How to do content marketing for To B business?

When it comes to To B operations, content marketing is an unavoidable topic.

Content marketing plays a big role in every stage of the customer life cycle, including awareness, consideration, preference, first use, continued use, and renewal.

As Roland Berger wrote in its report “The Digital Future of B2B Sales”:

B2B buyers complete nearly 57% of the buying process on their own before first contacting a salesperson. 90% of B2B buyers will search online for keywords such as relevant brands, products or features, and 70% of B2B buyers will watch relevant video content online.

This means that it is particularly important to plan ahead for the first 57% of the B2B buyer's purchasing process, and content marketing can play a key role in this.

Since content marketing is so important, how should we do it?

Here, I will systematically talk about some thoughts on how content marketing should be done from the following 6 aspects:

1. Content Essence
2. Content Purpose
3. Content Planning
4. Content Production
5. Content dissemination
6. Building a content marketing team

Next, I will talk about them one by one.

1. Content Nature

Before I talk about how to do content marketing, I would like to ask:

What do you think is the essence of content?

You can think about it for a while and then continue reading.

I believe that the essence of content is to solve the anxiety problems of customers.

As Ma Dong, the founder of QiPaShuo, said:

Content is a product that concerns people's hearts, so the timing is not about what you do at what time. The most important thing is whether you have grasped what people are currently concerned about.

So, in essence, no matter whether you are writing content related to your customers; content related to the industry; content related to your own products; etc.

The essence of what you write is to solve the customer's anxiety, and in the process of solving the customer's anxiety, you will ultimately achieve your business goals.

The production of high-quality content that can solve and alleviate customer anxiety can influence its readers and even the development of the entire industry, thereby bringing value to the entire industry.

2. Purpose of Content

Before talking about the purpose of content, let me first talk about what content marketing means?

The book "Customer Acquisition" defines content marketing as follows:

Content marketing refers to a marketing method in which companies produce and publish valuable, relevant, and sustainable content to attract target audiences, change or strengthen their behavior, and generate commercial conversions.

There are four key points in this sentence:

1. Attract customers
2. Changing Behavior
3. Reinforce behavior
4. Business transformation

It can be said that these four key points basically cover the entire purpose of content marketing:

1. Attracting customers means obtaining customer traffic.
2. Changing customer behavior means providing pre-sales education and cultivating customer leads.
3. Strengthen customer behavior, which means providing guidance to customers during their novice and growth stages.
4. To carry out business conversion means to make money from customers, and make more money.

To sum up, content marketing runs through the entire life cycle of customers. At each point in the customer life cycle, content marketing plays an important role and needs to achieve its corresponding goals.

3. Content Planning

In order to achieve the goal of content marketing, the next step is content planning.

Regarding content planning, you can get the final desired planning plan by thinking in the following three dimensions:

1. Content entry point
2. The different psychological states of customers in 6 stages
3. Content Type

Part 1: Content entry point

How to find the entry point for content?

Finding the entry point for content means finding the intersection between corporate strategic needs and customer needs.

For example, the strategic positioning of a SAAS company is to help catering companies increase their performance through software + hardware + agency operation services.

Enterprises hope that the solution of software + hardware + operation service can help customers solve problems and help catering companies grow their performance, and customers are willing to pay for this solution; customers' needs are about how to do marketing, operations, and management well.

Then, content about changes in the catering industry, how businesses market, how they operate, how they manage, etc. is the entry point for this SAAS company's content marketing.

Part 2: Different anxiety psychology of customers in 5 stages

The five major stages of customer anxiety are as follows: cognition, demand generation, consideration stage, solution selection, and use stage.

What B2B staff need to write is to focus on these five stages and alleviate customers' anxiety.

The first stage, the cognitive stage

At this stage, customers know that they have a lot of information and new things that they don’t know, and they are eager to learn new information related to themselves and their business.

At this time, the content you output is mainly related to the customers, and can generally attract the customers' attention and thus arouse their interest.

For example, if your solution is to help companies solve big data problems, then your content, whether it is related to big data or "100 Lectures on Product Manager-Related Skills" written for key decision-makers such as product managers, can generally attract customers' attention.

The second stage is the demand generation stage

At this stage, customers either encounter difficulties in actual work, or have an ideal goal in the future and hope to find some ways to achieve it. At this time, customers will read various methodologies, opinions of opinion leaders, and other related articles, and gradually clarify their own needs in the process of learning.

At this time, your main output may include various methodologies, industry trend analysis and other articles.

The third stage, the consideration stage

This stage shows that customers have already generated certain demands.

What you need to do at this time is to continue to cultivate customer leads and deliver more content that builds education and trust.

For example: customer cases, industry white papers and other content are all suitable.

Stage 4: Select a plan

At this stage, customers already have clear needs and have recognized the solutions that address these needs. Customers are now choosing from a variety of options.

At this time, you need to output content such as customer success cases, cost advantages, risks, and image advantages.

The fifth stage, the use stage

At this stage, customers begin to use the product, and the focus of this stage is to help customers succeed.

What you need to do at this point is to output content that can help customers improve their business strategic thinking ability, their ability to use product functions, and ultimately solve business goal issues.

We all know that the decision-making cycle of B-side customers is long. Only by sorting out the different stages of customers and outputting content for each stage can we achieve efficient content marketing.

Part 3: Content Type

The types of content are mainly divided into the following categories:

1. Short copy within 300 words
2. More than 3,000 words in depth
3. E-book
4. Paper Books
5. Audio
6. video
7. live streaming

Due to the influence of budget and resources, most companies generally use short copy and in-depth long articles when doing content marketing.

Companies that do well in content marketing basically cover all seven types of content.

Regarding content planning, the entry points mentioned above let us know the scope, boundaries and focus of our content. Then we plan the output of our content in a targeted manner based on the different psychological states of customers in the six stages.

In other words, the core of content planning is to find the entry point of the content, and then plan and output different types of content based on the anxiety of customers at different stages.

4. Content Production

Through the above introduction, we know:

• The essence of content is to relieve customer anxiety;
• The purpose of content is to attract target groups, change or strengthen their behaviors, and generate commercial conversions.
• When planning content, different content should be produced according to the different psychological states of customers. The content can be in the form of short copy, in-depth long articles, e-books, audio, paper books, etc.

The next step is to start content production.

The main process of producing a piece of content is as follows:

1. Determine which psychological stage of the customer the content to be produced is to solve;
2. What are the problems of the customers at this stage?
3. Which of the customer problems you have discovered do you currently want to solve?
4. Start choosing a topic;
5. Find information;
6. Start writing;
7. Content optimization;
8. release;
9. spread.

Here, I will mainly talk about the fourth step, “Start choosing a topic”.

Topic selection is a relatively important part of the entire article. In many cases, whether the topic is well selected basically determines more than half of the fate of an article.

In other words, if the topic is good, even if the content is a little worse, the number of readers and reposts will be good; if the topic is not good, even if the content quality is okay, the number of readers is unlikely to increase.

Based on my personal experience, I think the choices can be considered from the following aspects:

1. A series of articles related to customer success stories;
2. Serial outputs related to company activities;
3. Selection of topics for special activities;
4. Fixed hot topics;
5. Breaking news and hot topics;
6. Topics related to the company's internal business, such as products, services, solutions, organization, etc.

5. Content dissemination

After writing a high-quality article, you should start to disseminate it externally. Only external dissemination can amplify the value of an article.

There are several ways to spread an article:

1. WeChat official account, which is your company’s main self-built media channel;
2. Cooperation channels include: vertical media channels, third-party media channels, long-term cross-industry cooperation channels, joint promotion channels, etc.
3. Employee sharing.
4. Customer sharing.

Through content dissemination, it will eventually lead to:

1. Fans (customers who follow the company’s own media);
2. Members (customers who register and leave leads);
3. Sales leads (customers who eventually meet sales criteria);
4. Make money (customers make purchases and continue to make purchases).

6. Building a content marketing team

In order to complete the content,

Human resources are needed to complete the relevant creations.

Human resources can come from three sources:

The first aspect is to recruit a professional content operation team to do it. However, as far as I know, there are relatively few To B content experts on the market. In other words, it is not easy to recruit professionals in To B business, especially for small and medium-sized startups.

However, for a startup company, if the founding team has writing experts, it would be best to have the founding team members write the report. This not only saves costs, but also allows them to write a lot of useful information that can highlight the business value proposition.

The second aspect is that all employees can participate in the creation, that is, all employees of the company can participate in the creation, but I think it is not realistic for many small and medium-sized startups to complete the creation of content in this way.

Because content creation for To B business is relatively difficult and requires professionals to complete it. Therefore, I think that if you want to achieve creation by all employees, it is basically something that only larger companies can do.

The third aspect is to find outside experts to cooperate in writing, that is, to find industry experts KOLs to write through payment or resource exchange. Experts can not only produce high-quality and attractive content, but also because of the traffic attributes of KOLs, they can help our content be disseminated to a wider range.

Finally, to sum up, when considering how to do content marketing, you can think about the following 6 points:

1. Content Essence
2. Content Purpose
3. Content Planning
4. Content Production
5. Content dissemination
6. Building a content marketing team

Author: Feng Xianfei

Source: Xiaofei Notes