Content Marketing is an important aspect in Business-to-Business (B2B) space. It has become more important with high amounts of competition, an abundance of information, and an increasingly well-informed and savvy customer base. Long gone are the days of static product pitches, as today’s B2B customers demand relevant and personalised content experiences delivered in real-time.
While attempting to keep up with the demanding pace, here are five key elements to consider when building content experiences:
1. Know Your Audience
The foundation of successful B2B content marketing experience is knowing your customer and understanding their preferences, needs, challenges and behaviour.
To begin, create profiles of your ideal target audience. Focus on the customer’s problem, not the product. Ask yourself what challenges, needs and objectives the customer has, and how can you help the customer continue the journey to achieving their goals. This customer-centric approach will help you create content experiences that locate and meet customer needs before they even ask.
2. Content Relevance and Variety
Once you have a better understanding of your audience’s behaviour, start exploring content and format types that would resonate with them. Pay attention to the types of content that your audience prefers, such as text, video, graphics, audio, etc. Create content that is both educational and informative, and offers value to the customer.
Although content should be tailored to suit customer interests, it shouldn’t be repetitive. To keep your customers engaged, it is important to keep content fresh, relevant and scroll-stopping. Have diverse content; juxtapose analytical topics with stories, share thoughtful curated pieces and develop completely unique content– all varying in terms of message and format.
3. Engagement
B2B buyers may need to seek content that can help them discover solutions to their problems and allow them to make informed decisions. Regularly engaging with your audience is easy, effective and cost-efficient way to establish a relationship with them. Here are a few ideas for engagement:
- Host webinars and webcasts
- Share eBooks and case studies
- Invite customers to participate in interviews
- Send out surveys, newsletters and content briefs
4. Track Your Success
Developing content – no matter the type – will be useless unless it’s successful. Track all your activities to measure their success or failure in attracting and engaging your audience. Make use of tools such as Google Analytics to gather audience insights and track the success rate of each engagement attempt. Knowing the popular content and top-performing channels will help you focus your resources and generate more effective content.
5. Focus On User Experience
User experience is the main priority when it comes to content delivery. To make your website attractive, ensure its elements are simple, attractive and easy to read. Break down longer content into small chunks and make like content easy to locate. Features like search boxes, auto-complete, breadcrumbs and page navigation can help users locate the desired content quickly.
Content plays a vital role in empowering B2B customers to make informed decisions. With these five essential tips, marketers can create content experiences that meet customer needs, engage them and ultimately, help drive conversions.