How to Use Content Marketing in your B2B Lead Generation Strategy

Content marketing is a highly effective, scalable, and affordable way to generate strong leads for your B2B marketing strategy consistently. Today, more than ever, during this COVID-19 situation, your clients and your leads want to feel that you care about them and that you are willing to provide additional value to their business. The impact of social isolation and the increase of many ongoing news and distractions in today’s everyday life make the attention span even lower. It makes this period to be even more challenging. The pressure is real, and the success of your company’s content depends on how much value that content will provide.

Producing content that is engaging is a constant challenge. Content marketing is not as simple as it might seem, and there are many challenges that B2B marketers face. Some of the key challenges are:

• Producing engaging content
• Producing consistent content 
• Measuring content effectiveness 
• Producing content from experts
• Lack of Budget
• Having Skilled Content Marketing Professionals 
• Lack of Marketing Integration

When we say content marketing, we suggest creating and sharing content in various formats that provide value to your target market and get your clients to act or schedule a free consultancy to get more insights. The most used B2B content marketing tactics are social media content articles, eNewsletters, articles on your website, blogs, case studies, videos, illustrations, photos, white papers, infographics, research reports, microsites, e-books, mobile apps, in-person events, online presentations, webinars/webcasts, conferences, podcasts, games and gamification.

There are many options for using suitable tactic depending on what your business does, but here is a list we think is a must-have content variety you need to offer your potential leads:

1. Blogs 
2. eBooks
3. Research
4. Videos
5. Case Studies
6. Reports
7. CTA

Blogs

The first step of the content marketing strategy is to have valuable articles on your blog. If your company already has a vast range of blogs that trigger curiosity and solve problems for your clients, you need to make analysis in your social media pages and within your company’s Google Analytics account. To have result-driven content, you need to analyze your buyer personas – your targeted audience profiles and, more specifically, their pain points and challenges. You need to know what they’re struggling with and write your blog content around while experimenting with the content proven to be popular and trendy. 

The first step in creating relevant B2B blog posts for your audience is to target the posts with the client’s main points and offer solutions on how to solve their challenges. If you seek a faster and easier way to do this, the only way is with outsourcing expertise. There are many reasons why outsourcing content writing is the right solution. To discuss further the benefits of outsourcing content creators, schedule a free consultation with us today.

eBooks

B2B eBooks are one of the most cost-effective content marketing strategies because they are jam-packed with information, valuable to the audience, and able to collect or convert potential customer information if you decide to use them as a lead magnet. In many cases, buyers are willing to register and share information about themselves in return for eBooks. In other words, this means that your company could get a leg-up on lead generation with eBooks, and that’s why you need to include them into your editorial calendar content list.

Research

If you are striving to create B2B content marketing that gets backlinks and improves overall SEO (Search Engine Optimization), original research is another must-have in your editorial calendar content list. This is because people–writers want to back up their content with statistics. By collecting your statistics and running a survey or analyzing the results you’ve brought to your clients, you will result in tons of industry authority and backlinks–a key ranking factor in the search algorithms.

Videos

The B2B video content marketing needs to be precisely what your audience wants to watch. In the beginning, you need to follow your Google Analytics reports and get to know what kind of blog content brings you the most traffic, whether it turns your traffic into leads and if not seize the data and use it as action steps accordingly. A good idea for this is to promote your current blog content with solutions in a visual and more appealing way.

Read more about how video content brought success to our client Rumble

Case Studies

Most of the B2B tech buyers search for peer reviews and testimonials before purchasing. We advise and suggest to you, in the beginning, to create a few case studies on the growth of your biggest clients, starting with what kind of problem your clients had, what did they ask you to do, what kind of solution did your company suggest, and the results your company delivered. Actionable case studies will prove to your potential clients that your service works. You would be giving them data to show it in real-life while you tie in a success story from your existing clients.

Reports

One other way to bring value is with free downloadable research included in a report file. Reports are part of content marketing but are time-consuming which is valuable as it serves the clients with up-to-date research data on the topics that they find useful for their business. For the current clients, it is great to send this in an email Newsletter, and for the potential clients, it can be a great lead generation source on your website. Research and reports as content writing build trust, as it educates your clients and provides valuable insights.

CTA (Call to Action)

If you already have valuable content, our next step is to include a call to action or CTA. A good content marketing needs to level up your lead generation. The call to action should be: 

1. Action-oriented
2. Used in first-person 
3. Contain strong visuals
4. Have a sense of urgency
5. Eliminate friction objectives 
6. Stand out and be easy to find

For every call to action to generate leads, you also need to remember your buyer’s journey. If the call to action you add does not fulfill the need of your potential client at the specific point in their journey they will be encountering it, it is not going to resonate with them, and they are not likely to move forward. There are many varieties of designs you can use when altering your Calls To Action with (and not limited to): color, button shape and size, size, style, position (both on the web page and the website), and animations.

When creating your call to action, you need to make sure that the CTA is important enough to attract potential clients. This can be created by utilizing a contrasting color from your website, a bright and robust font, specific placement, and actionable content. 

We know this list is overwhelming, but it’s crucial for every business willing to generate B2B leads. If you have new ideas for other pandemic-related business growth ways to help, please feel free to suggest them during our meeting, and if you need more insights, schedule a free consultation here.

Learn more about content marketing and its contributions to growing your business from an expert. Schedule a time to talk with a Cosmic Development expert for free to learn more about how you can create great content for your blog.

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Sources:

• blog.wishpond.com/post/93784970078/4-things-you-need-to-do-after-a-lead-is-generated
• neilpatel.com/what-is-content-marketing/
• impactbnd.com/blog/the-secrets-to-persuading-your-customers-to-click-and-convert-on-your-call-to-actions