Marketing to other businesses is no easy task. There are a lot of complexity, nuances, and processes that you need to follow to gain value for your efforts. Getting the attention of other businesses as a vendor in a crowded market place is getting harder every day — the reason why is that more companies have been adopting content marketing to gain visibility with their prospects. If companies do not innovate their marketing efforts, then they will be left behind. We will be doing a deep dive today into B2B content marketing. We want you to understand the basics of using this tactic to make your company more competitive in the B2B space. The first thing that you need to know before we begin is what B2B content marketing is? B2B content marketing is the strategy, tactics, and execution of a plan for using content to build brand awareness, influence, and authority with prospective organizations who would be your ideal customers. The multiple layers of B2B content marketing There are three significant components when it comes to B2B content marketing. These components are: creating content, distributing content, and analyzing content. Each process is structured and meant to have an order of priority when you are working on them. For example, you can not distribute content without creating the content first. You may plan on how you want to distribute your content while working on writing your content. We will discuss each procedure in detail to give you a better understanding of how B2B content marketing works. 1. Creating content When you are writing content to market to other businesses, then you want to be seen as a thought leader in your industry. You want to find out what are the problems that are plaguing your client and how your company will fulfill those needs. One of the things that I like to do is go to Quora. I look for the most popular questions that people are following based on a topic. This tactic gives you a good indication of what problems most people have that your product or service may be able to solve. You can then use this method to provide you with different topics that you can cover by writing blog posts, white papers, and eBooks. When developing your content, there are a few fundamental guidelines that you should follow to give you the best chance of attracting and influencing your prospects. Here are the best practices for content creation: You need to identify who your target prospects are that you will be writing your content piece to solve a problem they are having.You research keywords that are related to a topic and find out their search volume. Implement these keywords into the piece of content you are writing. You want to create content that will position you and your company as a thought leader in the industry. You want to make sure that your content is not a sales pitch.Your content must provide value to your prospects and customers.Your content must be of high quality.Your content must be mapped out to your marketing funnel.You must deliver the right message using the correct format (ebooks, white papers, blog posts, email communications). These tips are an excellent place to start when creating your content. Make sure you implement these tips into selecting the right topic, choosing your format, and that you are using expert b2b content writers in creating your content. 2. Distributing content You have created your content, and now you need to get it in front of the right people. You need to set up a plan before distribution that would be ideal for you to reach your targeted prospects. When you are distributing content, they are two tactics that you can use. You get organic web traffic to your content. There are different tactics in getting your content noticed by your prospects. The first thing that you want to do is market your content on your own social media channels. Using your company’s own social media channels is called owned media. This step is the easiest way to generate web traffic. You post your content on LinkedIn, Twitter, SlideShare, and any other niche sites that will drive free web traffic. What I like to do is post my content on my personal LinkedIn account, LinkedIn company page, and relevant LinkedIn groups to get the word out about my amazing content. LinkedIn and Twitter are the best platforms for attracting b2b prospects. If you are a small business serving other companies in your local community, then posting on Google My Business page is a good idea. You can also earn media for your content. If your content is high quality and adds value to a topic, then industry experts, bloggers, and publications will want to share your content on their site. Some bloggers are very influential in their industry, and if they share your content, then you can get a lot of relevant web traffic sent to your content. This tactic can result in prospects learning more about your business, and you influence them of your status as a thought leader in the industry. You pay to get your content in front of your prospects. Another popular method for driving more web traffic to your content is using paid media. Paid media is an excellent source of web traffic that is targeted based on keywords if you use Google AdWords or interests targeting using Facebook. Whatever the advertising platform you use to get relevant web traffic, there is an advantage for you in setting up a conversion pixel. When you set up a conversion pixel, you can see how much money you are spending to get web traffic and how much of your budget results in someone converting based on your call of action. A conversion can be a prospect giving their email address to download an eBook, scheduling a meeting with your account managers, or buying a subscription for your software. The advantage of using paid media is that it is web traffic on demand, and the ROI is measurable with the conversion pixel. 3. Analyzing content After creating your content, distributing your content, you now need to examine how well your investment performed. You want to take a look at your Google Analytics to look at the overview of your entire web traffic for your campaign. You want to analyze the distribution of organic and paid web traffic and look at their bounce rate to your landing page for your B2B content. This analysis will yield information on the quality of web traffic. For example, if you are paying for web traffic on LinkedIn and Facebook. If the bounce rate on Facebook is 90% and on LinkedIn, it is 40%, then the data tells you that LinkedIn is where you should dedicate more resources to marketing your work. You also want to look at your conversions. If advertising on LinkedIn gave you ten conversions, but Google gave you twenty conversions naturally, then this tells you that you need to focus on investing in SEO to increase your keyword rankings. The idea is that you want to analyze your results and continuously improve your content, distribution, and metrics to improve your ROI. You must use a structured method for B2B content marketing that is simple, functional, and repeatable. This article is only meant to introduce you to the concepts of B2B content marketing. You can find resources around the web to help you develop a strategy that will allow you to implement advanced ideas for your organization. Content marketing has a lot of value in the B2B space. Make sure you are using your content to generate more leads and close more deals for you. If you can accomplish your lead generation goals with your content, then you are doing a great job with marketing your content effectively.

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