
4 Tactics to Boost Your B2B Content Marketing ROI
Content marketing offers an opportunity to dramatically increase sales by attracting traffic and nurturing leads. It’s a long-term approach that improves brand visibility and helps build strong relationships with the target audience—but only if it’s done right.
After investing considerable resources (time, effort, and a fortune in marketing budgets), B2B content marketers typically yearn for the best return on their investment. So it no surprise that roughly 6 in every 10 content marketers want to learn the best practices to improve the outcome of their content marketing strategies.
Now comes the all-important question; how do you increase the ROI of your content marketing strategy? Here are 4 important tactics to get the ball rolling:
1. Know and Focus on Your Target Audience
Understanding the needs, preferences, problems, and location of your target audience is arguably the most important step for a successful content marketing strategy. For B2B marketers, you need to know the type of companies that qualify as prospects.
Get into the nitty-gritty of what the decision-makers in these companies want and expect in terms of content. For this, you can either analyze your competitors or your existing data. The idea is to create engaging content that resonates with your customers at a deeper level than any alternatives. And with a highly engaged audience, a juicy content marketing ROI follows soon afterwards.
2. Learn How to Build and Launch an Effective Sales Funnel
What most B2B content marketers fail to understand is that prospects (even the highly qualified ones) are at different stages of the buyers’ journey and their needs differ accordingly. The content you used to attract prospects just doesn’t suffice anymore for leads that are further down the sales funnel.
You need to understand the stages in your sales funnel, nail the content requirements in each of them, and distribute relevant information to each lead. This ensures your content is relevant to improve conversion rates—leading to an improved content marketing ROI.
3. Distribution! Distribution! Distribution! – Choose the Right Platform
Your distribution channels could make or break your content marketing strategy. You can create the best content on the internet but it’ll never gain the traction it deserves if you push it in the wrong platforms.
“Content may be king, but distribution rules the land.”
—Adam Robinson
The right distribution platform is defined by where your target audience tends to hang out (so this point ties closely with tactic 1 above). It can be anything from blogs, emails, other reputable websites, to social media platforms.
For B2B companies, LinkedIn is usually the content marketing platform of choice—owing to the professional audience base of company decision-makers. (PS: 9 in every 10 B2B digital marketers distribute their content on LinkedIn).
4. Keep Track of Trends and Analytics – Move with the Flow
What is going on in the digital marketing space? What are the best content marketing strategies? And most importantly, what do your metrics tell you about the effectiveness of your strategies?
You need to keep your eyes and ears on the ground—ready to leverage emerging trends in the industry. It’s also imperative that you measure the performance of your content marketing strategy to ensure it resonates with the audience. With this, you can tell the type of content that drives the most engagement, reasons you’re losing leads, the rate of conversion, and so on.
As long as you play your cards right, content marketing is easily one of the best ways to thrive in a competitive online landscape. It shows your target audience that you understand their needs and you’re ready to solve their problems.
The tactics highlighted in this article offer a snippet of what an effective content marketing strategy looks like. Stay tuned for more tips and tricks!
Keywords Used | AVG Monthly Searches | SEO Competition | Paid Competition |
Content marketing | 14,800 | 63/100 | 26/100 |
Content marketing strategy | 1,900 | 12/100 | 38/100 |