3 B2B Marketing Trends: What Works and Why?

Today, any top-performing B2B content marketing strategy always puts the audience’s informational demands ahead of the company’s sales or promotional message.

The content needs to be informative and helpful for the audience. That’s the singular, most effective B2B marketing strategy that all top marketers and successful companies use to get more leads and learn the latest new need that their clients have.

Of course, as a digital marketer you want your audience to find, consume, discuss and share your content.

That’s why successful content marketers put their audiences’ needs first. With that in mind, you can also create similarly interactive content.

10 Best B2B Content Marketing Examples:

I won’t deny that finding successful B2B content marketers was tough.

You’ll always find unsuccessful content marketing strategies out there. There are many content marketers who are doing things wrong and not achieving their marketing goals.

I’m going to share with you today some of the best business to business companies that not only understand content marketing but back it up with excellent work of their own.

Here are some of the greatest case studies of B2B brands doing content marketing perfectly:

1. First Round Magazine: Venture Capital

First Round Magazine sets an amazing example for a successful marketing strategy. In an AMA on Growth Hackers, Camille Ricketts (the First Roundhead of marketing) shared some insight on how the company creates its content strategy. She said:

“We knew we’d be successful if we could grow First Round’s brand awareness among brilliant pre-founders. What do these people need? What would have a lot of utility for them? Clearly, they’d love advice from people they didn’t have access to. So that became our aim … We started out writing articles based on what operators shared during speaking events like our summits. We determined there was an appetite for this type of exclusive, tactical knowledge, but that we could super-charge it even more if we based articles on interviews, where we could focus even more on eliciting specific advice.”

Stunningly, this great content marketing strategy works perfectly for them. First Round website has gotten over 70,000 backlinks to several blog posts, pages and interviews to their site.

As a result, they’ve become the leaders in the VC community although they only have a small content marketing team. They saw the trend and they capitalized on it, whether they had the resources or not didn’t matter – they had the will.

2. LeadPages

LeadPages designs mobile-friendly and customizable landing page templates and testing services to help companies increase their audience reach.

Clay Collins, Founder, and CEO of LeadPages knew they had to be scrappy to compete against VC-funded giants like Infusionsoft and Hubspot.

So, Collins created a growth hypothesis depending on the idea that “a content team of four people could outperform an 80+ person sales team at most companies.” It was a brilliant idea which allowed them to focus on something better instead of wasting $10,000 on customer acquisition as some of their competitors did.

Based on this principle, LeadPages developed these effective content marketing assets:

• ConversionCast: it is an extremely popular marketing podcast presented by Tim Paige, a world-class podcaster.
• A successful marketing blog that covers A/B testing, lead generation, and related topics.
• Weekly webinars on various topics related to online digital marketing.
• A set of marketing resources, including 10 content marketing case studies, 7 online marketing courses, 2 inspirational eBooks, and 8 helpful infographics (all are free).

Clay Collins’ hypothesis was true. Thanks to his content marketing strategy, LeadPages ended up with a remarkable high lifetime value to customer acquisition cost ratios. In other words, this helped them grow a massive audience, earning 35,000 customers in less than three years.

Ideally, they hit over $16 million in revenue in the year 2015, and in 2016 became the #148 fastest growing company in America. LeadPages success makes them one of the greatest content marketing examples according to every analysis, report, or statistics out there.

3. Close.io: CRM Software For Inside Sales

One of the great lessons to learn from Close.io is the diversity of content types. They keep on creating different types of content.

Simply, the Close.io content strategy is based on the diversity of their content formats. It’s not just a bunch of how-to guides. It’s not just a bunch of listicles. And it’s not just a bunch of blog posts on how to write a clickable email.

Instead, you can take a look at the content diversity in this screenshot alone:

Two more traditional blog posts on targeted, valuable topics

Part of an interview series called Women In Sales

A roundup of advice from 16 thought leaders

It’s the perfect mix of content! Close.io is one of the best and most successful B2B content marketing examples that you should look at and learn from.

The trends, as they’re developing, tell them what’s shareable and they use their unique approach to follow-through, giving their buyers key resources and critical information.

4. WP Engine

WP Engine knew they had a big challenge to overcome. Basically, it’s a managed hosting platform focused only on WordPress.

They particularly target WordPress users; it made sense for them to concentrate on content marketing tricks and strategies. Doing so made it easy to target bloggers, businesses and other WordPress users.

Following the vision of WP Engine’s CMO, they created a content marketing strategy of 5 buckets that include:

• Industry: Focuses on how digital marketers and agencies use WordPress to build their creative online presence.
• Torque: Focuses on the WordPress open source community. WP Engine doesn’t brand this sort of content much so they can create a community feeling around it.
• Product: Focuses on content and product information about their new features, and related company news.
• Support: Focuses on solving their customers’ issues through video and written content.
• Business impact: Focuses on how people use their online presence to grow their business, including leads and sales.

WP Engine’s content marketing tactics have driven notable results. These include obtaining 300,000 sites, applications in 128 countries worldwide, and raising five rounds of funding worth more than $40 million.

5. MindSea: App Development For Startups:

“Research is gold in B2B”; a lesson I learned over the years of creating engaging content and trying to get people to share and interact with it. Journalists love it when an organization provides fascinating new insights backed by reliable data.

MindSea has created a great piece of content when they made a good research on the pop-up each app store category uses. The research was all about the icons of popular apps from food apps to games. The article was rich with great insight and BusinessInsider picked them up.

Their approach was working and they played a major role in the smartphone app industry.

6. STR Software:

TR Software works on attracting large businesses with big budgets and long, complex sales cycles. STR Software decided to create a content marketing strategy instead of investing thousands of dollars to acquire each customer.

They put all their content into a centralized hub they called “BI Publisher University.” Each piece of content and media shows relevant data for leadership training. Then, using Pardot’s email automation system, they created email autoresponders that included more content ideas.

STR Software promotes their “University” widely on their site; on their homepage, sidebar, and they publish useful blog posts. Also, they use email marketing campaigns to promote it to their audience.

Some of their efforts made a wonderful impact on their output:

• The campaign had an extraordinary performance of any they developed.
• Attracted high-quality inbound links, which helped increase their organic traffic.
• Increased quality of their lead generation initiatives.
• Saw a 67% increase in page views, a 54% increase in website traffic and a decrease in the bounce rate on the site.
• Averaged a 10% conversion rate on blogs, up from 1-2% on other forms.

7. Proposify: Proposal Software for Service Businesses:

Obviously, it’s not a physical party. Proposify is about using channels that your audience and followers are spending their time on. The team at Proposify realized really early that their target audience had a craving for information. Moreover, this craving was often satisfied by listening to podcasts.

So the company found that launching a podcast called Agencies Drinking Beers is the best solution … It took off and was a huge success amongst communities living the #AgencyLife.

As the consumer base for their product grew beyond agencies, they shifted to Proposify Biz Chat. Since then, it’s been a hit and got the attention of both B2B customers and professionals in the SaaS and service industries.

8. SaaStr Ventures: Venture Capital Focused On SaaS

Jason Lemkin has established himself as the B2B king of Quora. Sadly, at this point, no one else is even close. During the recent years, he’s answered more than 2,600+ questions and has been one of Quora’s top posters from 2013 until now.

So, his answers have been seen over 38 million times!

Simply, he finds the right content and he knows his target audience (SaaS professionals and founders) would be looking for it. So, he provides answers with TONS of value on that subject.

Not only that, he embeds his company, SaaStr, and blog posts in an indirect way that doesn’t make it seem like he’s clearly striving to drive more traffic.

9. Moz: SEO Software For Marketers:

Now, Moz is already popular amongst bloggers and businesses. Since 2007, Moz has been shipping Whiteboard Fridays.

Simply, they are videos about SEO or the state of the web that combine an illustration on a whiteboard with a conversation/monologue. Rand Fishkin started Moz and now he’s the CEO of spark too. His tradition has lasted for over 10 years.

The torch seems to have been passed to Britney Muller, who is keeping the Whiteboard Friday momentum alive.

A lot of companies have huge ideas and even say that they’ll be publishing something constantly — but then they just don’t do it.

Moz has adopted consistency in terms of quality and frequency with their Whiteboard Fridays. As a result of their commitment, they’ve become a leader in SEO.

10. Drift: Conversation Marketing On Steroids:

When you think about a B2B case study, you probably think about a boring rundown of obstacles, solutions, and outcomes.

On the other hand, when you check out the B2B case studies Drift has put together, you get a precise sense that these people care about their customers’ victory and take pride in supporting them achieve significant results for their business.

WRAPPING UP

I hope you learned a lot. Remember, one thing is consistent everywhere. And it’s something you need to know before you even begin.

A buyer plays an important role in helping the company move forward.

This means that buyers should be respected, not treated as something to make your profits. About 60-80 percent of companies actually go the latter way and end up losing out in a big way.

To improve their condition, they need new planning and a new guide – one that says that buyers are actually the most important.

Don’t make that mistake. In your content marketing strategy, you can only beat competition if you respect your buyer, your audience – no matter the scale of your project or your ROI. Only that way can you generate more traction and gain exposure.

Not necessarily everything that you do helps you take your business closer to your goal.

There are certain benchmarks that have to be met and certain highly powerful market obstacles that need to be overcome.

Apply something from all these case studies in building and promoting your own strategy and you’ll have plenty of effectiveness to avoid huge failures. Don’t budge, make a difference.

Finally, I’d like to say that it is always best to be creative since every business has its own thing. However, it’s nice to have some successful business to business case studies to look up to in the beginning.

Then, as you gain experience, you can create your own B2B content marketing success and find your path.

 

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