The Grim Truth About B2B Content Strategies: Too Much Content, Too Few Readers

Content marketing is becoming the biggest source of revenue for some businesses. Exclusive B2B websites are also focusing on blogging to cater to a wider range of customers. Platforms like Blogger, Medium, and LinkedIn are providing strong content marketing opportunities to businesses. In fact, over 53% of contemporary marketers include blogging as their priority. By the end of 2020, there will be over 31.7 million bloggers across the world spanning several niches.

B2B companies are more likely to engage in content marketing as compared to B2C companies. Even there, a noticeable bulk of B2B content simply sites unnoticed and unused. This points towards the lack of an optimized content strategy. The continuous increase in the bulk of content has led to a situation where the human users are incapable of consuming it. Mark Schaefer described this disconnect as a content shock. The availability of astronomical quantities of content is throwing off the old content marketing strategies. This is causing content marketing budget of businesses to rise, yet there are hardly enough ways to increase reach effectively.

Do you have a content SEO strategy?

At this moment, the only savior of business content can be SEO. It can power any inbound marketing strategy successfully. Any active search engine optimization strategy should include market analysis as its integral part. This will help any writer target their content towards a definite user group. Having a robust SEO strategy, of course, helps with a brand's organic visibility. It is all about finding your target audience and reaching out to them in the right way. Utilizing specific keywords and latest search trends always help in developing pertinent content that rings with the right audience.

What kind of content should work for your brand?

Original content writing trumps everything else in the content marketing sphere. Here are a few types of original content you can create leveraging the latest SEO trends for 2018 –

• Visual content: guides, webinars, lookbooks, infographic, illustrations, and animations.
• Interactive content: live chats, quizzes, discussions, configurators and solution builders.
• Static content: white papers, blog posts, e-books, and brochures.

It is of paramount importance to keep your content type diverse. This will help you mix things up, and it will help the readers stay on your website for longer periods. Interesting content needs interesting packaging. This can include cross-blending content types and include videos within the static content or free visual reports with your email newsletters. The idea is to keep your readers engaged for as long as possible and modern readers are definitely not popular for their patience with static content types.

Stop busting your content budget, let your users help

Generating fresh content daily, especially without the necessary appreciation from the target readers can be fatiguing. If you are suffering from a creative burnout, you need to start thinking about leveraging user-generated content. There are several pros of user-generated content –

1. This kind of content is easy to leverage, and there is plenty of it.
2. This increases user engagement and boosts user trust.
3. It is cheap, and you don't have to sweat it every few days to create new angles. Your users will do it for you.
4. It keeps your brand name in mention, and it helps with organic presence.

There are a few standard ways to generate user content including organizing online quizzes, competitions that promise token prizes for winners, creating a dedicated page for user-generated content, Q&As, discussion threads and using your social media to collect more snippets from users. Online marketing agencies have been leveraging user-generated content (UGC) from Facebook and Instagram for quite a few years now, to power their content strategies.

To keep things colorful and interesting, your user-generated content strategy should, of course, focus on visual content like HD images, videos, and infographics. Some brands prefer using Twitter or Instagram as sources of their visual UGC. Quizzes, live chats, and polls can also become an active source of your UGC; you need to orient them to boost engagement.

The takeaway message

There is no use boosting your content marketing budget unless you know who your customers are. Your ultimate target should be to boost customer engagement and improvement of organic visibility of your pages. Most importantly, do not let your existing content go to waste. It is time to repurpose it and then use the right platforms to increase their visibility. Repurposing content can include creating visual representation out of existing static content or linking your static content to interactive content formats to drive traffic. The problem is not the lack of good content. The problem is the lack of enough ways for businesses to push these content pieces to the correct audience. So, stop wasting your time thinking about new content creation and try to optimize your existing pieces for better response.