Building a Better B2B Content Marketing Strategy in 2022

Over the past two years, amid a pandemic that has made it difficult for firms to reach end consumers, many businesses have discovered that business-to-business (B2B) channels offer better returns, especially if they channelize their efforts in the right direction. As a result, B2B marketing has the potential to be incredibly lucrative. What’s the secret, though?

Pitching your product or service to gain client trust helps ensure that end clients receive more than just the service they’re expecting. As a B2B brand, exceeding end-client expectations can be a challenge. But it can also be an immense sphere of opportunity.

Content matters in this context. Whether it’s text-based blog content or a viral video that decision-makers at a brand happen to see and contact you about, your content has a tangible impact on this result. Therefore, it’s essential to go back by one level of abstraction to understand your overall aims and brand direction.

In this article, we’ll look at the key ways you can boost your B2B content marketing efforts to deliver content that helps convert B2B leads into potential high-value clients. Let’s jump in!

Make Sure To Do Keyword Research the Right Way

Keyword research is critical to creating solid content. If you want eyeballs on your content, you need to create content that ranks for the keywords people are searching for. This is, unfortunately, easier said than done. Let’s look at an example.

Suppose you’re a confectionery manufacturer in the Midwest. Your chocolate fudge is amazing, and you want to boost revenue from direct sales of chocolate fudge.

Stop right there. How will you deliver results from a keyword perspective in alignment with this goal?

“Chocolate fudge” might seem like a reasonable keyword. It’s a longtail, comprising two words, and it’s fairly niche. However, two ingredients are missing here: location and intent. How do you geographically filter for leads who are located in a place where they can actually buy your product? And how do you filter out potential clients from middle school students researching fudge manufacturing for a class presentation?

This is where optimized keyword research comes into the picture. When you’re doing keyword research, it’s a good idea to start with broad themes like “chocolate fudge,” then go down a few levels of abstraction to keywords and phrases that are more aligned with what your clients might be searching for.

The idea here is to balance specificity and intent with search volume. A very broad term like “chocolate fudge” might have thousands of monthly hits, but its intent might not be very high. Plus, keyword competition might be so high that an up-and-coming website with limited domain authority might not be able to rank on the first page of Google without a substantial amount of paid traffic.

The best thing to do here is leverage platforms like Ahrefs and SEMrush to identify high intent, low competition keywords—these often have lower volume, but that shouldn’t be a limiting factor. When the competition is low, it’s easier to rank at the top on Google. And when the intent is high, it’s more likely that a lead will take action after engaging with your content. A response rate of 10 percent for a keyword with a monthly volume of 100 is far better for your bottom line than a 1 percent response rate on a keyword with 500 monthly hits.

Focus on Solving Existing Problems Over Creating New Solutions

People want answers to deal with the problems they have. Apart from searching for memes and GIFs, this is one of the main reasons people search for things on search engines like Google. As a business, you need to align your content with solving common client problems.

Being solution-oriented means getting in the mind of your potential leads, then walking backward. What are your leads searching for? Why are they searching for those terms? What do they lack that they might be looking for? Then, you need to align your content with these needs.

Let’s go back to the example of a confectionary store. B2B clients in this segment might be retailers in Midwest metros looking to stock up on cost-effective chocolate collections. They’ll likely be looking for:

• Local sources of the product
• How to deliver a more cost-effective package to their clients
• How to offer a greater variety

Keeping these points in mind, you’ll want to think of content topics that align with these questions. For instance, “Chocolate fudge in Sioux Falls: How X manufactures the most cost-effective confections in Western Iowa.”

Integrate Your Content With Your Overall Marketing Strategy

Great content will deliver results as long as you get eyeballs on it and offer a way for leads to take measurable action. What does this mean for your approach to content? First, you need to closely integrate your overall content strategy with everything else you’re doing regarding digital marketing.

It’s important to realize that content is one part of an effective, 360-degree digital marketing strategy that incorporates factors like social media, paid ads, and ways to measure success. When content works closely alongside other digital marketing efforts, it’s a powerful force multiplier, meaning more leads, signups, and better progress on strategic goals.

Conclusion

Content isn’t everything at the end of the day. Still, it can differentiate between a good digital marketing strategy and one that delivers measurable results for your clients. What do you need to focus on to create content that truly delivers? First, identify your end clients’ needs, then work backward to understand exactly what prospective leads might search for. Next, create content centered on those topics, focusing on solutions to the issues these leads face and exploring how your product or service can help them reach their goals.