How is content marketing useful for B2B?

The buyers’ journey continues to evolve.  In a recent report by Harvard Business Review: Winning at Sales in a Buyer-Empowered World confirms what many already know:

“Prospective buyers in business-to-business settings have completed 57 percent of their due diligence work before engaging with your sales representatives.”

Where is all this “due diligence” happening? Online of course and if your online presence consists primarily of content explaining the features and benefits of your offerings, you are missing the evolution.  Today you have to be in the business of creating informative, educational AND engaging content that supports all areas of your customers’ information journey.  If you do it right, you will position yourself as the expert in your field and become a sought out resource for your industry.  When creating content that is geared for the B2B marketplace, there are some important things to keep in mind.

Be Relevant, Dive Deeper

You should make every effort to produce quality content targeted towards a specific topic that will showcase your expertise and foster interest amongst your audience. In other words, the content should dive deeper and be more “educational” than in a typical B2C approach. 

B2B Content Creation Tips:

• Focus your content creation on core issues facing your marketplace and address it thoroughly


• Start with the problem, then provide actionable solutions that are backed up by research, theory or real case studies


• Be aware of the different stakeholders (buyer personas) within your target audience and craft messaging that appeals to each of them


• Create an editorial calendar with varied ideas and topics that address both the buyers’ and customers’ journey

Extend Your Reach

Now that you have laid the foundation for your content generation activities, next work on a game plan for how to extend the reach of your content outside of the properties that you own.  An obvious place to start is LinkedIn, as it is the perfect B2B setting where people are actually looking for new content to read, engage and debate with.  Even if you have been using LinkedIn for a while, here are some important points to keep in mind:

• Take another pass at your company page, make sure you have a compelling profile and that you are taking advantage of all social platform features


• Discover relevant groups and join the conversation to make deeper connections with industry influencers


• When you are ready to post, do so in an educational fashion, not a blatant self-promotional way


• Be sure to leverage the network of your employees on LinkedIn by encouraging them to repost your articles; this is not only good for the company, but also for their professional profile

Another great place to turn to gain additional reach for your content is to establish relationships with leading publications in your industry.  Why? Because this is where your customers are already going to educate themselves on the latest information impacting their industry, and by having your content/brand associated in these environments you’ll gain tremendous “brand rub”.  Many of these publications also use content marketing platforms that place your articles adjacent to relevant content on the publisher’s site. The best part about these services is that you can quickly get your content promoted to a targeted, engaged audience with minimal effort.

Time to Dive In

The primary goal of implementing a B2B content strategy is to create a supply chain of content that feeds your industry and positions your organization as the thought leader and the “GoTo” source for insight.  If you do not take this leadership position, it is likely that one of your competitors will fill this information void – so do not be afraid to take the leap!