How effective is our B2B content marketing strategies? Have been able to address issues of our customers through these contents? How sticky or effective are our contents and are you consistent in your approach in publishing insanely great contents? As a Content marketing strategist (Yea right! That’s one fancy job title to write for!) these are some of the questions crossing the mind every minute in the quest to accomplish marketing goals.

 Courtesy 2015 B2B Content Marketing Trends—North America: Content Marketing Institute/MarketingProfs

Content marketing has become one of the most potent marketing tool, for inbound & outbound activities, used by all business sizes. 86% B2B marketers (93% in 2014) use content marketing to drive business but only 42% think their content is effective. Customers care more about their problem than about companies’ products/services so they are constantly searching for solutions online and offline. Smart companies know this so they package great contents to help their potential customers enjoying their trust & attention in the process over time.

The three important pillars of content marketing are:

• Search – Great contents need to rank to be effective
• Social – Ability to share on social platform is imperative for contents to travel far and beyond
• Reach – how far it reaches customers determines it’s success and worth

What makes an effective B2B content marketing strategy and how it is different from a B2C content plan? As on how a B2B content marketing strategy is different from B2C, first we need to understand how a B2B customer and a B2C customer differ. A B2B customer is driven and influenced by stats/data you offer to support your products/services whereas a B2C customer is driven and influenced by emotions leading to impulsive shopping in most of the same cases. So, the content marketing strategies for B2B and B2C revolves around publishing contents that influences the driving forces of their customers. Be it through compelling story to trigger emotions or a story backed with data to influence buying decisions. Apple is one such company that plays on their customers emotions and have been insanely successful in creating a frenzy war whenever there is a new product launch.

 Infograph: wolfgangjaegel.com

With ever growing aggressive marketing and number of channles to market on, it has become all the more important that your prospect customers are not overloading with contents; customers these days are getting bombarded with emails from companies every day updating them on webinar registrations, newly published blog posts or upcoming conferences and seminars etc. With businesses struggling to get the attention of their potential customers, its not hard to imaging marketing managers getting carried way and ending up not getting the desired results of business conversions. Objective should be to attract and retain customers through an integrated marketing approach and scaling the efforts as results drive in.

No doubt, according to a research by Sirius Decisions, that over 67% of the prospect buyers’ journey is completed online consuming contents and company messages even before they interact with any sales people however What and Where of the contents matters the most which determines the content publishing effectiveness and overall marketing success.

If your content marketing strategies doesn’t include these, it ain’t working for you.

• Well defined and documented content publishing plan- Only 35% of B2B marketers do
• Having an editorial content calendar – most marketers miss this but this is a crucial factor in overall success
• Deep understanding of buyers’ personas – invest to have an understanding of your buyers and their inherent buying behaviours. SkyTap increased their B2B leads by over 124% after including buyers’ personas in their content marketing.
• Clear business goals and conversion matrix
• Communication mediums and defined touch points – where potential customers would interact
• And most importantly a check-back mechanism to measure the content’s effectiveness

While developing a plan, Content marketing strategists would know that the biggest challenge they face is creating compelling contents and consistently delivering them. You may be publishing tons of contents but if it isn’t working or it isn’t published regularly, it’s not worth the efforts. So it the quality of the contents published along with the frequency and selection of media platform for the reach that determines the effectiveness of your B2B content marketing programs.

We would love to get your feedback and add-ons to the points above on how you were able to launch and manage a successful B2B content marketing campaign for your company.