Have you noticed how marketing to an individual consumer or shopper is pretty straightforward? 

They watch an Instagram video and decide to buy a product. 

Simple and direct! 

But marketing to an organization?

Whoosh, that’s a different ball game. 

They’d have to research, have internal meetings, and get approval from stakeholders before making a decision. 

You know how it is, right?

That’s why you need a different approach when marketing to companies — B2B content marketing. 

This approach helps you guide these corporate clients through their decision process, making closing deals easier. 

Want to learn more about this approach and how it works?

Let’s walk you through the entire process.

What is B2B content marketing?

B2B, short for business to business, is a type of business whose products or services are sold to other businesses. 

Take Shopify, the e-commerce giant. Small businesses subscribe to its service to manage and run their online stores. Basically, its customers are other businesses.

Content marketing, meanwhile, is producing and sharing valuable content to promote your business.  

Let’s merge the two terms. 

B2B content marketing is creating and sharing helpful content such as case studies or e-books to advertise your product or service to brands and companies.

Here, you focus on producing content that meets the needs of businesses in a format they’ll enjoy. 

Now content marketing that involves advertising to brands (B2B) and direct customers (B2C) might seem similar since they both involve creating content. 

However, they’re quite different in terms of objectives and other factors. 

In the next section, we’ll explore the key differences between B2B and B2C content marketing so you know which approach best suits your audience.

What’s the difference between B2B and B2C content marketing?

One main difference between both forms of marketing is the audience you’re selling to. 

In business-to-consumer marketing (B2C), you advertise your product to anyone who needs it. Students, stay-at-home moms, influencers, professionals, or anyone. 

But in B2B marketing? 

You’re targeting stakeholders and decision-makers in companies who have the final say on products the organization will use. We’re talking about chief revenue officers (CROs), marketing leads, or e-commerce experts. That’s why the B2B brand, Hotjar, has its blog section structured to target different stakeholders. 

Image Source: Hotjar

Another way both marketing types differ is through their distribution channels.

B2C content is great for social media. Because their target audience is kinda open to everybody, you can publish content on different social media platforms like Pinterest, TikTok, etc. Once someone sees a product they like, they click the link in your bio and buy it. 

Publishing B2B content follows a different approach. Here, your audience is probably attending a webinar/conference, browsing LinkedIn, or reading blogs.

So, if you want to distribute B2B content, it has to be on channels where stakeholders spend their time.  

But hey, enough talking. 

Let’s share other ways they differ with the comparison graph below.

Now that’s cleared up, let’s talk about why B2B content marketing is important. 

Why is content marketing important for B2B businesses?

At the end of the day, the decision-makers in a B2B brand are still people. And according to an Adobe study, people buy more from brands they trust. 

In fact, 88% of B2B buyers will only buy if they view your sales and marketing team as trustworthy.

Content marketing helps you build trust with ‘these people’ by consistently creating content that meets their needs. 

This also positions you as an authority in the field, someone who understands the workings of the industry well.  

In addition to that, B2B companies need content marketing because it offers:

An impressive return on investment (ROI)

Content marketing is a cost-effective digital strategy. By investing a little in creating valuable content, you get immediate engagement and long-term returns. Once published, high-quality content can attract and keep leads, meeting your audience’s needs and driving traffic to your site long after its initial release. This means you can achieve a strong return on investment as the content continues to generate interest and engagement without extra cost.

We’re not just saying this; statistics show that marketers have tagged content marketing as one of the digital marketing channels with the highest ROI. 

Increased brand visibility

As you create and publish content that solves people’s challenges, you gradually build a reputation. 

People start recognizing your authority and get hooked on your style. Before you know it, they’re referring you to colleagues and tagging your brand on social media to share their results—all because you kept creating content that addressed their needs.

That’s what 83% of marketers surveyed by the Content Marketing Institute experienced after leveraging content marketing. It took their brand awareness to another level.

So what type of content would B2B brands appreciate?

Only one way to find out…keep reading. 👇

8 types of B2B marketing content

Brands aren’t like regular direct customers…if you want to convince them, you need content formats that show authority and positions your brand as their best solution. 

Its content types that reflect just that we’ve put on display below. Let’s walk you through them. 

1. Thought leadership blog posts

These are articles you write and publish on your website. They’re helpful for:

• Sharing in-depth knowledge on topics the B2B audience is searching for. 
• Writing about new trends in the industry. 
• Updating your audience on new product features and how to use them. 
• Providing detailed solutions to the audience’s pain points. 

This content type is one resource center where people go in search of credible information.

An example is the Ceros blog where brands can find insights on how to increase their team’s output and be more efficient. 

With blogs like ours, people can find useful knowledge they can use in real time to solve problems, improve their workflow, and do research. 

We’re not just saying that.

 71% of B2B buyers use blogs when researching their purchasing decisions. It helps them learn more about your brand and the problems you can solve.

Now, when you create blog posts that meet the audience’s needs at different stages of the marketing funnel (awareness, consideration, and decision), it positions you as an authority in your field. 

Other brands will want to use your success as a case study and even link back to your site.

Take HubSpot a marketing software brand, for instance, its blog has had over 2 million backlinks in the past six months. 

The reason that’s possible?

They’ve consistently published helpful content, so now people trust them to provide useful information when they’re in a bind. 

And other brands recognize this too.

2. Whitepapers

Whitepapers are a type of content that provides quality information on a particular topic in your industry. 

It allows you to go into more detail on a topic than a blog post allows, highlighting the problem and providing the solution. 

Here’s what whitepapers help you do:

• Educate your knowledgeable audience as it lets you go in-depth with explanations.
• Promote a methodology or approach people can use. 
• Collect leads as whitepapers are gated content. The audience will need to provide some information to access it. 

This whitepaper, designed on Ceros for Forter, a digital commerce software tool, is an example of what we’re talking about. 

Here, the creators provided a snippet of what the audience can expect to see if they get the whitepaper. And then requested that they download it by providing some information. 

Now it sounds so much like an e-book but nah, they’re quite  different. 

While both are digital content, whitepapers are used to describe a problem or challenge and provide a solution. On the flip side, e-books provide comprehensive information on topics you discuss on your blog.

You can say whitepapers are the academic documents of the marketing world.

But they’re effective. A Demand Gen survey showed that 71% of B2B buyers use whitepapers to research purchasing decisions.

3. Testimonials

Whether you’re running a B2B or B2C marketing campaign, one thing is certain in both instances — people are involved. 

From the Adobe study shared earlier, we see that trust is a big deal when making purchase decisions. 

If people trust your brand, there’s a good chance they’ll buy from you. 

But, how do you build this trust?

Aside from creating blogs as mentioned before, another way is through testimonials. 

Do other people have a good experience using your product or service?

A survey by G2 of over 500 business professionals showed that 92% of them say they’re more likely to buy a product or service after reading a trusted review about it. 

Testimonials act as social proof to buyers, telling them your brand is the real deal because of other people’s experiences. 

It’s a positive comment from existing clients describing how helpful your business has been to them. And it can be in written or video format.

In our case, we used both formats to share customer reviews. 

The testimonial page started with what users have said about Ceros with interesting stats. 

Then, show clips and quotes from happy clients.

4. Case studies

Case studies are a more detailed version of testimonials. 

They’re an in-depth study of a customer’s experience with your brand. 

Here, you begin by presenting the challenge they were having before using your product or service. 

Then, proceed to show details of how you’ve helped them solve the issue and the results they’ve gotten. 

It’s different from testimonials because the case study provides context to potential customers. They get to see the situation of that existing customer and understand what motivated them to pick your solution. 

Like other content types on this list, case studies are pretty effective. It’s a content format preferred by 79% of B2B buyers when researching a product to buy.

An example is this case study of MarkUp.io by content marketing agency Minuttia.

Image Source: Minuttia

It showed a summary of the brand, the growth it experienced, and then proceeded to challenges faced and solutions. 

5. Podcasts

Podcasts are long-form audio content where you discuss topics and customer pain points conversationally so people can listen on the go. 

Aside from the fact that podcasts have become popular in mainstream media, they allow you to touch on important topics in a way B2B buyers like.  

Listeners can control how they digest the information by pausing, rewinding, or forwarding the audio. 

But, do they work?

In an interview with Fast Company, Clayton Ruebensaal, executive vice president of American Express said 60% of their small business owners listen to podcasts and more than half of that percentage listen to business podcasts. 

Reports also show that 61% of people want a product or service after hearing it on a podcast. 

So, yeah, it works. 

Also, you can produce podcasts in different ways. 

You could go solo, invite industry experts so it’s like a real-time interview, and record a video of the session for YouTube or other social media platforms. 

Sprout Social, a social media analytics tool, has a podcast publication they call Social Creatures. Here, they go with the interview version.

Image Source: Sprout Social

They invite guests who’ve had a successful run with social media to share their secrets. 

6. Webinars

A webinar is an online presentation that can take any form you want. It can be an online seminar, a lecture, or even a workshop, depending on what you’re trying to achieve.

Want to build authority? 

You can organize an online seminar about industry trends and how they will change the way brands work.

Launched a new product feature?

A workshop for your audience explaining why it’s relevant to them and how to use it will do. 

Overall, webinars allow you to engage with your audience and have conversations with them. 

They ask questions unique to their company and you provide solutions, solidifying your position as a thought leader. 

That’s why 66% of B2B buyers prefer this content format. 

It’s a good way for them to get custom solutions to their challenges. 

A webinar is also a good way to get leads as people have to register for the online event.

An example is this webinar on how brands can adapt to changes in Google search:

Image Source: Minuttia

The seminar talked about the impact of Google’s search engine generative experience on brands and strategies they can learn to adapt to the changes.

If you want to organize a webinar, this is an approach you can take. 

7. Videos

Video content has always been a gold mine in marketing. It just has a way of capturing people’s attention. 

And that applies to B2B marketing too. 

91% of marketers in a Wyzowl survey say they use it as a marketing tool and for 90% of them, it boosts their brand awareness.

55% of tech-focused buyers pegged it as their most useful content type.

If you share helpful information using videos, people will want to watch it.

According to the Wyzowl survey, videos are how 91% of people say they learn about a product or service. 

82% of them have been convinced to buy a product after seeing a video. 

You can create videos that meet user’s needs at different stages of the marketing journey. 

Product videos for awareness, how-to & case study videos for the consideration stages, and customer testimonials for the conversion stage. 

That’s what brands like Semrush, a digital marketing platform, do with their YouTube pages:

Image Source: YouTube

They create videos that business owners at different stages can leverage to improve their productivity.

8. Interactive content

Interactive content is a content type that requires the audience to engage with the content. They have to click, hover, scroll, or respond to experience the content.

Research shows it gets more viewing time than static content, which people merely look at. More specifically, while people spend about eight minutes viewing static content, they’ll spend about 13 more minutes on interactive content. 

Plus, it gets 52.6% more engagement too. 

Using interactive content gives your brand a different feel and vibe. It makes it more attractive, holds people’s attention, and makes them feel more connected to the brand as they interact with the content. 

An example is this landing page by HuffPost celebrating Pride Month.  

Aside from the calls to action (CTAs), the page had clickable hotspots, animations, and videos too. It was a two-way experience for readers.  

Want to see more examples of interactive content like this?

Check out this page for more. 😉

You’d even find templates you can start creating interactive content with ASAP.

***

So, those are content types you can use in your marketing strategy. 

But creating content is one thing — for it to work, it needs to be distributed appropriately so the content gets to your target audience.

That’s what we’re going to cover in the next section. 

What are the main content distribution channels for B2B brands?

There are three main channels your content can be promoted on in B2B marketing.

Let’s quickly unpack them together.  

Owned media

The best place to start promoting content is on digital properties you own and have total control such as:

• Official website: Your brand’s home on the internet where all information about the brand and its product or service is stored. Here, you can host all your content from blogs to podcasts, brand news, webinars, videos, and e-books, the whole nine yards. 
• Mobile app: The handy version of your product. You can use it to promote content on your site to capture people’s attention. This way, your audience can access the content on the go. 
• Email newsletters: Email is another channel where you can share content with your clan. With emails, you can send updates about new posts and new promotional offers.  

Paid media

This distribution channel lets you communicate the brand’s message only when you pay for it. It includes:

• Search engine marketing: This involves bidding for keywords users are searching for, to get the first placement on the search engine results page (SERP). 
• Social media advertising: Here, you’re posting content on your social media accounts and boosting it so it has more reach. With this option, you can target those who see the content based on their demography, interests, and desires.
• Display ads: These are those ad banners you see in different places on a site. It involves buying ad slots on different sites to display your content.

Shared & earned media

If you consistently produce high-quality content, people will notice. And when they do, they’ll share the content with others and will want to invite you to chat about ideas in a webinar or conference.

That’s what shared and earned media is, getting your content on third-party publications. It includes:

• Brand collabs: This is where you team up with another B2B brand to create and publish content. This way, the customer base from both brands gets to see the content. 
• Guest blogging: Here, you write blogs and share your expertise on another brand’s site. The idea is to promote your brand and let people know you’re a real deal in the industry.

***

With that cleared up, let’s show you how to start winning with B2B content marketing by creating a plan.

How do you develop a winning B2B content marketing strategy?

Like most great things in life, you need a plan to get started. A plan guides you on the right steps to take so you know if you’re succeeding or not. 

The same applies to B2B content marketing — creating a plan will set you on the right track to success. 

So, we’ve outlined a seven-step plan to get started on your B2B content strategy.

Let’s dive into them in detail.

1. Research the target audience

If you want your marketing campaign to be a hit, the first thing you need to do is to know who your target audience is. 

A content marketing report by Semrush showed that understanding one’s audience is the first step to successful content marketing. 

Let’s share two ways you can do this:

Leverage Google Analytics (GA) 

GA is a platform that gives you insight into your site and its performance. It can also help you learn about who your audience is. 

Here’s how to do that after you’ve signed up or signed in to GA:

Go to Report on the dashboard. Then, click User, User Attributes, and Overview. 

That will give you a rundown of your existing users by age, gender, language, location, and more.

Monitor your competitors’ audiences 

See, in the B2B game, there’s almost always going to be a brand that’s been around longer than yours. Or does something very similar to yours. 

To find the secret of their success, you can use Semrush’s One2Target tool.

Once you’re signed in, enter the competitor’s URL and hit the analyze button. 

You’ll find information about its audience demographics (age, gender, and location), interests, and platforms they spend their time on. 

Then, lastly, create buyer personas; profiles that group shared characteristics of different people from your research.

HubSpot has a tool, Make My Persona, that’s designed to help you do that. 

It’s these personas that you’ll refer to when you start creating content. 

2. Identify your content marketing goals

You then need to know what you’re trying to achieve with this B2B content marketing deal. 

Are sales low and you need to close more deals?

Maybe new leads are low and you need to generate more.

You need to pick a struggle that’ll define how the campaign will go. Defining your goals will help you decide on which content to create, which distribution channel to use, and which key performance indicators (KPIs) to track. 

But the trick to setting goals is to be pretty clear about the expectations. 

For instance, your content marketing goal can be to generate a thousand more leads in the fourth quarter of 2024 (Q4) via your email marketing campaign. 

That’s an example of a goal that’s specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound. 

Any other goal should follow a similar principle.

3. Perform a content audit

A content audit is like running a test to see what’s working and identify areas that could use improvement.

It helps sort through your content so you know what needs repurposing (adapted for other uses), updating, deleting, and when you need new content.

To analyze your website, you can use GA again. 

Head over to Reports on the dashboard. But this time click on Lifecycle, down to Engagements; then Pages and screens.

This will show you different pages on your site alongside metrics like views, user visits, and number of conversions. 

You can also use the Google Search Console to run the audit. 

• Connect your site and verify it in Google Console. 
• Go to the Performance menu and click the Search Queries tab. It’ll show you a list of terms users type in to find your site. Analyze it to discover questions, terms, and content ideas that are relevant to you.
• Look through the queries to find ones with high impressions and low clicks. That tells you the site is appearing on the SERPs for that keyword but people aren’t clicking it. That’s a chance for you to update the content there, and make it more appealing and relevant to users. 
• Go through clicked queries. These are content items that people are clicking and engaging with already. Here, your job is to identify better opportunities to create complementary content to build on the success there. 
• Monitor the Performance menu for changes in impressions and clicks. This will help you identify changes in your target audience’s interest over time. So you know when to increase content marketing efforts on a particular topic or else find new topics. 

4. Check what competitors are doing

The idea of this step is to identify:

• What’s working for your competitors
• What’s not working
• What types of content they create
• Where their content marketing game is strong and where it’s weak

Overall, identify what’s working for them so you can replicate and fill the gaps where they’re struggling. 

A competitor-analysis tool like Site Explorer on Ahrefs can help you do this:

• Click on the Site Explorer menu
• Enter the competitor’s URL 
• Click the Backlink button

It’ll analyze the website’s backlink profile and show you the content types the competitor is associated with. 

SimilarWeb is another tool that can help you watch the competition. It does a deep dive into their content and traffic source. 

With Similarweb, you can also check out topics people are looking for and sites they visit.

5. Consider the entire sales funnel

In marketing, there’s a cycle customers go through when making a purchase. 

It’s called the sales funnel and it has different stages in it:

• Awareness stage: Aka top of the funnel (TOFU) where they’re aware of the challenges they face and that they need a solution.
• Consideration stage: Aka middle of the funnel (MOFU) where they’re doing in-depth research on which product or service is the right fit for them. 
• Decision stage: Aka bottom of the funnel (BOFU) where they’re almost ready to make a decision based on their research in the previous stage.

To have a successful campaign, you need to create content for all these stages. 

A 2020 survey shows that 82.6% of B2B content is focused on TOFU. So creating for other stages will make you stand out.

So, what content can you create for all the stages? 

Let’s start from the top:

• For TOFU, you want to go with content types like podcasts, social media posts, blogs, infographics, and videos. 
• MOFU requires more informative content types, such as comparison posts, whitepapers, e-books, case studies, and webinars.
• BOFU is the finishing touch of conversions, so you want to go with emails, product demos, case studies, reviews, discounts, and one-on-one consultations. 

6. Choose the right distribution and promotion strategy

Next up, think about where to publish your content. 

We talked about this earlier, in the section on distribution channels. 

But the question you’re probably asking is … how do I know which channel to choose?

You’ll get an answer if you can answer these questions:

• What channels do your clients spend most of their time on?
• Which channel can help you achieve the content marketing goals more quickly?

Answering that will give you a hint on where to focus. 

It might be a combination of all three types we spoke about earlier or just consistently focusing on one.

7. Track and measure for success

Lastly, ensure you’re monitoring the content marketing campaign performance.

The goals you’ve set will come in handy here again as they’ll help you identify what to track. 

If your goal is generating leads, for instance, you’ll want to track impressions, clicks, engagement, and conversions using Google Analytics. 

Monitor pages on your site housing the different content types to know what’s working and what’s not. 

This way, you’re constantly optimizing and improving the content and how it’s presented on all fronts. 

***

Now, let’s say you’re ready to launch but unsure if you’ve got the right resources to begin.

We’ve put together tools you can leverage to streamline your workflow below.

What software tools to use for B2B content marketing?

Content marketing is a digital interpretation of the phrase, ‘Rome wasn’t built in a day.’ It’s a long-term game and you need all the help you can get, starting with these tools:

• Ceros: Ceros is a no-code platform for creating, managing, and publishing interactive content. If you want to ensure your content captures attention, Ceros is the tool for you. 

The best part? No prior experience is needed—just your creativity. On Ceros, you can start with a customizable template and effortlessly edit it to fit your style.

• HubSpot: An all-in-one marketing platform, HubSpot is a digital tool that’s committed to helping brands grow. It provides everything you’ll need to give clients a good experience. 

It has a marketing hub to help launch and manage a content marketing campaign. And when you get leads, HubSpot has a sales hub to help you close deals in a personalized way. Overall, it simplifies managing a campaign for you. 

• Marketo: Marketo is an Adobe product that lets you automate cross-channel B2B marketing campaigns. It can help build and segment audiences with its predictive AI feature, manage leads as they come, and offer your audience a personalized experience by sending action-triggered content. Marketo also allows you to track the audience’s touch points as they interact so you know what’s working. 
• Hootsuite: Hootsuite is a digital platform for social media marketing and management. You can use it to monitor social media campaigns, track brand mentions, publish posts on social media, and run paid campaigns too. 
• Semrush: This is an online marketing tool that can help you launch content marketing campaigns. With Semrush, you can find topics the audience needs, optimize them for organic traffic, and research your competitors. It can also help you with keyword research, finding gaps in a competitor’s backlinks, and managing social media profiles. 
• Google Analytics: Google Analytics is a tool that monitors your website and mobile apps to collect useful insights so you can make better decisions. GA lets you know what kind of audience you’ve got, how much time they spend on your site, and other necessary data. 
• Trello: Trello is a management platform you can use to organize different tasks to be done in your campaign. It helps you centralize the project, assign jobs to team members, and keep everyone on track. 

Up next, we want to share some tips to improve your chances of success.

What are some best practices for B2B content marketing? 

Because content marketing is a long game, you need to be on your A-game to make a lasting impact. 

Here’s how you can do that:

Send out regular newsletters

Email newsletters are a gem in B2B content marketing.

Fifty percent of B2B marketers have tagged them as their smoking gun in a campaign. So it’s something you need to take seriously, as a regular newsletter will: 

• Keep you on top of people’s minds every time they open their email inbox. 
• Build a good relationship with your audience. 
• Position you as an authority. 
• Nurture new leads as you guide them to make a purchase. Thirty-one percent of B2B businesses say that’s what they do.   

Focus on informative content

Want to ensure you have great content marketing success? 

Produce only high-quality valuable content. People should consume your content and leave educated, entertained, and satisfied. 

In a survey by Gartner, a research and insight firm, 77% of B2B buyers experienced a long purchasing process. 

And the way around that, according to Gartner?

Creating helpful content.

It helps make your buyers' lives easier and makes you a likely prospect when it’s time to make a purchase.

Leverage storytelling

As we’ve established early on in this guide, people are responsible for purchasing decisions in B2B marketing. And if there’s one thing people like, it’s stories. It just has a certain oomph that’s relatable and makes people emotional.

If you tell stories, you’ll be appealing to their emotions, earning their trust. A report by digital marketing brand The Drum showed that 80% of marketers witnessed a positive impact on their campaign performance when storytelling was used, compared to those without it.  

So, using stories will make every interaction stakeholders have with your brand memorable. 

***

There, you have it. 

A detailed guide to B2B content marketing. You’re welcome!

Over to you!

We hope by now you’ve figured out the best way to get started on this journey. 

But if you haven’t, that’s okay too. 

Our advice?

Embrace interactive content as you begin. Not just because it’s our thing but because it’s effective content. 

According to research, that’s why other marketers have begun to embrace it. It’s bringing in engagements for them, increasing awareness, and generating leads. 

You’d like to have a similar experience, won’t you?

Here’s where it begins: schedule a demo with Ceros and your journey begins!