Why B2B Content Marketing is Important

Content marketing has been the steering wheel, constantly brewing the B2B dominion. As the big data & Internet of Things (IOTs) have taken over the B2B world, B2B content marketing has become more important than ever.

According to a report by the Content Marketing Institute (CMI), 91% of the B2B brands use content marketing as compared to 86% of the B2C brands.

The B2B content marketing trends of 2019 reflect that content has been the core when it comes to attracting, engaging & converting the prospects of B2B brands.

According to a study by Skyword, 87% of the visionaries & 81% of the leaders consider content to be central to their marketing endeavors.

Because of the race for ranking higher for organic traffic fiercer on the search engine result pages (SERPs), your content can be the ultimate gateway to achieve higher organic rankings.

Evolving with time, the modern B2B content marketing definition transcends beyond the usual content creation to merge with the interdisciplinary aspects of digital marketing such as Search Engine Optimization (SEO), digital advertising & data-driven digital storytelling.

The moral of the story being that if your B2B content marketing is audience-centric, it can boost your content marketing endeavors in the right direction to drive customer engagement & optimized revenues.

B2B content marketing is an invisible tool in the marketing arsenal of B2B brands. It makes the jobs of your customers easier & improves the web-discoverability of your brands as well as of your products and services.

According to a report by the Content Marketing Institute, 62% of the "most successful" B2B marketers have a content strategy in
place.

Moreover, in spite of the strong connection between documenting a content strategy & achieving the optimization of sales revenues, merely 37% of the B2B brands have a documented strategy for deploying B2B content marketing.

Below are some of the benefits of content marketing & reasons why B2B content marketing is a must-have for the marketers:

1. Content marketing for Lead Generation:

According to Hubspot, B2B brands with blogs generate 67% more leads than B2B marketers without blogs.

Good content marketing has its advantages. Publishing new & relevant content on your digital channels assures that one can improve the likelihood of new customers figuring out about your brand's products and services.

Projecting yourself as a subject-matter-expert through content marketing is an invincible strategy for marketers to improve their brand resonance.

Read more:  How Omnichannel Reputation Management Assists in B2B Branding

2. Content marketing Earns Customer Loyalty:

Your existing customers are your greatest brand advocates.

According to the best-selling author Andrew Davis, “Content builds relationships. Relationships are built on trust. Trust drives revenue.”

B2B content marketing helps the brands enhance their multi-channel attribution modeling framework. The primary advantages are entailed as under:

• B2B content marketing inspires trust & familiarity among the prospects & existing customers. This helps build a strong relationship with customers
• B2B content marketing creates positive engagement or sentiment
• B2B content marketing creates an emotional connection with the existing customers as well as prospects. As buying is majorly an implicit decision, striking the emotional cord helps drive an accelerated number of conversions
• B2B content marketing provides an easily accessible knowledge repository to the audiences & thus, is of immense value to both
  the existing customers as well as the prospects
• Besides, B2B content marketing also helps build awareness about the products & services at the disposal
• B2B content marketing attracts & converts prospects into brand loyalists
• The traditional avenues of advertising have expanded to entirely new heights when merged with B2B content marketing.
• Care should be taken that the pieces of content published on the website abide by the principles of E-A-T (Expertise, Authority, and Trust ). Remember that your audiences expect your content to be useful, interesting & potentially adding value to your online experience.

If your B2B content marketing isn't in synchronization with audiences' expectations & doesn't address their pain-points articulately, your customers may move to your competitors.

Read more: How to Assimilate Competitive Benchmarking in Social Media

3. B2B Content Marketing Helps Marketers Show the value Proposition of their Products or Services:

B2B content marketing is an impeccable tool for marketers to engage with their audiences. Content marketing is the best tool that assists the marketing team to address the specific needs of their customers at specific stages of their buying cycles.

The following are the main advantages of the content marketing endeavors of the marketers:

• It helps build a connection between brands & prospects. It helps brands effectively communicate the value proposition of
  their products or services
• B2B content marketing employs the art of storytelling to make the most out of the emotional quotient of the prospects & to direct their implicit intentions to purchase
• The engagement built by B2B content marketing pays off in terms of brand loyalty & repeat purchases
• B2B content marketing supports meaningful engagement across all channels
• The needs & challenges of the prospects & the customers are addressed
• B2B content marketing helps reflect on the brands’ vision as a whole & communicates effectively to support the business bottom-line

The most common goals for marketers employing content marketing include brand awareness, lead generation, thought leadership promotion, customer experience & expectation management & lead prospecting, client acquisition & the much-required boost to increase sales.

4. B2B Content Marketing helps Improve Customer Retention:

According to a report by Roper Public Affairs & Corporate Communications, 61% of the customers feel inclined to purchase from a company that delivers them custom or personalized content.

B2B content marketing is all about keeping your customers engaged & updated with great content to help improve customer retention in the long-term.

According to a report by toptal.com focusing on customer-retention can increase revenue over 18 months by as much as 80% or above. Additionally, it also reduces the cost of customer acquisition by as much as 30% & increases the total customers by 1.5x times.

5. B2B Content Marketing Harnesses the Power of Storytelling:

Keeping your content simple & jargon-free & framing it in the form of a story can help the marketers connect with their target audiences. This assists in establishing connect with the audiences & in attracting, engaging, converting & retaining them. Furthermore, using the data-intelligent points in storytelling makes the stories convincing enough for the audiences to inspire action & optimize the sales conversions in the process.

A story activates parts in the brain that allow the listeners to turn stories into ideas & ideas into actions. Storytelling has a more amplified impact when audiences can relate to the points being highlighted by storytelling.

The process of neural coupling assures that when the brain interprets a story, it is inspired to take action. Hearing a story the neurons of the listener fire in the same direction as that of a speaker, the phenomenon called neural coupling & hence, there are synchronicities between speakers' brains & the brains of the audiences.

Storytelling helps establish an emotional connection between the listeners & the storytellers & thus causes the audiences to
act from a place of empathy. Story-telling can engage the vital areas of the brain including Broca’s & Wernicke’s area along with additional areas such as motor cortex, sensory cortex & frontal cortex. Furthermore, hormones such as dopamine ensure that the stories told are easily memorized by the prospects with a higher degree of precision.

6. B2B Content Marketing  Helps Define your Niche & build a Community:

You may be a niche-specific marketer; the best way to let the world know about it is through B2B Content Marketing. When you share valuable content across multiple channels on the web, it becomes a hub for new & relevant information. B2B content marketing can be leveraged to create a community of enthusiastic users.

Wrap Up

B2B content marketing should be a documented part of every B2B marketing strategy. In an era of knowledge-economy customer experience management (CXM) should be a vital part of every marketing strategy. B2B Content Marketing, if properly executed can help you build a loyal customer following who pierce through their digital research phases & streamline their buyers’ journeys - generating optimized sales revenue.

Valasys Media leverages an array of custom-made B2B services including lead generation, account-based marketing, lead nurturing, event promotion services, list building services & content syndication services to help the B2B marketers optimize their business bottom-lines.