Top content marketing methods to nurture your B2B audience

What is content marketing?

Content marketing refers to a marketing strategy used to attract, engage, and retain an audience by creating and sharing relevant media they can engage with. This approach establishes expertise, promotes brand awareness, and keeps your business at the forefront of people’s minds when it’s time to buy what you sell.

Content marketing, if done well, is an asset-focused investment that provides value over time.

- Content Marketing Institute

Why is content marketing so important in B2B?

Content marketing allows B2B companies to nurture their audience and show they care about the same things as their customers. Building a relationship is paramount in B2B because you're rarely selling at volume in the way B2C companies can. Because B2B companies are niche, customers tend to be fewer - therefore the value per customer is much higher.

How do you write for a B2B audience?

Writing for a B2B audience doesn’t necessarily have to be different from B2C, but then again, it could be! Generally, content that’s written for a B2B audience will need to be more technical as you do your best to engage customers in the nuts and bolts of your product. Like all content marketing campaigns, personalizing your content to the needs of your audience is vital for success. 

B2B content ideas that build trust

Nowadays, appealing to and empathizing with your audience's challenges involves a heck of a lot more than a product demo or a catalog. A robust content strategy will allow you to take a step back from the practicalities of your business and focus your attention on the inspiration behind what you do. And that’s what people buy into.

Case studies

In marketing, case studies are used as social proof — to provide buyers with the context to determine whether they're making a good choice. A marketing case study aims to persuade that a process, product, or service can solve a problem.

Problem-solving blog content

Blog content must create value for your audience, and helping them to solve issues should act as a golden thread through all of your B2B marketing channels. 

Customer testimonials

With 92% of consumers reading online reviews and testimonials when considering a purchase, testimonials are a great way to market your brand, product, or service to new customers. It allows people to view your brand from the perspective of people like them and instills more trust in potential customers.

Short content roundups on audience-relevant topics

Attracting and keeping your audience’s attention is getting harder. 52 seconds: that’s the average time a reader spends reading a blog post. Providing content roundups on topics relevant to your audience builds your credibility. Your audience will also appreciate not wasting time searching for information across multiple sites.  

Thought leadership whitepapers

The job of a good whitepaper is to take a complicated topic and break it down into small, easy-to-understand concepts. As we mentioned earlier, B2B marketing sometimes requires getting into the nitty-gritty details of your product or service, and technical articles or white papers are the perfect format to do this, and publicize your product or course! 

Collaborations with other trusted names

Content partnerships — where brands work together to gain promotion through their content — can be an extremely useful tool in your B2B marketing strategy. Content partnership expands the reach of your business by opening up to another company’s audience to your product. 

For example, if you’re a project management platform and you partner with a business selling time tracking software, there is likely to be a lot of target audience crossover, boosting opportunities for conversion. 

On-trend content formats

Webinars, podcasts and video content (such as TikTok) reign supreme. A little advice? Don’t sleep on video content: YouTube is the most visited website in the world with 5.5 billion monthly visitors.

B2B content marketing: an example

Content marketing truly is the champion of B2B relations, mainly because it is so well suited to the longer sales cycles, where the customer is taking more time to research their options among competing companies. However, finding that perfect mix of excitement and intrigue for what can often prove to be a highly dry subject matter is never easy. Here’s an example from HubSpot for a little inspiration. 

HubSpot is a marketing company credited for coining the phrase “inbound marketing.” As part of their content strategy, they created two types of content to address different stages of the funnel:

1. Their blog is designed to teach small businesses about inbound marketing to attract readers to the top of the funnel.
2. Their resources section includes an impressive library of eBooks, case studies, webinars and marketing kits that target mid to bottom of the funnel visitors. 

The Results:

Their content marketing is a major driver of traffic, allowing them to transform in just ten years from being funded to a public company worth over a billion dollars. Nice!

Content marketing works

B2B content marketing is buyer-centric, compounding, measurable, and scalable. It consistently performs more reliably than almost any other tactic, which makes it one of the best foundations to build marketing success. From blog posts to podcasts and everything in between, unique, consistent, and valuable content is the best way to connect with your audience on the most effective level.

For further insight into how, as a B2B company, you can speak to businesses and engage individual consumers, join us as we explore the 6 chief digital marketing strategies for B2B business.