The benefits of content marketing for B2B brands.

What is content marketing?

Content marketing is the art of creating high-impact content for specific audiences that, rather than directly selling or pushing products, aims to capture their interest and deliver genuine value. This makes content marketing a powerful way of connecting with key audience groups to demonstrate your brand’s expertise, build awareness and establish trust.

To deliver an effective content marketing campaign, B2B brands must step into the shoes of their customers to fully understand the challenges they face every day. This will allow them to create content that cuts through and resonates with their audiences. Over time, an effective content marketing strategy will contribute towards a businesses’ position as the go-to, trusted partner that enables customers to make informed decisions.

How can content marketing benefit B2B businesses?

Now that we’ve explored what it is, let’s delve a little deeper into why brands should prioritise B2B content marketing campaigns.

Trust and authority.

Every marketer knows the value of trust – it is essential for every brand, particularly in our current climate where factors such as price and convenience barely separate many brands. Consumer trends and expectations have evolved beyond this baseline, and your customers now seek authenticity, genuine connection, and transparent communication.

When developing B2B marketing strategies and content marketing campaigns, it’s vital to research audience behaviours and attitudes. One effective way to do this is by exploring customer journey mapping and conducting CX analysis – this will enable you to build an accurate picture of who you’re talking to and how they prefer to engage with content. Not only will this infuse the production of highly targeted content, but it will also guarantee that your brand remains relevant and available at every touchpoint, both online and offline.

Nurturing Relationships.

This leads nicely to nurturing relationships – once you have captured attention and started building trust and authority, it’s important to remain continuously engaged with your audience. After all, their needs and wants will evolve – sometimes more rapidly than we’d like to see in marketing! But this is where we find ourselves; it’s vital to remain plugged into industry changes, audience perceptions and the opinions that so often flood our channels. Content marketing communications must respond to this, consistently delivering expert insights and value at every turn to support customers in navigating the complexities of their evolving industries.

Improving SEO.

Yes, content marketing can span any channel or platform, depending on your business and audience requirements. But let’s not forget the king of all content and the keeper of the keys – Google. The search engine’s E-E-A-T framework should sit at the heart of your content production – this means that everything your brand produces should showcase your ‘Expertise’ and ‘Experience’, position your ‘Authority’ and build ‘Trust’ across your target audience.

The crux of the matter is that if you’re producing consistent and relevant content across earned, owned and paid-for platforms Google will – overtime – recognise your brand and boost its visibility to the right audience.

Lead generation.

Of course, if you activate content marketing campaigns and improve SEO, you’re bound to generate and convert more leads, particularly if you gate some of your valuable content. This could be anything, from whitepapers and reports to videos and case studies. By gating content you’re delivering something that is exclusive, something that is unique that will provide more value to your target audience. The more engaging the content, the higher the chance of capturing more customer (and prospective customer) data to fuel conversions.

Cost-effective.

Content marketing can be a cost-effective way of engaging audiences over the long-term. To manage the broad range of opportunities that may emerge through this approach, having a defined content marketing strategy can help you to maintain a consistent approach which maximises the value of every piece of content created.

Let’s take a long-form whitepaper as an example. Initially, as a key piece of content, a whitepaper will typically sit behind a wall, allowing brands to capture the details of potential customers who are interested in the content. After this initial stage, however, much of the content of the whitepaper can be repurposed into a variety of other content to be distributed across all platforms – including thought leadership, blogs and social media.

Building a B2B content marketing strategy.

So, let’s start at the beginning. Building a strategic B2B content marketing strategy has four key stages. Firstly…

Research.

The foundation of any campaign should be your audience. Before creating any content, the first step is to research! Explore who you’re talking to – what are the pain points in the market? What are the specific challenges? How can you solve them?

Next, investigate what your target audience is doing online. Deploying a CX mapping strategy will enable you to uncover key touchpoints and analyse the typical customer journey. This will provide further insight into which content is successful and where the gaps are. Of course, research is essential, but don’t forget to draw on your brand’s expertise and years of experience to compliment and complete the bigger picture.

Audit.

Now, it’s time to turn your attention inward. Sometimes, we’re guilty of producing content (albeit striking) that may not have performed as well as we’d have hoped. This is a great opportunity to do some exploration across your content landscape, as well as investigating what your competitors are producing. By taking an honest view of your content creation, you’ll be able to see what’s worked and what hasn’t; locate the gaps within your content marketing strategy and communications and understand how your brand compares in the market.

Capture attention.

Now, let’s get back to “striking” –now that you’re in tune with your customer’s behaviours, you’ll be able to create and activate a multichannel content marketing campaign that connects at each stage of the customer journey. This understanding will allow you to make informed decisions on which content will deliver the most value. Perhaps videos will be more impactful than the written word? Or maybe a live event will bring more value than a webinar?

Evolution.

Finally, you must constantly review, rethink, and reimagine. What else could you be doing to elevate your message? Content marketing is where art meets science, so ensure you’re actively undertaking essential SEO work behind the scenes to ensure your content is discoverable. If you’re continually engaged with what your customers are searching for, you can harness this to fuel content adaptation to remain relevant.

How do we use content marketing?

At Wyatt International, we’ve created content marketing campaigns for international B2B brands – including Pandrol – a world-leading supplier to the global rail industry. We created the concept for a ‘Back on Track’ tour across Europe. This B2B event marketing-led campaign brought Pandrol’s new technologies to life, granting leading figures and customers across the European rail industry a chance to watch live product demonstrations, test track maintenance skills, and discuss key issues with industry experts.

For over three months we spearheaded content production as the tour made its way across 14 countries! We decked out the truck with new branding, new designs and created promotional items for each event. We also created a range of content across all platforms, both online and offline – this included video production, press engagement and social media marketing.