If you’re letting the obstacles of being a B2B company hold you back from creating great content and closing the deal, you may want to reconsider it. After all, content marketing is highly effective in increasing lead generation.
Now, let’s talk about why content marketing is a great approach for B2B and how you can start converting those leads into real customers. We’ll assist you with some marketing ideas that will change your B2B game. Keep reading, things are about to get real.
Why Content Marketing?
B2B companies are in no way exempt from the influence and power of content creation. In fact, around 78% B2B marketers utilize content marketing. Now, the high percentage clearly indicates how effective it is but it also means it is crucial to up your marketing content game.
With the recent change in Google’s search algorithm, the involvement of content creation remains supreme. The 2019 Google core updates put much of its emphasis on setting the bar high for content by focusing on the increased visibility of insightful, comprehensive, and original content.
In addition to having massive SEO benefits, content marketing is no stranger in nurturing leads to lots of B2B brands, which further leads to customer conversion. Communications provider Atlantech Online Inc. increased its sales qualified leads by up to 355 percent simply by updating dynamic CTAs and price pages to blogs.
6 Strategies to Turn B2B Leads into Customers
Content marketing may not feel like a sure thing but with the right push and nurturing, it can certainly happen. You can get started through the following strategies to get those leads converted from potential to secure customers.
1. Deliver Exclusive Content
There are a couple of ways on how content can work to your advantage. It can demonstrate your field expertise, establish your fellow brand ambassadors as influencers, and offer people an insight into your product. Ultimately, this nudges your company on the right path for persuading leads into loyal customers.
Putting out exclusive content will provide a clearer perspective about your company to potential customers that may be feeling hesitant towards your products. Additionally, this will also help clear out any queries regarding the company. The content you put out during this stage has to educate your leads.
By being inclusive of prospects with your content, you’re able to build a win-win situation long before they even become customers. For instance, you can show eBooks or whitepapers that are unlocked with email addresses. As such, they receive content value and your company earns information to sell products/services.
2. Qualifying Leads with in-depth Content
Using content marketing for the top of the funnel alone is a huge mistake for B2B companies. Adopting this strategy will make it difficult for you to track content success, which can result in limiting the potential of good content.
So, what will you do with content marketing? You should instead fixate on qualifying leads. This will help your company’s sales team to direct more focus and energy on prospects found further down the funnel.
Now, let’s put this thought into practice. A short blog post would generally contain top of the funnel contents. While it addresses topics that are important to the audience, it may fail to indicate high interest regarding your specific company.
Think about this: A prospect reads this blog on Elon Musk’s product strategy. However, the content is entirely aimed at beginners within the marketing cycle. So, you’ll want to offer content that’s more in-depth regarding your product/service. One great example is the ‘how to find keywords’ blog post from Express Writer.
As seen above, it provides a long-form content that can lead customers more towards a purchase. The founder of Express Writers, Julia McCoy shares how a single in-depth blog post per week garners great results. It averages around 1,072 leads a month and 150 in monthly sales, which is a pretty good return for a $1,600 investment.
3. Align Messaging Between Platforms
In order for your content to perform effectively, it should overlap. If you’re still confused about this, have a look at this example down below that pretty much summarizes the situation.
In the image, Tom Brady is AdWords while Randy moss is Facebook. A prospect will see and click on the text ad and eventually downloads the whitepaper. Next, another audience on Facebook composed exclusively of people that downloaded the whitepaper gets served with a hyper-specific ad (Facebook).
This specific ad will address problems identified within the search ad clicked by the prospect and provide a data-driven solution to solve the problem. This way, Tom releases the ball, Randy takes over coverage and touchdown!
Thus, by aligning messaging platforms you’re able to acknowledge the independent existence of various channels. Facebook and AdWords are great if you’re utilizing paid advertisements. It can be seen as a single content marketing strategy with two platforms and increased leads.
4. Out with Writing and in with Videos
When you think about content creation, the written content is often the default format. Blogs and words rule the day. However, 51% of marketing professionals claim video content as the format that offers the highest ROI. According to Aberdeen Group, marketers that create and utilize video content earn about 66% more leads in a year.
Now, why is that? Reading is not always an indication of a higher interest level. Reading through a blog on various subjects takes only a few minutes, hence, the investment is low and so is the interest level for readers. While stats can be tracked via downloads or page visits, there’s no actual way to determine if written content is consumed.
Video and webinar content on another hand indicates a higher and increased level of interest. It does require more time for commitment as compared to written formats but it is much easier to keep track of video consumption made by an individual. This makes video leads a lot more valuable.
The construction tech company Gordian reportedly used video content to drive up to $6 million in revenue. With video content, you can make use of a CRM for following up on prospects that consume the content or qualify more leads by gating playbacks or longer video content.
5. Building Trust via Case Studies
About 92% of B2B consumers base their purchasing decision on online reviews. This is exactly how marketing contents like case studies are able to assist B2B companies in showcasing brands that are successfully used.
Neil Patel makes use of case studies in emails which meets an increase in closing deals by about 70%. Even WikiJobs increased their purchases by about 34% with the use of testimonials. Case studies deliver perfect social proof, which is quite important, especially during a period where 84% of buyers deal in sales processes with referrals.
Pipedrive uses this strategy along with detailed case studies. Like this particular one where Mixergy streamlined their interview process and also increased sales through the creation of a consistent approach.
The case study included a short video and a Q&A that focused on challenges faced by the business. This gave customers a clearer perspective of what Pipedrive will be able to do for them and it worked. Customers that watched the video content decided Pipedrive as the thing they were looking for.
To create effective case study content for B2B, you need to address particular customer points and make use of a data-driven approach. For instance, it’s easier to convince a company executive to purchase new software by indicating how it will help in closing 45% more sales rather than saying it may help increase sales.
6. Right Content at the Right Time
Finally, you have created awesome content and it seems to be getting traffic but the traffic isn’t ready or willing to put their greens on your service/product. So, what happened? The problem may not be the content but rather the timing of your content delivery. Even with the right content, if the timing is off with the audience, there will hardly be any conversion. Also, we should always look at the latest content marketing trends.
Think of it as meeting someone for the first time. You don’t rush into the meeting and immediately hug them or treat them like a close friend, do you? You greet them formally, shake their hand, and slowly get to know them. This very same thing is applied to content marketing.
If your relationship with content marketing seems to be moving too fast, what would the solution be to this? The answer is segmentation. This content marketing strategy will help differentiate distinct goals for different content. For instance, Slidebean made a $70,000 investment in content marketing and had an ROI of $200,000.
Slidebean achieved this by creating a mixture of content for its brand awareness. This included blog posts or short video content for capturing leads.
Final Thoughts
No matter what kind of B2B content marketing you put up, it’s important to make sure you’re putting the needs of your audience first. It’s also crucial to uncover and test new strategies rather than sticking with a single strategy.
Your company’s online presence will either bloom or wither depending on the kind of content you create and the content marketing plan as well. By creating quality and routine materials, you’re able to ensure audience engagement, hence getting your leads interested enough for customer conversion.