Sample B2B Content Marketing Strategy

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

Just about every business can benefit for incorporating a content marketing plan into their overall marketing strategy, but that is especially true for B2B companies. Good content is going to help position your company as an expert in your industry, help build you online brand presence, encourage consumer trust, drive traffic to your site and more. Step one is obviously to write great content. This could be a webinar, an e-book, a whitepaper and more. Content isn’t just what’s on a webpage, it can be almost anything. An important thing to remember is that B2B content can’t be full of sales pitches. You want your content to be something that a prospective buyer would keep on hand as a reference.

So let’s say you’ve written a white paper. How do you go about marketing it? Here is a sample content marketing strategy that I’ve seen successfully implemented:

Step One: Incorporate links to your site within the white paper’s content
Remember, you aren’t going for a sales pitch, but that doesn’t mean you can’t go after some relevant keywords and link back to pages of your site. These links can drive readers (which are your target audience) to your site and help with your link building and SEO. If you wrote a white paper on organizing business finances (you run a business finance management software company) the people downloading your white paper would most likely be business owners. These are the people you want to engage and connect with. Your white paper can answer their question on how to better handle payroll, and they might click through to your payroll management software page and consider purchasing it.

Step Two: Promotional blog posts
If your company operates a company blog, this is a great chance for a little self promotion. Introduce your white paper to your readers and give them the link to download it right there. Include a summary of the contents and describe who can benefit from the information. You can those promote those blog posts on your social networking profiles: Tweeting the links, posting content snippets to your Facebook wall, submitting the post to your various LinkedIn groups and so forth.

Step Three: Partner Promotion
Reach out to any partners you may have. Ask them to write a promotional post for their own blog, or include a link to download your white paper in their newsletter. This is a great way to get your content in front of a bigger audience. E-mail marketing is far from dead, and having your white paper delivered to opt-in email subscribers will keep it from being labeled as spam.

Step Four: Online advertisements
Create a landing page for your white paper. (This is a great place to enhance your own opt-in email list. In order to download your white paper, would-be readers have to sign up for your own newsletter.) Do some research and find small, yet popular blogs, in your niche and take out a banner ad promoting your white paper. Many small blogs will sell you ad space for as little as $50 a month. In return you can get a lot of downloads and e-mail addresses, maybe even new clients!