The B2B Content Marketing Plan
Business-to-business transactions can make up a major portion of your sales for the year, but like any demographic, businesses need to be convinced that you’re the person they should be buying from. You have the added task of working with people who already know the ins and outs of marketing, so you’ll have to be twice as convincing as you are with your everyday consumer. Your best bet is to create a B2B content marketing plan that lays out your strategy into clear, attainable actions and allows you to aggregate data for further optimization of your action plan.
Step 1: Setting Goals and Objectives
Much like creating a marketing plan for consumers, your B2B strategy needs to be highly developed and laser-focused on what exactly you’re trying to achieve. There are several different types of objectives that you can set, which can either be qualitative or quantitative in nature. In most cases, the categories of objectives will be similar for everyone launching a marketing campaign: sales readiness, acquisition, or touching base.
A sales readiness goal may be something as simple as quantifying how many businesses are active leads before, during, and after the course of your campaign.
An acquisition goal is your standard “grow by x amount of leads by y date.” These new leads need to fit into your demographic and can be obtained in any number of ways, including conference attendance, PPC rates, and ad impressions.
Finally, your touching base goals are simply making the commitment to touch base with your leads more often, for the sake of bringing them into your consumer base.
Step 2: Choose Your Market
The next step in creating a B2B content marketing plan is narrow down your demographics. One of the best ways to do this is by researching what negative aspects of their field that businesses are experiencing. Once you’ve honed in on the troubles that they are facing, you can create individual campaigns that focus in on your researched market sectors.
It’s very important that when you are creating these individual sectors that you don’t try to “redefine” the business’ problems through your lens. You have to meet your consumers where they are, and that includes being empathetic while you offer solutions.
Step 3: Create Your Content
Creating content for a business isn’t so different from creating content for the average consumer. The biggest shift is that you’ll need to be able to use the language of the field. Marketing to a consumer searching for an architect is going to look more informative than marketing to an architect who needs raw goods. Instead of providing additional informational content about the field, you’ll instead share trends about how other people are solving the same problems that they’re experiencing. You can also provide content based around your services, including pricing and the process of doing business with you. The more transparent you are about your process, the more likely you are to be a trusted by those seeking your services.
Digital Solutions can help you kick off your B2B content marketing plan following these simplified guidelines, as well as provide insider tips to the right way to gain leads and increase your B2B traffic. Give us a call or send an email for inquiries into the process of marketing to other businesses.