NOTE: This is the first of a two-part series describing the benefits and giving practical tips on how to achieve your content marketing goals.
By now, B2B content marketing is so commonplace that the benefits are limited, right?
Some Digital Marketers need to explain the benefits of Content Marketing in order to secure the budget they need to succeed and get buy-in from management. So how do you go about explaining the benefits of just how important content marketing is in your company’s marketing mix?
There are lots of reasons why content marketing is an extremely effective tool for B2B businesses, and these seven tactics can help ensure you’re getting the most out of it.
Content marketing is one of the most successful marketing tactics for B2B companies. According to the Content Marketing Institute, 91% of B2B marketers utilize content marketing in their overall marketing strategy.
However, that’s not to say that everyone has a mature content marketing strategy. In truth, less than 30% of B2B marketers have a solid content marketing strategy in place while the rest are still early adopters.
For those marketers who are still working on developing a mature content strategy, what often holds them back is a lack of clarity on content marketing success. Only 41% of B2B organizations have a clear idea of what a successful content marketing program looks like and the benefits it affords.
If you fall into the 59% of organizations that lack clarity on the benefits of B2B content marketing, this article is here to help you out. We’ve compiled a list of the top seven benefits your company can expect from content marketing.
Content marketing is so popular because it can have a positive impact on many different areas of your business.
Content marketing is one of the most effective ways to drive traffic to your website. Whether it’s through blogs, social media content, white papers, or emails, the content you create demonstrates what your company offers and who you are.
Then, when potential customers search for help to their needs, challenges, or pain points, they can find your company through keywords or phrases that match what they’re looking for. It’s all about creating targeted content that answers those needs and consequently draws leads to your website.
The best part is that effective content marketing works without a sales pitch as the driving force. Instead, it’s about developing content that answers your audience’s questions and provides them with valuable information about how your services and products answer their concerns.
To see how many qualified leads your content marketing is bringing to your website, you can use Google Analytics and Google Search Console to track your traffic and see which content pieces are most successful.
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Valuable content for the right audience, delivered at the right time, helps build trust and thus leads to conversions. It can also help with lead nurturing tactics and remarketing audiences. In particular, remarketing is one of the most valuable ways that content marketing can help you increase conversions.
When you create targeted content and use a product such as HubSpot to track it, you’re provided with valuable analytics that can help you see what content your audience has interacted with. From there, you can use that similar content to remarket to those leads on different platforms.
For example, let’s say a lead read a blog post about your new service. Using remarketing, you can follow that lead to social media and show them an ad for that same service. Or, you can send a follow-up email that expands on a blog post. In this way, you can get in front of your leads multiple times with similar content for an increased chance of conversions.
Creating content based on your industry’s most competitive keywords can help you outrank your competitors’ website on search engines. In fact, a well planned content marketing strategy can help you develop enough content that you can dominate the space for your specific search terms or phrases.
For example, let’s say that one of your products already ranks #1 on organic search. Using content marketing for the same or similar term, you can take over the remainder of the page with blogs, white papers, and landing pages so that your competitors have little to nothing showing on the search page.
This is especially the case for things like Google’s Answer Box, which overrides the typical search results to provide the most likely answer to a question at the top of the page.
In this scenario, you have a great chance of showing up as the top result with quality content even against an industry leader if you provide content that directly answers the question. Just take a look at how Inc.com gets the top result for its article compared to a company.
By providing valuable content to the right audience at the right time you show your customers that you’re listening to their needs, which pleases them. This consistent production of quality content also helps keep your customers engaged with you, which inevitably, increases your chances of upselling or cross-selling.
The truth is, that if you want your customers to have a strong brand affinity for you, they need more from your company than just products and services. They have to love what you offer and be willing to tell their friends and coworkers about you. Creating valuable content is vital to building this type of B2B customer loyalty, where customers are willing to vouch for your brand without coercion.
High-quality content can attract your target audience to follow you on social media. Customers and leads don’t follow brands that constantly sell. They follow brands that provide value. That’s why 94% of B2B marketers make social media a major tactic in their content marketing strategy—more so than any other tactic.
Through content marketing, you can leverage your social media channels to reach your customers where they’re at whether that’s LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube. The way to do this is to start with your blog or website as your content marketing hub and then to share that content on all your social media channels.
You should also curate quality content from around the web to share on your social media to demonstrate your thought leadership. Remember to follow the 10-4-1 rule! This will inevitably help you gain new followers who appreciate the content and value you provide. You can use tools like Pocket , Twitter Lists, and Buzzsumo to help you find and keep track of external content to share on your accounts.
As mentioned above, high-quality and consistent content allows you to build your reputation as a thought leader in your space. It’s all about focusing on the needs of your clients and creating/curating content that answers those needs. This is different from creating content that sells. It’s about generating content that tells a story your customers want to hear.
In addition, you can use your content to monitor and address concerns and to have an open conversation online. For example, let’s say your company gets caught up in a PR crisis. You can use your content marketing strategy to create, disseminate, and promote positive, strong, and credible information that paints your company in a good light and pushes the negative news stories off of the first pages of the SERPs.
Content and SEO are intertwined. Content marketing helps your B2B SEO not only by helping you rank for keywords and phrases, but also by building links, adding more mentions and citations of your company, and demonstrating your thought leadership, so search engines are more friendly to you. Of course, we know this is the most obvious benefit of content marketing, but no list of benefits would be complete without mentioning it!
There’s no doubt that the benefits of a solid B2B content marketing strategy are abundant, and there’s no better time to review your company’s marketing strategy to ensure that you’re not missing out.
Be on the lookout for our next article “The 7 Best Tactics for Content Marketing” to find new ways to expand your strategy, and if you’re having problems, then we’re always here to help.
Contact KeyScouts today for an in-depth content audit to see what you’re doing well and where you can improve. A second set of eyes can make all the difference.