Best B2B Content Marketing

by Mike Harris | Sep 10, 2019 | B2B Marketing

Creating B2B content that gets shared...a tech company example

It’s fairly easy.

Creating the best B2B content marketing for technology and other companies is relatively simple, even if you skirmish with ideas, grammar or writing. Here’s how to make it easy and enjoyable.

Best B2B content marketing – 1 step at a time.

So you want to create the best B2B content marketing ever?

The best content focuses on a single, current industry hot button. Think user challenges, cost, support, adoption and integrations, for starters.

Keep your eye on the ball. The knowledge you’re distributing will help someone do their job better.

The most effective B2B content

Case Study 55% 55%
Best Practices 53% 53%
How-To Guides 47% 47%
Market Trends 43% 43%
Product Features 24% 24%
Competitive Comparisons 17% 17%

Next steps

To create the very best B2B content marketing, the next step is to go through this short exercise, jotting down a few bullet points.

1. Background: usually a recent trend in your industry, vertical or market space around this topic.

2. Current challenge: a B2B challenge is almost always described in terms of time and money wasted.

3. Your experience: ‘we’ve seen this happen with some of our customers’.

4. Your recommendation: ‘based on this, I recommend…’ It’s fine to recommend something your solution fixes. Just don’t mention your company, product or service.

5. Conclusion: the best B2B content marketing conclusions begin with next steps.

Example: an article for a tech company

You are with a company that sells file management software to certain verticals. Here’s how you would create a piece for an enterprise data storage audience focused on the life sciences vertical.

1. Background – Life sciences is creating petabytes of unstructured data through genome and related projects that have complex workflows with lots of technical and/or rich content. This leads to soaring storage and IT costs for those companies.

2. Widespread Challenge – Data storage costs are skyrocketing and overburdened IT staffs need a way to push file management down to the business user, in this case the research scientist. Allowing the researcher to determine what, when and where to archive data for later retrieval will migrate data to lower cost storage and save huge amounts of time and expense for IT teams.

3. Your Experience – Recently we’ve seen next-generation enterprise software solutions that solve this problem. With ROI focused architectures, these solutions are ideal for cloud computing and object storage.

4. Your Recommendation – Look for software companies that offer cloud file management across multiple storage locations. Fashion a bullet list that, of course, highlights your company’s competitive advantages without ever mentioning the name of your company or product.

5. Conclusion – There’s no longer a mandate for IT departments to keep adding costly near term storage. Nor is it necessary for IT teams to bear the labor brunt of mediating between business users of data and storage archives.

Write or delegate

With those simple bullet points you have an outline for an article. And you’re on the way to creating top B2B content marketing.

Once you’re happy with your bullet points it’s time to write the article or delegate to someone else. If you delegate make sure it’s someone who knows your company, products and markets.

For written posts aim for a minimum of 1,000 words because search engines won’t take you seriously otherwise. Search engines like to see more than the minimum.

Create a headline

Next, look at what you’ve created and think of a seven word headline that grabs someone’s attention and gets you found by search engines. Potential headlines for this article could be:

Overwhelmed By Unstructured Data? Here’s Good Medicine.
Need Relief For Your IT People?
The Unstructured Data Tsunami. Here’s How To Manage.

Finally, notice how easily this article can be converted for an audience in a different vertical.

Ninety percent of this content can also apply to industries with rich content or technical workflows including Media & Entertainment, Oil & Gas, Software Development and others.

So with relatively little effort you now have interesting, relevant content that can be blogged, tweeted and posted multiple times across multiple verticals for several weeks.