There are various factors that secure qualified leads for B2B companies. Explicit factors like the company’s name and the problem it promises to solve are, of course, extremely important. But, there are also some implicit factors that often “push” interested buyers into making purchase decisions. The number of times the buyer visits your website, responses to marketing emails, the type of blogs, and downloadable content on your website – these are all implicit marketing strategies that often help B2B companies secure leads.
Sending leads valuable content that genuinely helps them find solutions to specific problems is a highly effective advertising tactic that many B2B marketers use to secure leads. Be it an eBook, a blog post, or any other type of content – the goal isn’t trying to sell them something but to provide helpful content that makes your brand look like a legitimate source of information.
In a recent survey involving B2B marketers, such content marketing strategies were considered to be extremely effective by 51{51a8f47ed26b62794f5b3aaed8601076d65294f6278e23b79b91f33f521836ea} of the respondents. However, creating relevant educational content is also extremely challenging for many marketers. Some challenges companies face while attempting to create and share relevant educational content include –
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- Changing business priorities and blurred organizational objectives.
- Stakeholder interferences on deciding what “good content” means for the business.
- Lack of budget, resources, and time.
- Lack of collaboration from other business departments prevents content creators from sharing detailed insights that their customer-facing colleagues face. Sharing detailed product information also becomes challenging when there’s a lack of internal cooperation in a firm.
- Insufficient access to customers prevents B2B marketers from understanding what type of content their target audiences need or what knowledge levels they already possess.
It’s clear that many B2B companies and marketers change their attitude, their workloads and allot more time into creating educational content. Educational-led B2B marketing strategies can help these companies build trust with existing and potential customers and popularize the products or services they offer.
Here’s how the best B2B internet marketing agency can help B2B companies adopt educational content marketing strategies –
Depend on Metrics
Define “good content” by the results they generate. Create, distribute, and promote educational content that has worked for your or other companies in the past. Eliminate the qualitative factor when defining “good content.” Focus on the number of clicks each blog post, video, or other forms of content receives to create metric-driven content creation strategies.
Test Before Creation
Conduct A/B testing, partner with focus groups, conduct market surveys and research to gain the data needed to define your content creation strategy. This data-based pre-launch work will help the firm create better budgets, address interdepartmental cooperation issues, and prevent people from sharing ideas that the research says don’t work.
Set Up Clear Quality Standards
Use readability algorithms like Grammarly to clearly define what a good piece of content means right from the start of all B2B marketing campaigns. Create a balance of non-experimental content (that has worked with target audiences in the past) and experimental content to ensure your content creation team’s creativity isn’t stifled by pre-set quality standards.
Once B2B companies start creating content that educates their target audiences, their market credibility will increase. Some other advantages include –
- The B2B marketers will gain clear insights into how the leads made their purchase decisions by assessing their buyer journeys. Future lead acquisition processes can be optimized using this data.
- In the long-term, these strategies help create a constant flow of leads to business websites.
- Sharing important information helps foster stronger brand relationships between businesses.
Creating an Educational Content Marketing Strategy – What Tools Do You Need?
The current unusual environment triggered by the COVID19 pandemic has elevated the importance of educational content. Consumers of all types are actively seeking helpful content on the Internet. Top B2B marketing companies are using these educational-led content marketing tools to help their firms –
- Educational Videos. According to a HubSpot survey involving marketers, 97{51a8f47ed26b62794f5b3aaed8601076d65294f6278e23b79b91f33f521836ea} of the respondents said that video content made it easier for their target customers to understand their products and services. Educational videos that respond to customer needs offer more value than your average brand promotional video content.
- Publishing industry reports, company documents, and white papers to collect important data from high-value leads. Businesses that are ready to read these types of documents from other companies are likelier to readily share their own data and establish cooperative relationships.
- Regularly publishing engaging written content (articles and blogs). Written content is easier to update and can also be integrated on other company websites to boost traffic to or from their sites.
- Hosting webinars or video sessions consisting of series of presentations about specific topics. Launching products or services using webinars instead of traditional PR announcements is a much more effective strategy.
Instead of waiting for customer bases to grow organically, B2B companies must take control of their fate and educate prospective buyers about new product/service categories. The best B2B marketing agencies can help them achieve these targets.
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