Through hundreds of client experiences and our involvement in B2B trade organizations, our marketing agency is privy to the content marketing strategies of some of the most successful B2B businesses operating today.
In this piece, we lay out the 6 most effective trends in content marketing as of 2024, describing the trend and identifying the types of companies that would benefit most from employing that strategy. Below the table, we outline how to execute on that strategy from a practical perspective, including the tools you’ll need to do it. Finally, we give links for further reading on each trend.
The Most Effective B2B Content Marketing Trends of 2024
| Trend | Description | Best For |
| Targeting Searcher Psychology | Shifting from topical interest to persona interest in content marketing via honing in on the target audience’s problems, wants, and needs. Doing so entails keeping an editorial calendar with columns for target persona, searcher intent, ideal response to intent, and a detailed content plan. |
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| Publishing Original Research | Becoming increasingly transparent with internal data via publishing original research in user-friendly ways. Particularly within data-driven industries, this practice results in increased visitor trust, higher conversion rates, and more links to your content from other websites. |
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| Hub & Spoke Content Marketing | Publishing articles on every facet of a particular subject. As the Web becomes more saturated with content marketing, Google has been forced to look for companies that are niche experts. Utilizing a Hub & Spoke model leads to higher Google rankings, more qualified traffic, and higher lead-to-MQL conversion rates. |
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| Repurposing Content for Multiple Channels | Strategically reusing content for email marketing, LinkedIn, speaking opportunities, and webinars. Doing so allows you to reach your audience on multiple channels, resulting in a more efficient use of resources and higher ROI from your content investments. |
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| Breaking Up Content to Track Micro-conversions | Adding natural break points to content in non-intrusive ways (e.g. “Read more”, “Click for larger image”, or “Download full report”) in order to track specific “events” in their analytics. Doing so results in a better understanding of how visitors interact with their site and more successful conversion optimization. |
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| Thought Leadership Marketing | Publishing authoritative content that projects industry leadership by distilling years of expertise into simple explanations and anecdotes; publishing proprietary reports; and holding webinars on specialized topics. |
Focus on Searcher Psychology
How To Do It: Interview your current clients and create detailed write-ups of their responsibilities, goals, constraints, and pain points. When planning your content, evaluate which persona or personae that piece of content is addressing and how to best respond to their problems, needs, and wants.
Helpful Tools: Detailed customer personas, an editorial calendar, and a search intent consultant.
Where To Learn More:
- Improve Google Rankings by Satisfying Search Intent
- Conversion Rate Optimization Best Practices
- Enterprise Content Marketing: What Works in 2024
Publish Original Research
How to Do It: Strip identifying customer information from your internal data and analytics. Compile this data into reports that address common customer searches. For example, we’ve used our internal data to publish a variety of hard-to-find marketing data, such as B2B Conversion Rates by Industry, B2B Lead Generation Statistics, and B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks, among others.
Helpful Tools: Your internal analytics platform, and a data analyst to help interpret the data.
Where to Learn More:
Plan Web Content with Hub & Spoke
How to Do It: Establish your holy grail keywords to serve as your content hubs. Determine which longtail variants will serve as your spokes, vet them for transactionality, and determine the ideal page type for each. Make sure the keyword for each spoke is highly searched—either because it autofills in the search box, or by using ahrefs.
Helpful Tools: Google, ahrefs, and the venerable spreadsheet.
Where to Learn More:
Strategically Repurpose Content for Multiple Channels
How to Do It: When creating content for your blog, flag any articles that can be repurposed for other channels. Quantitative research pieces should be expanded on for downloadable white papers, high-level strategy makes for excellent presentations and email newsletters, and how-to guides can form the basis of a webinar series. Optimize the content for each channel’s audience and expected attention span.
Helpful Tools: An editorial calendar to organize content, Hubspot for email marketing, and LinkedIn for social.
Where to Learn More:
Break Up Content to Track Micro-conversions
How to Do It: When your content naturally presents opportunities for users to learn more, your web development team can use these to gauge visitor interest. Including prompts throughout the page allows your team to estimate where users lose interest, and determine which keywords, writing styles, and layouts are most successful at engaging your visitors. The data from these prompts can be fed into your CRMs for more detailed analysis.
Helpful Tools: Google Analytics; Hubspot, Salesforce, or another sophisticated CRM; Plugins for WordPress or the CMS of your choice.
Where to Learn More:
- Conversion Rate Optimization Best Practices
- Hubspot’s Micro Conversions: What They Are, Why They Matter & How to Track Them
Invest in Thought Leadership
How to Do It: Set up an internal team that includes SEO strategists, subject matter expert writers, editors, and graphic artists to create best-in-class content for your website. Make sure your content maintains a clear logical progression that takes care of your reader, stimulates their mind with original and insightful content, and offers concrete and practical next steps for them to take. Due to the time it takes to set up such a team, many companies will choose to outsource this process to a high quality agency that specializes in ghostwriting thought leadership for the first 2-3 years of a content marketing campaign.
Helpful Tools: An editorial calendar and a dedicated content marketing team that includes industry experts; or an outsourced thought leadership agency.
Where to Learn More:
If you’d like to learn more about outsourcing your thought leadership production, book a call with us here.
