It’s harder for business-to-business (B2B) organizations to promote and sell their products or services than business-to-consumer (B2C) brands. One of the reasons for this is that there are more decision-makers involved in the buying journey. Also, B2B products are usually costlier than B2C ones and have a smaller market.
So, how do B2B brands convince other businesses to choose them over the competition? While there are four key pillars in this endeavor—search engine optimization (SEO), content marketing, social media, and paid ads—content marketing stands out as one of the steadiest ways of reaching B2B sales objectives.
In this article, we explore the importance of building thought leadership through content creation and uncover key strategies for success. Let’s take a closer look.
Understanding Brand Authority in B2B Marketing
Brand authority in B2B marketing is a reputation that the business builds for itself. This reputation should be impeccable: it should be credible and trustworthy. But it takes time and effort to achieve this status.
Today, brand authority is often conveyed through digital channels, primarily through content. And to build communities and relationships with business customers requires persuasion through one’s industry authority. Building this authority is like creating a buffet at a restaurant.
You need to ensure that you offer different types of content to different audiences so that all parties gain something valuable from the interaction. One of the best ways to achieve this is through thought leadership. Let’s see how it works in more detail below.
The Role of Thought Leadership in Building Brand Authority
Thought leadership in the B2B space is communicated through various digital channels. It is when an organizational leader, as an authority on a topic, steps up to the plate and offers valuable advice and information to their target audience.
This can be done in a multitude of ways, including but not limited to public speaking, webinars, contributions to public debates at conferences, content authorship through guest articles, opinion pieces, articles in magazine columns, book writing, and a lot more.
Each of these baby steps slowly accumulates and creates a snowball effect, building onto each other to give the business the industry standing that it is hoping to achieve.
Strategies for Creating Thought Leadership Content
Building thought leadership takes consistency. It also requires following proven strategies for maximum results. Here are the primary steps you should take on this journey to B2B success.
Identify your target audience
You may have a clearly defined brand identity and visuals that accompany it plus well-articulated unique selling propositions (USPs). All this is not very useful if you don’t have a clearly defined target audience. Think about the types of businesses that you are targeting. Identify their pain points. Create an online maturity assessment and provide personalized feedback. As such, you can collect information about them and exercise your thought leadership at the same time. Know what solution you are bringing to the table. And understand how they reach their decisions.
Conduct thorough research
Deep research should be a major part of your thought leadership strategy. This involves SEO keyword research to better understand the traffic potential of your content. It also involves thorough research into the industry you are targeting as well as what your competitors are doing. Understanding what you’re up against will go a long way to helping you tailor your strategy.
Leveragе different content formats
There are multiple content formats that you can leverage. Be they in-person events, online sessions, or different content types, spread your weight across those you’ve identified as where your audience “hangs out”. If your target B2B customers are primarily on LinkedIn, you should by all means be there. If they’re looking at helpful how-to videos, your presence on YouTube should not be missed.
Collaboratе with industry influencers
Look for ways to collaborate with those who have already carved out a niche for themselves in your industry. Influencers are not only young models for make-up or selling fitness clothing line in the B2C space. They are influential people with weight attached to their name. Collaborations with them are more likely to help you build and boost your brand, plus give you greater credibility and authority.
Optimizing Thought Leadership Content for SEO
If you’re planning on creating written content, there are important things you need to be aware of. Publishing a piece of text without understanding why you’re doing so, who is going to read it, and whether they’ll even get a chance to read it (due to lack of SEO) is a fruitless activity.
Importance of SEO in B2B content creation
SEO is critical in B2B content creation. It is the fundamental starting point for any thought leadership efforts. You need to study what your competitors are doing and how you can do better than them online. This means doing a thorough analysis of competitors’ keywords, backlink strategies, and optimizing your site and online presence so that you gain improved visibility on search engines.
Keyword research and integration
Good B2B SEO experts will tell you that you need to match what your users are searching for online. That’s where keyword research and integration takes center stage. Using high-search-volume keywords that are in a medium to low competition space with low keyword difficulty levels is an important strategy when writing your content.
However, it’s essential to avoid stuffing keywords unnecessarily. Search engine algorithms are quite smart at determining what a piece of content is about. Make sure you add value and follow best practices for on-page and off-page SEO. We cover this in more detail below.
Best practices for on-page and off-page SEO
Let’s start with on-page SEO. This is what your audience is exposed to. Think of it as the front-end of your online presence. You not only need to craft and optimize your content with keywords, you also need to consider other on-page factors.
Examples include clear and compelling meta titles and descriptions and strong visuals. Plus, you should follow good design principles. As for off-page SEO, be sure to optimize for mobile devices and ensure a fast website loading speed for a good user experience. Using certain online project management tools can seriously boost these efforts.
Measuring the impact of your SEO efforts
And, of course, there’s the old saying “what gets measured gets managed”. Ensure that you measure the impact of your SEO efforts. Metrics that are critical in this regard include search engine results page (SERP) rankings, organic traffic volume, engagement, followers, branded queries, backlinks, media mentions, etc.
Promoting and Distributing Thought Leadership Content
It’s great if you’ve produced thought leadership content. You’re on the right track. However, the work has only just begun after hitting the “publish” button. You now need to promote and distribute it through various channels and take steps to broaden your reach. Here’s what you should consider:
- Leveraging social media platforms: Once you publish a piece of content, don’t just leave it on your website. Make sure to leverage your business’ social media channels — from Instagram to TikTok — and promote it far and wide.
- Engaging with your audience: When your audience engages with you, be sure to engage back and vice versa. Like and repost their content to create a mutually beneficial relationship that doesn’t feel one-sided.
- Building relationships: Build relationships with industry peers. Reach out to them and discuss chances of collaboration. Whether it’s an influencer in your niche, a person with authority, a website that you’d like to contribute to as a guest author, etc. — use every opportunity you have to create meaningful relationships.
- Incorporating email marketing and newsletters: Leverage your subscriber list and send out newsletters that contain your content for greater exposure. Also, consider sending emails in which you share your latest pieces. With email having a generally high open rate, you’re bound to get an audience interested in what you have to say.
Measuring Success and Iterating Your Strategy
As final words, we’d have to say that you need to be dedicated and consistent if you want to achieve solid results. Once you gain momentum and start producing B2B content, be sure to distribute it far and wide and measure its impact.
Watch where your content strategy is working and where it is somewhat lackluster. When you’ve identified these key insights, you can take actionable steps to iterate your strategy in the right direction so that your online presence snowballs with good results for your business and audience.
Conclusion
Operating in the B2B space isn’t without its challenges. But with the right content strategy, you can build thought leadership that will position you as an authority in your niche and create a positive impact on your business. Be sure to follow the strategies outlined above and don’t forget to measure every interaction so that you can tweak and refine your strategy for maximum impact.
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