Kickstarting Your B2B Content Marketing Engine

Kickstarting-B2B-Content-MarketingFor many B2B businesses, content marketing can seem daunting. Though all the signs point to marketers increasing B2B content marketing budgets at all levels of business, many still struggle with where to begin. What many businesses fail to realize is it’s likely they are already swimming in great content. They just don’t know it.

Of course, careful planning and analysis is necessary to understand your goals, what your competitors are doing, and your customers’ needs, paint points and triggers. But if startups and growing businesses reluctant to embrace content marketing just stopped to look, they would find treasure chests of knowledge, insight, and thought leadership. Here are 3 key resources your business can leverage to kickstart your B2B content marketing engine:

1. Leverage Existing Material

As mentioned above, chances are you’ve probably created the starting point of great content without even knowing it. When helping our customer’s kickstart their B2B content engines, the starting point is always a content dump. Your existing sales guides, presentations, fact sheets, internal training documentation, business plans, best practice documents, among others are likely brimming with knowledge and content that your customers may love.

For one of our customers, this process included an incredible amount of material on the a large number of products that they sell in the healthcare and rehabilitation market. So how do you decide what’s valuable? Put yourself in your customers’ shoes. For example, if your customers value health and safety as part of their operations (common with industrial organizations), repurpose the content from your health and safety plan to demonstrate that it’s a shared value.

2. Leverage Employee Knowledge (Duh!)

As Velocity Partners notes, “thought leadership is exploiting your unique position in your market to generate valuable insight and advice on issues your customers and prospects care most about.” Who’s in a better position to understand your market, your position within it, and the day-to-day challenges of your customers better than your front line employees? If you’re searching for great B2B content, all you have to do is dig. And interviews are a great way to uncover gold. Scheduling 10-15 minute interviews with employees over the phone can uncover great ideas, help you confirm some of your B2B content marketing hypotheses, and extract the juicy tidbits of firsthand information that make for great content.

3. Leverage Conferences & Events

As an inherent part of their growth processes, startups and growing B2B organizations tend to be mainstays at most industry events, trade shows, conferences, meetups, and networking events. Any why not? There’s often no better way to generate word of mouth buzz for your business than by building meaningful industry relationships. Content inspiration comes into play with regards to leveraging these events into easy to create, highly sharable pieces of content like engaging photos, infographics, or blog posts that summarize highlights and key takeaways. Doing so can help position you as in-the-know and a thought leader in your industry.

As your B2B content marketing strategy matures, always make sure that various voices from different elements of your business are involved in the content marketing creation process. Even as you expand your content marketing tactics to include surveys, research pieces, digital content, eBooks and more, actively seek out the opinions of others to make sure the voice of your customer is ultimately the guiding light of your content.

If you’re looking for help kickstarting your organization’s B2B content marketing strategy, feel free to give us a call to discuss how we can be of help.

Kickstarting Your B2B Content Marketing Engine