There have often been comparisons between B2C and B2B marketing, focused on how B2C marketers experiment with various messaging concepts and angles to broadcast exciting offers or details about their product while B2B tends to be a bit boring…(though it doesn’t have to be!).

In today’s B2B environment, the good thing is that B2B content marketers and marketing leaders can deploy similar tactics akin to their B2B marketing counterparts to boost online engagement and even build better content marketing output. B2B marketers, over the years, have opened up to the idea of creating newer customer experiences that draw a lot of similarities to B2C marketing basics…

However, a few core fundamentals need to be retained as content pillars in B2B marketing, given that the purpose of this market or behavior of the target audience in this segment is vastly different from what a typical B2C content marketing plan serves to achieve. 

B2B marketers need to always ensure that their content provides value to their audience, along with new learnings or tips. Besides which, it is more than crucial for B2B marketers to ensure a stronger sense of authenticity; marketing to other businesses is not the same as marketing to direct consumers. 

So what does it take for B2B marketers to ensure they’re always creating high value content? 

Marketing Technology News: MarTech Interview with Rob Sanchez, CEO at MeritB2B

Newsletters or Emailers that aren’t Necessarily All About ‘’You’’ or Your Brand

Here’s the thing: the martech segment is overflowing with new innovations all the time, giving end users a range of choices and options. Every martech platform has their strong points and weaknesses. 

Newsletters are usually part of most marketing plans, it is easier to use this channel to nurture regular subscribers or customers and share news of product offerings and updates. 

This is where marketers can build better strategies around their newsletter to create messaging that is more of a value-add and not always self-promotional. This will help subscribers grab a few top takeaways that are either beneficial to their role or near-future plans. Incorporating a few promotional elements along with value-add information, like latest insights, industry trends, best practices on a topic that is close to your target audience’s pain points can create a better newsletter strategy that gets users to read and engage with your content. 

Key Takeaway: It’s Not Always About The Click-Through Rate when it Comes to Brand Newsletters or Emailers. Time spent in engaging and reading newsletter content is a good indicator of how much your audience values your content. 

It’s time to Invest in Visual Content Strategies

Seasoned marketers who have been around will agree that there is just far too much information and content out there today. This puts the onus on marketers, to build well-thought out content structures and plans with a certain goal in mind. 

For content marketers, this means understanding what the audience wants, how they currently feel about your existing marketing or content plans and making data-backed changes to build out simpler and executable strategies, the keyword here being executable. 

Remember, the problem with too many ideas is that more than half of us fail when it comes to execution and the key to a robust, ROI-driven marketing or content plan lies in identifying adequate content or marketing plans based on the ability to see those campaigns executed to the end. 

When it comes to understanding what your audience wants, most of today’s B2B audiences crave easy to consume content that can be viewed across devices or accessed easily. Besides this, B2B audiences have also been leaning more toward interactive, visually appealing experiences and content, primarily because these formats from a world full of text based content. 

It’s a given that B2B marketers today need to incorporate visuals into their content strategy to boost engagement and add that element of quality. This is where marketers can be more experimental with the type and number of marketing channels they use to broadcast their brand content. 

Being active on channels like YouTube by uploading short video snippets or Q&As with industry thought-leaders and customers/partners for instance can boost search results and also allow marketers another medium through which to engage their audiences. 

Key takeaway: It is crucial to invest in easy to use video editing tools or have a professional video/audio editor work on raw files before they are used. This can help create better quality content that renders well.

Marketers can also use visuals and images within their text based marketing channels like blog articles to create better reader experiences and make their content more reader-friendly. 

Marketing Technology News: MarTech Interview with Greg Hanover, CEO at Liveops

Identify Content Types and Topics Based on Marketing Goals

Hiring a team of writers to help build out blog articles is pretty easy to do. But the main aspect to keep in mind when it comes to B2B content marketing is that: every content or marketing initiative has to enable the brand to ensure a better positioning in front of the right audience, while helping the team generate quality / organic leads through these initiatives. 

Fortunately, every stage of your marketing and content marketing can be measured to help make corrections in processes in real-time. 

What content marketers and marketing leaders need to hone in more in today’s highly heavily-fuelled content marketing space is that without aligning core goals to campaigns or content initiatives, it will be harder to build effective or quality content. 

Key takeaway: When you know you want your next 5 articles to help the brand rank higher in search, or when you know you want to run a video campaign to achieve a certain number of replies/engagement from a particular target list, it is easier to work backwards and build out a short-term content marketing plan aligned to this particular goal. A goal will also make it easier to identify the most appropriate content and marketing channels to choose from thereby ensuring a focused approach that boasts of quality content, because it is suited to a purpose.

Key takeaway *2: B2B is a dynamic environment to be in. Creating long-term content plans might not be as beneficial as goal-focused plans and campaigns that can be easily measured and evaluated.

Marketing Technology News: MarTech Interview with Greg Hanover, CEO at Liveops