Content Marketing 101 - Part 2:
Content Marketing Tips for B2B Marketers
In this episode, Paul Slack and Ray Larson, Director of Client Services, share their insights on how B2B marketers can maximize their digital marketing strategy. They emphasize the importance of identifying the target audience and creating a comprehensive plan incorporating various digital channels. Here are some of the key takeaways from the episode:
1. Understand Your Audience and Their Problems
One of the biggest challenges that B2B companies face when creating content is coming up with topics that their audience will care about. Blanket advice on content creation is ineffective, as it doesn't address specific issues. Companies should focus on understanding their audience's problems and writing to their decision-makers and influencers, not just talking about themselves.
2. Focus on Empathy and Solving Customer Problems
To create content that resonates with customers, there should be a focus on empathy, understanding the customer's problems, and how the company can solve them. Becoming the go-to resource for the audience and solving their problems should be the focus of content creation, not just generating traffic.
3. Use Different Content Formats
The old school way of content marketing was blog-centric, but the new school way involves more content in different formats. Foundational content, periodical content, and resources are important for creating a comprehensive content strategy. Atomizing content and publishing it in various places is essential for reaching buyers where they are.
4. Measure and Improve Content Marketing Efforts
Measuring and improving content marketing efforts is crucial for success. Planning, development, distribution, and measurement form a continuous loop in content marketing. Important steps in planning include identifying audiences, creating messaging playbooks, researching, and identifying content pillars. Content formats should be chosen based on the needs and preferences of the target audience.
5. Content Pillars and Categories
Foundational content is long-form, 3000 words or more content that lives on your website and is an in-depth dive into each of your content pillars. Periodical content comes out with some regularity and is serialized, such as blog topics that circulate around each content pillar. Resources are produced for every piece of foundational content, and these are content upgrades that help customers with the topic they're reading about.
Three to five content pillars are a rule of thumb, but it is okay to have six or seven, but ten is probably too much. Categories on the website should be organized in a way that aligns all of the content on the site, especially periodical content, such as blog content, within these content pillars. Start with the content pillars and then add services to the category structure.
6. Content for Each Stage of the Funnel
The slides provided address each stage of the funnel: top of the funnel (40% of content should be about the category), middle of the funnel (40% of content should be useful information), and bottom of the funnel (20% of content should be about solving specific problems, testimonials, and success stories).
7. Different Types of Users Within the Ideal Customer Profile
There are three different types of users within the ideal customer profile: decision-makers, managers, and end-users. Content should be created specifically for each type of audience.
8. Know and Do Exercise
The "know and do" exercise can help come up with topics: first, ask what the customer needs to know about a topic, then what action they should take next. To come up with good content ideas, look for topics that go deeper than what is currently out there in the market.
9. Content Audit
A content audit is necessary to see what needs to be removed, rewritten, or atomized. The audit provides opportunities to see what content categories are heavy and what