There have been tons of articles on content marketing but what about marketing business to business? Today I have put together a list of successful marketing tips for business 2 business marketing that you can use to help to get the most out of your business to business content marketing plan.

These tips were collected from pros like Hilary Hamblin, Jennifer Jones-Mitchell, David Klein and several other pros.

1.       Create content that is long form things like e-books or whitepapers that can be downloaded after they provide their contact information.  This helps you because the people who offer their contact information are concerned and searching for answers to their problems. The other way it helps you is that you can develop a mailing list. It is also one of the cheapest ways to develop leads.

2.       An editorial content calendar is a must in order to manage your content creation and distribution. It is hard to come up with good content and stick to a set schedule. Invest in a content calendar like the one offered here in order to get the most out of what you publish.

3.       A blog that is streamlined into your website, with well written content you can engage directly with your customers and potential customers both. It also increases your websites visibility.

4.       Align your content with the purchasing method; do not write content just to write content, better refer to writing services. This is because the purchaser is on a mission to find out answers as to what your product or service can do for them. With that said, your content should answer questions the purchaser has at every step of the purchasing method.

5.       Use case studies so that customers can see the evidence that your product has been used and has supporting data and metrics by someone real that they know and trust. This will help them trust your product or service and in turn trust your company.

6.       Focus on relationships, you wouldn’t tell a total stranger your difficulties or ask them to become your spouse so don’t do it with sales to potential customers. Learn about them, what is it they need, what they are looking for and why. Then you can offer help with telling them how your product or service can address those needs.   

Further tips from Moz

7.       Well defined strategies and goals for marketing. This is important as without defined goals then how do you come up with strategies that work. Without strategies you cannot put into place the content that will help you meet those goals. It sounds simple and obvious but you can’t believe the number of people who do not set well defined goals. A goal of $100,000.00 of sales is not well defined.  A goal of $100,000.00 of sales by the end of the year by providing customers answers to problems with well written content, tutorials on how to use the product or service….Do you see the difference here? There is a date by which to achieve that goal. Do you see what I am getting at when it comes to well defined strategies on how to meet that deadline?

8.       Make your content tell a compelling story.  Concentrate your story on the reader’s discomforts and chances instead of your product or service. Use words and visuals to connect to the reader. Make sure your team has a content guideline to work by, this way your content has a consistent voice throughout including contributors complying with your quality standards and brand.

9.       Plan your week in advance. This helps you stay on track with your tasks, what content you will produce, and more. You can be more productive this way and keep your content flowing.

10.   Your content should be created to help the buyer reach that moment of aha this will help me with these 3 top issues. Here you are helping your prospect realize that they are not the only one who is having this issue, others in the industry are as well. This will help them recognize and admit that there is an issue. Then answer why now and why you. This will lead them to that aha moment and get them to make them the purchase.

11.   Take the experts in your business and put them front and center; capture their answers to customer’s questions. By doing this you can achieve a question and answers or FAQ page that showcases their knowledge and makes them heroes to the readers.

12.   The three things you must do constantly, listen, pursue your story, and revise. Always listen to your customers, constantly review and revise what is and isn’t working, and keep your story going forward.

13.   Repurpose, recycle, and re-use your content. To do this repurpose the large content, recycle the evergreen, and re-use the short content. Take the large stuff; your e-books or long articles and repurpose it into smaller content, take the smaller content and find ways to turn it in to larger content such as e-books and long form articles.

Conclusion

With these tips in mind you can analyze, tweak, adjust, what is working and drop what hasn’t been working. You can also develop a plan or strategy that will allow you to improve your business to business sales through better marketing; all you have to do is listen to the pros!