Writing Smarter: 5 Hacks to Elevate Your B2B Content Marketing

When done successfully, B2B content writing can drive some impressive business results like increased search traffic, boosted social media engagement, and more importantly, conversions.

There are numerous tips and strategies that can help B2B content writers be more effective and efficient. Here are a few hacks to help you start seeing better outcomes from your content marketing:

1. Know Your Audiences

When it comes to writing in the B2B space, it’s especially important to understand your audience including their role and daily responsibilities, the common challenges they face, their understanding of the topics you’re writing about, how they find information and read content, etc.

As a B2B content marketer, your job is to reach people who are making decisions for their company rather than people who are making decisions for themselves. With this comes an increased need to prove expertise in each subject area, as this person will need to get buy-in from their boss and justify the purchase to their organization.

Hack: To get a better grip on your audience, not all of this research can (or should) necessarily be done online. Take advantage of any real-life resources available. For example, reach out to a subject-matter expert (SME) on the topic to set up a brief conversation or interview around the topic at hand.

2. Refine Research Skills

It may go without saying that successful B2B content writing requires sharp research skills. Writers must have the researching abilities needed to become an expert in any industry, and provide truly valuable content to the audiences at hand.

Taking audience understanding to the next level means knowing their jargon and industry lingo, and speaking their language.

Writers must know how and where to:

• Do research online
• Find the most relevant and recent statistics and information
• Communicate it in a way that is effective and aligned with industry speak

Hack: Researching online is a lot easier when you refine web searches. Using certain symbols or words in your search will help make your search results more precise. This will get you more targeted information, quicker and easier.

3. Be Timely & Relevant

B2B content writers are constantly challenged to come up with new content ideas that will be both well received by their audiences and drive the most results.

Staying on top of the latest industry happenings will not only help better understand audiences, but it will also help in coming up with extremely relevant and timely content ideas. Know what top competitors are doing and keep track of trends in the space.

When it comes to the content you’re putting out there, it’s important to remember that more content does not always equal better results. Yes, it is important to provide content regularly to readers and keep a consistent stream of publishing. But, quality is the more important factor.

Hack: Fully commit to the industries you’re writing about by subscribing to top publications, participating in forums and even attending tradeshows or events. Monitor Google Trends, set up Google Alerts, and check Google News around your priority keywords.

4. Understand User Intent

User intent should always be top of mind for B2B content writers. It’s essential to provide content that meets the needs of searchers, no matter what phase of the buying process they are in.

For B2B, this is especially important because the sales process is typically much longer than B2C. This means that content writers will be involved in multiple stages of the buying process before a sale is actually made.

It’s important that B2B content writers know what information buyers are looking for at each specific stage of the sales funnel, and provide content that appeals to those needs. For example, someone searching for “marketing automation” is likely at a much different phase in the buying process than someone searching for “the best marketing automation software.”

There are a variety of ways to figure out what questions people are asking, and how people are searching for information online.

Hack: As Casie Gillette suggests in a recent post, tools like BuzzSumo Question Analyzer, Answer the Public, KeywordTool.io, and Keyworddit give you the questions people are asking about a specific topic. Don’t forget things like site search, support forums, and live chat logs that help understand what people are asking on your site.

5. Maximize Time & Resources

B2B content writers are constantly looking for new ways to stand out and create truly great content. But, great content doesn’t always mean starting from scratch. Sometimes it makes sense to leverage existing assets where time and resources have already been spent creating them.

Writers can get more out of their content by monitoring and evaluating top performing assets. These existing pieces – which have already proven successful – can then be repurposed or refreshed to drive even more visibility.

Hack: Use Google Analytics, as well as other tools like BuzzSumo, Moz and SEMrush to explore the best performing assets, whether that’s for traffic, social shares, backlinks, or conversions. This will present some great opportunities to refresh existing content, repurpose assets, and create cornerstone articles.

Final Thoughts

While there are many elements that go into successful B2B content writing, these are just a few that I find most important. Hopefully this post provided you with some simple ways to drive your content strategy forward.

Did I miss anything? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below, or reach out to me directly via Twitter!