In the B2B content marketing world, creating high-quality, relevant content is essential to capturing the attention of your target audience. Great content helps build trust and ultimately drives new leads or sales.
But with so much noise and competition in the digital space, it can be challenging to create content that stands out and resonates with your audience.
Read on to learn several essential tips to create high-quality and relevant content that can help you engage your B2B audience and achieve your marketing goals.
The first step in crafting great content is understanding who your audience is and what they are looking for. Knowing your target demographic helps you generate more influential blogs or articles to engage them better.
Researching your audience’s interests, behaviors, demographics, and values can help you better understand who they are and what kind of content resonates well with them. Once you clearly understand your target audience, you can craft more tailored pieces that speak directly to their needs.
Once you have identified your target audience, it’s time to set goals for the type of content you want to create. Ask yourself questions such as “What do I want people to get out of this?” or “What action do I hope my readers take after reading?”
Answering these questions can help clarify what type of content is best suited for achieving your desired results. Additionally, setting measurable goals can help track whether or not they have been achieved once you’ve published the piece.
Creating content just for the sake of creating content is a waste of time and money. Each content piece should have a specific purpose or end result—such as to persuade, inform, or cause someone to fill out the contact form for more information.
For example, you can write a blog post comparing your products/services to two other competitors. The desired result should be to reach those who have discovered your company but don’t have enough information to say “yes.”
Once you know who your audience is and what goals you need to achieve, the next step is to brainstorm creative ideas for how best present this information in an engaging way that resonates with readers.
Brainstorming techniques like mind mapping or listing key points can help generate new ideas that may not have come up originally when brainstorming alone.
Analyzing other successful pieces can also give insight into how others have effectively presented similar topics and how best to approach them from different angles.
You can use free tools to brainstorm or create mind maps, such as Popplet, Trello, and Bubbl.us. Consider asking friends and colleagues to critique your brainstorming ideas.
Free artificial intelligence (AI) tools like ChatGPT are another great way to brainstorm new ideas that a Google search can’t provide. For example, once you’ve created a free ChatGPT account, ask it the following (or a variation thereof):
Provide a few blog post ideas for my B2B company that manufactures green and blue widgets
ChatGPT will return several ideas, including the following:
“5 Creative Ways to Use Green and Blue Widgets in Your Business Operations”
“This blog post could provide tips and ideas for businesses looking to incorporate your widgets into their operations in unique and innovative ways. This could include examples of successful case studies or customer stories.”
Ideas may seem great during brainstorming sessions, but without proper research, there might be many gaps that could easily go off-track from the original idea. It’s also important that you use highly reliable and trustworthy sources throughout the piece.
Ensure that the data you cite is accurate and up-to-date to build trust with people who read your content. Consider referencing actual experts in your field—provided they’re not in direct competition with your business.
Once you’ve written your blog post or article, it’s time to enhance it with images or videos. While you can use free stock images from such sites as Pexels, Google and other search engines technically consider this a slight form of duplicate content—as many other websites have used the same exact photos.
To give your blog post the best chance of ranking well in the search results, consider using images you took yourself. For example, let’s say you wrote an article about how to use software to accomplish a specific task. Take ample screenshots and insert them in the blog post as a visual aid.
Videos also add tremendous value, both from a “Google perspective” and a human being perspective. A standard computer webcam has a high enough resolution for you to create a short 1-2 minute video to add value to your piece, and you can upload it for free to YouTube or Vimeo.
Proofreading your blog post is one of the most critical steps to producing high-quality content, especially in a B2B context. For example, if people start noticing many grammatical errors or very hard-to-read sections, it will either turn them off, confuse them, or cause them to think less of your business.
Free tools such as Grammarly and Hemmingway Editor will catch any grammatical or readability issues and then make suggestions on how to fix them. Just copy and paste your content into the tools, and they will flag all the grammar issues.
Finally, consider sending your blog post to a colleague or other employee for a final read-through and review before you publish it on your website.
Witmer Group develops processes, content, and workflows to support lead generation throughout the buyer journey. We create high-quality content that targets buyer personas specific to your business offerings.
Click here to learn more and download a free inbound marketing eBook.