Content marketing is as old as the hills. From 19th century farmers publishing magazines on how to help farms become more profitable, to SEO-optimised guides for B2B businesses in 2023, it’s fair to say that content marketing has evolved — and that the number of content marketing examples has expanded exponentially.
Today:
- 97% of digital marketers say content marketing plays a role in their overall marketing strategy
- But just 57% of them have a clear strategy informing their content marketing campaigns.1
Without clear content strategies, businesses will find it harder to fulfil their goals, and time, money and effort could be wasted.
Aligning each piece of content with the buyer’s journey is a great way to make sure each piece of content has a clear goal — and a plan to meet it. By providing genuinely useful information to your target audience at each stage of their journey, you educate them about your industry and brand while building a relationship of trust.
So what are some good ways to do this? Here are 6 good examples of B2B content marketing that are worth copying in 2023.
What is content marketing?
Content marketing is a type of marketing that creates and shares various types of material, including blogs, newsletters, videos and social posts. Its purpose is to generate interest in a brand’s services or products, without explicitly advertising the brand itself. It adds value to the reader while advancing the business’s objective.
Content marketing:
- Educates a business’s target audience on solutions to their pain points
- Creates and drives a brand reputation as an authority in the industry.
- Generate leads and encourages conversions.
Aligning content with the buyer’s journey
Aligning your content marketing with each stage of the buyer’s journey is important to the success of your campaigns. It makes sure the information provided is targeted at not just the persona, but where that persona is in their journey. Do they need help defining the problem they’re facing? Or have they understood the issue and are looking to decide on a solution?
Remember, too, that it’s not just about providing information on the product itself. 80% of purchasing decisions in the B2B arena are based on the quality of the overall customer experience.2 Businesses should bear this in mind when creating any type of content.
Awareness content marketing worth copying
At the awareness stage, the potential buyer becomes aware of a) the specifics of the problem they’re experiencing and b) the potential solutions.
Awareness content marketing is about two main things: educating your target audience and helping them understand their problem. Blog and social media posts, webinars, and checklists are good examples of B2B marketing at this stage.
1. Huler: SEO-optimised guide
Through their product HulerHub, Huler provide an employee experience platform. Their product sits within a digital workplace. So, in partnership with Gripped, we helped Huler produce an SEO-optimised ‘guide’ on the digital workplace: What Is A Digital Workplace?
What’s the goal?
- Education, education, education: The blog aims to provide informative and useful information on what the digital workplace is, how it’s used and why it’s important to modern businesses.
- Establish Huler as a useful resource: As the buyer begins their journey, the guide positions Huler as an authority on the topic, building the buyer’s trust in the business. HulerHub sits within a digital workplace, allowing this guide to introduce their product as a potential solution to what should be included in a digital workplace..
How does it achieve it?
- Reaching the target audience: The guide needs to reach people. This is achieved by search engine optimisation (SEO), via building and optimising content around a relevant keyword to make the article rank highly on search engines.
- Speaking directly to its persona: The guide speaks directly to its target persona. It does this by providing information on a pain point to help them understand and define their problem and using an accessible tone and style to develop a sense of relationship.
By adding value to the reader and successful SEO, the guide is on page 1 of Google — and has seen drawn almost 300,000 impressions over the last year
2. Gripped: Event roundup blog
Here at Gripped, we’re a B2B digital marketing agency, specialising in inbound marketing for the SaaS and tech niches. After attending HubSpot’s Inbound 2019 conference, we created this 10 Lessons from Inbound 2019 blog to provide a roundup of what went down at the event, offering information and insight to digital marketers.
What’s the goal?
- Share information: This roundup blog aims to inform digital marketers on the insights shared at HubSpot’s annual event — particularly to those who were unable to attend.
- Position Gripped as an industry expert: The roundup isn’t just telling its audience what went on at the event. It also draws on Gripped’s digital marketing expertise, adding additional value to readers, beyond what simply happened at the event. This helps to build trust between Gripped and the target market, while showing Gripped’s expertise and connection with the broader marketing world.
How does it achieve it?
- Using an effective format: Research shows that round-up formats are a great way of engaging target audiences, while being uncommon.3
- Using paid promotion: Unlike the Huler guide, this blog doesn’t use keywords. Finding relevant keywords so soon after the conference — when people are looking for a roundup blog — is unlikely. Instead, the blog was published on LinkedIn, using paid promotion to get it in front of our target audience.
- First-hand statistics: The blog also includes first-hand statistics which help the page obtain backlinks and improve search engine ranking.
As a result, the blog appears on page 1 for the term ‘Inbound 2019’ — alongside HubSpot’s Inbound website.
Consideration content marketing worth copying
At the consideration stage, prospects have defined their problem and begin to consider, through research, which product or service will best solve their problem.
So consideration content marketing should look to inform readers about how services and products can do this. Content here should also nurture leads generated at the awareness stage, and build trust between the business and potential buyer. Consideration content includes producing case studies, listicles, eBooks and product comparisons.
1. Unbounce: eBook
Unbounce is a leading software company that builds landing pages, providing a place for business’s customers to convert. As conversion specialists, Unbounce produced the eBook The Unbounce Conversion Benchmark Report.
What’s the goal?
- Drive conversions: By providing useful information on how to measure and increase conversions, the resource is valuable to many types of businesses and aims to become a conversion point as a gated piece of content.
- Build authority: By providing thorough information on conversion point benchmarks, Unbounce shows that they know what they’re talking about. By positioning themselves as experts, leads will connect authority and expertise with Unbounce.
How does it achieve it?
- Gated content: Readers need to provide their contact information to read the full report. The content about conversion is a conversion point itself, helping to tie potential customers into a closer relationship with the company.
- Easy accessibility: In providing the information on-page rather than in a downloadable PDF, the report improves user experience, making the information more accessible and improving the perception of the brand.
And the result? The report has attained the top spot of Google search results for its main keyword ‘Conversion benchmark report’, obtained 5,100 backlinks, and currently attracts 4.1 million monthly visits.
2. Nexstor: Production Comparison blog
Nexstor, a UK-based data storage and hybrid cloud specialist, delivers data storage solutions with a focus on accessibility, security, and easy monitoring. Working with Gripped, we helped Nexstor produce this comparison blog, Veeam vs Dell EMC | Data Backup and Recovery Solutions, on their area of expertise.
What’s the goal?
- Compare solutions: By comparing two competitors in detail, the blog is a practical exploration of what solution might be best for buyers. By detailed both Veeam and Dell EMC Networker’s pros and cons, Nexstor positions itself as a business that can help them decide on the best solution.
- Build authority: Nexstor isn’t comparing itself to its competitors. Instead, they’re providing information on other products in which they have expertise. By giving in-depth information, readers develop trust in their authority — making it more likely they’ll return to them for more information or, ideally, solutions.
How does it achieve it?
- Honest, engaging content: By being honest about both Veeam and Dell EMC NetWorker’s advantages and disadvantages, it positions Nexstor as genuinely helpful, rather than explicitly and primarily advertising Nexstor itself.
- Adding real value: As content further along the buyer’s journey, it provides information targeted to a persona that already has a good level of experience and expertise. By adding additional value and knowledge beyond what they already hold, the blog helps build authority — and move them closer to a buying decision.
- SEO: The blog is optimised around the highly relevant keyword, ‘Veeam vs dell emc’. But simple SEO optimisation can only get you so far — the information provided has to be interesting and relevant to the target audience.
This results in the page achieving position 1 on Google search results page — beating Gartner, G2 comparison and even Veaam’s own Dell EMC comparison page to the top spot.
Decision content marketing worth copying
At the decision stage, prospects are ready to, well, decide. They need product and service-specific information that persuades them to purchase a specific solution. This is based on practicality, like whether the product will resolve their pain point, But building a trusting relationship with the business they’re sourcing the solution from remains important at this stage, too.
The best B2B content marketing examples here get straight to the point, with FAQs, video testimonials and product comparisons.
1. I’m Your New: Instructional video
I’m Your New, a B2B SaaS company that helps businesses with the recruitment process by ranking resumes based on job descriptions. Their collection of testimonials and reviews jumps on the content marketing video trend, using videos recorded by customers talking about their experience with the product.
What’s the goal?
- Convert: At the decision stage, potential buyers understand their problem, have researched how to solve it and have whittled down their list of potential solutions. Now, they’re deciding. This page aims to give them the final push and buy.
How does it achieve it?
- Authenticity: Video marketing is often a polished, high-budget affair. But by utilising user-generated videos from customers who have used the product, in their working environment, it provides a sense of legitimacy.
- Good user experience: With clear headings and video players including section pointers labelled with headings, viewers can skip straight to the part most relevant to solving their specific pain point — speeding up their decision and conversion.
Video marketing can be highly successful when done right. 72% of marketing teams realise an ROI of 50-500% from customer testimonial videos. In short, don’t neglect video.4
2. Flowace: Head to head… to head to head
Flowace is a productivity tool — one of many in the market. That’s why they decided to produce a unique head to head comparison page, listing its features in comparison with 10 of its competitors! Flowace is a productivity tool — one of many in the market. That’s why they decided to produce a unique head to head comparison page, listing its features in comparison with 10 of its competitors!
What’s the goal?
- Choose Flowace: Compare Flowace to its closest competitors and position them as the best tool productivity out of the lot. The goal is to get those on the page to purchase.
- Don’t oversell: At this stage, you’re trying to funnel people towards your solution. As with testimonial videos, you need to be careful; comparisons need to come across as genuine, and it’s important that the page only mentions solutions that the product or service can tackle.
How does it achieve it?
- Straightforwardness: Flowace has already attracted people to their site. At the decision stage, clear information on the solutions provided is vital. The no-frills approach of the table and tickbox get straight to the details to help close the deal.
- Clear CTA: The ‘sticky header’, including the ‘Free 14 Day Free Trial’, remains visible at the top of the page as you scroll, creating a clear conversion point wherever you are on the page.
- Additional information: If the table doesn’t do it, users will find links to more in-depth decision content, pitting Flowace against direct competitors in blog posts.
Content Marketing for B2B Companies
Content marketing comes in all shapes and sizes. But from the 19th century to the 21st, all good content marketing focuses on the same principles: to engage and inform potential buyers, helping them solve their problems.
Producing interesting and engaging content aligned to the buyer’s journey helps businesses get in front of — and build a relationship with — their target audience. While there are no clear-cut rules, there are (as we’ve seen) examples that are worth copying.
At Gripped, we’re experts in content marketing, creating content for each stage of the buyer’s journey to help B2B, SaaS and tech businesses generate leads and traffic. Check out how our content marketing can help your marketing efforts or book a free growth audit today.
1 40+ Content Marketing Statistics to Power Your 2022 Strategy
2 Try These 14 B2B Marketing Strategies To Grow in 2022
3 How to Write a Better Expert Roundup: 5 Examples of Roundup Posts for Content Marketers
4 New Research: The Impact of Video Testimonials on Digital Marketing