8 Core Benefits of B2B Content Marketing

Updated November 2021

Many of us have seen the impressive numbers around B2B content marketing usage. If you haven’t, here’s a snapshot (courtesy of the Content Marketing Institute):

While these figures are encouraging, they likely aren’t enough alone for you to adopt a full-fledged B2B content marketing strategy. Here’s a closer look at eight core benefits of B2B content marketing to help make the decision simple.

Content Marketing For B2B Generates (Qualified) Website Traffic

An effective B2B content marketing strategy will entice prospects and customers to click into your site without a sales pitch being the driving force.

When developing content, think about the ways you can answer the audience’s questions and provide them with the information they need to become more aware of your service before committing to a purchase.

Most B2B products and services provide a solution to a very specific need – therefore, pages of content that are being visited on the site are likely being seen by a targeted and qualified audience. With these specific searches, audiences are more likely to convert, as their knowledge of the topic is more advanced than someone looking for a more general topic.

Good B2B Content Marketing Generates Conversions

Any qualified traffic being sent to the site is great for visibility and brand awareness. However, at the end of the day, you want to be able to create content that will bridge the gap from the unknown (generating awareness) to the “money-making” sections of the website.

Think about ways you can creatively drive the traffic you’re generating from informative blog posts to product or contact pages.

Remember to make the call to action (CTA) as natural and relevant as possible. After all, the customer or prospect clicked the piece of content to learn more about the associated keyword or keyword phrase (don’t make your content a billboard!).

Content Marketing Creates Brand Leadership Position For B2B

A B2B content marketing strategy can give your organization the ability to become involved in conversations that are happening across the industry.

For example, one of our network security clients published a blog post around best practices for dealing with the WCry ransomware that has made headlines around the world.

By becoming an active participant in this conversation, they’re able to showcase their industry knowledge and further solidify themselves as a leader in the network security space. Their target audience now relies on them to provide recent and relevant information, so they go to them as a resource over and over again. Without a content marketing strategy, they would be reliant upon stagnant product or services pages to do all the heavy lifting.

Content Marketing Builds Foundation for Fending Off the Competition

“Keeping up with the Joneses” is a still very meaningful term in B2B marketing. Content marketing strategies can help you generate all the content needed to dominate the space and erase the competition from the picture for a specific search term.

While you may have a product page ranking on the first page of organic search for a specific term, you could be ranking behind a competitor with a much more powerful domain.

Additions to search results pages, like the Google Answer Box, can allow smaller or lesser-known organizations to topple the industry juggernauts around a target phrase, especially if the smaller organization has better, more optimized content that better answers users’ questions.

If you think outside the box and generate a well-thought-out piece of content, you just may find your website owning additional search real estate and pushing your competition out of the neighborhood.

B2B Content Marketing Improves Priority Keyword Targets

As my colleague, Derek, noted in a previous post, “Keyword research is a fundamental tactic providing business direction for B2B search engine marketers.”

The keyword roadmap should also be closely followed when developing a content marketing strategy, as content assets give marketers an opportunity to place relevant keywords in the page titles, meta descriptions, and the body of text. It’s important to research related terms as well– and cover these as needed in the content.

When creating content with specific keywords in mind, be sure to include relevant crosslinks to other pages on the site – this will encourage search engines to frequently crawl your site and learn more about its web pages.

B2B Content Marketing Generates Links

The SEO landscape changes by the day, but the importance of links remains a staple to search marketing success. However, the days of submitting homepage URLs to directories for SEO benefits are long gone.

To achieve a higher domain authority, you must be earning high-quality links to relevant websites.

A B2B content marketing strategy makes this possible.

Contributing to third-party websites can increase your website’s perceived expertise, authority, and trust with search engines, but a dedicated link-building campaign with outreach and promotion can help as well. Just focus on providing value and not solely on the links themselves.

Take a look at this evergreen Moz post for more link-building information.

B2B Content Marketing Opens New Channels for Conversation

As you develop content on your website or on your corporate blog, think about the other ways it can be used to generate new conversations.

Successful B2B marketers leverage social media channels like Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok, Twitter, etc. to syndicate or share content with their audiences.

• Do you have an awesome infographic on your website? Share it on Pinterest.
• Do you have a long “how-to” guide living on your site? Put it into a presentation format and post it to SlideShare or LinkedIn.
• Share pre-written tweets with employees using a service like ClicktoTweet to make it as easy as possible to share content.
• Preschedule repeated shares of content using a service like MeetEdgar or MissingLettr to automatically reshare content after it’s been published.

By doing these things over a period of time, you will find your social following growing and more avenues where valuable conversations are happening.

B2B Content Marketing Should Be Cost-Effective

Of course, a comprehensive content marketing strategy will involve some investment of time and money upfront. But, at the end of the day, it could be much more effective than the other forms of marketing being used in the present.

While you may have to pay over and over to keep digital advertisements running, one well-crafted piece of content could solidify its spot at the top of organic search results and keep qualified traffic coming to your site for years to come. Here at KoMarketing, many of our client’s top website pages are “evergreen” blog posts that have done just that.

Final Thoughts

There are good reasons behind why content marketing has become such a highly-utilized marketing tool by B2B organizations, and these are just a few.

What are some of the benefits your organization is seeing from content marketing efforts? Get the conversation started by dropping a line in the comments section or connecting with me on Twitter!