Companies that market themselves to other businesses are active participants in what’s commonly called the business-to-business — or B2B — field. And, like the business-to-consumer field, B2B marketers depend heavily on effective, measured and engaging content marketing.
In fact, B2B content marketing plays a crucial role in the overall marketing mix, contributing to every part of the marketing and sales funnels, from brand awareness to lead and demand generation and more.
To help you on your content marketing journey, we’ve compiled a full guide to B2B content marketing. It covers what B2B content marketing is,how to do it effectively, and how you can build a strategy that works towards your business goals.
An Introduction to B2B Content Marketing
Before building an effective B2B content marketing strategy, it’s important to understand the basics.
What is B2B Content Marketing?
B2B content marketing is the process B2B companies use to create and distribute content to increase brand awareness, web traffic or leads. That content can take many forms, including blogs, infographics, videos, emails, e-books, social media posts, webinars and more.
What Is the Difference Between B2C and B2B Content Marketing?
The key differentiator between B2B content marketing and B2C content marketing is the target audience. B2B content marketing is tailored to suit other businesses’ needs or preferences, often called “accounts.” This is because a purchase or subscription is often attached to a brand, not an individual user. B2C content marketing targets individual consumers.
This difference has many implications, affecting everything from the topics covered in content to the performance metrics used to gauge success. The table below highlights a few:
| B2B content marketing | B2C content marketing | |
| Target audience | Business professionals, specifically decision-makers | Individual consumers or end-users |
| Typical content focus | Common pain points or challenges faced by relevant businesses | Buying guides, how-to explainers and product comparisons |
| Popular content formats | Blog posts, whitepapers, case studies and webinars | Blog posts, social media posts and videos |
| General messaging style | Emphasizes problem-solving and includes expert insights | Appeals to emotions with a focus on benefits |
| Common distribution channels | Websites, email and professional social media platforms | Websites, email and social media platforms |
| Key performance metrics | Lead quality, channel-specific conversion rates and ROI | Engagement rates, click-through rates sales or leads generated |
What Are the Benefits of a B2B Content Marketing Strategy?
A B2B content marketing strategy structures content marketing efforts, ensuring they align with overall business goals. Depending on what those goals are, B2B content marketing strategies can be tailored to achieve diverse objectives, including:
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- Increasing brand awareness
- Improving audience engagement
- Building customer trust
- Generating website traffic
- Converting leads
Types of B2B Content
B2B companies can use diverse content to reach their audience, but these are some of the most popular B2B content types:
Webinars
Webinars facilitated through digital solutions like the ON24 webinar hosting platform offer an excellent opportunity to deliver valuable, informative content to B2B audiences and engage with individual prospects.
Blog Posts
Blog posts are a versatile type of content that can be used to overcome common objections and provide value to leads throughout the B2B buying journey while also attracting organic traffic through search engine optimization (SEO).
Case Studies
Case studies act as a form of “social proof” allowing B2B companies to demonstrate the value their product or service offers to potential customers through real examples of previous successes.
Whitepapers
Whitepapers are almost specific to B2B, often providing in-depth technical explanations or comprehensive expert insights into topics of interest to a company’s target audience.
Infographics
Infographics merge visual and textual information in a simple graphic, which can then be shared through diverse channels, including social media to capture the target audience’s attention.
Videos
Video content can serve diverse purposes, from providing product information to summarizing case studies. It can be distributed through channels like social media and is particularly effective at driving engagement, capable of generating up to 1,200% more shares than other content types.
Emails
Emails provide an opportunity to engage directly with a target audience, delivering useful content, newsletters, surveys and more straight to potential customers’ inboxes.
LinkedIn Posts
LinkedIn is the social media platform of choice for B2B companies and offers both organic and paid advertising opportunities that can be used to grow an engaged community or drive website traffic.
Podcasts
Podcasts are a growing force in the B2B content marketing landscape, offering businesses the chance to discuss topics of interest to their target audience and build a community of engaged listeners.
Testimonials
Testimonials are another form of social proof, like case studies, but focus solely on communicating positive feedback from previous customers to demonstrate the value of products or services.
Tutorials
Tutorials, which can be delivered in diverse mediums, including videos, blog posts or live demonstrations, are designed to provide practical guidance on how to use a product.
Step By Step Guide on How to Create a B2B Content Marketing Strategy
Creating an effective B2B content marketing strategy involves careful planning and consideration. Following these steps will help ensure that your strategy is tailored to suit your broader business goals and capable of achieving them.
Conduct Audience Research
Understanding your target audience’s needs, preferences, and challenges is an essential first step in developing an impactful B2B content marketing strategy. This information will provide a basis for your content strategy, ensuring you cover topics that are relevant to your audience.
Audience research can be conducted in many different ways, including by sending out first-party surveys, conducting polls, or using freely available platforms like Answer The Public, Quora and Reddit.
Website analytics software like Google Analytics can also be useful to get more information about your target audience’s demographics to build accurate customer personas.
Perform a Content Audit
You likely already have a collection of content that could be an untapped resource. Reviewing your existing content to identify pieces you can update or repurpose to suit your new content marketing strategy is often quicker and easier than creating new pieces from scratch.
Conduct a full content audit, analyzing content from across your website and social media accounts to find pieces to add value to your new strategy. Then, consider how you can adapt or improve them to ensure they contribute to your objectives.
Conduct Competitor Analysis in Your Industry
Looking into how your competitors are approaching content marketing and using tools like Semrush or SproutSocial to investigate what kinds of content perform best in your sector are valuable ways to inspire your strategy.
Focus on finding the best-performing competitor content for the metrics you care about, whether organic traffic or social shares, and break down what it does well and where it falls short. You can then use the findings from your analysis as the basis for your own content, adding additional value to the topic by applying your business’s unique perspective.
Define Your Goals
Establishing specific, measurable, and achievable goals is essential to keeping your content marketing strategy on track and aligned with broader business objectives. These goals will provide guardrails that ensure every piece of content you produce contributes to performance in a way that matters to your business.
If driving more product demo signups is your overall objective, for example, your main B2B content marketing strategy goal might be to increase organic traffic to the product page on your website by 50% in 12 months. Other business objectives, like increasing brand awareness or B2B lead generation, will inspire different content marketing goals.
Diversify Your B2B Content Marketing Strategy With Different Content Types
Different types of content have varying strengths and weaknesses, so the best B2B content marketing strategies involve diverse content. Video content is particularly effective at generating engagement, while whitepapers are great for communicating expert insights.
As you build your content marketing strategy, consider which content types can contribute to your goals. Remember to factor in the insights you gained through the audience research process to ensure that you’re producing content that resonates with your target audience.
Distribute Your B2B Content Effectively
Creating strong content is only half of the B2B content marketing process – distributing it effectively is also critical. Channels like organic search, social media, email, content syndication networks and paid advertising platforms all present different benefits and can be combined in multichannel campaigns to increase content reach.
Build your distribution strategy around your audience’s preferences, prioritizing the channels they use most to ensure the right people find your content. And think about how you can repurpose content across different channels – chopping webinars up into shorter-form videos for social media, for example.
Measure and Optimize Your B2B Content Marketing Strategy
Taking a sophisticated approach to measuring and analyzing the results from your B2B content marketing strategy is an important part of ensuring high performance. The data you collect from tools like Google Analytics and social media analytics platforms will help you to understand which content and channels work best and which are underperforming.
Stay flexible and experiment with different tactics based on the data you collect. Focus on the methods that are delivering results and tweak the ones that aren’t. Over time, this approach will help you reliably improve campaign performance.
B2B Content Marketing Case Studies That Can Inspire You
Countless combinations of content types and distribution channels can deliver results. The challenge is to find the combination that best fits your goals and your audience’s preferences.
Merrill Corporation, a leading B2B SaaS provider, found content marketing success by applying real-time engagement data from webinars hosted through the ON24 webinar hosting platform to discover which topics resonated with their audience.
Informatica, an enterprise cloud data management leader, generated millions in pipeline by using ON24’s content hub functionality to build self-service content hubs that offered personalized content journeys to their diverse audience segments.
To maximize the effectiveness of your B2B content marketing, follow these steps when building your strategy:
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- Conduct audience research
- Perform a content audit
- Conduct competitor analysis in your industry
- Define your goals
- Diversify your B2B content marketing strategy with different content types
- Distribute your B2B content effectively
- Measure and optimize your B2B content marketing strategy
At each step, take full advantage of tools that can help you understand your audience’s preferences, generate effective content, and learn from data to improve your approach in the future.
