Content Marketing and why it is important to your B2B organisation

Essentially, content marketing is about writing quality content to promote your services to key B2B influencers and decision makers. Marketing your services via the content you create gives you the opportunity to help prospects rather than overtly sell to them – something that is increasingly ineffectual as more quality information becomes free online. Providing and being known for providing top quality information, ahead of the market in turn allows you to lead the conversation in your field. For this reason content marketing is sometimes called thought leadership.

Especially in technology marketing, you want the subtle call to action after someone has read your content to be “if I want to do this with my business, these are the go to people”.

Writing engaging content is one thing but unless you have effective distribution channels via social media then you could build the most effective library of content ever and no-one will come to read it. This is not the Field of Dreams. You don’t build it and they will come. You have to work damn hard to squeeze every last drop of value out your content. This can be done by using social media like LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook to promote your content, or by ensuring that your website is easy to find through leveraging effective SEO techniques and finally, by varying the delivery method of your content you attract different audiences. B2B clients, for example, love video. They feel that a webinar or single subject video talks directly to them. It works for your own personal branding too as potential clients get to see you in the facilitator role talking eloquently and verbosely about your subject.

Content marketing is fast becoming the preferred way to market a business in the B2B environment. Even as recently as ten years ago, decision makers in business got their news and industry information solely from monthly magazines and quarterly digests. Slowly their intake of information changed from monthly magazines, peppered with expensive full page adverts selling services and products, to getting news online and getting only comment and debate from the magazine. In the last 18 months it has changed again, not least because the media landscape itself has changed. Magazine and newspaper publishers have gone through somewhat of an apocalypse in this recession. They have faced the triple whammy of recession and reduced marketing spend, increased paper bills and further migration of content – free content at that – and readers online. Pressure on budgets have slowed attendance at costly roundtables and conferences as businesses prefer their decision makers to do their own research and upskill in their own time. If anything the economic conditions have accelerated the change and solidified content marketing and social media platforms such as LinkedIn as the place to network, promote their business and get quality information and industry insight.

This genie is not going to go back into the bottle. Content, insight and information is now expected to be free. If you want to ensure that your brand and company is aligned with quality content you need to consider your B2B content marketing strategy now.