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What Is B2B Content Marketing? Definition, Channels, Best Practices With Examples

B2B content marketing is defined as a set of strategies centered around distributing content to drive brand awareness, engage your audience, generate and nurture leads, and ultimately boost sales.

In this article, we cover the concept of B2B content marketing, core content marketing formats and distribution channels, advantages, and best practices, along with B2B content marketing examples to help you win at your content initiatives in 2020.

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Table of Contents

What Is B2B Content Marketing?

B2B content marketing is a set of strategies to distribute and deliver valuable content to your target audience to attract, engage, and generate new leads and customers while retaining existing ones.

There’s a stark difference between the content marketing strategies implemented for B2B and B2C brands. While content marketing for both types of brands begins by understanding the pain points of their audience and ends with driving revenue, their approach is vastly different due to the difference in the buyer’s journey, motivations, and decision-making process.

B2C brands primarily create munchable content aimed at engaging and entertaining their audience. The intention is to build strong brand recall and an emotional bond that enables the audience to relate to the brand.

On the other hand, B2B brands focus on a wide range of content formats that demonstrate their subject matter expertise to inform, inspire, and engage the prospective buyers while helping them resolve their pain points. The purpose of B2B content marketing is to instill trust in the minds of consumers that stems from empathy.

The latest research by Content Marketing Institute (CMI) reported that B2B marketers primarily used content marketing to drive brand awareness, educate audiences, and build credibility.

Goals Achieved by B2B Marketers Using Content Marketing

Top 5 Content Formats for B2B Content Marketing

Content creation is one of the two main pillars of content marketing. In this section, we will look at the top five content formats widely preferred by B2B content marketers.

1. Blog Posts 

Blog posts are a cornerstone of B2B content creation due to their SEO benefits. They also double-up as the primary content distribution channel. They can be 500-4000 words long, depending on the topic and depth covered. Blog articles are an excellent resource to appeal to the top-of-the-funnel (TOFU) audience.

2. Infographics 

Infographics (Information Graphics) condense text, data, and information in a visual format. Infographics primarily rely on graphs, charts, icons, images, other visual elements, and some text to convey information that aids comprehension. They can be used to draw comparisons, provide an overview, show trends, explain processes and workflows, etc.

3. Gated Content 

Gated content requires users to fill in their details to receive access to them. It is an essential part of B2B content marketing that helps marketers generate leads and qualify them for the next stage of the funnel.

Gated content includes e-books, whitepapers, case studies/success stories, buyers guides, webinars, exclusive courses, and product demos. Here’s an example of a landing page that allows users to download gated content.

An Example of a Landing Page That Allows Users to Download Gated Content

4. Videos 

Video marketing is on the rise, and B2B marketers are using videos to create how-to, branded, explainer, influencer marketing, product review, event coverage, etc. Organizations are also utilizing webinars, live video, and ephemeral video content to cater to different content consumption preferences.

5. Podcasts​​​​

Podcasts are episodic audio content that let users consume information on the go. The rapid adoption of audio streaming services and podcast distribution platforms facilitated the growth of podcasts, and marketers have banked on this opportunity to connect with an audience that also consumes information passively.

MarTech Advisor hosted the Talking Stack, a marketing technology podcast that featured experts from the martech space, and now features an all-new podcast called The Get, a B2B marketing talent podcast.

MTA’s Talking Stack and The Get Podcasts for the Martech Space

Learn More: What is Content Creation? Tips to Get You Started

3 Key Distribution Channels for B2B Content Marketing

Content distribution is the second pillar of a successful content marketing strategy. The content you create needs to be promoted across different media channels so that it reaches the target audience. Here are three key distribution channels for B2B content marketing:

1. Owned Media 

Owned media consists of web properties that the organization has complete control over. The following are the four primary owned media channels:

Website: Your official website or blog is the home for your content. It sits at the core of your content marketing strategy and sets the brand voice and tone. Along with hosting your content, it can also serve as a newsroom to amplify company announcements.

Mobile App: Mobile apps often have different use cases depending on the product/service, but they can be used to distribute the content you publish on your website. You can use them to share snippets of content for users on the go.

Email Marketing: Building a significant subscriber base can be arduous, but the ROI of email marketing is well worth the effort. In fact, 59% of B2B marketers agree that email marketing is the most effective channel for revenue generation. You can use email to distribute content, send updates, and promote offers to engage your leads and customers.

Forum: You can launch forums as a way for your community members to interact with you and among themselves. You can use the forum to answer FAQs, initiate discussions, and invite industry experts to discuss topics in your niche. 

2. Earned and Shared Media 

In earned media, third-party entities such as publications, bloggers, journalists, or customers share your content. It happens when a campaign goes viral, or a product sells exclusively through word-of-mouth. Since earned media efforts take place organically, brands don’t have to pay for it. Earned media includes the following:

Guest Blogging: Guest blogging allows you to share your expertise with a broader audience and establish yourself as a thought leader. It immensely helps if you build relationships with journalists and publications to get an opportunity to be featured on their websites in the form of a thought leadership piece, PR coverage, or interview.

Brand Collaborations: B2B brands with complementary offerings can pool in their resources to create content for the same target audience while banking on each other’s customer base. The collaboration could be an e-book, research, conference, or webinar.

Brand Synonymity: Brand synonymity is achieved when your target audience uses your brand name as a noun, verb, or adjective. For instance, Google is commonly used to describe a search engine, and the act of performing an online search is described as Googling

Social Media: Social media doesn’t fall, particularly under owned or earned media because your social media presence is partially governed by the rules of respective social media platforms. Therefore, it is considered as a shared media channel. B2B organizations can use social media platforms to distribute their content through their official pages or groups.

3. Paid Media 

Paid media is a distribution channel that allows marketers to buy ad slots on digital avenues such as social media channels, search engines, and websites to broadcast their message. Paid media primarily works on two pricing models, viz. Cost per click (CPC) and cost per mille, i.E., thousand impressions (CPM).

Search Engine Marketing (SEM): SEM allows you to show your website higher up on search engine result pages (SERPs) for relevant keywords. SEM is a widely used paid media channel, but may not be the most effective content distribution channel for smaller brands considering the cost and competition.

Display Advertising: You can purchase ad slots on various websites to promote your content through display ads. You can manage these transactions manually or automatically (i.E., through programmatic advertising).

Social Media Advertising: Social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn, allow you to promote your content to your target audience through precise targeting capabilities. You can segregate users based on their demographic, geographic, and psychographic characteristics.

Native Advertising: Native advertising is a form of display advertising that adopts the look and feel of the platform it appears on. Content that appears under Content Recommendations is often native ads. Due to their ingenious appearance, experts have often debated over their usefulness.

Influencer Marketing: Influencer marketing involves reaching out to experts or influencers in your field to promote your content on their social media accounts. However, influencer marketing is not the most common B2B content distribution channel.

Learn More: What Is Content Distribution? A Complete Guide for Marketers

5 Best Practices for B2B Content Marketing in 2020

The B2B content marketing landscape has changed drastically due to the introduction of videos, podcasts, and other interactive content formats. Here are five best practices you should consider for your B2B content marketing initiatives in 2020:

1. Create Content for All Stages of the Funnel 

According to the latest CMI research mentioned earlier, 86% of the B2B content is TOFU-focused. While driving brand awareness is a crucial content marketing goal, your aim with content marketing should be to cover all stages of the buyer’s journey. Here’s how you can achieve that:

Top-of-the-funnel (TOFU)/Awareness Stage: Provide solutions to your target audience's most pressing needs through blog posts, videos, and social media content. Your organic and content outreach efforts should outperform your competitors to make the first contact with your audience.

Middle-of-the-funnel (MOFU)/Evaluation Stage: As your prospective buyers are evaluating available alternatives, you can help them make the right decision by providing case studies, product demos, webinars, and in-depth research reports and whitepapers.

Bottom-of-the-funnel (BOFU)/Decision Stage: As prospects are zeroing-down on a solution, send out reminders about your offerings through drip email campaigns, free trials, discounts, and consultations. 

HubSpot has nailed its B2B content strategy by creating content for each stage of the funnel. Users can learn right from the basics to the most advanced concepts of inbound marketing.

HubSpot Has Created Content for All Stages of the Funnel

2. Create Cohesive Content Experiences 

The purpose of content experience is to provide a stream of brand content across multiple platforms and channels throughout the buyer’s journey. Since the average number of devices has grown to almost four per user, delivering a consistent, omnichannel content experience has become a necessity.

The foundation of a cohesive content experience lies in a vibrant content mix. Marketers could incorporate various content formats into their strategy to ensure that their content is accessible across different channels and mediums, be it YouTube for videos or Spotify for podcasts, and create a central content repository to make all this content accessible.

A great example of this is Leadpages, which has compiled its content in the resources section to make it easily accessible to website visitors.

Leadpages Has Created a Central Repository for a Cohesive Content Experience

3. Fix Thin Content 

Thin content is content that is jaded with keywords but adds little to no value. Google has cracked down heavily on websites with thin content by demoting them in search rankings. You can easily identify thin content on your site by finding out pages with good traffic but a high bounce rate or low average time spent on the page. You can address the thin content issue in the following two ways:

If the topic is outdated or obsolete, consider removing it

If the topic is relevant, update or rewrite it

Since the age of the link matters from the ranking perspective, updating page content is a practical choice.

4. Repurpose, Big Time! 

Content repurposing has become a lost art that needs to make a comeback. In content repurposing, you take an existing content piece, reimagine it in a different content format, or post it on various channels. This technique combines the best of content creation and distribution to amplify your reach.

Here are five ideas to repurpose your content:

Upload your webinar on YouTube and post the slide deck on SlideShare.

If you have written a series of blog posts on a particular topic, create a gated content piece such as an e-book.

Guest blog about previously covered topics – Buffer’s co-founder Leo Widrich wrote about 150 blog posts to grow their user base from zero to 100,000 in nine months.

Convert your blog posts into infographics and videos.

If you run a podcast, upload it on YouTube as well. Tim Ferriss uploads the podcast episodes of his show on YouTube to connect with his audience on a different platform.

Tim Ferriss Uploads His Podcast Episodes on YouTube as Well

5. Use Marketing Storytelling 

Marketing storytelling uses traditional storytelling techniques in the marketing context to appeal to the emotional side of your audience. It’s become an essential part of B2B content marketing to make your brand memorable.

Storytelling allows marketers to convey how the product can help them without making it overly promotional. And since videos have become a core part of content marketing, organizations can use them to launch storytelling campaigns.

Intuit’s “A Giant Story” campaign used storytelling to convey how their various products can help entrepreneurs grow their businesses.

Intuit’s “A Giant Story” Campaign Used Marketing Storytelling Effectively to Portray Product Benefits

Learn More: What Content Marketing Tactics to Use in 2020

3 Advantages of Content Marketing for B2B Marketers

B2B content marketing has an overarching impact on almost every marketing function. Here are three ways in which content marketing can benefit B2B marketers:

1. Establishes Thought Leadership 

A well-rounded content marketing strategy puts your brand on the map and establishes you as an expert in the niche. Expertise builds awareness and trust, which are two crucial content marketing goals.

Thought leadership also makes the brand a mainstay in popular industry publications and builds influence through backlinks bringing SEO benefits as well.

2. Builds EAT From the SEO Perspective 

Since we’re talking about SEO, in 2018, Google heavily penalized several websites offering health and medical advice. Google wanted to provide not only relevant content but also accurate content. The search engine started featuring websites that showed high levels of EAT (expertise, authority, and trustworthiness) in their niche.

Google has guidelines for creating EAT content, but B2B brands can begin by creating helpful content and guest blogging on trusted resources to build authority.

3. Generates Qualified Leads 

Content marketing is a sure way of driving relevant traffic to your website. Gated content, such as webinars, e-books, and whitepapers, helps you guide your visitors through the marketing funnel and helps you identify sales-ready leads depending on their behavior. This way, your salespeople can close more deals, faster.

Learn More: 5 Steps to Generating ROI With B2B Content in 2020

Conclusion

We hope this article has helped you create your B2B content marketing strategy for 2020. As said earlier, the digital landscape has seen a paradigm shift in the last decade, and to thrive in the content space, you need to diversify your content mix and keep experimenting with various content distribution tactics to get the maximum benefits.

How do you plan to approach B2B content marketing this year? Tell us on LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter.

Your 2020 Guide On How To Get The Most Out Of Video Marketing

 Video Content Marketing Trends & Tips

In the past few years we’ve seen a massive increase in video content popping up online, and there’s no sign of it slowing down.

From creating webinars to putting short clips in emails, a video marketing strategy is a must if you want to truly engage with your audience in order to improve brand awareness and boost leads and sales.

According to Wyzowl, a company that creates animated explainer footage, 83% of marketers say video helps them with lead generation, and 87% say it has increased traffic to their website.

Some other benefits include:

It’s good for SEO. If your stuff is compelling enough to attract views and shares, your Google search ranking can improve.

It’s a timesaver. It doesn’t take long to create short yet engaging clips in comparison to writing an article or blog.

It’s affordable. It can be more cost-effective to create a short clip vs. Producing an ad or a blog.

It gets attention. People may scroll through written words, but most will at least give a glance to interesting footage.

As we head into 2020, here are three video content marketing trends you can expect to see going forward.

Vertical videos.

Just when everyone seemed to get the memo that horizontal filming is best, vertical videos come along! This is because consumers watch a lot of things on smartphones.

Instagram and Snapchat were the first to utilize vertical videos in Stories, and Instagram Television (IGTV) was next.

Here’s how Netflix used vertical digital marketing videos to showcase previews.

Live streaming.

This refers to anything that is recorded and broadcast in real time. People like to feel like they’re being spoken to directly and authentically, and live streaming is also a low-cost way to produce collateral.

We’ve seen more and more social platforms implement this functionality, including Instagram Live, Facebook Live, Twitter Live and LinkedIn for a select few.

In-video shopping.

So far, it seems to be largely clothing retailers who are leveraging this tactic.

How it works: Users can click on a section of the screen (say, a skirt on a model) and be directed to the link to buy the item.

A recent survey by Brightcove revealed that 23% of consumers overall and 30% of Millennials want links that let them directly purchase a product.

Now that you’ve got an idea of what’s going to be popular in 2020, here are some ways to incorporate engaging footage into your campaigns this year.

Use your landing pages.

A survey by marketing technology company eyeview showed that video on landing pages can increase conversions by 86%. It’s a great way to increase search rankings, as Google’s algorithms are increasingly prioritizing websites with this type of content.

Other advantages: It can lead to more social shares, build trust and awareness and reduce bounce rate.

Shopify created an inspirational brand montage that lives on their homepage. It explains what they do, highlights different customers and announces they now support one million businesses.

Blogs and articles.

Did you know blog posts can be just as valuable as a landing page? Think about filming your post instead of writing it (or do both), and you’ve easily increased the odds of that info reaching more visitors.

Moz.Com, which is considered an SEO authority, found that showing a clip with blog images and text increased reach by 3X.

Here’s how one of our clients, Financial Recovery Institute, uses it in a blog to tell a story.

Emails and newsletters.

The digital marketing videos you create will depend on your objectives and goals. For example, are you announcing a new product, an event, or a course you want people to sign up for?

You could also use email to give people a sneak peek of longer footage on your website. Once you’ve decided what you’re promoting, you can begin shooting.

Something to note: There are over 30 major email clients, including Microsoft Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo Mail and Apple Mail. Some of them don’t support the requirements for using clips in emails.

Several of the popular email newsletter services like Constant Contact, aWeber and MailChimp make it simple to share what you film by using a screen capture and linking the image to the original content.

That way, a user can just click on the image in the email and be directed to your clip. Want to learn more? Check out eVision Media’s recommended email newsletter providers.

Social media platforms.

A solid social media strategy is essential, and you only need to glance at your Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or LinkedIn feed (and of course YouTube and Pinterest) to see how big a role video plays for companies.

Some formats you could shoot for social media include:

How-to guides

Q&As

Behind-the-scenes glimpses

Events

Interviews

Unboxings (if you have a physical product)

It’s important to remember that each social media platform has rules around how long your digital marketing videos can be. Here’s a quick reference guide:

Facebook allows you up to 240 minutes (though you probably wouldn’t want to use all that time),

Twitter provides 2 minutes and 20 seconds.

Instagram gives you one minute if shared as a post, 15 seconds as a story and up to 1 hour as a live or IGTV video.

LinkedIn has a 10-minute limit.

Snapchat allows 10 seconds.

Make sure your videos are optimized for each social media platform. Viewers on Instagram expect different things than those on Twitter, for example.

We can’t possibly cover every platform or video content marketing strategy out there, but I hope this has given you some ideas on how to use this valuable tool in 2020.

Remember: No matter what you’re creating or selling, it’s all about storytelling. It’s time to tell the most authentic and compelling stories you can about your products or services!

And if your organization needs help with social media marketing, it’s best to find a qualified service provider who understands the specific nuances of the different social channels and what works best on each.

Originally published here.

Recommended For You Webcast, March 5th: How AI Can Find Opportunities and Shorten Your Sales CyclesRegister Now  Author: Susan Friesen

Susan Friesen, founder of the award-winning web development and digital marketing firm eVision Media, is a Web Specialist, Business & Marketing Consultant, and Social Media Advisor. She works with entrepreneurs who struggle with having the lack of knowledge, skill and support needed to create their online business presence. As a… View full profile ›

The Importance Of Communication And Collaboration Throughout The Video Process

When a firm hires a video production crew to film their next video, whether it be an introduction to a new brand, a vlog for content marketing, or a new video for the website, communication is key in order to have a successful end product. And it’s important to remember that that applies throughout the entire project and not only during the initial pre-production phase.

While the early strategic stages of a video project are extremely important, it’s not the be-all and end-all of the creative process. Rather, it’s a work-in-progress. If a firm is completely invested in the way their brand looks, sounds and feels to their audience throughout production, then it will show when all is said and done. Here are several things to be sure to communicate with your video production crew from initial planning to post-production.

Identify the right team

First things first: make sure you pick the best crew for the job. Meet with the folks behind-the-camera to get a feel for their personality, their skills and even their equipment. For instance, find out if they have the right gear for the job. If they don’t, make sure they can get it. One of the hardest parts of the whole process is making sure you have the right people in place to get the job done.

Convey your firm’s brand

One fundamental aspect to be sure to thoroughly explain to the team is your firm’s brand. Is it slick and sophisticated? Friendly and conversational? Whatever it may be, know how to convey that brand, personality and company culture to the video crew so that everyone is on the same page from the get-go in terms of video style and themes.

Recommended For You Webcast, March 5th: How AI Can Find Opportunities and Shorten Your Sales CyclesRegister Now Direct the vision

Even though they’re the professionals, the video crew needs a firm’s ideas, input and expertise to make an awesome final product. Once the project is green-lit, firms should make sure to have ideas to present. This prevents the crew from spinning their wheels for days to figure out the vision for the video. The video crew can collaborate with a firm to help fully flesh-out their ideas, but proper direction is key in order to lock down the concepts and how a firm wants them visually presented on-screen. Firms should continue to be in continuous contact with the crew throughout the project to make sure this vision is coming to life.

Consider video size and medium

How will your firm’s video be presented and where will it live? On the website? On Facebook, LinkedIn, or another social platform? Will it be e-mailed to clients? Or used at a major presentation?

The type of screen where a video will be featured plays a key role in how the video will be filmed, scripted, etc. With a multitude of file size requirements needed in today’s digital world, make sure to have that conversation early and often, so no one gets caught off guard when it comes time to wrap up the project.

Get the best shot

While the video team are the ones in control of the camera, it’s helpful for a firm to provide input on what to shoot, and how you want it shot, if there’s a specific need. Your firm knows yourselves better than the camera crew who shoots countless projects each year for a variety of clientele. So if there’s an important shot that might not jump out to the casual viewer, make sure to call attention to it and let the camera operators know what’s needed and why. Putting shots in context to the crew is beneficial too as the team progresses through the shoot day. Even if it’s only to put their mind at ease, it’s totally worth it in the end.

Partnership is key

Great videos aren’t created in a vacuum. It takes frequent calls, e-mails, Skype sessions and in-person meetings to create a video everyone can be proud of. If left to their own creative devices without direction, a video creator might go a totally different direction in the editing room and provide something so off-brand that it’s hard to corral it back on track. But when a firm is a solid partner throughout the process, providing positive and respectable feedback from start-to-finish, then it will be evident in the final cut. By the time deliverables are due, your firm will have a video you’ll be thrilled to share with everyone from clients to internal associates and other stakeholders.