It should go without saying that the way you market to other businesses is significantly different than the way you market to the general public. You will always have a smaller audience with a narrower reach.
Strategy #1: Define Your Targets
The most logical place to begin developing a solid content marketing strategy is by determining who your best customers are and marketing specifically to that segment. I don’t think I need to mention ideal avatars again, but I’m going to because they are that important. There are also marked differences between a consumer avatar and a business one, so it’s important to know how to develop one for B2B conversions. The ones for businesses are often referred to as customer profiles.
Once you identify your more lucrative segment, it’s time to then find your best customer and analyze what kind of content that customer responds to most favorably. Chances are there are more waiting to be found, and once you’ve successfully targeted your true ideal customer, more will find you.
Strategy #2: Develop a Deeper Understanding of Your Ideal Customer
This strategy goes hand-in-hand with the previous one. It’s important to not only pre-determine your customers’ appropriate pain points or buying tendencies but also observe how all the parts of the ideal avatar come together in the actual execution of a content marketing campaign.
Your customers will want different kinds of content at different stages of their buyer journey. In the beginning, it’s all about capturing their attention. Once you’ve whet their interest, you need to provide more in-depth content – things that are more informative and prove that you are an expert in your industry or niche.
Strategy #3 – Set Clear and Attainable Conversion Goals
What do you want to accomplish with your B2B content marketing campaign? What specific numbers do you want to hit? What percent ROI are you expecting to achieve? If you set reasonable goals and you’re not hitting them, stop throwing money at them. It’s not worth the time, effort, or expense. Either it’s going to work or it isn’t. If it isn’t, you have to be willing to simply walk away and try something else.
Now, as the owner of a successful copywriting company, I need to make a little aside here. There is a significant amount of trial and error involved in this process. If you hire a copywriter or custom writing service to help you and an article or blog falls flat, it’s the fault of the market, not the copywriter.
Always expect and insist upon good quality content and market it the smartest way you know how. Do not, however, decide that if something falls flat, it’s the copywriter’s fault. The market wants what the market wants. Maybe a year from now, that piece will have a greater impact, so put it on the back burner and use your good business sense to determine the right time to pull it out again. That actually brings me to my next point…
Strategy #4 – Make Your Content Scalable
Be prepared for a high demand for good-quality content from a B2B audience. If you fail to deliver quality, game over. If you fail to deliver enough fresh content to satisfy the demand of your audience, game over. If you deliver the wrong content at the wrong time, game over.
Look for current trends within your industry. Analyze what your competition is doing and how they’re doing it. As I said earlier, timing is everything. You want to deliver content that is relevant at the moment, with little to no deference to your own preferences or likes. This is about determining what the market wants, not forcing content on your audience that you think is amazing but doesn’t impress them.
Strategy #5 – Provide Ample Opportunities for Interaction
Your overall content marketing strategy needs to align with the way your audience is going to most effectively hear, understand, and get excited about your message. Calls to action, inviting feedback and conversations (especially through social media), and being visible to your audience are all crucial elements of any successful content marketing effort.
Make it perfectly clear that you value your audience’s opinions and are interested in their thoughts and ideas. People are far more prone to do business with a company they believe to be genuinely interested in aligning itself with their needs and desires.
As a final note, I would just encourage you to be decisive and act quickly when the next big idea hits but also keep these five things in mind before you dive head-first into a content marketing campaign. There is no way to guarantee success but there are ways to maximize the odds in favor of it. Get good at that, and you’ll smoke your competition every single time in the content marketing arena.