While B2C engagement and awareness-oriented content marketing has always been a match made in heaven, B2B companies have had a harder time finding their content niche. Indeed, a recent Content Marketing Institute (CMI) report revealed that just 27% of B2B content marketers felt their marketing efforts were very or extremely successful. From the smaller ROI of more specialised influencers, to the greater struggle of creating content that resonates with specific audiences, pinning a content strategy down can be difficult.
However, Smart Insights claims that a misuse of data could be behind this struggle to connect, as brand, data, and content teams just don’t compare notes on their insights. While the team at Smart Insights looked at many different solutions to the problem, these are the two I feel are most important:
Share buyer personas to guide content marketing
It should probably come as no surprise that Jasmine, 18, a drama student from Newcastle, has different interests than Terrence, 54, a small business owner from London. From just that sentence, we can presume that the two have different hobbies, consume different media, and prefer different stories and content types. However, there’s a dearth of B2B research teams letting their content teams get hands-on with buyer personas. The more you can tell your content producers about who they’re trying to reach, the more they can produce stories that are right for your brand – leading to more valuable engagements, media interest, and eventual conversions.
Use Google Analytics to map future content
Of course, even if you have a great audience persona, there’s still a certain element of guesswork – but you almost certainly have access to data that could do away with that as well. By logging into Google Analytics, you can determine which content on your site is driving traffic, time on site, number of pages per visit, backlinks, and even drill down into next page path and goal completions. This allows you to see exactly which content topics are driving the most interest from the most valuable users, and the content types they prefer, from whitepapers to GIFs. Once you’ve discovered that, you can move forward with a very strong guide on what content will almost certainly be a smash – and what won’t.
No one can argue with the fact that content can be a trickier beast in the B2B market – but it’s likely you already have the tools to make your own B2B content strategy a success. All that remains is to get your hands on the data and discover the insights that will take you to the next level.
