The demand for B2B content marketing is hot!
In fact, two-thirds of B2B companies say they expect their content marketing budget to increase in 2022.
Why?
Put simply, it helps your business get found more easily in search engines, adds value to your prospects by solving their challenges and so they’re likely to share and re-engage with your content… And all this adds to building trust, being memorable and therefore thought of when the prospect is ready to buy.
Actually, 86% of marketers report successfully creating more brand awareness with content marketing.
At the back-end of 2022 and moving into 2023, we’re seeing more B2B brands switch to content marketing as a primary growth engine.
So how can you use content marketing to boost revenue? Let’s look at four best practices…
Before we jump in, let’s quickly recap what content marketing (and SEO) is…
Content marketing should be a key part of any B2B digital marketing strategy.
Why?
It helps you to provide valuable, interesting and informative content to your potential customers at all stages of the buyers journey. Content can be anything from blog posts on your website to video content or infographics you post on your social media channels.
Instead of directly selling your products or services through ads, you can provide them with useful content to help solve their problems and lead them to a purchase decision.
Your B2B content marketing strategy can help you to build visibility online or drive conversions and, if you get it right, your content marketing strategy can be extremely profitable for your business.
SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is the process of optimising your website pages and content to make sure they’re visible to your target audience when they’re actively searching.
SEO helps to drive traffic to your B2B website where you can (hopefully) convert them into paying customers.
Content is one of the key elements that search engines consider when ranking your site. Your content marketing strategy should tie into your SEO strategy by focusing on relevant keywords and answering your potential customer’s questions.
Including relevant keywords within your content and creating specific pieces focused on your customer’s questions, you can increase the chances of your site ranking. In addition, regularly publishing strong content to your website will help to improve its authority which will help to boost your site even more.
In fact, Google now actively looks for ‘Helpful’ content when ranking your site.
👉Learn more about this in our blog: Google’s ‘Helpful Content’ Algorithm update: How do you write content for humans?
Knowing exactly who you are talking to when you create your content strategy is essential for success.
You need to know what your target is looking for, what their pain points are and what they’re searching for for a number of reasons.
You’ll also need to think about the different stages of their journey and structure content across their process. This will help you to lead visitors from an initial search through to conversion.
To drive traffic to your website and make sure your brand is found in the search results, keyword research is essential.
Want to know why?
Keywords are the words and phrases your B2B customers use to search in Google or any other search engine. This is how they find the information, products and services they need and want.
Keyword research will not only help you to see what your customers are looking for, it will also help you to see how your competitors are appearing at the top of the results too.
However, don’t forget that adding a piece of content to your website and stuffing it with keywords is NOT an effective SEO strategy. Always use keyword naturally within the content and tailor it to your reader to make sure it’s easy for them to read and digest and to ensure search engines look at your content positively.
For Logica’s client, Air Supply, we conducted keyword research to help the brand appear at the top of the search results for the terms relevant to their business. This involved creating new content and updating existing pages to achieve a 77% YOY increase in the number of keywords ranking in positions 1-10 AND they are now ranking number 1 for key term ‘used air compressor’.
📈Read more about Air Supply’s results here.
You might be producing plenty of high quality content. But, is it any good if noone is reading it?
Customers might eventually find your content through search but this can take time. We always recommend promoting content through email marketing, social media platforms and even encouraging customers to share content with their friends and family.
This can help you to drive brand awareness and helps you to get your content out there. Plus, social signals as you post on social media and people engage with your content can help to boost your SEO results overall.
When you create content, it’s worth optimising it for SEO as you’re writing. Or, you can update your existing content too.
But what do we mean by this? SEO optimisation for content involves a few key elements:
SkinBase wanted to improve SEO rankings and drive more conversions through organic traffic. We analysed pages that were not in top ranking positions and improved the content by adding keywords and making it more user friendly. In just 6 months, SkinBase saw a 2.5x increase in organic traffic to their site.
Content marketing is a key element of B2B digital marketing strategies but you should also make sure that you consider SEO best practice when creating your content calendar and writing and publishing content.
Remember to write for your users first and include keywords naturally to ensure your website ranks as well as possible, as well as provide visitors with the information they need.
If you’d like to find out more about digital marketing that can get results for your B2B business, please get in touch on hello@logica-digital.co.uk. Or, jump straight in and request a free digital marketing audit.