B2B Content Marketing in 2023: An Illustrated Guide
I’m often called upon to describe the blend of content marketing and SEO our firm provides to B2B companies. As a result, I’ve developed an analogy that I believe is both simple and accurate. If you’re seeking a clear explanation of the way B2B content marketing operates at the highest level, I hope it will be elucidating for you.
Imagine your website is a grand resort. While it has many amenities and is a great place to vacation, few people know about it. Therefore, you need a strategy to get more visitors to hear about it.
Successful B2B Content Marketing: Where to Start
Successful content marketing begins with updating the meta titles of your site’s main pages to include transactional phrases your customers would type into Google (i.e. keywords). Like big signs that lead people to different areas of your resort, doing so tells Google where to send people interested in what you sell.
Your site’s title tags are signs not only for visitors, but for Google as well. Google is like the area’s Board of Tourism, which recommends resorts to tourists. Every product or service you sell needs to be “announced” to Google the way a hotel would announce a new amenity, like a spa. And including the keywords your customers would type in when searching for that product or service in the page’s title tag is the way to announce them. At that point, Google will build a new “road” to your resort, meaning it will route people who have searched for your keyword to your page.
However, Google knows that searchers phrase their keywords in very specific ways. Rather than typing, “find me a day spa,” they might type something like, “find me a day spa with deep-tissue massage.” Therefore, Google asks resorts to create signs for every specific variation of their product or service, and when they do, it rewards those efforts by building additional roads catered to these specialized interests. In the SEO world, we call these signs Landing Pages.
The more pages you create around specialized keywords, the more personalized content Google has to offer its searchers. And Google loves websites that offer them a lot of content to serve their searchers; it makes them a better search engine. For that reason, Google also loves sites that publish educational content — rather than just sales-oriented pages — because it helps searchers who are doing research. You can win Google over by posting new, relevant content on a regular basis, preferably at least twice a week. Do this and after about six months, you will start to see higher rankings and more qualified visitors on your site.
How to Create the Best Content for a B2B Business
With an understanding of how B2B content marketing works within the context of SEO, you’re ready to create your content. Here are some ideas on how to create content that will engage your visitors and help you outrank your competition.
#1: Offer the best response to the “question” behind the keyword your article is targeting
By providing the best answer to a question, you engage in “thought leadership:” content that sets the standard for the most informed, comprehensive, and authoritative answer to a searcher’s query. Do it well and a thought leadership campaign will increase the ranking of every page on your site.
Once you’ve gotten the hang of writing the best answers to queries, you can differentiate your response from other content on the same keyword by sprinkling in some of your organization’s unique expertise. This helps your answer stand out and give your SMEs the chance to showcase their knowledge.
#2: Build trust with Google
Content marketing for B2B in 2023 is about establishing a relationship with readers based on trust. This means cultivating a dedicated readership and deepening loyalty among existing customers. So focus on the value you may gain from customer relationships over the long-term, not on closing a few sales in the near future.
You can do this by writing about keywords that relate to higher levels of the sales funnel. Moreover, you should do it by offering readers content they’ll find valuable.
#3: Raise your credibility
Make sure you cite the sources of the information you publish and write from an objective, unbiased point of view. Because the more readers trust you, the more Google will trust you.
The Easiest Way to Post Great Content in 2023
Unless you have a substantial and well-trained in-house content team, the easiest way to publish lead-generating content in 2023 is to outsource it. If you work with an agency, it should specialize in both content marketing and SEO for B2B firms specifically. It should be able to explain its process to you. And it should take care of the technical SEO — site speed, security, and mobile optimization — at the start of the campaign. Finally, it should have a detailed tracking and reporting process for leads.
B2B content marketing in 2023 is not especially more sophisticated than it’s ever been, but executing on it can be. If you’d like to let experts handle it for you, feel free to contact us.
Evan Bailyn is a bestselling author and award-winning speaker on the subjects of SEO and thought leadership. Contact Evan here.
