Last updated: February 7, 2024
The effectiveness of B2B content marketing comes down to 3 questions: Does the content respond to the audience’s intent? Does it fulfill that intent? And does it do so more satisfyingly than any other page on the Internet?
If your content team can honestly answer “yes” to those 3 questions for a given piece of content, you’re probably getting a lot of inbound traffic and leads from your content. In 2024, with the Internet saturated with decent-quality content and ChatGPT generating a large amount of confidently-worded articles, standing out is more important than ever. In the meritocracy that is Google, where there’s only one #1 result, you must do things differently than your competitors.
To help you come up with original ideas for B2B content marketing, our team has assembled what we believe is the ultimate list of B2B content marketing tactics. In the table below, we categorize our findings by tactic, and give specific examples of how you can execute on that tactic. (Please note that each tactic is applicable to many more industries than we provide examples for.) We hope you find the below list valuable.
B2B Content Marketing Tactics
| Tactic | Examples | Notes | |
| Industry | Content | ||
| Best Practices Blog | Food & Beverage | A B2B craft beer distributor publishes a series of articles aimed at restaurants discussing beverage program management, as well as topics such as inventory management best practices and beverage pricing. | Best practices articles both build trust with readers, and provide an opportunity to nudge them toward your services. As with most content marketing, aim to deliver useful information first rather than promoting your own company. Doing otherwise will cause the reader to lose trust in your content. |
| Manufacturing | A B2B manufacturer of machines for industrial paper processing publishes a series of articles discussing printing and packaging industry best practices, including how investing in high quality equipment can reduce operational costs long-term. | ||
| B2B SaaS | A B2B SaaS company that develops project management software publishes a series of articles on the best way to implement agile project management. | ||
| Case Study | Mechanical Engineering | A mechanical engineering company publishes case studies describing the unique challenges they’ve solved for their clients and highlighting how their specific expertise helped them find an ideal solution. | Case studies are the best way to demonstrate the real world value of your products or services. When possible, providing the name of your clients (i.e., not anonymizing the case study) lends more credence to the content of your studies. |
| Commercial Construction | A commercial architecture firm creates project pages highlighting completed buildings they designed, describing the unique challenges they encountered, and outlining the design philosophy that guided their process. | ||
| B2B SaaS | A B2B SaaS company that develops bug and issue tracking software publishes case studies on how their software has reduced average bug-fixing time for their clients. | ||
| Comparison Blog – Multi-Item | Manufacturing | A B2B plastics manufacturer publishes blog articles discussing the advantages of different types of plastic when used in biomedical applications. | Multi-item comparison articles are excellent investments for companies that offer a variety of different products with similar uses. They can also be used to compare your company with your competitors, but take care that you highlight your own competitive advantages or select competitors that tend to target markets you have less stake in. Note that this type of comparison blogs should always include tables that highlight the most important differences between each option. |
| Hosting | A managed cloud services provider creates a comparison table discussing the differences between using AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. | ||
| B2B SaaS | A B2B SaaS company that makes clinical trial management software publishes articles comparing the features, pricing, and user friendliness of all major clinical trial software on the market. | ||
| Comparison Blog – Versus | Insurance | An insurance agency publishes an article discussing the difference between home insurance and home warranty. | More than any other type of blog, versus articles should be created with SEO in mind, as they perform best when targeting highly searched phrases. As with multi-item comparison articles, they will often contain a table to provide a side-by-side comparison. |
| Cybersecurity | A cybersecurity agency publishes a blog article comparing two prominent endpoint detection and response platforms, highlighting where each excels and where each falls short. | ||
| Senior Living | A senior living community publishes articles discussing the difference between quality of life in an assisted living facility and | ||
| Compliance Guide | Electrical Contractor | An electrical contractor publishes a guide to electrical code compliance. | Compliance guides are highly transactional and often geotargeted, allowing firms to narrowly target prospects in a specific region. Because compliance is such a complex topic, a guide that explains the basic steps to |
| Water Treatment | A water treatment company publishes a guide to EPA regulations covering mining wastewater discharge. | ||
| Directory of Companies or Service Providers | Interior Design | A commercial office design firm creates a directory of commercial interior design contractors targeting potential clients interested in renovating their office spaces. | Directories serve two primary purposes. For manufacturers and distributors, they can be used to direct business to customers, indirectly increasing demand for the products they distribute. Firms that coordinate the services of multiple other companies (e.g. general contractors and designers) can also use directories to increase demand for their own services, as readers begin to understand the full complexity of the projects they wish to undertake. |
| Automotive | An auto parts distributor creates a directory of local auto shops near each major city in their service area. | ||
| How-To Blog Articles | Marketing | A marketing agency specializing in the construction industry publishes a blog series on construction marketing strategy, costs, choosing a construction marketing agency, and construction marketing best practices. | How-to articles are similar to problem/solution articles, but offer a higher level perspective on broader topics. As with other article types, these articles create excellent opportunities for content repurposing, as popular articles can form the basis for webinars or white papers. |
| Financial Services | A wealth management firm that works with ultra-high-net-worth individuals publishes a guide to estate planning discussing Section 734(b), Crummey trusts, and grantor-retained annuity trusts. | ||
| Interview Series | Manufacturing | A B2B plastics manufacturer publishes a series of interviews with medical device designers and manufacturers they work with. | Interview series help lend a human face to your company, as well as demonstrating that real world clients trust and appreciate your products and services. These should be used relatively sparingly, however, as an overabundance of interviews leads to few standing out. |
| B2B SaaS | A SaaS company that offers CRM software interviews clients to discuss which features sales teams find most useful in their day-to-day work. | ||
| News Website | Transportation & Logistics | A supply chain management company creates a news website focused on developments and trends in retail supply chains. | Creating your own news website on a standalone URL gives you a rare opportunity to “own the news” in your space; all that’s required is creating content that objectively reports on what’s happening in your industry. That leaves rooms for editorials that promote your worldview, and advertisements that promote your company directly. |
| Manufacturing | A plastics manufacturer creates an industry news site that discusses the latest advances in thermoplastics technologies and new potential applications. | ||
| Problem/Solution Blog | Pest Control | A pest control company publishes a series of pages for each common pest in their region. | Problem/Solution articles are excellent for building trust with your target audience, laying groundwork for a future conversion. They also create excellent sharing opportunities for social media, making for efficient content reuse. |
| Construction | A manufacturer of precast concrete products publishes a series of articles discussing common problems faced by their customers in the construction industry, and how precast concrete products have helped solve those problems. | ||
| IT Services | A managed IT services provider publishes articles on common IT problems that remote businesses face, and how working with a managed IT provider can help solve them. | ||
| Product Review | eCommerce | An eCommerce company that sells pens and stationery publishes a series of articles reviewing popular ballpoint pens. | Product reviews are best for distributors and retailers that offer a variety of different products, all of which can be purchased directly from them. They are also useful for service providers that install or service a variety of products. |
| HVAC | An HVAC company publishes a series of reviews on each type of furnace they’ve installed or serviced, discussing its performance and long-term maintenance needs. | ||
| Solar | A solar panel installer publishes reviews on each solar panel they’ve installed for their clients. | ||
| Research Report | Marketing | An SEO company publishes reports sharing anonymized internal data on marketing benchmarks such as ROI, conversion rates, and click through rates. | Research reports share anonymized internal data that is useful for prospects, usually consisting of benchmarks or statistics. They can also garner attention from journalists, thereby helping disseminate your content. |
| Staffing & Recruiting | A recruiting firm publishes a report sharing their internal data on hiring rates within each industry they work with. | ||
| Trend Report | Food & Beverage | A B2B craft beer distributor publishes quarterly reports on consumer beer buying trends. | Trend reports use data from one of two sources: (a) presentations of proprietary internal data that isn’t available anywhere else on the internet, or (b) publicly available information that is accessible but difficult to parse. |
| Fashion & Apparel | A B2B contract fashion manufacturer publishes reports forecasting consumer clothing demand at the start of each season. | ||
| Financial Services | A financial services firm publishes quarterly reports on the fastest growing sectors of the past 3 months. | ||
| White Paper | Transportation & Logistics | A 3PL logistics firm publishes a white paper showing the decision tree on how the firm plans the best shipping methods for common goods. This paper includes both data analysis and images to help tell a story and demonstrate their abilities, improving conversion. | White papers are flexible and can be adapted for nearly any B2B industry. If strong content exists elsewhere on the website, placing white papers behind an email registration improves conversion rates and builds out a valuable list for future email marketing. |
| Agriculture | A pesticide manufacturer publishes a white paper analyzing the effectiveness and potential negative effects of each type of pesticide available to farmers in California. | ||
Getting Help Implementing B2B Content Marketing Tactics
While knowing the range of marketing tactics available to you is a great start towards creating valuable content, there are a number of other aspects of B2B content marketing you’ll need to master: creating personas for the target audience of your pieces; choosing keywords for content that you want to rank for SEO; crafting compelling visuals to increase the skimmability of your pieces; and properly tagging and tracking your content as part of your digital marketing conversion funnel.
Our agency has worked with B2B clients across a wide variety of industries. Our SMEs work directly with clients to create conversion-oriented content that utilizes the B2B content marketing tactics listed in this article. If you’d like to speak with someone about your company’s content marketing, consider reaching out to us to discuss a marketing partnership.
