5 Types of B2B Content to Fuel your Content Marketing
According to LinkedIn’s most recent B2B buyer trends report, the overriding message was that buyers want to know your story.
The whole story.
To make your brand story compelling enough to generate leads and sales, it's time to rethink how and what you post on that platform, and others. This blog reveals how to source more diverse marketing content to grow your business.
Marketers - take it to your CEO because it's not just for you. If you're going to deliver an engaging brand story, the entire business - the CFO, the engineer, the apprentice - needs to support your content marketing efforts with insights, feedback, anecdotes, and showcasing the people that are the real heroes in your business' story.
Dive into our blog ‘How to Create Powerful B2B Marketing Content in 4 Steps’ to read more about why insights from the people in your business are fuel to creat great B2B content.
Stay with us as we walk through five types of content that can power up the customer journey on social channels - making your brand story an authentic page-turner.
But why do we need to diversify content and deliver a brand story?
We chose (or choose) high street shops for reasons other than price: the shopfront, the staff's friendliness, and the store layout fine-tune our experience, perceptions, and therefore buying decisions and brand preference.
The same is now true online. Buying has become personal - we care about where we spend our money. And it’s equally as important in the B2B space.
How do we know? Gartner states that 45% of B2B buyers' time is spent researching solutions online before they think about talking to a company. Why? They want to know about a business before investing money and/or time. They're peering into your shop window, assessing the demeanour of your staff, reading others' opinions - before even putting a metaphorical foot through your door… they're looking for your brand story - so make sure your online presence tells it accurately and engagingly.
We’ve got a whole host of B2B buyer trends from across the industry typed up into our blog ‘B2B buyer trends 2023 and how they should inform your marketing’ to dive into.
5 Types of Content to Power up B2B Content Marketing
1: Brand Content
Who are you? Why do you exist? What problems do you solve? For whom? What are your values? How do you talk? Before you create any marketing - anything, even a single tweet - figure these things out. Better still, write them down: create a brand strategy.
Most B2B content marketing services work around a carefully crafted brand strategy. Why? It helps everyone understand the business's purpose, vision, mission and values and your audience's aims, objectives, challenges, pains, wants and needs.
The exercise will hone your brand's personality, and every aspect of your business - from brand colours and web design to your marketing tone of voice - should then reflect it.
Only at this point - when there are no plot holes in your brand story - should you start telling people about who you are. And remember: help people connect and engage with this personality rather than shouting about its awesomeness. Broadcasting how great you are is no way to win friends!
How to add brand content into your mix:
Tell people about your values:
Buyers are clearly curious. So satisfy this: share your values, your employees’ experience, what makes your CEO tick, how you support your local community. The more creative ways you can let people into your company's inner circle, letting them see the heartbeat of the business, the more you'll create the human connection they're looking for!
Get your brand message across:
Build content that serves your community, but also includes your brand message. By crafting a brand strategy you’ll have written out a tagline, the value proposition and the core challenges you’re solving. Whether it’s a customer case study or downloadable resource document, be sure to find creative ways to incorporate the brand message. Another example, create a short video to highlight the values instilled into your working culture on a day to day basis - these values are what your customer is buying.
If you want to see the faces behind Wildtribe, jump over to our about us page to take a look. We’re real people who value great content!
2: Talent content
In the top three of LinkedIn's 2023 buyer trend report was the assessment that a good employer signals a good brand. We're all looking to work with companies we respect, believe in and feel will also respect us. Companies that'll help us grow, achieve our personal goals and provide a great culture and community. Potential clients want to know this too.
People want to see you care about your people and actively cultivate a positive workplace culture. Your B2B content marketing strategy should reveal what it's like to work in your business, the type of ship you run, and the behind-the-scenes, authentic workplace culture.
The trend speaks to the fact that clients want to know they're onboarding with a 'human'-first business that cares about their team, which, in turn, will care about them.
How to add talent content into the marketing mix:
Sharing Counts
Capture and share the moments that matter: from work trips to team incentives, welcoming new team members, or celebrating the achievements of those already in the company - as well as any community work: get those stories out there. They're the chapters in your story people love to read.
Employee Advocacy:
Hootsuite recently reported that employees can increase the social reach of a top brand by 4000%. This incredible stat suggests that the voice of employees are more trusted than the brand's.
The more you can engage the professional voices of your team to advocate for your brand on social channels, the greater its reach and influence could be. And the bonus is that resharing your employees' content champions their voices, highlighting your respect for the people who work for you.
Check out our blog ‘what is employee advocacy?’ to get quick answers on what, how and why you’d invest in this area.
3: Editorial Content
Here, your expertise, experience, and thought leadership as a business comes into play. How can you create content that navigates your customer through the murky waters of buying within your sector?
How to add editorial content into your mix:
Educate, explain, entertain:
Speak to buyers with helpful, valuable and engaging content: infographics, podcasts, videos, guest speakers, webinars are all great examples of editorial content.
Focus on straightforward and easy-to-digest pieces that don't get hung up on buzzwords or complexities: you’ll lose viewers if your thought leadership video could be clearer or your webinar claims too much.
And remember, we're all impatient! We want the answers quickly, or we'll turn off and move on. If you’re thinking, “I’d love to see a thought leadership piece from Wildtribe” well, let us pop one in-front of your eyes here - 2023: How does the year ahead impact your innovation strategy? .
4: Product Content
Your customer passes through a journey of discovery with your brand. After that initial discovery, they engage with it and finally reach the consideration stage. It's here where product content becomes very useful. The prospect is close to deciding but wants to know exactly how your product or solution works, what it costs, the specifications, and the steps they'll need to take to use or purchase it.
How to add product content into your mix:
Speak to Sales:
Speak with sales to understand what a prospect wants to know before they become a customer. Are there specific last-minute objections or common FAQs before someone commits? Are these questions specification-related or contract terms? Your product content can work to anticipate these roadblocks.
Think customer experience (CX):
Hands up: who skips the instruction manuals to get to the game or attempts the flatpack on instinct rather than information?
If a B2B buyer is to invest thousands in a product, they must understand how it works (without having the life sapped out of them). You need to ensure their purchase is a success - as they'll then sell it on your behalf to others via recommendations.
Get creative: guides, demos, FAQs, and onboarding documents can be crafted around what you know about your customers and how they tick. Lean into their wants!
5: Collaboration Content
Whether sharing an article from an industry thought leader, media outlet, partner or client, collaboration content allows your business to bring others into your community. Social media lives on mutual recognition of one another's interests. Where you see an opportunity to collaborate on content, take it! Fifth on the list of trends from LinkedIn was to 'influence the external influencer'. What better way to do that than to recognise these thought leaders in your content?
How to add collaboration content into your mix:
Actively seek out opportunities to collaborate.
Has a partner business just landed a new client? What’s their story, and can you mutually celebrate it? Has a team member attended an event or keynote? Can you cite some of what they saw or heard? Or has a non-competing company in your sector just achieved a landmark innovation - can you cheer them, and the industry, on?
Spending time on LinkedIn looking for these opportunities is not mindless scrolling - it is virtual networking and is as valuable as crafting all of the content mentioned above.
Final thoughts
And that's it - five B2B content types, fuelled by brand awareness and taken from the people from across the entire company who tell its story on the ground, every day.
What content marketing fuel have you been missing? We hope we've reignited your thinking about how B2B content marketing services can work in 2023 - to drive your content marketing efforts forward and deliver sales.
If you'd like to book in a chat to talk about content marketing for your business, click below, let's talk!
