Did you know that buyers consume a whopping 11.4 pieces of content before they decide to purchase?
Yup.
Content marketing is a pretty big deal, even in the B2B marketing space.
It plays a key role in attracting target clients, building an engaged audience, and generating trust-based relationships with prospects and customers from which you can gain consistent qualified leads and sales.
So, if you’re just getting started, you may be wondering ‘how can I go about setting up content marketing for my B2B Technology business?’.
Well, there are a few moving parts that work together to build a solid lead-generating content marketing machine such as customer personas, SEO, and scheduling.
And so, in this post, we’ll be touching on these elements to give you a clearer idea of what’s involved.
Let’s get into it!
******P.S. Feel free to use this blog post as a reference point. I will be linking the posts that show you how to carry out each step individually as I release them in the coming weeks. So, stay tuned!******
Scarily Accurate Customer Personas
A customer persona offers a detailed breakdown of your target customer from details such as their occupation, age range, location, likes and dislikes and much more.
Once complete, they can be used to determine things like the kind of content styles, topics, and marketing channels that resonate best with your audience. This will increase the odds of your content striking a chord with your prospects and inspire them to take the next step in your funnel.
Some ways to create an accurate customer persona include:
- Gathering data from all teams in your company on the types of customers you serve then collating them into one document (for each customer persona – note you may have more than one).
- Sifting through reviews and comments to gain an understanding of the problems your customers and prospects face as well as the language they use.
- Conducting surveys among your client base to harvest current information to include in your personas.
- Utilizing data from your CRM
These methods of curating information on your target customer ensure your persona is built on actual data rather than speculation to boost the odds of success.
One thing to note is that a client persona a living document too. So, be sure to update it in line with the changes your customer base undergoes over time.
No Nonsense SEO Strategy
SEO is the optimization of a website, site pages, or blog using keywords to give it the best chance of being acknowledged by the search engines as relevant and worthy of a high ranking.
This is what SEO optimizers strive for as studies have shown 1st position on Google gets 33% of the traffic, with the 2nd position dropping to 15%. After this, footfall tails off at 9% for the 3rd position.
So, when it comes to SEO, you can think of it as a fairy Godmother working in the background to make sure your prince charmings’ aka prospects find you and you live happily ever after.
Ok, so the romantic fairytale example was a bit of a stretch but you get the point. SEO allows your website to be found when the search engine crawlers roam your site for information to catalog.
So, it’s worth investing time in developing a formidable SEO strategy that consists of tasks like detailed keyword research, competitor research, On-Page SEO like filling out your meta description, optimizing your headlines and subheading with keywords to get your business on the right track.
Get the SEO element right in your B2B marketing and before you know it, you’ll see those blog visitors trickling in.
Bingeworthy Content
Publishing mind-blowingly helpful content that will ensure your audience keeps on coming back for more, and more, and more.
What’s more, content that answers the questions of searchers will have a higher chance of being viewed as relevant and thus worthy of a good spot in the rankings.
So, it pays to become your prospects’ and customers’ go-to for information in the niche you serve and investing time in uncovering what your target audience actually wants won’t go to waste.
With these facts in mind, it’s important to write for enjoyment and then edit for SEO. This will ensure you keep your customers’ wants and needs top of mind and fulfill them accordingly.
Then, whilst entertain and guide your audience, your SEO will work in the background to grab the attention of the search engines. As the saying goes teamwork is the dreamwork!
Another thing to remember is to be human in your content and treat your customers like their humans too. Because, well…we all are!
Just because your product is in the B2B space, doesn’t mean your content has to be stiff and boring.
No way!
In fact, its vital your content anything but if you want to grow and maintain an engaged readership.
So, put your business out there.
Release all the formal training you had in English class in school and how some personality.
Reveal things like your company’s daily routines, quirks, beliefs, and mission all while educating your audience to make your content more memorable and addictive. It’ll make your business more approachable and relatable which is exactly what we need to build genuine connections with our audience.
You won’t regret it.
The content strategy is where you put all the moving parts together to decipher things like our:
Core keywords
Content topics
Target customers
Scheduling
Content style
Tone of voice
Marketing strategy
A Success Game Plan aka Content Marketing Strategy
A great content marketing strategy will pull together details from your customer persona SEO, Voice, content creation, marketing plan, style, and scheduling to give you a formidable plan to tackle your goals in a methodical manner.
This eliminates the stress caused by disorganized and spontaneous bursts of content creation and ensures your brand remains consistent on all platforms you use.
As your audience grows you can build connections with readers through your content, comment sections, and social media platforms, and eventually secure conversions.