How to Increase B2B Sales with Content Marketing

A smart content marketing campaign moves customers from brand awareness to increased leads, conversions and sales, and can be one of the most effective B2B inbound marketing strategies. Content marketing works because it gives customers what they want (valuable information they can use to solve problems) and establishes your position as an expert and trusted adviser.

How well does content marketing work? Consider the following:

• Sixty-one percent of consumers are more likely to buy from businesses that provide custom content.
• More than 90 percent of consumers describe custom content as useful.
• Eight out of 10 business decision makers prefer getting information in the form of content versus advertisements.

Some Campaigns Are More Successful than Others

While some content campaigns are wildly successful, many fail. Content marketers who succeed tend to have well-executed strategies. According to research from the Content Marketing Institute, 60 percent of B2B marketers with a documented strategy consider their efforts effective compared to just 32 percent whose strategy is “verbal."

If you want to increase sales with content marketing, you'll need a documented strategy. These four tips will help you jump-start the process:

1. Create a plan: if you want to be successful, you’ll need a smart, persuasive plan. Planning begins with the discovery phase, which involves taking stock of your current content inventory to identify the content you have and the content you need to create. If there are gaps in your current inventory, you must decide how you will create the additional content you need and how much this will cost. Your plan should also include clearly defined business objectives, such as metrics for lead generation, conversions and increased sales. Finally, your plan needs to utilize good analytics data to define your target customer (you can do this by creating detailed buyer personas) and determine how your content will align with their interests, problems and pain points.
2. Get buy-in and line up resources: content marketing isn’t free; there are costs for content creation and distribution. Successful campaigns generally consume from 25 to 30 percent of marketing budgets, but only 10 percent of marketers actually spend in this range, and about one in four spend less than 10 percent. Your strategic plan must clearly outline costs and persuasively link these expenditures to outcomes. You can’t fight this battle alone. To be successful, you need to present your case convincingly, then get buy-in and the necessary resources from chief stakeholders within your business.
3. All content should create a tightly-woven narrative: content marketing shouldn’t be piecemeal. Each piece of content you create should be distributed strategically over time, and should be part of an overarching, compelling story about your brand, your business and the ways your products and services can solve your customers’ problems. Think of each piece of content you create as one chapter in a book. Write that book in its entirety before publishing chapter one to ensure that all of the pieces are integrated into a persuasive narrative. Individual pieces of content should be designed to move customers naturally through the buying cycle, from affinity to trust and loyalty to conversion and sales.
4. Build a strategy for scalability: content needs to be fresh and unique to resonate with customers and boost search engine rankings. That means creating a lot of content. In fact, marketers now cite creating enough content as their biggest single challenge. One way to achieve scalability is to repurpose existing content. For example, you can distribute sections of a successful white paper as separate articles or turn a compelling webinar into multiple videos. Another way is to leverage the many free, online tools designed to simplify content creation.

Conclusion

Content marketing can enhance your brand, generate more leads and boost sales. You'll need:

1. A smart and persuasive strategic framework to get the buy-in and resources necessary for success.
2. Some creative ideas to develop content that resonates with your customers over the long haul.
3. A plan to create a sufficient volume of fresh content to maintain consumer interest and boost search rankings.