10 B2B Content Marketing Ideas to transform your B2B strategy

While there are multiple factors (not least creating content that keeps the search engine algorithms happy), there are countless opportunities to make B2B content marketing a core revenue centre.

Today, the Tiga team has collected our top 10 B2B content marketing ideas to inspire you to get creative.

Setting B2B Content Marketing Targets

The first step is to look at your content marketing strategy - or start developing one - and fine-tuning the goals you're hoping to reach.

With numerous ways to leverage content marketing in the B2B space, those objectives will determine things like which types of content you focus on, where you place them for maximum visibility, or how you distribute content to your target audience.

There's no right or wrong aim, but knowing where the goalposts lie makes your chances of success considerably higher:

• Market share: if you're competing in a dynamic sector, your emphasis might be on increasing visibility, drawing higher traffic to your site or app, or building your range of mediums by integrating referral links, email click-throughs, or social media feeds.

• Profit growth: all profit-making businesses want to boost their revenue. Content marketing is part of playing the long game, but establishing trust and delivering truly added-value content will trickle down to your bottom line over time.

• Brand strength: those global brands we all know and love spend a lot of time (and money) investing in content marketing - and that's why we know their names. Content can establish you as an industry expert and augment your brand awareness metrics.

• Lead-gen: if you intend to engage and interact with new potential customers, your content marketing should aim towards lead generation. Simple steps such as encouraging newsletter sign-ups or inviting B2B clients to request information via email can all grow your content marketing list step by step.

The final aim you may want to build into your content marketing strategy is customer loyalty - pivotal for B2B enterprises that rely on ongoing customer relationships.

Great content marketing isn't about selling a product but about enhancing every element of the customer journey by solving problems, providing support and generating interactions to keep the conversation flowing.

Understanding Your B2B Content Marketing Demographic

The next step is to learn about your audience, understand their pain points, and use that knowledge to craft a content marketing approach that meets those needs - even if they aren't requirements your customers already know about. 

Again, the choices are vast, but a simple solution can be to sit down with your sales teams and ask them about the questions they receive the most or the issues that are most commonly raised, so you can be proactive in addressing them.

Analysing your core demographic can be as technical or intuitive as you wish, but some of the stages might involve:

• Evaluating the performance of your previous content marketing endeavours, looking at click-through rates or which emails scored the highest open rates.
• Logging into Google Analytics to find out which pages your clients visit most, where they're bouncing away, and what information customers look at before they check out or abandon their cart.
• Using keyword searches to see what phrases your audience uses the most, particularly the questions they ask.
• Checking in the Google Search Console to see where your website pops up most - which keywords does Google associate with your brand, and what are the most prevalent topics?

This list is a brief overview and by no means exhaustive, but hopefully gives you a flavour of the research tools at your disposal to help build a solid customer persona to influence your selected B2B content marketing strategy.

10 B2B Content Marketing Ideas

By now, we've got a defined audience, a list of areas to focus on, and have started to develop an approach.

The trick to successful content marketing in a B2B context is to concentrate on adding value and sharing important information - we're not selling an individual item to a standalone consumer, so marketing should be more specific than in B2C.

Any content you publish should do one of two things (if not both):

• Solve a problem, answer a question or address a need.
• Provide a quantifiable reason that a customer should work with you.

For the latter, that's because most content recipients won't be sole decision-makers. 

If they think you have something to offer that would benefit their business, they'll need to run it up the ladder, so stats and figures supporting the shared content are high-value.

Onto the B2B content marketing suggestions we promised. 

B2B Marketing Blogs

A business blog is a perfect place to share diverse content and cover a huge range of areas where you see the opportunity to improve customer experiences and share quality content.

That could be advice about using a product, solving common integration challenges, general industry updates, advice about end-customer needs, or company-specific blogs, such as:

• Announcements and upcoming events.
• Information about forthcoming product launches.
• Invitations to participate in beta testing or new product analysis.

Blogs are a superb content marketing resource, as refreshing your online assets helps engage better with your audience while contributing to SEO performance as a bonus.

Technical Data and Installation Advice

While most products will come with basic information, the more content you can provide to make it a seamless delivery, the better.

If you commonly receive questions about a specific function, how to use a feature, or using your product alongside another, this is where you can bring additional customer benefits through content marketing.

You could produce assembly instructions or data sheets to help customers understand how to use, assemble, integrate or optimise your product to achieve the best results.

Detailed Product Information

Although a lot depends on the product or service you sell, you can encourage customers to stick with you and trust your advice by delivering as much detail as possible to make their lives easier.

For example, let's say we're a dropship retailer, selling a curated range of products for online sellers to stock in their shops. 

Each product might have a technical description of materials, testing standards and dimensions.

If you can provide more specific product information sheets or listings, you help customers make faster decisions, feel confident that the product is right for them, and, crucially, support them in driving revenues by providing base content to feed into their own marketing.

Guest Blogs or Industry Interviews

Publishing gold standard blogs on your site is great - but if you can insert your content somewhere where it'll reach a wider audience, you're onto a good thing.

Whether that's a chat with a respected industry leader, a technical article to clear up common myths, or an interview on market-wide events, it's all adding to your reputation and brand awareness.

Case Studies and Example Applications

There is a world of opportunity to enhance your lead-gen statistics and garner interest through carefully placed case studies.

Before and after examples, interviews with client account managers, and examples showing how your product has transformed the profits of a B2B customer are all-powerful.

You can also showcase diverse uses of your product or service, with application examples that make it easier to see how this might slot into a prospective new business customer and give them similar benefits.

Online Courses or Learning Resources

Learning materials return some of the best engagement metrics going, as people and businesses continually try to stay up to date, streamline their processes and raise productivity.

Free resources are an impactful form of content marketing, which could look like:

• Well-organised knowledge banks.
• Free courses or modules.
• Private member's areas for existing customers.
• Image guides explaining a product feature.

Your online learning materials can be complex and highly technical or a fun way to engage but ultimately need to make your customer feel valued and supported by increasing their understanding.

Studies and Research Figures

We mentioned earlier the importance of statistics - and here's how it slots into content marketing.

If you have researched the market, analysed feedback, assessed product performance or conducted customer surveys, you need to share that data with your audience to solidify your position.

You can also double the visibility of this sort of research-based content by cross-posting on industry publications and inviting customers to contact you for more insights.

Product Performance Reviews

Most B2B clients want the assurance that the procurement decisions they make will benefit their business - and offer the best value for money.

If you want to cement that belief, then product reviews, live performance testing or comparisons with rival products are great solutions.

Perhaps publish your findings in a blog or on product pages to showcase the best characteristics you want to highlight to your audience.

Video Instructions or Tutorials

Videos are an excellent medium for sharing information in an accessible, more personal way than relying solely on text or written content marketing.

As a quick example, content on social media gets about 54% of engagements because it's fast and requires little to no effort on the part of your audience.

Sharing tutorials or instructions from your team makes the brand more individual. You can increase visibility by optimising videos and posting them on YouTube to start building a video bank your customers can refer to at any time.

Live Webinars and On-Demand Downloads

A webinar is a useful tool and can be used for pretty much anything. You might invite customers to attend a live 'ask the team' webinar and run through some direct Q&A sessions or host a trouble-shooting webinar where you respond to a pre-submitted list of queries.

If you make a webinar live, your audience can fully engage, but it's also wise to have an on-demand download option so the event acts as an ongoing content marketing asset.

Expert Advice Choosing Between the Best 10 B2B Content Marketing Ideas

We hope these ideas have inspired you to start working on your B2B content creation - but we appreciate that with so many choices, it can be tricky to pin down your objectives and select the right place to invest your marketing budget.

If you'd like any further advice or tailored guidance for your business, please get in touch with the B2B content marketing team at Tiga to arrange a good time to talk.