Big changes are happening in the world of content marketing. From the AI effect to the ever-growing popularity of audio and video content, current trends are changing how business-to-business (B2B) organizations approach content. Here are five B2B content marketing tactics I believe will be crucial to winning and converting more leads in 2024 and beyond.
1. Use your data to segment your audience and personalize your content
The days of “spray and pray” are done when it comes to marketing. Even in B2B marketing, 77 percent of buyers won’t make a purchase without personalized content. You need to start treating all of your campaigns more like ABM campaigns, which requires you to tap into your data and break your audience into industry, title, use case, and so on.
However, moving forward, it’s going to be more important to capture and use first-party data, or information users provide companies directly when they interact with them, such as inputting their contact information. That’s due to the phasing out of third-party cookies, which are the small pieces of data websites store in visitor web browsers to personalize their experience and collect de-identified data about their visit.
So how do you collect first-party data with content? There are several ways, such as:
Running a contest
Creating and gating more long-form content, such as white papers and extended case studies
Writing a weekly or monthly newsletter
There’s a lot you can do to build your email list, and creating compelling, personalized content is at the core of nearly all of it.
2. Keep leveraging video and audio
Consumer preference for video and audio content has been happening for some time now, and it doesn’t show any signs of slowing down. However, B2B companies are still learning how to best incorporate them into the marketing mix.
One tactic to consider is starting a podcast. It may seem like a poor use of resources, comparatively speaking—it’s difficult to cast a wide net by making them broadly available while capturing data on who’s listening. But there are lots of reasons for B2B organizations to have a podcast, such as increasing awareness, differentiating yourself from competitors, humanizing your company, and letting people listen on the go while increasing accessibility. Just like with webinars, podcasts can do double duty and help you create content for other channels, such as blogs, case studies, and Instagram Reels, depending on the content they include.
Beyond podcasts, another audio format to consider is creating audio versions of blogs and other assets. This increases accessibility for your content and makes it available to consume in more ways. Think about this: Someone on a walk, at the gym, or otherwise going about their daily life might Google a work problem—something your product or service helps solve. But they might not be in a place where they can read a long piece of content or might not have the time right then and there. Having content available in audio format helps people consume it in a way that they prefer.
When it comes to video, it’s no longer a “nice to have” for B2B organizations. If 83 percent of consumers prefer video over text, it stands to reason B2B prospects are no different. What’s great is that one piece of video content can serve multiple purposes:
The audio portion can be used for a podcast
Snippets can be used for social media
A video interview with a customer can be transformed into a text-based case study
To that last point: Search engines can’t index audio or video content, so text-based content is still crucial. While video transcripts can help, creating a condensed, text-based version of an interview or case study will appeal more to people quickly scanning, helping you get the most out of that content.
3. Create original content
Everyone seeks inspiration from others—see the various blogs and lists I linked here! There’s nothing wrong with that; citing the work of others helps boost your credibility. But at the end of the day, wholly original content works best for a number of reasons, such as that it helps you appear authoritative on the topic at hand, it improves engagement, and original content helps you ultimately rank higher in SEO.
Creating original work is easier said than done. How do you make it happen?
Conduct original research: From in-depth reports using your own data and/or third parties to holding industry-wide surveys, publishing the results of your original research can help your products and services’ value propositions really shine, all while providing real value to readers and without pushing too hard for a sale. Though it’s more of a time and resource investment to create something like this, a well-crafted research piece could net you numerous, high-quality leads for months to come.
Leverage your SMEs: Your executives and other subject matter experts (SMEs) in your organization likely carry industry knowledge that will be of great interest to your target audience, but they may be too busy to create these assets on their own. That’s where a copywriter can come in, interviewing and authoring original pieces on behalf of your SMEs.
Tap your existing audience: Friendly customers can provide plenty of insights that could that your prospects may find interesting. While case studies and quotes are worth their weight in gold, even just allowing your customers to speak about your industry or products/services like yours more generally—on, say, a roundtable interview or customer spotlight. These pieces can go a long way toward creating awareness and general goodwill with both prospects and your existing customers.
4. Incorporate AI into your workflow
Of course, AI and specifically generative AI tools like ChatGPT are the hot topic in marketing right now due to their ability to mimic human creative capabilities and speed content creation. Just how B2B marketers can best utilize these tools is another story.
It may be tempting to throw everything at ChatGPT instead of a copywriter and use it for all of your blogs, emails, and landing pages, but there’s good reason not to. According to Forrester, even generative AI content that has been lightly touched up worsens the purchase experience for 70 percent of B2B buyers—which means marketers rushing to use ChatGPT for everything will find themselves in a race to the bottom. Long story short: People can tell when you’ve relied too heavily on ChatGPT to market to them, and they don’t like it.
That doesn’t mean you should never use generative AI for your content. It can be a great tool to generate ideas and get you past “blank page” syndrome. It can also be perfect for creating smaller assets from previously written ones, like metadata and some of your social posts, depending on the channel. The key is to keep a human in the loop. As one marketer put it, “human marketers are going to do the thinking,” and AI expands upon that in a supporting role.
5. Be authentic
To that last point—authenticity sells. With all the noise from social media, AI, and algorithms, people are hungry for messaging that speaks to them like a human being. As one marketer puts it, “honesty and sincerity will always win out over artifice.”
That means there’s still a lot of value in things like email marketing, which can build trust from your audience over time. The same goes for off-the-cuff social media marketing, like Instagram Live or TikTok, the latter of which is a growing B2B channel and a great place to experiment.
Remember, it’s not just about creating more content, but the right content. Most marketers (57 percent) cite creating the right content for their audience as one of their biggest challenges. With so many channels and so many voices out there, responding to industry trends with smart, targeted, real content will help you cut through the noise.
Are you looking for help with content strategy, content production, or implementing generative AI into your workflows? Let’s have a conversation.