In this column, celebrated Astro Strategist cum Business Astrologer Hirav Shah talks about B2B content marketing and how it can help you boost your business in so many ways.

What is B2B Content Marketing?

Hirav Shah says, “B2B content marketing is the process of developing and distributing curated content to attract companies and buyers. It is all about driving sales by producing highly related content and using Search Engine Optimization techniques to increase website traffic and attract qualified leads.”

Why so special about content?

Shah explains that when it comes to marketing there is no secret, “Content is king” Based on the fact, content marketing leaders gain 8 times more website traffic than others. Content marketing is an essential technique that considers bringing a large return with a probably low budget.

Hirav Shah adds, “Content marketing acts as a backbone of all your marketing strategies, from paid campaigns to outbound marketing strategies. With the help of content marketing, every marketing technique is augmented to an audience. With content marketing, businesses have been able to increase their website reach, boosts leads, conversion rates, and more. When your target is to generate leads you need to integrate those campaigns into a powerful content marketing strategy.”

Benefits of Using Content Marketing for enterprises

  1. Increased Sales
  2. Cost Savings
  3. Good customers who have more loyalty

Here are some reasons to build an effective B2Bcontent marketing strategy and improve your leads.

1. Storytelling

One of the significant elements of a successful B2B content marketing campaign is the ability to connect with the customers. And good storytelling allows you to do just that.

It improves the selling aspect and analyzes the process. Since every business has a story to tell, this shouldn’t be difficult to implement.

How can you incorporate storytelling into your Content marketing?

  • Grab the audiences at the beginning with a surprising factor
  • Introduce a situation that needs to illustrate your point and be easier to relate
  • Use Visuals like images, graphs, and videos to grab people in
  • Add personality to your content- whether it is expressing your emotions

2. Create Free Resources as Lead Magnets

Lead Magnets work by the free resource in exchange for a user’s contact information, like their email address, name, and possibly phone number. These resources are often something like eBooks, webinars, a checklist, and white papers. They are naturally valuable to your target audience and since they come at a very low price, even users who didn’t know them well won’t hesitate to download them.

You can publish your lead magnets in blog posts, in widgets in the sidebars of your site, and even in ad campaigns.

It gives you two advantages:

  1. The users now have a piece of relationship with your business after consuming the free content and now you have their email addresses.
  2. Follow with email campaigns which are designed to nurture leads into customers. This usually starts with a welcome series autoresponder and then a serious offering of valuable content like a newsletter. Finally, you’ll be able to send an offer like a free trial or a discount code that could attract them to convert.

3. Gather little contact information

Your content needs to be tied to a strong value proposition that will urge the user to provide you their email address or other contact information. Traditionally done with a lead magnet, it’s easy to get wrong or miss out on great opportunities to convert a visitor.

You need to ensure to have a highly enforced offer that visitor wants to access. You need a clear call to action, a lead form box, and a way to deliver your offer automatically (e.g., Mailchimp).

Most importantly, you want your lead form to gather as little information as possible. For example, if you ask for a phone number, a mailing address, and more, few people will convert into a lead. If you ask for only an email address, you will have a much higher conversion rate.

4. Track Metrics

Combine one or more CTA (CALL TO ACTION) into each piece of B2B content marketing. Each page should provide the way to your B2B content marketing which you had offered.

The key to turning out the content marketing success is to build the proper metrics into your distribution with related tracking codes before you publish. Use codes based on your platform option such as presentation format, distribution date, metrics, and any goals or related results for comparison.

5. Offer something to perform the next action

Among the questions, you need to answer about your audience based on what triggers will motivate action. But not every interaction with your content will convert to a sale, but content should always give the reader to do something on the next move. That next step, surely, is to inquire, buy, refer, or share.

B2B Content marketing should help buyers to lead themselves to the end that your solution is the best answer to the problem by which they are trying to solve.

6. Call to action

Calls-to-action is a core component of any marketing efforts today, mainly within the B2B space. They are a button, link, or text that drives your audience to receive your offer. If your CTA is not powerful at capturing people’s mind and persuading them to click then it makes the offer useless.

It can be used on blogs, social media, product pages, direct email, and much wherever you can market your offers. But not all the CTAs are created equally. Over worldwide every brand is fighting for buyer’s attention, it is important that audiences choose your offer over your competitors.

Getting good rankings on search rankings helps to gain more traffic, by which you can convert them to leads using CTA.

7. Lead Nurturing

The independent clients’ protection is up, and they are neglecting your messages. Not each leads that go to sales is accessible to buy, so you have to ensure that you have in place a stable lead nurturing method to endure awareness and passion for your brand while your prospect is self-educating. Lead nurturing also boosts to enhance conversion rate, drives more revenue, and shortens the sales cycle. It is about seeking the right clients at the right time.

Lead generation imports clients into the funnel, but lead nurturing and scoring sends them to sales so that your sales team can close the deal at the correct time. By providing some information it helps your audience to learn about a subject, make decisions, and build a bond with your organization. In fact, based on some Lead Generation benchmarking reports, companies who influence lead nurturing see a 45% rise in leads over those companies who do not use lead nurturing.

8. Get subscribers

The best way to generate leads on your website is to offer a subscription to your blog, email program, or resource center. By creating good content that is enough for your audience to subscribe to it. Then nurture the subscribers to leads by providing valuable offers. In changing a lead’s email address, you will send your blog digest or other beneficial offers. The form provides free tools and best practices for the visitors in exchange for their email addresses. We also let our visitors know that we respect their secrecy, and make it clear that if they fill out the form, and then we will share those updates.

9. Make the comparison easy

Target the comparison keywords. Buyers who are looking at your service may not be fully convinced you should offer exactly what they are searching for. As a result, your product will get compared with the competitors. To generate leads create comparison landing pages.

10. Think niche community

You can offer your content to niche communities such as GrowthHackers.com, Quora, and or wherever your ideal customers spend their time. The distribution of content to niche communities generates traffic and enhances brand recognition, which creates leads. This method is especially effective when you engage in these communities and build genuine relationships with others.

The stronger your relationships in the communities that are most relevant to your space, the larger your markets of capable buyers will be, and these people generally share their contact information with you.

Conclusion

In conclusion to the discussion, Hirav Shah says, “Now you have a good grip on what an impactful B2B content marketing strategy looks like. It’s a question of how well you can incorporate it into your existing marketing campaigns. Depending on your business, you might either need a full renewal or just a few modifications to your marketing campaign.”