If you want your business to rank well on search engines, your content must appeal to your audience and establish you as an expert in your niche. But effective B2B content marketing ideas aren’t always easy to come by. They must be intriguing enough to generate traffic, offer plenty of value so audiences stick around, and distinguish your brand to drive results.
It’s a demanding task — but achievable. Below, we offer ways to get your creative juices flowing so you can generate impactful ideas for your niche. We explore content formats to attract customers and ways to source topic ideas. And because you need more than random pieces of content to make an impact, we discuss how to fuse your ideas with a solid content marketing strategy.
B2B Content Marketing Ideas: Where to Start
When creating B2B content, you target business decision-makers who are solving commercial challenges. These customers make decisions that can impact an entire company and need reliable, industry-specific information to grow their businesses. That’s why B2B marketing differs from B2C methods, which may incorporate influencer marketing or appeal more to emotions.
Blog posts are at the heart of most B2B content marketing strategies — and for good reason. They’re versatile and can be structured to cover a range of topics. But they’re not the only way to share your knowledge. If you’re looking for fresh B2B content ideas, consider expanding your marketing to include different formats. Publishing various content types makes your site more dynamic and appeals to different user preferences.
- Case studies: Show the impact of your product or services and back it up with statistics.
- FAQs: Make it easy for potential customers to find the answers to important questions.
- Infographics: Present complex information visually to help customers understand topics and easily share content with their colleagues.
- Augmented and virtual reality: Leverage technology to offer immersive and interactive experiences, such as product demos, virtual showrooms, and interactive 3D models.
- White papers: Explore industry issues, and establish authority with in-depth analyses and thought leadership.
- E-books: Share your expertise in a downloadable format that’s creative and visual.
- Videos: Appeal to audiences who prefer to consume video content instead of reading.
- Webinars and podcasts: Invite experts to discuss topics in an interactive format.
- Glossaries: Define technical and industry terminology customers may not be familiar with.
Finding B2B Content Ideas
To impress your audience with B2B topics for your niche, consider the information they need to do their jobs and how you can assist. For example, your content might:
- Provide data to support decision-making
- Summarize industry research or present your findings
- Share information from presentations you made at conferences
- Offer insight into industry trends and what you expect in the future
- Provide tutorials, guides, and checklists to help them through a process
- List tools to improve their productivity
- Offer free templates to make their workflow easier
- Give tips to enhance how they use your products or services
- Provide tables and charts to compare products
Your customers may also have specific questions; go to the source to see what they want to know. Conduct surveys, or ask your sales and customer care teams what questions and issues often arise. Visit online communities, such as Reddit, or listen in on social media conversations to discover what audiences are talking about. Analytics is an essential tool to see which marketing emails produce clicks and which pages on your website perform best. Round out your research with a content gap analysis to find missing key topics on your website that have the potential to generate traffic.
Where possible, leverage your firsthand knowledge, and provide real-world scenarios and examples in your content. This helps your website address Google’s E-E-A-T guidelines by demonstrating experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.
Successful B2B Marketing Begins With a Content Strategy
The right mix of content can drive traffic, build leads, and improve conversion rates, but it requires planning. The best way to brainstorm and harness ideas is through a content marketing strategy — it helps you create purposeful SEO content that satisfies your audience’s needs. Use the following tips to customize a B2B marketing strategy that guides your content production.
Identify your target audience and what matters to them
A successful content strategy is tailored to your core audience, so you need to understand your customers and produce content that caters to their problems. Before you nail down your B2B content ideas, reflect on your long-term goals, who you’re writing for, and the purpose of the content. Clearly understand what customers want to know at different stages of the buyer’s journey, and deliver exceptional content that answers those questions.
Find out what competitors are doing
If you’re unsure how to make B2B content interesting, look into what your competitors are doing and how they’re ranking on the SERPs. Suppose you manufacture cloth made of pure cotton. Your direct competitors are companies that produce the same kind of cloth, and your indirect competitors sell other fabrics, such as silk or polyester blends. Essentially, these companies either sell identical products, variations, or replacements for your product. Chances are these competitors distribute content to rank for the same keywords and attract your target audiences.
Competitive analysis is invaluable for planning your content. You can use tools such as Ahrefs and Semrush to understand what keywords your competitors are ranking for and the volume of traffic they’re getting. This gives you an idea of the content users are looking for and gaps in your competitors’ strategies. For example, if you have a SaaS product and competitors are talking about how to scale small businesses, you might go a step further to create content about common mistakes small businesses make when trying to scale.
To draw in more customers, you also need a unique selling point. When creating content on common topics in your niche, highlight aspects of your business and topical authority that set you apart from your competitors. This helps you create an impression in your customers’ minds and gives them a reason to choose your company over others.
Incorporate cluster strategies
A content cluster is a way of organizing content by theme. It uses a main pillar page as a gateway into the high-level topic, directing audiences to related, in-depth pieces. This strategy enables you to interlink your content to improve user experience and establish authority to boost your SEO.
To create a content cluster, you need to conduct SEO and keyword research, determine your core pillar pieces, and decide on cluster articles that support those pillar topics. Once your content marketing ideas for B2B are in place, you can start writing high-quality blog posts and internally link them to each other.
Let’s look at an example of how this works.
Decide on a main idea related to your product or service. If you’re a content writing business, the customers who land on your page are likely looking for ways to upgrade their existing content strategy. So, let’s say your first pillar piece is about content strategy. You then create a list of overarching topics that cluster around this one.
For example:
- Does your content strategy make a difference?
- 5 ways to create a solid content strategy
- Common content strategy mistakes
- Should you hire a content writing team?
Once your topic cluster is ready, create a content brief for each article with subheadings to avoid repetition. Ideating content in this way helps you develop multiple ideas to cover specific overarching topics in more detailed chunks. AI platforms, such as ChatGPT, can assist with brief creation.
This clustering strategy also helps you push out more pieces of content that relate to each other and link back to a common, final destination — the conversion page of your website.
Creating a cluster strategy
Developing compelling content clusters is simpler than you think. Follow this structure for an organized approach:
- Pick a topic or a main idea.
- Research keywords for that topic.
- Audit existing content to see what you’ve already covered.
- Chart out overarching blog ideas related to your topic and the high-ranking keywords.
- Create content briefs and assign writers.
- Link between articles in the cluster.
Emphasizing quality
Remember that a solid content strategy is only the first step. You also have to deliver quality content. Even if you identify relevant topics and use the right keywords, your content needs to provide value to the reader. Flesh it out with nuanced observations about your industry and back it up with statistics and research.
If your strategy and content are in place and your customer clicks through your site, there shouldn’t be anything off-putting about your conversion page to cause friction. Make sure you have a good conversion offer, demo, or clear contact option. Minimize distractions or other links so visitors can maintain attention while buying your product or service.
In this way, content clustering can help you bring structure into your content marketing strategy and help you achieve your B2B content marketing goals.
Don’t forget brand marketing and positioning
Brand positioning is the impression people have of your business in comparison to your competitors. It’s what sets you apart and gives you a distinct place in your customers’ minds. But how can you position your brand using your content?
- Talk to your customers and find out their pain points. Find out what they’d like you to do differently, how you can offer more value, and why they chose you over a competitor. This gives you an idea of what you’re doing right and what you should improve. Your openness to feedback also creates a positive impression of your brand and shows you care about your customers’ needs.
- Promote your USP. Determine what sets your brand apart from others. Incorporate your USP into your content marketing and give your customers a reason to choose your brand over others in the market. Emphasize how you can help them and why they should trust your company over another.
- Let your brand voice shine. Is your company a startup that uses humor to appeal to audiences? Maybe it’s an established brand that conveys authority and expertise. Use tone and voice in your content to convey your brand’s message and shape how your customers perceive you.
Plan in advance
B2B companies that posted more than 11 times a month received 3.75 times more leads than those that posted a handful of times. That’s a lot of content to manage, but an editorial calendar can keep your strategy on track. Organize your B2B content marketing ideas, slot them into your schedule, and make sure nothing falls through the cracks.
We recommend planning content 6-8 months in advance, even if you only publish a few times a month. This creates a consistent output and enables you to align content with important occasions, such as product launches or seasonal events. Preparing your content in advance also allows time for research, writing, editing, and quality assurance, preventing sacrifices in quality due to rushed deadlines.
Consider working with writers who understand SEO concepts. Outsourcing your blog can help you draw on fresh perspectives and quickly stock up your content inventory.
Revitalize Your B2B Content Marketing
If you’re trying to establish your company as a leader in the B2B space, a solid content strategy and high-quality content are essential. The focus should be on creating content that’s useful to your target audience and attracts organic leads to your business. At Crowd Content, we have the writers to set your content strategy in motion. Our talented B2B content marketing writers help you create blog posts, white papers, and SEO content that builds trust with decision-makers and boosts your business.
