B2B refers to a situation where a business establishes a commercial transaction with another. Content marketing refers to a strategic marketing approach that focuses on creating relevant, consistent, and valuable content to attract an audience that is clearly defined.
An effective Content Marketing Plan helps business in multiple aspects to grow. From increasing brand’s awareness, to generating leads and increasing sales, if the marketing plan is optimized for better results, then the business will surely grow.
Forrester in one of its articles claimed that customer experience is all set to be an essential marketing mix component in 2020. An article by Think with Google, which was similar to the Forrester article, highlighted the importance of prioritizing digital maturity by CMOs in 2020.
At the beginning of every year, certain complications can occur in goal setting for marketers. A multitude of choices is available for improving the results and increase the return on investment. It is essential to deepen customer relationships with high-quality content. Furthermore, one must enhance new research so as to dig deep into the audience’s insights and create a robust lead list.
In recent times, companies are investing in value-based rich content for messaging, campaigns, and other business activities due to its great benefits. They are well-aware of their content marketing ROI by measuring the value it provides to the company.
For serious content marketers, these options are viewed as highly strategic. The content marketers, in order to be successful, must look at the overall larger picture rather than having a narrow outlook.
The main question is how to approach such an ambitious vision. Well, not to worry as we had a great conversation with Mobisium (Largest marketplace of verified content writers) and they have outlined six ways that would be effective in increasing B2B sales with content marketing in 2020.
Review of 2019 Performance
Review of past year performances is something we consider of significant importance. Before focusing on 2020 goal planning, one must look back on 2019. One must analyze each and every KPI that was tracked. You should reflect back on the meaningful insights of the KPIs on performance. One must come to a decision whether it was worth the time and effort put or not.
Another aspect of this revision is to analyze the return on investment with regards to one’s team. A decision on metrics must be made to justify the existence of the team, along with the budget allocation.
Finally, a review must take the place of the 2019 goals. The various shortcomings must be identified, and the reasons for them should be ascertained.
Such a review of the past year will highlight the various strengths and weaknesses of one’s team. Hence, you can incorporate the valuable lessons learned into 2020 goals.
Conduct Audience Research
Understanding your target audience is a profound aspect of any b2b content marketing strategy. Defining your audience into a particular category requires a lot of work to do. The first step in your b2b PR strategy is to collect information about key audiences. In 2020, you have the opportunity of going deeper into your audience research. The consequence of this would be the preparation of content that is in accordance with the evolving needs of the audience involved. Naturally, you would gain deeper insights into your target audience, thereby facilitating the creation of rich buyer personas.
Simply speaking, audience research refers to a study of people that watch a specific television programme, read a particular book, use a particular product, etc. Audience research will throw light on who’s missing? For example, one may have defined a key decision-maker like the CIO, but other influencers and users are still to be defined. As per the 2020 benchmarking report of CMI, content is created by B2B marketers for an average of four audiences.
Enhance Organic Search Results
Natural traffic is, without a doubt, the best traffic source ever. The common understanding is that better traffic leads to a better result. Currently, modern web search engines engage in the deployment of advanced algorithms. Such algorithms rank websites based on timeliness, worth, and quality of content.
Weightage is also given to various social engagements like comments, shares, and likes by these search engines. As such, relevant content should be focused upon and that too in a timely manner. The quality of content is of paramount importance which should be emphasised, you must follow best practices and learn how to write high-quality content. The content must be engaging, appealing, and original to boost organic search results. For this purpose, a content audit must be conducted.
Use Gated Content
Common content formats in existence are white papers, research reports, ebooks, webinar, etc. Such formats can be gated with a web form. Depending upon the required filters, there can be an enhancement in the complexity of the web forms depending on the required fillers, thanks to this gated content. For example, adding a few custom questions to the basic business card information is quite common. Gated content is an effective way to produce top-notch qualified leads, especially if you engage in remote sales. After all, remote selling is the top choice for every business in 2020.
Note: Checkout Primoprint for Business Cards
Map Content with Buyer Journey
Conventional advertisers consistently find website traffic as a significant KPI. Advertisers are often capable of increasing traffic to the websites. However, they fail at converting or supporting at a similar rate. The primary reason for this has been a lack of relevancy in content.
Google Ads or PPC Ads on social platforms allow promotions to the right audience. Unfortunately, most of this traffic gets in touch with nothing more than a few landing pages. To solve this, a proper analysis of content consumption by each section of the larger audience must take place. Each audience subset must have enough content to engage on the basis of the buyer journey stage they currently are in.
Amplification of Content
An online survey for money plays a very important role in seller choice, you can use a survey maker to create your online surverys. Furthermore, negative remarks cannot be avoided in any business. This is where social listening comes in useful. Instead of deleting negative comments, they should be replied as soon as possible. Simultaneously, organizations must produce quality substance to demonstrate their thought authority and proficiency.
It is important to distribute and amplify content pieces across all possible channels. A few negative remarks won’t leave a bad impression in the mind of prospects when they come across many times more positive comments.
If you want to read more about this topic, we recommend this article on inbound marketing written by our friends at ArchiSnapper.
Also Read:
The Ultimate Video Content Making Toolkit and Guide for 2020