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let's be honest as a B2B marketer lotss of the cookie cutter content marketing advice you're going to find online is not going to be that helpful and usually in B2B your audience is smart so if you're just churning out generic rubbish that's going to make you look dumb and of course for most B2B companies the goal isn't quantity of leads it's quality of leads so you need to make sure that your content is actually delivering that quantity well it can feel like a lot but we've worked with tons of B2B companies across Finance Healthcare legal manufacturing B2B e-commerce and we've won tons of Awards building immense B2B content strategies that generate huge Roi today we're going to share exactly how we do it the difference between B2B and b2c content fundamentally B2B and b2c content aren't really that different but there are some specific hurdles when it comes to producing for b2bs the pool of topics that we have to choose from can feel pretty unsexy compared to our b2c counterparts but remember you are still selling to a customer that customer is just part of a business and they have the same human need to be entertained and interesting that they do when they're buying products for their consumption after work and they're still going to go through the same process they're still going to read up about their problems they're going to read articles comparing different options they're going to spend time educating themselves about the thing that you're selling which is why content is the most effective way of convincing potential customers to do business with you but the goal isn't just creating content for Content sake it's not even just about creating useful and interesting content though that is important and we'll come back to that in a minute the goal of B2B content is to educate the customer about why you are the best option for them with our B2B clients we want to make sure that every piece of content we produce for them isn't just educational informative for the customer but actually educates and informs the customer on why they should do business with our client for example we've got a B2B client that sells packaging to other businesses now really important in a space like this that can feel quite commoditized that we accentuate why people should buy from this business rather than all of their more generic competitors so in every piece of content that we produce we're trying to emphasize things like their excellent customer service and communication levels the high quality of their products and the fact that they're sustainable the fast and secure delivery the fact that they give help and advice on their products and the flexibility and customization options so we'll drop these things in throughout any content that we're producing but we're also looking at each piece of content as a way of guiding the customer towards the purchase for example when we first started working with this business we realized that they had loads of touch points with their potential customers where potential customers were reading and interacting with maybe five or six different pieces of content maybe some of it on the website some of them via email some of them on social and we wanted to make sure that every piece that was being produced was moving the customer further down the line towards purchase how do you do that well of course you drop in calls to action that are relevant to the stage in the journey that somebody is at but you can also automate some of that customer Journey nudging using email marketing which we'll touch on a bit more later on and by the way if you're facing push back from some of your leadership team about the value of content Marketing in B2B we've got a couple of videos for you linked in the description one is about how to plan your marketing budget and another is about how to get buying from senior leadership team and actually get them excited about what you're doing all right now we've talked a bit about the role of content Marketing in B2B now let's explore some of the different tactics that the content marketing team here at exposure ninja use to generate High volumes of good quality leads for our B2B clients using positioning to stand out in an ocean full of businesses battling for each potential customer's attention it can be difficult to stand out nowhere is this more true in B2B particularly in the least sexy B2B sectors often you get businesses that are super generic and really boring and that's great if you're competing against that stuff fantastic cuz that's loads of load hanging through what we need to do is figure out how to differentiate you against those through your marketing and through your content to begin with this is about picking one aspect of your product or service that really most stands out and represents what customers most want now this might be customer service it might be the quality of your work it might be some sort of guarantee might be reliability the possibilities are endless and I can't really diagnose it on this video so you've got to go meet with your team and figure out if somebody says why should we buy from you what's the best answer to that question we can then communicate that benefit and that differentiation throughout the content that you're producing it's really important of course that whatever you choose is actually authentic if it's not you're going to have trouble but let's look at an example so this is monzo business banking and the positioning is super clear it just works so you can too really really straightforward and this is such great positioning in the world of business banking if you ever tried to open or run a business account it's an absolute nightmare we had to change from one of the most established banks in the world just because their customer service and experience is just horrible and this is great positioning for monzo because if you've ever tried to work with a large established Business Bank it can be really difficult just to run and operate the account terrible customer service really slow communication so this positioning stands out and it's a great way to grab market share against more established banks that may be seen as more reliable the RO with positioning is you sell what you've got so if you're really well established you sell the fact that you're really well established if you're a new upstart you sell the fact that you're really disruptive and that you're a new upstart but it's really important that you don't just mention this once and expect customers to just get it immediately look at how monzo repeats this and has other messages that are tied to this so no monthly fees free transfers best British Banking provider 24/7 customer support monzo knows what makes it different from more traditional business Banks and this page is basically just highlighting all of those things they are selling against their competitors they never mention their competitors but this entire page is selling against the traditional experience of using a business bank now if you can find a really simple hook like this fantastic it may not be so straightforward for you and you might be tempted to pick out like five or six different benefits and try and cram them all in I'd Maybe caution against that and see if you can come up with something a bit more succinct that you can dot throughout your content now whilst this isn't necessarily A content strategy it's one of the key principles of having an effective content strategy so whilst this isn't a Content strategy it's one of the key pillars of a successful content strategy because it allows you to continually anchor this message in whatever content you're producing and make sure that it's really clear in your customers mind why they should use you and by the way when you do this sort of EX size you may realize that your current website isn't really fit for purpose it's not doing what it needs to do and sometimes this can be a great opportunity to have a bit of a website refresh now if you need some help with this the incredible Dev team here at exposure ninja build websites for our B2B clients and they're fantastic they're all designed to generate leads and they're all well optimized for search as well you can head to the link on screen or in the description now if you're interested to talk to them teach your audience something new your content should be use use f genuinely useful to your audience this isn't just a chance for you to brag about how great you are of course you want to let people know how great you are but that shouldn't be the main premise of any content that you're producing you're just subtly adding that in as long as you go like I'm doing in this video Boom the best way to do this is to use your content to solve a problem that your potential customer has sometimes your customers don't even know that they've got a specific problem let alone that you are a good potential solution so we need to work out which type of content you need to produce and I'm going to show you a couple of examples in just a minute in general lots of your content should be free to access I.E there's no gate that someone has to go through they don't have to fill in a form it's all just free to access on your website although you probably will have some gated content in the form of lead magnets which we'll touch on in just a second but let's look at some examples first of all now this article from isms talks about ISO 270001 versus ISO 901 not the sexiest topic I think you would agree but this is targeting people who are searching for things like ISO 901 versus ISO 2701 so there is some intent there because people might need one of these certifications now it's a great guide It's really informative it ranks nicely on Google and you've got calls to action throughout that can nudge people into the funnel for this particular business so this is a type of content that's designed for someone who knows what their problem is I they know the accreditation or they are know that there are two accreditations and they're trying to choose between them this example from slack is a different type of content this is designed for people who maybe don't know that they've got a problem or don't know that slack might be a potential solution to their problem and this is the state of work in 2023 engineering Trends so slack produces these stateof work guides basically to get on the radar of different types of workers they put this behind an email capture so they're getting the details of the people that are downloading this and of course when you download the guide it talks about the state of work in engineering and happens to mention slack a few times so what they're really looking to do is get on the radar of people who maybe haven't thought about how slack could increase their productivity or their communication between their team and present slacked as a solution which brings us nicely onto creating lead magnets so lead magnets are typically your most useful content that get people from Just landing on your website and actually get them into your funnel they get them signing up for something so think ebooks white papers webinars original studies that type of thing usually a lead maget is a type of content that people wouldn't be able to get elsewhere because there's something proprietary or it's in much more detail or it's packaged in a more useful way than everything else that's out there if you're just offering a lead magnet for the sort of content that your competitors are giving away free that's not really a lead magnet it's just a blog post that no one's ever going to get to so remember that because you're asking for Content details you need to incentivize people sufficiently to want to give you that contact details to download the lead magnet in the first place so the quality and the relevance of your guide needs to be super high for example here's a lead magnet that we designed for one of our clients during the height of the hybrid work transition and this was at a point where office managers really didn't know what was going on in the world they didn't know if their staff were going to be returning to the office or not so we produced this guide and ran a whole campaign around this to generate loads of attention for our client who works in this space we then boosted the visibility of this with paid media with email marketing promoting it across their website to make this piece of content a real Cornerstone of an entire campaign now our recipe for success with this campaign was we decided not to gatekeep the key findings from this study although we did keep the detail for the white paper that had to be downloaded we also gave visibility to journalists and people who write about these topics we used a reputable study company Yugo to build credibility for this and to make it a real sort of industry-leading study and we generated around 70 back links from high Authority Publications about this study so it's a fantastic campaign for the client because they obviously got leads from people downloading it but we also use that as a way of boosting the website's visibility overall by building authority and building noise in the industry about the fact that this study existed here's another example for a niche accountancy firm that only works with Mark agencies now every year wow conducts a survey with their customers to work out what the industry Trends are they then produce an annual guide called the bench press report that shares a bunch of information that no business owner in this space would otherwise have access to things like the profitability of their competitors how much their competitors are charging what their competitors retention rates are utilization all of these things are really interesting to their target audience and because wow has this knowledge cuz they've collected it from their client base they put this behind a gate so you have to fill in your name and email address and of course what do they do then well they promote their services to you because they're an accountancy firm that works with the people who are going to be most interested in the results of this study email marketing for nurturing email marketing is a massive content superpower but so few businesses use it effectively many b2bs have some sort of email list which they've kind of compiled accidentally but they don't really have a strategy for what they're sending out and it's very ad hog They Don't Really track measure and they certainly don't think about sequences Automation and behavioral targeting but we've taken a lot the best principles from B Toc email marketing and applied them to our B2B clients and actually email marketing for b2bs is potentially more important than from B2 C's if we think about the average B2B sales cycle being 4 months it's so important that there's something going on with those prospects during that 4 months that doesn't require your sales team constantly calling and emailing in a one-on-one basis if you automate a keep War sequence then it means your sales team can focus on the new leads coming into the pipeline and also those leads that are most ready to close all the while your automated email marketing sequences move those customers steadily further towards the purchase now one of our top tips for B2B email marketing is to make sure that you're properly segmenting your audience not everyone on your list needs the same type of emails so we might segment our Cent lists based on things like which product categories they're most interested in or the size of company that they're from and that means that you can produce tailored emails for each of these different segments that are more likely to resonate with the people reading them if you're a B2B e-commerce company there's absolutely no reason you can't use standard b2c email marketing strategies like browse abandonment and basket abandonment to run email sequences to people who've left products in their cars but you also going to want to run dedicated sequences for people who've downloaded a certain lead Magnet or inquired about a particular service for example for our SAS clients we might have a different email sequence for those who've requested a demo versus those who've taken a self-served demo versus those who've just filled in their email address on a subscribe to this newsletter popup for our packaging client for example we have separate sequences for those whove requested a free sample versus those who downloaded the free packaging guide nothing turns people off than getting emails that just aren't relevant for them it makes you sound so boring and so out of touch so by segmenting your audience like this you can significantly reduce the likelihood that you're sending your audience stuff that they're just going to ignore repurpose old content not everything that you produce needs to be brand new sometimes you've had some really great piece that you produced over the years which has maybe been forgotten and all it needs is a bit of a tweak a bit of a freshen up a bit of a glow up and you can get it working again we update our book about SEO every year now part of this is because SEO changes every year but part of this is just to create some more excitement and to build a bit of a campaign around it so we'll then run some ads for it and we'll mention it on our socials and we'll send out an email to the people who've downloaded or bought the book previously with the new fresh updates why are we doing this we're doing this to get on The Radars of these people because some of them might be ready to buy SEO or content marketing services but of course you can also repurpose this content so we take some of the topics from this book and we write blog posts about them or we make videos about them or podcasts about them because once you've done the research it's a lot quicker to then turn that information into different formats which are going to appeal to different types of people across different platforms we need to talk about offsite content too content marketing isn't just about the stuff that you publish on your own website digital PR can be one of the best ways of getting in front of your target audience particularly if they don't already know you whilst also getting your website links that are going to help your ranking on Google but b2bs can make two types of mistakes with their digital PR some of them only go after massive huge Publications right they only really care about getting mainstream media coverage cuz they think well these are going to be amazing powerful links that's the only stuff that we care about others only go for trade press much smaller websites because they think well that's where our audience is neither is right neither is wrong ideally you need both of these yes you want the high Authority sites to really help your ranking but you also want those trade Publications that might have less Authority but a much higher quality audience another mistake is not knowing what types of stories are going to work best with digital PR and particularly talking about the boring rubbish that the company leadership cares about like oh so and so he's been appointed as VP of boredom or whatever that's the sort of stuff that on the whole doesn't really tend to work too well for digital PR most Publications want to publish exciting news rather than like boring dry stuff that only the three people involved actually care about so there's two ways that b2bs can do really well with digital PR firstly they can be a bit creative about the types of content that they produce for example I remember years ago we had a client that did racking safety inspections now you can't really get more boring than that they go into warehouse and inspect the quality of the racking and how it's all set up to make sure that it doesn't collapse like in those videos that You' seen on Tik Tok so how do you get PR coverage about a business like that well what we did is we analyzed some fictional workplaces from things like The Simpsons or Game of Thrones or Doctor Who and analyze them from the perspective of a safety inspector now this was light-hearted it was entertaining it was fun it was interesting and it got some mainstream coverage for a business that's racking safety inspection this was extraordinary the other way that b2bs can use digital PR is to do their own studies and collect data if you can get some statistics about a trend or a theme that people are seeing this can be the type of thing that the media is interested in publishing now here's a creative campaign from Shutterstock where they piggybacked on Game of Thrones which was really trending at the time and they had their team redesign uh the Game of Thrones houses as modern corporations now I don't know anything about Game of Thrones so I don't know if this is funny or clever but it seems to get a really good response from people and this isn't a huge amount of work yes you need to put some energy into the creative but once you've done that you're then running a digital PR campaign about Game of Thrones which is much easier to do than running a digital PR campaign about stock imagery which hasn't really changed for a couple of decades optimize for search of course producing content on your website is fantastic but if you really want want to get the most leverage from it you need to optimize it for search this is going to get it found by people who are searching who are in market for what it is that you're selling or who need a solution to the problem that you've identified check out this B2B SEO video to find out exactly how we do it until next time