13 Best Types of B2B Content Marketing for Lead Generation
Businesses have different audiences they can target with their marketing strategies.
Other businesses present one of the audience segments to target when developing marketing strategies, often referred to as B2B (business-to-business) content marketing.
The principal concept to understand before considering B2B content marketing is how content marketing works.
In the most basic sense, content marketing uses information-sharing and storytelling techniques to achieve specific business goals.
Marketers must be able to differentiate between business-to-business and business-to-customer content marketing.
B2C content marketing targets individual consumers. On the other hand, B2B content marketing targets other businesses, making it an interaction between two companies.
As a B2B content marketer, you must understand and integrate the challenges, interests, and needs of the individuals making purchase decisions for their organizations.
Hence, the most important thing to remember is that B2B content marketing should be fact-based and educational.
Companies tend to make inquiries about other companies they want to do business with. However, the only way they will get to the inquiry part is if you produce content that ranks in the search results of search engines.
This means quality, consistent, and valuable information that will make these businesses stick around on your website long enough.
All these elements can be summed up into awareness, consideration, and decision.
In B2B content marketing, you have to make other businesses you are targeting aware that you exist through content. The quality of the content will lead them into consideration, after which they will make a decision.
The goal is to properly target your buyer persona with your marketing strategy since the biggest determinant of effective marketing is the audience.
You do not want any of your content marketing to fall on deaf ears, especially after juggling between channel decisions, creative demands, and budget limits as a marketer.
You have to get it right, which can be difficult to achieve if you are doing it alone. The alternative usually is to seek the services of a marketing agency to improve efficiency and ensure a return on investment.
Benefits of B2B Content Marketing
When you get it right, B2B content marketing can have several grand benefits that assure you a return on investment.
- Boosts brand awareness: B2B content marketing seeks to make prospective customers that are seeking a solution to a problem know that you exist. You only have to provide the information they are looking for in their preferred format to make it valuable and beneficial to them.
For instance, a blog post would be valuable to individuals acting on behalf of organizations that are interested in learning about your product launch on their commute home.
- Creates maximum impact: B2B content marketing does not only create brand awareness but also cultivates maximum impact by allowing you to optimize your messaging or content using diverse formats, where you can cross-promote your products, services, and activities.
- Expands your reach: the ability to publish content about your brand on diverse platforms increases the probability of reaching wider target audiences. Since you are targeting a specific audience, those who consume the information will likely share it with like-minded individuals, thereby expanding your reach.
- Increased traffic and better SEO: targeting other businesses as part of your content marketing strategy helps you get more content to market. When the content is high-quality and valuable, you will get a higher organic ranking in search engine results, which will drive more traffic to your website.
More traffic generates leads and increases conversions. Therefore, B2B content marketing will reward your business in terms of revenue.
13 Types of B2B Content Marketing
- Website
With half the world’s population being online and getting most of their information on the internet, it is critical to have a centralized place where all the information about your business is found.
A website is the right place for such. It allows you to create a variety of content that helps your business sell online as the current trend dictates.
- Blogs
It is impossible to emphasize enough how blogs are the epitome of any form of content marketing.
In B2B content marketing, blogs allow you to provide detailed and quality information that corresponds with the needs of other businesses and the goals of your business.
A 2022 Content Marketing Institute report revealed that blogs, consisting of short articles below 3,000 words, provided the second-best results when considered as a content asset.
The primary objective of using blogs as a type of B2B content marketing is to create awareness.
Nonetheless, blogs have the additional advantage of helping you provide specific details about your products or services, which can spark the interest of the target audience.
It is vital to ensure that in your blog, you produce relevant and comprehensive coverage of the issue you are addressing.
Blogs can be in written or audio forms.
- Webinars
There is no better way to spark the interest of your B2B audiences and keep them engaged than to incorporate the views of an expert.
Webinars involve the sharing of knowledge and expertise on an issue through an online presentation.
The advantage of webinars as a type of content marketing is that it facilitates interactions between the target audience and experts, which allows sharing of quality and valuable information.
You have the option of inviting an industry player as a key speaker or hosting it yourself as an expert.
Regardless of the approach, webinars are an indirect way of increasing sales because they give direction to your audience.
According to the B2B Content Assets report, webinars are ranked as the most effective in producing the best results when it comes to B2B content marketing.
- Research reports/Whitepapers/E-books
Sometimes it is impossible to provide all the information a prospective customer might need in a blog post that is limited to 3000 words. When this is the case, compiled research is recommended.
Research reports or whitepapers are the best type of B2B content marketing to publish the findings from the compiled research.
More importantly, whitepapers are “gated content” that prompts target audiences that are critically seeking information to share personal data, such as name and email address, for access.
Whitepapers or research reports were ranked as equally effective as blogs in producing the best results when it comes to B2B content marketing.
- Case Studies
Building trust with your prospective customers is also a significant aspect of content marketing. I
n B2B content marketing, case studies provide an appropriate avenue for showcasing your products or services to spark the interest of a customer.
Simply put, case studies help you show proof of concept or capability that cultivates trust in your prospective customers.
As a result, there are specific elements you must consider and integrate when presenting your case studies to customers.
These include identifying the problem the customer had, the solution to the problem, as well as the contribution of your company.
In describing the contribution of your company, you must identify the features of the solution that makes your business exceptional by providing it.
Lastly, including bytes from the customer to solidify the credibility of your story is also essential.
- Podcasts
Businesses seeking a solution to a problem are a well-informed group that you must engage in an equally informed way.
Podcasts are a type of B2B content marketing that gives you the platform to intellectually engage your prospective customers in a way that gives them value.
Marketing experts believe podcasts are a promising content channel that continues to be preferred by marketers.
Currently, there are over 2 million podcasts, which may be discouraging for a marketer due to the belief that the platform is saturated.
However, podcasts present a format that is still taking B2B content marketing by storm by facilitating great storytelling, sharing of expert opinions, and audience interactions.
Thus, you should adopt this B2B content marketing type to engage even further with your audience.
- Videos
The use of videos as a type of content marketing is crucial for today’s audiences that have become more visual.
These videos can be very informative for B2B content marketing audiences since they are always looking for in-depth and factual information.
You can produce content using videos in the form of product or service demonstrations, client testimonials, and interviews.
Videos are particularly good content marketing for first-timer users or prospective customers who find it challenging to use your product or service, which will help them optimize it. This can lead to customer trust and loyalty.
Just like in business-to-customer marketing, business-to-business marketing also gains significantly from the email type of content marketing.
Email content marketing is a traditional form of marketing that leads to increased engagement that transforms subscribers into customers by providing specific solutions and speaking to particular needs and pain points.
When using the email content marketing approach in B2B marketing, you have to earn and hold the attention of your business buyers in the way you craft the emails.
This will ensure your efforts achieve the results of lead nurturing, as is the role of email marketing.
- How-to Guides
If you want other businesses to trust that you can effectively provide the products or services you market, one way to do that is to create the impression of having an authority in your niche.
How-to guides are effective in this aspect, putting you in front of the minds of customers and causing them to rely on you for help.
How-to guides can be in the form of checklists and templates designed to address the unique issues your ideal customers may be experiencing.
You can include a request for personal data in exchange for how-to guides, checklists, and templates, which, in turn, you can use to bolster your marketing efforts through email marketing.
- Social Media
A new catchphrase that almost, if not all, are familiar with is the reference to those who interact mostly with online audiences on social media platforms as influencers or content creators.
Social media is also a type of B2B content marketing, with certain platforms, such as LinkedIn, strongly supporting B2B marketing.
Through such social media platforms, you can share images and videos, as well as publish articles that are tailor-made for other businesses that you consider as your target customers.
- Infographics
As already mentioned in one of the points above, audiences today are more visual than before.
Therefore, as a content marketer, you have to find effective ways to stimulate their minds and keep them engaged with your content for maximum effect in terms of generating leads.
Infographics offer a way to do that, whereby you share informative charts, graphs, and diagrams that visually appeal to your audiences.
From these visuals, your B2B target audience can get a glimpse of the information in the content you have published.
This will help them if they want to make quick buying decisions and do not have the time to read through all the content.
It is important to remember that infographics are always part of the content.
- FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions
Sometimes it is good as a business to anticipate the needs of your target audience and address them proactively. FAQs anticipate some of the questions your target audience may have and provide the answers, making the job of the buyer easy.
As a result, customer loyalty and trust emerge since they are likely to come back to your site more often to seek answers.
- Quotes
As a business, your aim is to be unique in a way that sparks interest from target customers. Quotes are a unique way to spark this interest by serving motivation and inspiration to the audience.
The use of quotes as a type of content marketing will be more effective if you pair it with social media, where you share the quotes on social media to increase engagement.
In conclusion, there are many types of content marketing you can choose for your B2B content marketing.
The best approach is to integrate various types for maximum effect.
Many of these types of B2B content marketing are interactive, which can help you cultivate your audience’s trust, drive traffic to your website, and increase conversions and sales.
