Content Marketing: An Introduction For B2B Companies

The term content marketing has been on everyone’s lips for years. It appears in all trade and marketing journals, offers topics of conversation at B2B congresses and trade fairs.

But what exactly is content marketing? In marketing terms, it means no more and no less than the distribution of content, which — unlike advertising — appeals to its target group rather quietly and cautiously and offers them added value in terms of information, advice or entertainment.

What is the goal of content marketing?

Of course, content marketing is also about making potential customers curious, convincing, winning or retaining them — not with products and services, but with the underlying topics/content that your potential customers are looking for on the Internet.

As in a classic customer contact situation, everything revolves around answering questions and solving problems. It’s all about building trust with relevant content, attracting attention and generating leads.

What is the best way to make the content available?

The most important rule is: Make it easy for your customers! Make the respective content quickly accessible and available in different ways — be it via blogs, studies, white papers, articles, podcasts, videos — on the relevant channels and social media platforms.

What are the most important principles for good content marketing?

Relevance

You need good and relevant information on topics related to your company and your products or services that are already occupying your target group and for which they are already looking for answers. Become an expert for the crucial topics and secure an optimized market position.

Address

Content marketing is a far cry from classic advertising messages. It is much more important to write about the interest, the challenges and question marks of the target group right away.

Usability

Content marketing often means a lot of text. For it to be read with pleasure, it must be well-structured and made manageable with tables of contents, subheadings or sub-headings. And because almost half of all search queries are now made via mobile devices, fast loading times and a clear display on the smartphone are naturally among the relevant criteria.

Keywords

In order to ensure that your potential customers find what they are looking for, you need to know and use the relevant (search) terms of your target group. What exactly does your customer research on the Internet? What search terms and search term combinations does he use? How big is the competition for these search terms?

What role does SEO play in content marketing?

A very important one. Because content marketing only makes sense if your target group can find your information. You have to know that — Google has become very clever and has already changed its search algorithms several times. In the meantime, the sites whose content provides the greatest added value are ranked best. So whoever has the most relevant content is most likely to win the favour of their target group. And because more than 70% of B2B decision-makers are the first to use Google or other search engines to begin the buying process, good SEO can tip the scales to effectively generate leads and successfully engage customers.

Content marketing offers important opportunities to make your company better known in the long term and to charge your brand with content. You can achieve the greatest success if your content marketing topics are relevant to the respective target group and they are free to decide whether and if so, which information they want to retrieve from you. The more valuable the content, the easier it will be for your target group to decide in the next step to seek further content from you.