B2B Lead Generation Through Digital - Content Marketing Leads The Way

Summary

Content marketing strategy is one of the most potent yet cost-effective means of B2B lead generation. Since customers place a high value on businesses that serve as educational resources and industry leaders, most B2B marketers depend on content marketing to generate new leads. Most consumers today are purpose-driven (44%) and base their purchases on how well a product or brand reflects their beliefs. This article talks at length about B2B lead generation through content marketing.

Content marketing for B2B lead generation is quite efficient. Your company's success or failure hinges on it. Creating a consumer persona is the first step in effective content marketing for B2B. The next step is to use keyword research to back up your chosen themes and confirm they interest your target audience. Finally, divide your subjects into those that serve to educate, entertain, motivate, and inspire. Case studies, white papers, and tutorials are all popular with B2B customers, so it's a good idea to focus on those types of material.

Introduction

If you are a B2B marketer interested in developing an efficient B2B lead generation strategy through content marketing, you are at the right place. However, before we get into how content marketing for lead generation works, let's take a quick look at what a content marketing strategy is and why B2B lead generation and digital marketing sales funnel are essential.

Why To Use Content Marketing For B2B Lead Generation?

Content marketing is an approach whereby businesses use content such as blogs, eBooks, case studies, market research, videos, podcasts etc. to attract, engage and convert website visitors into customers. The effectiveness of a solid content marketing strategy stems from the fact that consumers, especially those of B2B companies prefer conducting a first hand market research before finalising on a product/service. Additionally, they prefer brands that demonstrate their expertise through intelligent content over brands that simply push out advertisements.

Now that the benefits of a good content marketing strategy have been laid out, let’s take a look at what goes into crafting an effective B2B lead generation through content marketing.

Who should you create content for?

Although it makes sense to begin your content marketing strategy with a thorough understanding of your target audience, most marketers either skip this stage entirely or move on to the next too fast.

It is critical to ensure that you thoroughly understand your customers’ needs. The best way to do this is by laying out your customer’s persona. A customer persona seeks to personify your ideal buyer by chalking out details like demographics, psychographics, values, strengths, and weaknesses. Did you know that by undertaking this essential step, you could get a 2x jump in email-open rates, and a 5x hike in click-through rates?

The best method to find out what kind of content resonates with your audience is to analyse its performance. It's a great way to monitor the success of your content marketing campaigns.

What should your B2B content consist of?

Create a list of topics around the following objectives:

• Creating awareness
• Generating interest
• Stimulating desire
• Facilitating action

Then, before settling on any topic, conduct a market research to find out if your ideal buyer will be interested in it. If not, you can supplement this technique by finding out whether or not people are searching for things around your topic by taking the help of free web services or free tools for keyword research.

Besides themes and topics, you must also look at the forms of content you should invest in. Unlike a B2C customer that is interested in listicles, editorials, and entertainment-led content, B2B consumers value inspirational or educational content like:

• How-to-guides
• Tutorials
• White papers
• Case Studies
• Industry trends and opportunities

How to engage consumers with your content?

Email: If done correctly, email marketing can effectively support your B2B lead generation efforts. Hubspot says that 93% of B2B marketers use email to distribute content, and 40% say email newsletters are critical to their content marketing success. Here’s what you should keep in mind before generating content for your next email campaign:

• Use eye-catching subject lines
• Keep emails concise and easy-to-read
• Address your customer’s pain point and offer a solution
• Add images or videos
• Include social sharing buttons
• Make sure there’s a call-to-action (CTA) linked to a relevant asset
• Test out different types of emails to establish what resonates with your audience
• Make sure that you have established a way to measure important metrics

Lead Magnets: People are only willing to share their contact information if you give them value. Lead magnets help you take care of just that. They are key to the success of your B2B lead generation through content marketing because they provide incentives to potential leads for leaving behind their contact details.

Types of content that can serve as lead magnets include:

• Ebooks
• Reports
• Webinars
• Quizzes
• Courses
• Videos

Search Engine Optimization: Publishing your content collateral on your website and then enhancing its discoverability on search engines through SEO writing is a great way to ensure that your blogs are read by the targeted audience. To promote your content on Google, one of the most widely used search engines, you must ensure that the selected topics are validated through keyword research. Incorporating relevant keywords within your blog further enhances your ranking on search engines. If a relevant person searches Google using these phrases, results that include your website will appear higher up in the page's list of results than other results. Finally, to step your SEO content up a notch, get in touch with a full-service ROI-first digital marketing agency that specialises in SEO services.

As for best practices for proper content writing, follow the ‘EAT guidelines’ to get search engines like google to favour your content.

If you adhere to these recommendations, you will likely see a rise in the number of people who visit your blog and the number of people who discover your website in the results of search engines when they are looking for services related to yours.:

Social Media: Decision-makers are highly active on Twitter and LinkedIn. Did you know that on LinkedIn, 4 out of 5 members drive business decisions? (Source: Oberlo)

Promoting high-quality content on such platforms will go a long way in establishing you as an industry leader, driving more traffic to your website and ultimately generating relevant leads.

Conclusion

Content marketing for B2B lead generation is highly effective. Creating useful, current, relevant, and evergreen content marketing for B2B lead generation. It has been shown that content marketing is more cost-effective than others while still giving advantages like increased traffic and leads. Statistics show that it is 62% less costly than conventional marketing methods. Yet, simultaneously, B2B lead generation is 3x more than traditional methods.

You must start by drawing up a customer persona to do content marketing right. The next step is to choose topics relevant to your customer profile and then verify those topics using keyword research. Don’t forget to segregate your topics based on themes that create awareness, generate interest and facilitate action. Additionally, you should try and opt for content forms valued by a B2B audience, such as case studies, white papers, and tutorials.

After you have generated engaging content templates within your content strategy, you will be all set to promote it through email marketing campaigns, lead magnets, SEO strategies and social media.