Creating Engaging Content for B2B Businesses
Best Practices for amazing Content Marketing services for your B2B clients
While content marketing is considered to be crucial by many B2B companies in India, the companies are still struggling to get it correct. The major factors that companies resort to content marketing is:
- Create awareness
- Generate quality leads, and
- Position them as an industry leader
While it is somewhat easy to create awareness, and gradually generate quality leads, what the companies are struggling with is generating industry thought leadership. With so many companies competing with one another to get better SERPs for niche keywords, there is no depth of content and information.
The crux lies if providing content that stands out and that your readers look forward to.
Here is a brief sneak peek into how to write and provide engaging content to your customers:
Have a content strategy – to write and promote your content
Yes, marketers keep on saying have a content strategy but what we tend to overlook is that a strategy is needed for both creating a content as well as promoting the content.
A practice that we have adopted at CreativeClick! is that, involving both content team and SEO team in terms of planning the content marketing strategy for a particular month. The team then works in sync both focusing on the outcome that needs to be generated by the end of each month for that client.
Include graphics or Infographics to your content to make it visually appealing
Just a plain boring blog is very dull for a reader. A reader might click and land to your blog post, but looking at the sheer words and content, he might lose interest to read the blog in full.
So, what can you do to ensure that the so called potential lead, reads about what you intend to convey?
Answer is simple; make it visually appealing by making using good graphics that gives a gist of what you intend to communicate to the reader.
Connect with your customers
Identify 5-10 target customers, these can be your current customers, and take a feedback from them regarding your content strategy. Ask them what it that they look forward to hearing from you is.
Remember, you are creating content for them, not for your own consumption. Though this is a very basic point, many companies still fail to create content for their customers and create content on assumptions on what they think the target customers would like to hear from them.
Interact with your customers with teaser campaigns
If you follow a proper content marketing calendar, creating a teaser campaign around the content on social media becomes very easy. This is one of the most engaging ways of connecting with your target audience, and gets an insight on what is their approach, expectation, or view about that particular content topic. Further when you publish this content, you can re-connect with them and take the conversation forward.
Add Case studies in form of success stories
Always talk about what solutions you gave to a client as a success story rather than a case-study. Define a proper format in which you would like to share your success stories, highlight the challenges and the solutions you gave. If possible, make it visually appealing by using vectors, flow charts, etc.
Add videos to your content
Currently videos have a better reach as compared to other forms of content. Video already makes up 64 percent of all internet traffic, according to Cisco’s 2014 Visual Networking Index, and its forecast to grow to 80 percent of all traffic by 2019.
While we do recommend at least one corporate video on the website, it is always an added advantage to have a video testimonial of your client, as it makes your content marketing more engaging and lively.