How to create B2B content that ranks and promotes sales

Content is critical to almost any B2B business encourages traffic and convinces your potential customers to become your customers. No wonder most B2B companies are increasing their content marketing budgets each year.

But do they use content marketing entirely? How do you create content that serves multiple goals, such as traffic and rankings?

Great challenge with B2B content

Although B2B content is extremely valuable for business success, it is extremely challenging for marketers to implement properly. The problem is twofold: Targeting.

Unlike B2C content, where you usually target a single person, in B2B you need to keep the whole group of decision makers in mind. This group is commonly referred to as the DMU (decision-making unit) and, depending on your platform and your target organizations, may include a marketing manager, executive director, IT representative, CTO, etc.

In other words, target B2B content group of decision makers and usually takes more time (and more steps) convert.

Creating compelling content that engages everyone within the DMU is hardly possible:

• Directors may need to know how your product will save them money
• The marketing manager will need to ensure that your product solves the existing problem without their department becoming redundant. In this case, the best interests of the CEO may conflict with the best interests of the marketing team, but the latter is probably the final decision, so you will need to consider their needs and challenges.
• The IT team will need to ensure that your platform is technically feasible (integration into their technical environment is possible).

Before you start creating your B2B content strategy to generate traffic, you need to know your decision makers and be able to plan your content based on potential conflicts.

In other words, plan your content elements that deliver value, and then decide which keywords you can optimize for.

Knowing your decision makers

So what’s the best way to know who you’re targeting? You already know your target companies (the ones you created the B2B product for), but how do you better understand their internal decision makers?

B2B audience research is different from B2C audience research: you can hardly use the demographics of your web analytics because you have to consider all of these levels within the organization and policy.

To better understand your target DMU, ​​try more of these options:

• Talk to your sales and customer support teams. They communicate with your potential and current customers every day. Have them describe their contacts and report to whom. Get all the details they can share, including their frequently asked questions and frequently asked questions.
• Research your customers. Using on-site and registration surveys will help you gather more information about the size of the companies you deal with and the roles of your actual users in those companies. There are different ones plug-ins which allows you integrate surveys with your content.

In addition, the Insight inbox offers convenience control List that you can organize your data and better understand your target DMUs.

From there, start creating a list of the problems that everyone at DMU has and how your product can solve them all. Here, matching these keyword issues after a search is the next step required.

Keyword strategy planning

It is often not easy to figure out how people may be looking for solutions and answers to important problems. While there there is no ideal word count to work in any niche, try to create a resource that will answer several related questions.

Google is now mature enough to steer your search in a more popular direction, so I suggest you start exploring your keywords with a simple Google search. Enter search terms as you would use them and pay attention to:

• What Google AutoComplete suggests in the search box
• “People also ask”Boxes and presented snippets
• Words that Google displays in bold search (desktop)
• Google’s “Related Searches” and (mobile) Google categories, which usually appear below unpaid search results:

All of this will help you gather key terms that your target B2B customers use to find solutions to their problems.

Use from there keyword research tools to expand your core terms and discover even more related terms.

Combining keywords is a good way to better organize your keywords by purpose and identify some common search patterns. Here is a good guide to using them identified keyword groups create a content strategy that will apply in both B2B and B2C.

Promote and change your B2B content

Publishing your content is a good first step to start creating some organic search. But if you don’t promote your content, you won’t achieve much, as search engines need more signals than just a useful copy.

Promoting your content is a whole new topic that has already been covered in great detail. Lots content promotion ideas apply to B2B and B2C content, including sharing on social networksemail marketing and more.

When it comes to the B2B niche, some of the more effective methods of getting content and links include:

• Organic promotion via email. Email is the main source of communication for most B2B businesses, so incorporating recent or most important content into your email signature will provide a few clicks and maybe even backlinks. Wisestamp will help your employees create a cool signature that can pull off your recent articles. They offer something cool examples of email signatures to get inspiration.
• Rearrange content. Given so many complex DMUs in mind, you will need different content formats to take care of everything. Enabling your content to be downloaded as a PDF file (to share it in-house) is the first step. You can achieve this by using Google Docs. Another idea is to convert your content to a video format that is quite easy to use Movavi. This would extend your reach to video-only platforms like Youtube. In addition, consider reusing visual elements (graphs and screenshots) in PowerPoint format to create content for promotion on Slideshare and LinkedIn. Venngage makes this very easy. In other words, change your content in lead magnets!!
• Web seminars are great B2B content because they can be used at every step of the sales funnel. You can stream them live, turn them into many videos, rewrite them to create textual content, enable forms to get leads to attract your leads. There are many platforms which allow you to do all this.
• Use email marketing. Email automation is an integral part of every B2B pipeline. Here are a some examples of email marketing campaigns to get started with yours.

Creating optimized content that targets different roles and comes in different formats will require a lot of organizational effort.

Conclusion

Planning and creating content takes a lot of time, so it makes sense to establish a content marketing strategy that serves multiple goals, such as organic marketing and sales creation. Hopefully the tools and steps above will show you some directions. Best of luck!

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Ann Smarty is the founder of Viral Content Bee, Head of Brands and Communities at Internet Marketing Ninjas. You can find her on Twitter @seosmarty.

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