B2B Content Marketing: Show Your Customers Who You Really Are
This post was updated on August 26, 2021.
If you haven’t revisited your B2B tech content marketing plan and adjusted it for today’s climate, you could be faced with some backlash, missed opportunities, and ultimately a tarnished reputation.
It takes many good deeds to build a good reputation, and only one bad one to lose it. – Benjamin Franklin
I continue to be amazed that B2B marketers (and B2B tech businesses generally) would think receiving emails offering no value would be met with anything other than a huge eye roll.
These types of communications reek of exploitation, fear, and insincerity.
As a trained B2B tech marketer, I also know the alternative requires deep customer insight, quick thinking, faster approvals, and instant creativity. Yet, honest, authentic, sincere, and timely communication is exactly what your customers are craving right now. This is definitely hard work.
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The Goal of Content Marketing For B2B Tech Organizations
The number one goal of content marketing is to provide value to your customers by developing a trusting relationship. Therefore your content marketing strategy should always focus on serving the pains of your customer.
Content marketing, when done well, becomes an essential, systemized technique for how you develop and build relationships with target customers. That relationship begins from the first moment a customer encounters your company’s content.
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| Creating the content: |
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| Amplifying the content across distribution channels: |
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| Reusing the content in unique ways: |
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| Analyzing content performance: |
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Businesses with established marketing and sales processes develop monthly or quarterly “content calendars.” Setting it up this way allows marketing and sales teams to scale and ultimately take a thoroughly planned out “set it and forget it” approach.
Learn more about how you can establish marketing and sales processes at our Webinar: How to Create A Marketing And Sales Engine + Keep It Running.
Content Marketing Starts With Your Target Customer
If you are following the same sales and marketing playbook that you were using before this worldwide crisis started, it’s time to reevaluate.
One of the core principles of content marketing is that you must understand — develop and write content specifically for — your core target market. This is why companies spend so much time, money and resources researching customers, to build target buyer personas. If you don’t have this foundational knowledge of your target customer, you can’t effectively feed the content development system.
Content marketing is also how you provide value and establish a relationship with your customers. For content marketing to be successful, it has to be personalized, speak to a specific need, with a very deep understanding of his/her buyer journey.
In other words, your content strategy must reflect a deep study and understanding of your target market. If that wasn’t enough, advances in technology make this understanding more complex to access yet more effective in building true connections with your customers.
Content Marketing Best Practices During a Crisis
Traditionally, content marketing has been an opportunity to provide value in order to gather names and to promote services.
Content marketing is also:
- The most effective way to build personal connections
- Reassure people in times of fear
- Help someone do something they had no idea how to do on their own
After the 2008 financial meltdown, companies that continued to invest in marketing recovered 9x faster than ones that didn’t. Now, more than ever, you have an opportunity to serve the needs of your customers and cultivate strong relationships with them that will last.
However, there’s probably a realignment regarding whose needs you serve the most right now. If you adjust your target audience, you will also need to adjust the value proposition with which you lead.
Getting your marketing house in order now will pay dividends down the road. As you are reexamining your content strategy, here is a good checklist to guide your decisions. Do your current marketing efforts:
- Serve the current needs and pains of your customer?
- Tell stories your customers can connect to?
- Build trust and rapport with your customers?
- Speak in a language your customers will understand?
- Make a strong first impression with your target customers?
- Use a unique voice and tone that reflects who you are as a brand?
- Meet your customers with solutions where their pains are?
Be intentional with your content and communications.
Meet your customers where they are.
This is the moment where your marketing skills will be put to the test. Rise to the occasion. Content marketing is a great way to build a reputation of service, quality, and integrity. And that is what the world needs more of right now.
Creating Content to Fuel Your B2B Customers’ Needs
Developing your content marketing strategy is not the same as developing your content marketing plan. A well-defined content marketing strategy focuses on your key business value and your customer needs.
To ensure your content marketing program stays aligned with your business goals, revisit your channel strategy, content topics, and team processes on an annual basis.
However, in light of the crisis, it’s important to reevaluate it now. There has never been a more critical time for cultivating connections built on trust. This approach will also allow you to meet your customers where they want to be met.
Ready to build a B2B tech content marketing that serves the needs of your customers? Book a free 30-minute consultation with our B2B marketing experts today.
