B2B Content Marketing: How to Convince Your Target Audience with High-Quality Content

1. Content Marketing in B2B: A constant and its growing importance
2. Buyer personas or classic target group in B2B content marketing?
3. Work steps in content marketing: Establishing processes is essential
4. Formats and Channels in B2B Content Marketing 
5. Formats and Channels in B2B Content Marketing
6. Helpful Tools for Measuring the Success of B2B Content Marketing
7. How to create successful content for your B2B business
8. Conclusion: Good content still matters – and creativity is its loyal companion

To reach potential customers, more and more B2B companies are using digital content marketing and are trying to create valuable and high-quality content to attract the attention of their target group, differentiate themselves in the market, or generate new leads. Successful B2B content marketing must be carefully planned, structured, and aligned with the company's objectives. This requires know-how in the area of strategy development and content format creation. Guest author Linus Kurtenbach shows you how to reach and convince your target group with high-quality content in this article.

Content Marketing in B2B: A constant and its growing importance

The conditions for Content Marketing have become increasingly complex and demanding in both B2B and B2C contexts in recent years. This is mainly due to the mechanization and digitalization on the customer side, which bring about a significant change. On the one hand, today's customer operates on many different online platforms: at the same time, he/she has high demands on service and communication. The market is changing in such a way that in many cases an increasing number of providers as well as the products and services on offer can be observed, which makes products, services, and services increasingly interchangeable. 

For B2B companies to be able to survive in the market in the long term, it is no longer enough to simply maintain a website and place ads in trade magazines. More and more providers recognize this and try to support their customers and interested parties with relevant content in finding solutions: The software company informs about the latest encryption techniques, the plant manufacturer offers tips for assembly. Content marketing is increasingly becoming a decisive success factor for B2B companies and can convince customers of an organization or a product, service, or service with the help of high-quality content and provide solutions to specific problems.

Content marketing takes on various roles in the field of B2B marketing and consists of a mix of instruments and content formats. Due to the increasing competition and the increasing number of products and services on B2B markets, differentiation and consistent communication is becoming more important. For B2B companies, digital content marketing can realize the individual approach of different buyer personas and provide different information sources via online channels depending on the phase in the buyer's journey. Since the B2B purchasing process is usually more complex than in B2C, decision-makers and influencers must be accompanied up to the final purchasing decision. The communication should take place in several stages and reach both upstream intermediate stages (trading partners) and the end customers via various channels and provide information during the research phase.

Buyer personas or classic target group in B2B content marketing?

The concept of buyer personas can serve as a strategic starting point for the subsequent work steps in content marketing. For long-term successful content marketing, an approach is necessary that goes beyond the classic target group description and characterizes one's own customers ideally, in detail, and on a human-emotional level.

In the communication and marketing environment, the classic target group descriptions are still very common to represent one's own customers. The classic target group represents a subset of the total market and results from a market segmentation that often builds on basic socio-demographic data. Often, the common target group description neglects the personal factors and the character of a customer, the preferences or the challenges in the everyday life of a person. The Buyer Personas concept differs greatly from the target group concept and gives one's own customers a concrete face. Buyer personas are ideal buyer typologies in which, in addition to the demographic and psychographic characteristics, the thinking and behavior patterns within the purchasing process are particularly taken into account – so it's about the motivation and the question “Why does someone buy something?”. 

Formulated personas support content marketing managers in developing targeted topics that meet the specific requirements and demands of potential customers, i.e. they are seen as relevant and high-quality. The number of personas applies: as many as necessary, as few as possible. Corresponding content must be prepared for each persona.

The creation of a persona can be done using different approaches. Most methods are based on answering core questions for each persona. Regardless of whether by questionnaire or with the help of individual flipcharts on the walls, the following questions should be answered in order for a persona to be created: 

• What is the professional and social background of the persona? 
• What does the persona deal with every day in their job and their company?
• Where does the persona get information and on which events and networks can they be found?
• What are personal and professional goals as well as challenges of the persona?
• How can we help the persona achieve their goals and overcome challenges? 

These questions can be answered by content marketing experts on a purely subjective level in the first step, and then complemented with the help of in-depth interviews. At least five interviews should be conducted per persona, which are then merged into a fictional persona. The exact number of interviews conducted depends on the information density and the still missing insights. Especially in the B2B sector, complex products, services, or services are sold, which are often associated with high investments and therefore trigger complex processes in the area of purchasing decisions. The information needs of potential customers is higher than for spontaneous purchases, which are made with a high emotional motivation. A company that is about to purchase new software wants to know in detail what added value this software offers and specifically asks for content. If the provider or the software company understands exactly in which phase of the buying process, content is needed, content offers can be effective and accurate.

Work steps in content marketing: Establishing processes is essential

The implementation of a content marketing strategy is the basis for successfully implementing operational measures. It should be seen as part of a holistic marketing and communication strategy. It must be clear what contribution the content marketing content makes to achieving the business and overarching goals and what needs the target group has. A content marketing strategy covers the entire process of planning, creation, and procurement, and the operational management of useful and usable content and usually consists of four parts:

1. Content Audit 

The Content Audit deals with the question of which contents an organization can build on and is a step that serves to assess the existing content of an organization. In order for the quality of the content to be assessed, categorization into 'valuable', 'effective', and 'useless' makes sense. Content can always be described as valuable when it provides a specific benefit to the recipient and thus solves a problem or provides an answer to a question, thereby contributing to the company's expert status. Content can be considered effective if it moves a target person to act, for example in the form of a specific download. Any content that does not meet these criteria is to be described as useless. A content audit helps organizations to capture the often decentralized production of content and the associated information gaps within a company and to evaluate content from other departments within the content strategy. 

2. Content Planning 

The Content Planning determines when on which channel in which form content is published for the appropriate target group to achieve defined business goals. A central control element in the area of content planning is the topic plan, which can be regarded as the basis for the third part of a content strategy, the content production. The coordination processes and available resources in organizations vary greatly and depend on the company size. Especially because strategic orientations such as a digital-first approach involve a high degree of complexity and coordination within an organization, planning processes and a regulated approach are essential for successful content marketing. 

3. Content Production 

Content Production deals with the creation of content and the different types of content for the target people. At the beginning of the production process, content that requires little effort should be preferred over time-consuming content so that topics can be tested for relevance. The content development according to the Lean principle proceeds in this way and is characterized by constant adaptation and analysis of a piece of content. This iterative approach therefore develops content gradually, similarly to how software companies reach certain milestones in sprints and thus gradually achieve their goal. To quickly implement this principle in practice, social media posts, short blog posts, or compact content for download are suitable. 

4. Content Management

The Content Management organizes and publishes the finished content on different channels in day-to-day business, after the previous three strategic steps have been completed. It is important here to know one's own target group in order to select the appropriate formats and channels for the content strategy. The measurement of success also still belongs to the last process step of a strategy planning.

Formats and Channels in B2B Content Marketing 

The challenges in the production process are to use the available resources optimally to create those formats that are suitable both for the buyer personas and for the company's goals. In the B2B environment, factual content conveying expert knowledge is particularly widespread. These include infographics, whitepapers, e-books, or studies. The table below shows the special features and distribution channels of the respective content formats. 

Formats and Channels in B2B Content Marketing

The challenges in the production process are to use the available resources optimally to create those formats that are suitable both for the buyer personas and for the company's goals. In the B2B environment, factual content conveying expert knowledge is particularly widespread. These include infographics, whitepapers, e-books, or studies. In the following table, the special features and distribution channels of the respective content formats are shown:

Helpful Tools for Measuring the Success of B2B Content Marketing

Generally, the success of a content marketing campaign depends on the goals defined in advance and derived from the strategy. The key performance indicators are the starting point for measuring the success of content marketing measures and making them measurable. But what are the key target dimensions that should be checked? Key Performance Indicators are characterized by the link with the given target dimensions and can occur in many different forms. According to BVDW, a distinction can be made between attention-, interaction-, and completion- driven key figures. In the form of a key figure pool, different key figures can be selected and used for success measurement. The area of attention-driven key figures includes reach or increase in awareness. Interaction-driven KPIs are engagement (interaction) and dwell time.

Completion- and performance-driven key indicators are, for example, conversion rates in newsletters, number of downloads, or number of new leads. For the success measurement, in addition to the data query via Content Marketing Tools like HubSpot Marketing Hub also an interpretation of the data is advisable. The selected key figures are evaluated differently depending on the objective, channel, and format. The number of calls of a blog post cannot be compared with those of a whitepaper. After all, it makes a difference whether a user spends 30 seconds reading a short blog article or a page-long whitepaper. The results of a measurement process should not be considered in isolation, but always in context. This way, false conclusions can be avoided.

Content Marketing Software supports companies in creating and/or distributing content for their own as well as external channels and platforms. In addition, some content marketing tools are used to organize content in a first step in order to use it in a second step to increase the so-called content experience of individual users. In doing so, exactly those content pieces that are suggested – derived from their profiles and/or their behavior – are played out to users or user segments. Content marketing tools can also create added value for companies with regard to external content. The Comparison of the Best 7 Content Marketing Tools also helps you classify the top tools in this area. You can find more tool tips directly on OMR Reviews.

How to create successful content for your B2B business

The recipe for content that works is a mix of added value and room for identification. Content should always provide some kind of added value. Answer a question, advise, entertain. Content marketing based on the principle of inbound methodology puts the customer and his proactive action in the foreground and delivers added value along the buying decision process. Unlike traditional outbound marketing content, the target group is not imposed on and a trust relationship is established between the company and potential customers. The following 3 things are important:

1. Design your content in a way that your target group can identify with it
2. Earn interest through high-quality content
3. Convince by solving a specific problem

Tools that can help you with automated text creation are neuroflash and AX Semantics for example. They help you to create Blog articles that inspire.

With content marketing, customers can be won from prospects. But it's about more than profitable customer reactions: content marketing is ideal for building and maintaining long-term customer relationships.

Conclusion: Good content still matters – and creativity is its loyal companion

B2B Content Marketing increases the awareness of brands and companies as well as their products and services. It is suitable both for acquiring new customers and for retaining existing customers. For this to be successful in the long term, organizations should create the necessary structures together with new technologies so that content marketing content can fully unfold its potential for B2B companies from the digital economy In addition, B2B companies should deal with their target group as intensively as possible in the course of content creation, so that content formats are classified by it as relevant, useful, and helpful.

In the aftermath, B2B content marketing can perform valuable functions in the buying process of the target group and qualify them decisively. When generating sales-relevant contacts, professional lead management is a success factor. Content marketing, with its various manifestations, plays a central role in convincing customers of a company's offerings and building trust.