B2B content marketing best practices: a guide to planning the right strategy for you

Best practices for a successful B2B content marketing strategy

If you have a B2B business and want to devote energy to content marketing, you need to know the rules that make up a perfect strategy, rules we can call B2B content marketing best practices.

Before we begin, however, let’s explain what content marketing is!

Content marketing refers to the set of techniques aimed at developing effective and valuable content, such as videos, blog articles, podcasts etc., to share with one’s customers to promote one’s brand by reaching the market, gaining visibility and conversion to purchase.

In fact, doing content marketing allows you to achieve your business growth goals, communicate optimally with your potential customers and attract the best ones through targeted and well-structured online content.

That is why it is essential to follow the best practices we will tell you about in the next few paragraphs and rely on market research to get reliable and usable data right away.

1. Start with goals and budget

If you operate in B2B and want to get started with content marketing, you first need to define your business goals (why do you want to adopt this strategy? Which results are satisfactory to you and which are not?), establish your budget, and figure out how to measure results.

Once you’ve drafted your goals, you’ll already have an idea of the clients you want to impress–you “just” have to get their characteristics down on paper, find the names and figure out what they want!

2. Know your potential customers, study an appropriate tone of voice and channels to use

To know your target customers perfectly you need amarket analysis, there is no other way (intuition, in these cases, does not reward).

Focusing on customer analysis, market research helps you to:

• Have a comprehensive list of potential customers operating in your geographic area of interest (e.g., with an interactive B2B market report that you can consult at any time to get the answers you need)
• Define the perfect profile of customers you’d like to target with your content marketing strategies
• Understand what they want, what problems they want to solve, what their needs are
• Know what they like and dislike about your company and your competitors
• know where they look for information on the web–and how they do it, therefore what words they use

With this information, which we at CMI extrapolate online using powerful market survey software, you can plan numerous aspects of your content marketing strategy, including:

• Tone of voice
• In which channels to publish your content
• what to write in texts

In summary: You will know how and where to communicate with your potential customers to build trust with them.

Market analysis studies not only current and potential customers, but also the competition!

Read also: B2B digital marketing: devising successful online strategies from your customers’ needs

3. Study what the competition is doing

B2B content marketing best practices certainly cannot misscompetitor analysis, which is essential to understand how your fiercest competitors work, how they communicate with potential and current customers and what platforms they are on (blogs, social, forums etc.).

It is important that you also know the results of the competitors’ strategy: they can express as much, where and how they want but they may not necessarily get positive outcomes!

And if they get them, we need to figure out how.

For example, with our interactive competitor report you can learn about website results, Google visibility and social media results so you can understand which competitors to imitate, how they attract customers and why they are successful.

Then what? Well, you have to imitate their strategies (and do better) and especially respond to the needs of target customers.

Therefore, it is time to draw up the content calendar.

4. Make an editorial calendar of content based on target customers’ questions

The editorial calendar is a document used to organize and plan the content you will publish on the different channels: blog section of your website, social, newsletter etc.

How to draw up the editorial calendar?

Not haphazardly, but by providing your customers with useful information (concerning, of course, your industry).

This aspect is very important because it allows you to strategically organize the publication of content and write interesting texts that will catch the attention of the companies you want to target.

Okay, but how do you know what your target customers want to read?

Ask and you will be given! We at CMI can provide you with information on industry trends, people searches (yes, your customers are people too) on Google, and much more.

Contact us now!

And now it is time for content writing.

5. Watchword: delegate!

Do you have time to put your B2B content marketing strategy into practice, or are your days so full that you may be reading this article on your lunch break or in the middle of the night?

Of the two, the second option is the most likely. So the last of the B2B content marketing best practices is this: don’t be afraid to delegate, but be afraid not to!

You can’t do it all yourself, and there are a host of professionals ready to do the best for your business: social media managers, copywriters, and many others who will help you get the results you aspire to.

You, meanwhile, can track these results.

Read also: How to do B2B marketing? Here’s what you need to start off with a bang!

Want to get started right away with your B2B content marketing strategy?

Then start with market research that can guide you to perfection!

Book a free consultation with us at Central Marketing Intelligence and together we will figure out the best solution for your goals. We are waiting for you!