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No matter whether you manufacture the industrial cooling devices used in chain markets or sell subscribed online and physical payment solutions: Even if you are a B2B brand, it is crucial to attach utmost importance to B2B marketing studies in order to advance in the competition. Let us try to explain this ambitious argument by addressing questions such as "Why is B2B marketing important?", "What are the types of B2B marketing?" and "How can B2B brands market content?", and to collocate all you need to know about B2B content marketing in a single article.
The nature of competition is constantly changing in business life, and the digital world brings about new tools for all brands offering products and services to end users or various enterprises. B2B brands, too, have been impacted by the shift of marketing to the internet environment and the transformation of digital marketing into a prioritized strategy for brands' presentation to customers.
In this article, we would like to first answer questions such as "What is B2B marketing?" and "Why should B2B brands do marketing?" before focusing on details of B2B content marketing, which is one of the strongest tools of B2B marketing. We would be providing a viable and comprehensive response to the question "How to do B2B content marketing?" under the headings addressing the nuances of B2B content marketing and B2B content marketing tools. If you're ready, let's start our journey to find clues about B2B content marketing toolkit that would position your brand as the sector leader.
We regret to inform you that the world where "the products and services sell themselves" has become a thing of the past; today, we experience the information age where the internet is at the center of the purchasing decisions of each user and enterprises of any kind. No matter what business you are occupied with in whatever sector or which product you try to sell to whom, you should explain yourself to your users by taking advantage of various marketing tools, and find creative ways of addressing your customers, and of describing in what aspects your products/services are different from the competitors. Otherwise, even if you are the market leader, your sectoral position may be threatened when you face challengers knowing communication and marketing better than you. Don't be concerned because of this honest and ambitious introduction, we will summarise your needs in respect of B2B marketing in this article.
Let's start with the most basic and conceptual one: B2B (business-to-business) marketing is a concept referring to the marketing strategies carried out towards an enterprise or organization. The activities of enterprises whose ultimate aim is to sell products and services not to end users but to other enterprises, is called B2B marketing. The main difference in B2B marketing is the change of focus. On the other hand, the purpose of B2B marketing is to ensure that your potential customers recognize your brand's name, products and services, and the distinctive aspects of such products and services and that they are interested in your brand thanks to this information. Other B2B enterprises that are interested in your brand may become your long-term customers, and the enterprises carrying out qualified B2B marketing studies may reach higher levels of profitability by accelerating business growth.
B2B marketing is distinctive in terms of the points focused on while searching for a B2B product compatible with the needs of consumer businesses. For example, corporate brands seeking a professional service often would like to get information about the return of investment (ROI), the productivity they would achieve using that specific product or service, and the expertise of the supplier organization. In buying decisions of B2B brands, financial facilities and rational factors have a more important role than emotional factors. B2B customers would like to be trained in an area of expertise they are not really knowledgeable about and to make the proper selection after reviewing these educational contents. In comparison with B2C decisions, B2B buying decisions tend to be much more long term; because purchase of a product/service on a corporate scale for a brand is a much longer and thoroughly considered process.
Published by LinkedIn, B2B Benchmark report shows that B2B business leaders envision an increase in marketing budget in various parts of the world for the following years and that at the same time, three-fifths of leaders attach more importance to brand construction processes in comparison to the previous years. In particular, B2B companies plan to allocate more budget for marketing in an era of economic slowdown and concerns for recession, and this shows that companies have started to take cognizance of the importance of B2B marketing better.
As we mentioned at the very outset, today, even businesses use the internet and search engines to find the right supplier and service provider when they intend to purchase a product or service. Such that corporate purchasing and supply chain processes have been designed to find solutions to business needs of each and every category and are ensured via B2B marketplaces involving hundreds of suppliers. This is exactly why also companies developing products and services for various businesses need to concentrate on marketing activities and to be positioned at higher places in search engine results than the competitor brands in order to advance in the competition. Exactly at this point, the concept of B2B content marketing comes to the fore.
B2B content marketing is the name of the marketing method used by B2B brands selling professional products and services for businesses in order to attract targeted potential customers by developing content strategies and producing content in line with these strategies. According to Content Marketing Institute data; used by 7 out of 10 B2B marketing professionals, B2B content marketing stands out as a marketing method that is often low-budget but has a robust and long-term impact. Because, a quality content achieves to preserve its up-to-date and informative aspect for many years and transforms into a tool strengthening B2B brand recognition by obtaining strong listings in a search engine. Fundamental benefits of B2B content creation that may be of interest to target audiences, may be summarised in the following paragraphs:
Brand authority: The contents produced by a brand in its area of expertise is considered as a way of putting forth its knowledge about the sector and area of activity of that brand. Proving brand authority with quality content gives potential customers confidence in the B2B company.
Search engine visibility: Written in an SEO-friendly manner with the correct keywords, B2B contents are considered to be the authority by also search engines. This results in the prominence of brands with their content pages in search engine inquiries.
Educational task: B2B products and services may often be complex by their nature. For example, products and services regarding cloud computing may not be understood through catalogues by customers who have ideas on a limited scale about digital transformation. At this point, educational blog contents, case studies and technical documents may assume an educational role on both the subject matter in question and the products and services.
Competitive advantage: Brands that demonstrate a sound know-how on lesser-known matters via quality contents acquire advantages against their competitors.
Organic customer acquisition: B2B marketing experts position the contents they produce within the framework of their B2B content marketing strategies as a phase in the B2B sales funnel. For example, accessing a technical document or research report through a form also means generation of a candidate customer pool.
If you have decided to do B2B content marketing, as in every marketing activity, you need to embark on your journey by determining a content strategy. In doing this, you need to first focus on understanding the target audience you address and their expectations. For example, the language and discourses to reach out to a senior manager having the decision-making power in an enterprise differs from the discourses to reach out to a technical expert and sales professional in terms of people's areas of expertise and value perceptions.
Content audit gets on the stage in the second step. Your website, old contents you have produced in your previous content marketing attempts, the voice tone you use in social media, and other headings regarding content are evaluated in detail in this process, which enables you to raise the performance of your potential contents to the highest level and to determine your future content strategy comprehensively.
In the following phase, the contents you have produced within the B2B content marketing strategies are linked correctly with the sales funnel. At this point, you need to allocate a great deal of time to understand the purposes of different content types, design call-to-action buttons accordingly or other items, and to consider which discourses may be more functional on which pages.
When produced constantly and updated regularly, B2B blog contents stand out as one of the content marketing items transforming into the strongest potential customer production tools for B2B companies. The SEO-friendly blog contents you will generate in the sector of your company's operation pave the way for your customers to access your website through their simple search engine inquiries by answering basic questions such as "What?", "How to do" and "What are the differences?". Once your potential customers enter your website and are attracted by your quality contents, it becomes easier to keep them in and to turn this into a sale.
Although content marketing myths involve the opinion that blog content generation is sufficient for content marketing, what do you think if we argue that one of the best methods to prove sectoral expertise is to have your current customers that you serve and satisfy by such expertise talk about it? A case study or success story where you have signed with one of your customers and summarized the favorable impact you have made on your customer's business processes facilitates the enhancement of confidence in your brand in the eyes of your customers.
As mentioned above, the technical documents where you explain your sectoral expertise more comprehensively and relatively more technically and you provide, for example, as a PDF file, may transform into candidate customer channels. Those persons who enter their information such as name, e-mail address and telephone number to download technical documents with qualified content presenting sectoral expertise with a strong design and ambitious discourses, may be considered to be candidate customers for cold calling to be made by sales teams in the ensuing days. As much as technical documents, also research reports of your company may provide a similar function. Turn the prominent insights from user data into downloadable documents having a nice design and open them to access of only the users sharing information. And that's it.
Many world-famous companies focus on going beyond written content by developing their content creating capacities and attracting potential customers via visual/audio contents such as podcast and webinar. Telling about your sectoral know-how via podcasts and webinars that you would record with the participation of experts from time to time, may facilitate gaining customers that do not have time to read texts.
We have mentioned so far only the in-house content creation that you may produce in your own media channels; however, no matter their sizes, we believe that B2B companies need to make use of also earned media opportunities. Digitized thanks to Online PR, press release distribution processes stand out as one of the easiest and budget-friendly methods of making use of earned media. Presenting your sectoral expertise to your potential customers via press releases published in reliable news channels facilitates your acquisition of a favorable image not only on your own website but also throughout the whole internet.
If your main business is not marketing, those mentioned above may have daunted you. One out of 2 B2B marketing experts states that they outsource part of their production of content marketing by cooperating with organizations such as content agencies. Online PR Service B2Press, too, achieves responding to all written content needs of your B2B brand with contents written by qualified editors by offering both press release distribution services and content creation packages called B2Press Plus. Understanding you and your brand and making applicable and long-term contributions to your content strategy, B2Press editors makes it a simple, easy and fast process to generate an online corporate library with sound contents, make use of earned media facilities and build your brand's authority on contents. Because, having an understanding of the language of media with their past experiences as journalists, B2Press editors offer unlimited opportunities to customers that prefer B2Press Plus service.
You may make use of B2Press' press release distribution service offered in more than 30 countries or entrust the processes of content audit and website text generation processes to the capable hands of B2Press editors within the scope of B2Press Plus. If you want, B2Press may produce content regularly for your B2B website's corporate blog and talk about your sectoral expertise on your behalf, and even prepare technical documents compatible with your company and area of business. B2Press may also create quality content for you to put forth your sectoral know-how through social media accounts. B2Press may also create "About Us" texts of your brand and discourse sets in collaboration with you. Online PR Service B2Press contains numerous B2B companies in its portfolio and it offers unlimited opportunities with regard to written content creation within the scope of B2Press Plus service. Please fill out the proposal form to let us contact you as soon as possible with further information about what B2Press may offer to you.
