If you want your B2B business to rank well on search engines, you must consistently put out content that appeals to your target audience and establishes you as an expert in your niche.
But as a B2B content marketer, you know that it can sometimes be challenging to continuously think of new content ideas that will set you apart from your competitors. If you’re looking for new B2B content ideas for your blog, you’re in the right place.
In this article, we give you tips on how to use content marketing to grow your business.
Do You Need a Content Strategy?
Usually, content that performs well and increases a website’s organic traffic and conversion rate is a product of meticulous planning.
For your content to rank well on search engines, it needs to be interspersed with the right keywords and answer commonly asked questions in an attempt to solve your customer’s problems. In addition, your content must be well-written, engaging and SEO-optimized. All of this, while maintaining a consistent posting schedule, can be a lot to handle. You’re more likely to compromise on content quality if you don’t have a solid content marketing strategy in place.
However, keep in mind that your B2B content marketing strategy needs to be different from B2C methods like influencer marketing or more high-level consumer-centric blogs. In B2B, your content is targeted at businesses rather than individual users. So your B2B content ideas need to be original, niche-specific, detailed and compelling to help businesses solve commercial challenges and grow.
In this article, we explain how you can create a robust B2B content strategy for your blog to maintain a consistent output of valuable content and drive your website traffic and sales.
How to Create a B2B Content Strategy
No matter how experienced a content marketer you are, there will be times when you may struggle to come up with topics for B2B-related articles.
We have five tips to help you build an effective, lead-generating B2B content strategy to boost your brand authority and impress your target audience.
1. Identify Your Target Audience and What Matters to Them
A successful B2B content marketing strategy is tailor-made for the niche audience that would benefit from your company’s products or services. Before you begin building a strategy or thinking of B2B content marketing ideas, reflect on what your long-term goals are, who your content is for, and what purpose it’s serving.
For example, if your business has a product intended to help other small businesses scale, reflect on what kind of content will benefit small businesses.
B2Bs should post content that is detailed and specific. This helps the audience trust you as a credible authority in your niche and encourages them to move through the sales funnel.
As a B2B, your audience is looking for relevant statistics and real-world examples that will benefit them as a business. Putting out content that is based on research and your own business experiences allows your target audience to trust you and encourages them to use your products or services.
Ultimately, the key is to have an excellent understanding of your core audience and produce content that caters to their problems.
2. Find Out What Competitors Are Doing
If you’re starting to build a content strategy, you need to see what your competitors are doing and how they’re ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs). This should give you an idea of the content that users are looking for.
Suppose you manufacture cloth made of pure cotton. Your direct competitors are other companies that are manufacturing the same kind of pure cotton cloth, and your indirect competitors are companies that are selling other types of cloth, like silk or polyester blend. Essentially, these companies are either selling the same product as you, variations of your product, or a replacement for your product. So chances are that these competitor companies are putting out similar content, trying to rank for the same keywords and targeting the same audience that you are to drive their sales funnel.
So if you’re unsure of how to make B2B content interesting, it always helps to look around and see what other similar businesses are doing. You can use tools like Ahrefs and Semrush to understand what keywords your competitors are ranking for and the volume of traffic they’re getting through those blogs. This will also help you understand which keywords to prioritize and content gaps in your competitor’s content strategy. You can then use these insights to produce content.
If your competitors are talking about how to scale small businesses, you can 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 (USP). So when you’re creating content on common topics in your niche, try highlighting the unique aspects of your business and things that set you apart from your competitors. This way, you create an impression in your customers’ mind and give them a reason to choose your company over others.
While distributing your content through social media platforms might get you a few readers, you’d want to ensure you’re ranking well on search engines so you can get organic and high intent readers. To rank well on search engine results pages (SERPs), it’s crucial for you to optimize your Google E-A-T. While deciding search engine rankings, Google judges your page’s E-expertise, A-authoritativeness and T-trustworthiness. The aim is to ensure that the pages that are most likely to help users rank the highest.
3. Incorporate Cluster Strategies
A content cluster means creating a batch of content in an organized manner such that you can direct your audience to your main product page through every piece and optimize internal linking to boost your SEO.
To create this content cluster, you need to conduct SEO and keyword research, determine your pillar pieces and decide on cluster articles that support those pillar topics. Once this is done and you have your content marketing ideas for B2B in place, you can go ahead and 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 the product or service you are selling. Assuming 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, you should create an outline for each article to mention what subheadings it will include, so you can avoid repetition. Ideating content in this way will help you develop multiple ideas to cover specific overarching topics in more detailed chunks.
This clustering strategy will also help you push out more pieces of content that relate to each other and that link back to a common final destination — the conversion page of your website.
How Can You Create an Excellent Cluster Strategy?
It’s simpler than you might think. You can follow this structure for an organized approach:
- Pick a topic or a main idea
- Research keywords for that topic
- Look at your existing content to see what you have already covered from that
- Chart out overarching blog ideas related to your topic and the high-ranking keywords
- Start writing in clusters
- Create an internal linking plan to stay organized
Quality Content Matters
Remember that however solid your content strategy is, the quality of your content is equally important. Even if you are posting about the right topics and using the right keywords, your content should be filled with nuanced observations of your industry and backed by statistics and research. It should be engaging and provide value to the reader.
Also remember that the aim of your content is to get you seen online and turn site visitors into paying customers by establishing your credibility. So, when your site audience clicks on your call to action or reaches the page with your conversion offer, the page should have:
- A good conversion offer, a demo or a clear contact option
- A keyword with a high search volume
- Minimum distractions or other links so that the visitor doesn’t lose attention while buying your product or service
If your content strategy and content are in place and your customer clicks to get in contact with you or buy your product, there should be nothing off-putting about your conversion page to come in the way of that.
In this way, content clustering can help you bring structure into your content marketing strategy, and help you achieve your B2B content marketing goals efficiently.
4. Cover B2B Content Ideas That Complement Product Marketing and Brand Positioning
Brand positioning is the impression people have of your brand in comparison to your competitors. It is what sets you apart and helps you hold a distinct place in your customers’ minds. But how should you position your brand using your content?
- Talk to your customers and find out their pain points. Find out what they would like you to do differently, how you can increase the value you’re offering them and why they chose you over others. This will give you an idea of what you’re doing right and what you should be working on improving. In addition, taking this feedback might also go a long way in creating a good impression of your brand because it shows that you care about your customers’ needs.
- Find your USP. Based on why customers chose you over your competitors and what you think sets your brand apart from others, find out what makes you different from the rest. Give your customers a reason to choose your brand over others in the market.
- Promote your USP. Just knowing your USP isn’t enough. While covering topics that your customers would like to read about, be sure to include how you can help them and why they should trust your company over any other. Promote your USP through your content, social networks and in any other way you can.
You can also consider writing a cluster of articles just about your USP to really highlight it. For example, if your cloth company provides an excellent customer service, you can write an article about why good customer service is essential while buying cloth. Cover topics that complement your product and also promote your USP.
5. Create in advance
B2B companies that posted more than 11 times a month received 3.75 times more leads than those that posted fewer times.
Planning out your content beforehand is important to ensure that you have enough content banked to keep up a regular posting schedule. We recommend planning your content in advance for the next 6-8 months, so there’s little chances of you falling off your posting schedule.
Creating a content calendar and preparing your content in advance prevents any sacrifices in its quality due to rushed writing. You should also consider working with writers who understand SEO concepts to do your heavy lifting and make your B2B content interesting, so your target audience stays engaged.
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 is 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 will help you create blog posts that your audience will love and share, giving your business a boost.
