Is content marketing important for B2B companies?
And if so, why is it important?
As a B2B marketer, you likely already know that content marketing is crucial for connecting with your target audience. However, presenting to company stakeholders the reasons why content marketing matters may not be as easy.
Getting buy-in from these key stakeholders is critical for ensuring your marketing strategy has the best chance of success. Having the approval of the decision-makers in your business can, in turn, make it easier to get sign-off on your marketing budget, resources and campaign ideas.
In this article, we’ll be sharing seven reasons why content marketing is important for B2B so you can confidently prove the power of marketing to the stakeholders in your business.
The Power of Content Marketing for the B2B industry
Content marketing is just as important for B2B companies as it is for any other type of company.
Recent research by Backlinko shows that 72% of B2B companies have a blog on their website. That leaves 28% of B2B companies without a blog and, therefore, without a solid content marketing strategy.
There are so many reasons as to why content marketing is an important aspect of growing a B2B company, including the following seven benefits:
- Help B2B buyers with purchase decisions
- Cost-effective way to improve online visibility and rankings
- Yield long-term results for your business
- Build strong connections with your target audience
- Capture and generate high-quality leads
- Showcase your products and services in an engaging, digestible format
- Stay one step ahead of competitors
Below we’ll look at each one in more detail as we explain exactly why they matter…
1. Help B2B buyers with purchase decisions
As a business, you know what you’re talking about – and content marketing is a great way to share that knowledge with your customers.
As part of your content marketing strategy, you can create content that helps to inform and educate B2B buyers. This type of content fits into the content marketing matrix where educational content is used to inform the audience with rational information.
Example image of the Content Marketing Matrix
Educational content could come in the form of an instructional video, a ‘how-to’ article or as an infographic, for example. Potential B2B buyers can then refer to this educational and informative content to help with their purchase decisions.
Another benefit of creating educational content is that it is often shareable – allowing you to further increase your reach, gain backlinks and build your reputation.
The B2B content marketing report by Backlinko found that B2B blogs that create education content receive 52% more organic traffic than those that mainly publish content about their company.
2. Cost-effective way to improve online visibility and rankings
When done correctly, content marketing can be a cost-effective way to increase the online visibility of your business.
Content creation isn’t the be-all and end-all when it comes to improving search engine optimisation for your business, but it can play a pivotal role in increasing your organic rankings.
When it comes to improving your SEO, content marketing is vital. The two go hand in hand – any on-site content you create is a way to improve SEO through keyword targeting, link-building and consistent output.
As an in-house marketing team, you may be able to create some forms of content yourself, such as social media content and blog articles. This means if you already have a website with blog functionality, there’s no additional cost to write and publish an SEO-friendly article.
However, if you’re not a content writer or don’t have an SEO specialist within your team, then the content produced might come across as low-quality which could have the opposite effect on organic rankings and audience attraction.
In these circumstances, you may want to outsource content marketing to a performance-based SEO agency.
Partnering with an experienced SEO agency means you will have a dedicated team on hand to produce high-quality content that is focused on generating results for your business.
While partnering with an agency may be an additional monthly cost for your business, the results garnered from the work produced should offset those overheads. By partnering with a performance-based agency like Common Ground you can have confidence that the time and money spent on your content marketing will yield positive results for your business.
3. Yield long-term results for your business
The lifespan of your on-site content is something to shout about when explaining the importance of content marketing for B2B companies.
Incorporating evergreen content into your strategy allows you to increase the longevity of your on-site content. Evergreen content can be repurposed for cross-promotional activities, such as organic social media or email marketing, time and time again.
The content created can also be shared with your sales team for use with customer outreach, or shared with your customer support team to help with client enquiries. This cross-departmental activity means your content marketing delivers a long-lasting positive impact throughout the entire customer lifecycle.
Finally, if this evergreen content ranks well in search results, it will keep directing customers to your site.
This is why good content marketing is so important – it can be written and then tweaked or repurposed over the years in order to ensure it stays relevant and continues to rank for your chosen keywords.
By regularly publishing content on your website, you’ll be rewarded (in terms of organic rankings and conversions) for having a strong mix of fresh content and long-standing posts!
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4. Build strong connections with your target audience
B2B content marketing is about more than just creating and distributing content. When executed properly, it can also be a way to build strong connections with your target audience.
From blog articles to videos, white papers, courses, webinars, and social media posts, content marketing provides your business with the opportunity to attract, engage, and convert your target audience through various types of content.
The content created can also be used to establish yourself as an expert in your industry – further building trust with your customer base. By consistently producing content that is relevant, up-to-date, timely and correct, you will become the go-to source for information in your field.
This will help build a positive reputation for your organisation meaning people will think of your company when making B2B purchase decisions, and they will be quick to recommend you to others – especially if they can share your content by linking to it easily.
Creating content that is solution-focused, rather than focusing on your products or services will further help you build a rapport with your target audience. Put yourself in your customers’ shoes and create content with them in mind.
By understanding how your customers think, feel, and interact with content, you will be able to create B2B content that is personable and relevant to the needs of your target audience.
Again, this creates a solid connection. Having this connection can increase your customer lifetime value, ensuring your audience moves from one-time visitors to lifelong customers.
5. Capture and generate high-quality leads
When it comes to getting buy-in from business stakeholders, they will likely want to know how the content helps to bring in new customers for your business.
Having the power to capture high-quality leads is potentially one of the most important reasons why your company may want to invest in content marketing.
The type of content you create can be adapted to suit the results you want to achieve and the stage of the customer journey you want to target. For instance, sharing valuable and informative content can help your business attract leads that are in the awareness or consideration stages of the customer funnel.
As part of your SEO and content marketing strategy, you can use a lead generation magnet to encourage your audience to travel further down the customer funnel, transitioning from consideration to intent and, finally, conversion.
Email marketing, eBooks, downloadable resources, and other forms of content can all act as lead magnets for your business.
For example, adding a pop-up window to your website that encourages visitors to sign up to your mailing list allows you to collect email addresses from your audience to further target them with relevant and informative content that keeps them engaged with your business.
You can then use email marketing to provide high-quality content that increases trust and speeds up the customer conversion process.
By incorporating B2B lead generation into your content strategy, you can help turn visitors into highly qualified leads.
6. Showcase your products and services in an engaging, digestible format
Content marketing gives your business the opportunity to market potentially complex or niche products and services in a way that is engaging and easily digestible.
People have short attention spans. Creating content that is both engaging and easy to digest allows your business to convey your key message in the shortest time possible. This content can be used to hook your target audience in, allowing it to complement long-form content and get initial buy-in from your ideal customers.
By making your content entertaining and interesting, as well as informative, you will be able to increase customer interest and stand out from the crowd.
7. Stay one step ahead of competitors
In any business, you want to be the best, and content marketing can help you stay one step ahead of your competitors.
As mentioned earlier, there are still 28% of B2B companies without blogs – and of the 72% that do have blogs, not all are utilising them to their fullest extent. Only 24% have pop-ups on their blogs, and only 35% have a ‘subscribe to newsletter’ section.
The audience is already there, so why not get the most out of them?
Without a solid content marketing strategy, you run the risk of falling behind as a business. You let yourself miss out on the chance to show up in organic searches, and you can’t become the expert and go-to in your field if nobody knows you exist.
Having a consistent B2B content marketing strategy will allow you to strengthen your brand’s reputation and visibility and, in turn, you’ll see the results roll in.
Analyse where you are in terms of the market and your competitors, and see if there’s a way for your marketing strategy to plug the gap. Competitor analysis is an important part of content marketing to ensure you are creating content that delivers long-term results for your business.
The content you create for your business is an opportunity to set yourself apart from your competitors. You can create content that is personable, engaging, educational and shareable to make sure that your business is the one that gets remembered above all others.
The importance of content marketing for B2B
Getting buy-in from stakeholders can be difficult. However, it is clear that content marketing offers many benefits for the B2B industry.
Content marketing, as you know, is also an opportunity to improve the SEO of your business to enhance your visibility and grow your organic rankings.
The content created for your business also allows you to generate leads and help B2B buyers along the sales funnel.
Offering so many benefits to the sales process, it is evident that content marketing is a valuable investment for your business. Here at Common Ground our team of SEO specialists can help you create a performance-based content marketing strategy that delivers measurable results for your business.
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