How to Create a B2B Content Marketing Strategy: Ideas, Tactics & Examples

Intro

If you want to have a successful business, you must succeed in your business-to-business (B2B) content marketing strategy. Otherwise, potential businesses will not know how to reach you. A good B2B content marketing strategy will enable you to spread the word about your business and, in turn, find success.

Studies show that 91% of B2B marketers and 86% of B2C marketers use content marketing as a part of their marketing strategies. While 46% of businesses said they wanted to increase their spending on content creation in 2022.

The reason behind those statistics is simple: content marketing strategies work. All you need to do as a business owner is understand what they are and take the necessary steps to put them in place.

In this article, we still study tactics and examples for a successful B2B content marketing strategy.

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What Is a B2B Content Marketing Strategy (with examples)?

Before we dive into how to make a splash with B2B content marketing strategy, let’s take a look at what it is and what it entails.

B2B content marketing is creating content relevant to other businesses so you may bring them to your brand. In other words, a B2B content marketing strategy is defined as what you will do to accomplish that. Statistics show that forty-seven percent of B2B buyers consume three to five pieces of content before engaging with a salesperson. So, having the best content is essential to your success.

You may use several different avenues to achieve your B2B content marketing strategy.

Some, but not all, include:

• Blog posts – Articles on a web page that provide insight and information into a particular area or topic.
• Webinars - A structured release of information similar to a classroom setting that is presented in an online format.
• Social media posts – Short, informative messages that appear on various social media avenues such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc.
• eBooks – In-depth information provided online or available for download as a PDF – often integrated with an edit PDF function if they’re interactive.

Check out the 3 steps below you should take to establish your B2B content marketing strategy.

3 Steps to Establish Your B2B Content Marketing Strategy

#1 Define Your Business Goals

Before setting your B2B strategy, you need to define your goals and the purpose of your strategy.

Studies show that the top three primary goals of creating content are boosting sales, building customer relationships, and increasing brand awareness.

So, as you are defining your business goals, consider what is important to you and have that as your focus. Whether boosting your influx of sales or improving your local business relationships, you need to know how to set your goals.

#2 Check Out Your Competitors

Knowing what your competitors are up to is one of the top ways to stay ahead of the game. For example, 44% of B2B companies’ top marketing spend is digital marketing.

So, if you are trying to decide how to spend your marketing budget, knowing that your competitors are spending top dollar amounts on digital marketing campaigns should be very useful to your own campaign.

#3 Create Useful Content

No one wants to read an article that isn’t helpful. This is why a huge part of your B2B content marketing strategy should be what you are creating and putting out there.

In fact, it turns out that 81% of marketers say their business sees content as a core strategy. A top priority for your B2B content campaign should always be to get updated content out there.

What Are the Best B2B Content Marketing Tactics?

If a B2B content marketing strategy is what you will do, then B2B content marketing tactics are how you will do this.

Here we will look into 7 tactics with examples you must implement in your B2B content marketing.

7 Tactics (with Examples) You Should Consider in B2B Content Marketing

#1 Strategize Your Keywords

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One of the best things you can do to improve your B2B content marketing is to embrace the challenge of strategizing your keywords.

Once you have defined your business goals and narrowed down who your audience will be, you will be able to focus your keywords on that audience.

For example, Shaked Law and Winters and Yonker are both personal injury attorneys. However, Shaked Law is in Miami, while Winters and Yonker is in Tampa Bay. Both of these law firms will find success in ranking by microtargeting their keywords to their area.

Instead of simply focusing on the keyword ‘personal injury lawyer’, Shaked Law should ideally focus on a keyword like ‘personal injury lawyer Miami’. This will allow the firm to micro-target its audience and reach potential customers near them. These customers will be most likely to use their services.

Shaked Law has already done this and according to Ahrefs, this is the traffic they are pulling in from more targetted keywords:

For your B2B content marketing strategy, you should define your focus and work on targeting businesses through that.

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#2 Backlink Away

If you are not backlinking already, you should be. Backlinking is when you include links to other pages on your website or another website through anchor text. Choosing the right links, however, is important to the success of this strategy.

The stronger your backlinking strategy, the better your search engine ranking. Google is prone to consider pages with a high number of relevant backlinks to have higher organic search engine rankings than those without. Yet, more than 66% of pages have zero backlinks pointing to them. So, a huge opportunity is being missed.

Here are a few statistics to consider when working on your backlinking strategy:

• Nearly 60% of the pages ranking in the top 10 Google results are 3 or more years old.
• Organic search results that rank on page 1 of Google contain an average of 1,447 words.
• Pages with lots of backlinks rank above pages that don’t have as many backlinks. The top result in Google has an average of 3.8x more backlinks than positions 2-10.

#3 Embrace the Use of Statistics

People love reading statistics and linking back to them. If you can be the voice of authority and have statistics for other businesses to use, you will find great success in this content marketing avenue.

One of the best ways you can share statistics and have other businesses link back to you is to use infographics. It turns out that posts with infographics create 178% additional inbound backlinks. Unsurprisingly, 37% of people click on the first link of infographics.

So, having infographics as part of your statistics content marketing strategy will quickly build up your B2B content reputation online.

Alt text: Funny cartoon on boosting sales. Source

#4 Repurpose Great Content

Great content shouldn’t just be shared once. Quite the contrary, great content should be repurposed in different ways so you can use as many different avenues as possible to reach potential customers.

Imagine that you wrote and hosted a great webinar on a certain topic. Instead of just ending that topic there, consider writing an article, boosting social media posts with the content, and sharing infographics with relevant statistics. Now, instead of just having one avenue, you have created an additional three more simply by repurposing that content.

Studies show that blogs with relevant images receive 94% more views than articles without images, so you want to ensure you always have more than one layer in your content. When writing an article, consider adding listicles. They get 218% more shares than the traditional “how to” tutorial-style posts, so this will be excellent for your B2B content marketing strategy.

#5 Tackle and Invest in SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of the top ways you can reach other businesses and bring them to your website.

There are several methods to having good SEO, such as expediting page load time, optimizing content sharing, and strategizing headlines and keywords, among so many other options. Studies show that 29% of Google users only visit one page from the search results, so figuring out how to be one of the top three Google results should be a huge part of your content marketing strategy.

#6 Invest in Paid Promotion

Creating content for social media is great, but it is only useful if that content is being shared on social media. One of the best ways to accomplish this is to invest some funds in boosted content and social media ads.

If you are unsure how to accomplish this, here is a helpful tip: a recent study found that roughly seven-in-ten Americans use social media, and marketers believe Facebook is the most popular) social media platform across all age groups.

If you are looking for somewhere to start, Facebook is definitely a good place. Once you have mastered that platform, consider expanding your horizons to Instagram, Twitter, and others.

#7 Measure Those Metrics

A good B2B content marketing strategy is only successful if you can prove that it was successful. Unfortunately, only 57% of companies had a documented content marketing strategy, so only 43% of companies are embracing this.

By establishing a set strategy and measuring how your efforts are being used, you will be able to see which marketing avenues are best for your business. Sometimes it may take a few months of tracking before you start seeing results come through, but when they do come through, you will be able to see which strategies worked best for you and which ones you should consider adapting.

Final Thoughts on How to Create a B2B Content Marketing Strategy

Having a B2B content marketing strategy is one of the best ways for you to reach new businesses and get the word out there about your business. Content marketing should always be a big part of your digital marketing strategy for you to have success.

By implementing some of the ideas and tactics above and tracking the metrics to ensure your strategy is successful, you will be well on your way to improving your B2B content marketing strategy and reaching an entirely new audience you have not reached before.

If you would like to learn more about improving your B2B content marketing strategy, be sure to check out Ranktracker. Ranktracker provides you with the SEO insights you need to bring targeted traffic to your website. Research keywords, check backlinks, assess the competition, detect problems and accomplish so much more. Find out more today.