B2B Content Marketing 

Did you know that your buyers are already 57% down their path of buying before engaging with you? To stay relevant, you need to meet your customers online before they engage with you. Here, we summarize how you can use B2B Content Marketing to achieve that.

Why is B2B Content Marketing important?

Think back to your most recently closed deal. How did that customer learn about your solutions, before and during the sales process? Chances are, a lot of it happened online.

Today, whether you actively pursue a content marketing strategy or not, your customers will learn about you before and during the sales process online. With no proactive strategy, you're at the mercy of what others say about you to get found. More likely, your customers will engage with your competitors.

Content marketing is an active and often dominant ingredient in any given B2B buying journey. To improve your chances of winning the trust of your customers, you need to actively pursue a content marketing strategy.

B2B Content Marketing stages

A great B2B content marketing program works from situations your customers find themselves in, and captures them in your sales process. Here's how a typical content based sales process helps you in every stage of the buying journey:

  1. Decide which situation you want to target - ideally a situation your customers find themselves in when they start a buying journey.
  2. Write targeted content about the issues your customers experience in that situation so that they find you through search.
  3. Spread this content on social media and other channels, including paid, to get found by more customers in those situations.
  4. Lead your visitors to insight-based content about the same situation.
  5. Establish a relationship with your buyer by offering value relating to their situatutation on a landing page behind a form.
  6. Follow up by targeted nurturing content about the same situation until your contact shows signs of buying intent.
  7. Align with the sales reps in their sales process to help them deliver and automate sales nurturing.

This journey can be illustrated schematically in a typical content based sales process. We call this a Marketing Funnel:

Content Marketing Funnel

Content marketing channels and formats

The marketing funnel shown above consists of three parts:

  1. Get visitors
  2. Get leads
  3. Sell

Each stage promotes content based on the stage in the buyer's journey, on different channels, and in different formats. Below is a description of those channels and format in each stage:

  • GET VISITORS

  • GET LEADS

  • SELL

Get more visitors

Tips from the coach: People search for their challenges, not your solutions! Therefore, blog about their experiences. From there, you can build trust, help them frame their experiences, and naturally link forward to your solutions.

How we help you implement B2B content marketing

We believe that you know your customers, their challenges, and your solutions best.

Therefore, we don't believe in taking over your content marketing efforts and producing the content for you. Rather, we want to supercharge your content production efforts with a great strategy and ongoing help, a fantastic Marketing Automation system to realize that strategy, and help to implement it all in the system.

To do this, we offer FunnelBud, a leading solution, along with unlimited free consultation and help. Learn more below.

SharpSpring: All-in-one Marketing Automation & CRM with help included

SharpSpring is an easy to use Marketing Automation and CRM solution that helps you get leads, manage your deals, and sell more. Complete with features such as contact tracking, lead scring and automations. Offered by FunnelBud a premium SharpSpring agency, complete with Professional Services and implementation at no extra cost.

Marketing Automation

Landing pages, newsletters, automations, segments and more. Rather than a bunch of tools - one for newsletters, one for events, one for lead scoring - let SharpSpring manage it all.

CRM system

Contacts, accounts, business opportunities, pipelines, email sync, reports and more. Integrated with Marketing so you get leads right into the CRM. Work as one team in SharpSpring!

Included Services

Our job is to help you grow. Get more leads. Automate your business. Integrate. Training and coaching. Designs and templates. Others charge $2-4,000/mo. We charge nothing.

Low monthly cost. All included. High quality help. Don't hesitate to request a demo now!

Want to learn more about SharpSpring?

No more juggling multiple tools. All your contacts in one place. Great features that help you get more leads, sell and align your sales and marketing teams. All customer communication saved in one place. Low cost, and Professional Services from SharpSpring experts included to get you going fast. Get in touch with us now and let's talk!