Welcome to Marketing Labs. This podcast is brought to you by Marketing Labs, an expert digital marketing agency based in Nottinghamshire. If you're a business owner or marketing professional looking for straightforward non-salesy tips and advice to help grow your business online, then this podcast is for you. Strap in because we're about to reveal the things that other agencies would rather you didn't know.
Hello and welcome to episode number 20 of our podcast Marketing Labs. I'm your host, Tom Haslam, and today we're diving into the world of B2B marketing, specifically focusing on how businesses that are looking to grow their business online should structure their content in the B2B industry. Creating effective and engaging content is crucial for building relationships and trust and ultimately helping to drive conversions. We'll discuss best practises, strategies, and tips to help craft compelling content that resonates with your audience on today's podcast and have with me our head of content, Melissa Healey. How you doing, Mel? I'm
Good, Tom, thank you for asking.
You can look at me in the eye. We also have our CEO, Matt Janaway. ,Hi, Tom. All good? Yeah,
Yeah, yeah.
Really good. You're excited about these new cameras?
I am. And Emma's first podcast.
Yeah, appearance. I was going to do a big intro for you, Emma. Oh, what? You
Just spoke for me, Matt. I haven. I've added to the build.
Yeah, part Virgin. Finally, we've got first time Potter. Emma nuns.
Hello.
You alright? Yeah. Good. What's your job title? Content marketing Executive. Yeah, I'm glad you said
That. I'm not sure.
So we're all here. We're ready to go. We're going to talk about content for the B2B industry. So I'm going to start off with a question. Who's going to answer it? Why is content so crucial? B2B marketing
People can fall into the trap of thinking that B2B marketing is so different from B2C that they can't use any of the same techniques and that's just not the case. And actually when it comes to content, there's a lot of crossover between B2C and B2B, and what works for B2C can also work for B2B. The two aren't mutually exclusive. You can borrow things from both and you hear people say a lot, well, my market aren't online in the B2B world, don't you? That's not where they shop. That's not where they hang out. Especially for things like industrial type things where maybe you wouldn't expect somebody to Google. I mean to think of a product that compost sell, for example. Yeah,
Like hoses. It's quite a niche market in it. Spiral
Hoses,
Spiral housing
In a small market where people tend to know suppliers and so companies think that this type of thing doesn't apply to them, but actually it does just as much as B2C if not more.
Yeah. Yeah, I'd say so. Well, it's interesting, isn't it actually, because I would argue 10 years ago, B2B and B2C were probably separated fairly substantially. Now they're so close. It is almost not that many differences in reality. And I'd also say that those audiences where people think they don't hang out online, I mean everyone hangs out online now. Exactly. This is what's merged the gaps between all of these markets is everybody hangs out online. Almost everybody hangs out online somewhere. So I guess yeah, that's a really good point, Mel. Actually, the differences between them aren't actually as strong as maybe they were.
I was going to ask if there was a difference between B2B and B two, and you've answered that between you. I
Mean there are still some subtle differences, but it shouldn't really dictate how you approach things. I don't think it is just some subtle differences between who the audiences are and how you write for them. Yeah,
I think the main reason that we're on this product is because a lot of our clients don't understand the importance of content. If they're in a B2B industry, like you say, they don't think that's where their audience hangs out and so on.
It all comes down to, for me anyway, for people, and that's central to everything in marketing, isn't it? And actually there is a person behind every purchase. So whether that's either you're buying from another business or you're a consumer buying from a business. So when somebody buys an industrial product or supplies or whatever it is, they're still somebody buying something in the same way that the B2C sector works. So you've got to still think about who that person is and what their demographics are. So they're obviously different demographics to the ones that you would consider for B2C content. Obviously you're probably less interested in the newspapers that they read and their political leanings and you're more interested in their job title and their pain points and their decision making criteria and those kinds of things. So you're looking at different metrics, but the same principle applies. You need to know who your buyer is and you need to focus on them when you're putting the content together and keep them in mind, keep them front and centre.
I would also add to that, that's some really great points there and those points combined highlight just why it's so crucial for B2B. So the buying journey for a B2B business, that is one difference between B2C and B2B. The buying journey is very carefully considered generally, so it'll go through various stakeholders. There's lots that would go into working or partnering with another business or buying a product from another business. So that makes the content even more crucial because what you need to achieve is to really help them understand firstly what problems they face, but also how the product or the service helps fix that issue or solve a problem. So the process of creating the content might be ever slightly different, but they're both equally crucial.
And are there any techniques that businesses should use for identifying their audience? We always say that you've got to put your content out there for the right purpose and for the right person. So a buyer personas an old fashioned thing now, would you still use them? Is it quite traditional method?
I think buyer personas is crucial specifically for content because you can't hope to solve an entire industry's problems in one blog post. But what you can do is write for one person and you'll find that in doing that you can be much more focused and actually it will apply to multiple people, but it helps the writing process to envisage the reader and who they are and what they like and don't like. Sort of what their world looks like, what they do when they get up in the morning and the day that they have, and how you can make that better, how you can add value to it. That said, of course that does imply there that I'm saying that you should be selling to them in the blog and shouldn't, obviously we know that's for informational purposes. I'm not talking about a commercial page here, but generally speaking, the same thing applies. Don't try and solve an entire industry's problems, just focus on your reader and what they need or want to know.
Yeah. How have you found writing for B2B industry? You are quite new to agency style writing, aren't you? And writing in different,
Yeah, so I think there is a big difference between what I was doing, which was more to consumer probably. But yeah, it's definitely different in the respect that you need to change your tone to suit who you are writing to, and sometimes it can be different depending on what kind of products you're trying to push or what the company's
Core services are.
Yeah,
Yeah, absolutely. So I specialise a lot in social media and I've found that there's a very big difference as well in the way that you'd write content for that on socials for B2B.
So having taken into account all of that, then, are there any specific types or effective types of content that are more aligned for B2B marketing? Well,
You've got lots of angles I suppose, haven't you? You've got blog related content. Lots of B2B businesses do incredibly well from creating content hubs where they'll really create awareness of who they are as a brand by pulling their customers really close. And the great way of doing that is by producing content that they find really valuable. If you work with businesses in a specific niche, so let's just say you are a car dealer or you produce parts for cars, but you've got hundreds of car dealers around the country that your clients, if you produce content related to things like business challenges, they face marketing challenges, they face HR challenges, they face supply challenges, they face tax challenges, they face accounting challenges they face. If you are the go-to for advice for car dealers, that is a fantastic way of really taking advantage of a market and bringing everybody closer to you as a business and capitalising on market share.
So you can do that in lots of different ways. You've got written content, which I guess is the main focus of this podcast, but then you also have other types of content. You've got podcast, video, audiobooks, eBooks, there's loads of different types I guess. So I think specifically here, it's probably best to focus on website content, isn't it really? So we're probably talking blog posts, which is more informational, top of the funnel, building awareness, educational. Yeah, absolutely. Then you've also got commercial pages, which are much more sales driven, sales copy. It's about solving very particular problems or showing how a product or a service can solve those problems. But then you've got social, so Emma mentioned a minute ago about the social side. Again, that forms a big part of the different types of B2B content and there's many more as well. So it's about picking which channels you need to align to your audiences and what problems you face as a business, and then tying all that in with making sure you are solving their problems and that pulling all of that together is the key ingredients, if you like, of a content marketing plan.
I guess that's the perfect example in how we're doing B2B content is this podcast we're trying to educate clients and marketing managers.
We've got a new book, different
Topics,
New book, podcast, all of these different things. This is exactly, this is content we're producing for that exact reason, isn't it? Yeah,
A really good example, I think of a couple of big brands that do it really well are Shopify and Vistaprint, because what they do is very cleverly diverge from their main area. So obviously either as an online platform for selling or printing services to expand on that and offer their customers small business advice and tips, which is actually really powerful because they know that their customers are dealing with these sorts of issues and problems in the growing stages of business. And I think that as a resource then that their clients can lean on. Like you say, Matt creates community, it brings them further to the brand and creates loyalty, some sense of loyalty. Absolutely. Really well done actually.
I'd argue there's no better way of creating brand advocates. You can have a customer. Moving a customer into a brand advocate is a very difficult thing. It's all about relationships, but I would argue that the fastest way of bringing these people closer to you as a business to become advocates is by providing them with value constantly where they're going to be needing help, support advice if you've got an answer for them, if you have content that's ready made to answer those questions, they're going to really appreciate that. It goes a long way.
So you're aiming to either answer a question, solve a problem, or help them understand a topic better than getting, there's a couple of different,
And there's another really key point wrapped up in that as well, which comes back to something I said at the start, and that's low search volume. So if you do work in a B2B industry where there isn't a lot of search volume for the market that you are in, it makes sense to look for related areas that you can talk about. So I've just written a blog for it, actually for the marketing website, come up with things to write about when you exist in a low volume search market, look for related subjects and topics where you can add value, and that's equally worthwhile to your customers. It is to Google because if you are building topical authority in those areas, and Google starts to see that they're likely to improve the ranking positions of your website for related commercial terms because you've shown that you've got an expertise in this area, then building up a body of work will really help that. For example, and this is a B2C example, but I always come back to one of our best clients. They sold beds, but we spoke about sleep, wellbeing, interior design and day decor, bedding, mattresses, pillows. There was a limitless list of things related to beds that we could use to build authority in that area and related areas.
I think that's what a lot of businesses miss out on, isn't it? Those topics that are linked, related topics, they think, right, I am in, I was going to say engineering then, but engineering's quite broad, but let's say you're a water engineer, you just want to talk about water. But I'm sure there's lots of different topics within that,
And I think that can be a stumbling block for people. We've had a lot of clients come to us and said, I don't know what to write about because I exist in an area where not many people are asking me questions about the work that I do. I mean, a prime example of that that we've had for a couple of clients is line marking and white lining and things like that. I mean, aren't a lot of people asking questions about that area of work, but there'll be people asking questions about things related to it. So we saw a lot of success with the blog on the Rules for Disabled Parking Bay, and there's a lot of search volume on that, and that's quite obviously semantically related to the products and service of road marking and white lining. So that's an obvious leap.
And also semantic relationships between these topics almost always go hand in hand with audience relations to the topics. So the audience also would value conversations and ideas and advice and information and education about those same topics. So you've Mel's highlighted their disabled base and you could continue going with things like that. So you've got electric, you've got parent and child, all of these different types of things that relate to it, both semantically, but also the audience also would relate to that. So this is why understanding your audience is so important because if you understand that you can then take a step back and even though there might not be a huge amount to write about with actual line marking, there is things to write about that would resonate with the same audience.
Yeah, yeah. I mean you've got two objectives, haven't you, in a way and many more, but primarily two objectives. One is obviously to increase traffic to your site because that's a good indicator that your content is valued, and that's where things with high search volume come into play. But the other is moving a buyer along the journey toward a purchase, and that doesn't necessarily need to come with high search volume. That can be very much, and it's about answering problems that may not up to this point of even being searched for before. And that's very much so that's very much you as a first. So when you're creating a content strategy for B2B, you need to consider both sides of that coin.
That brings me around nicely to my next question then. Are there any key steps or processes that you need to consider when creating a content strategy for your business? Would you do three months in advance, six months in advance to any set way, or how would you go about doing that?
It depends on the business, doesn't it? I mean, what are their goals? What are their focuses? What are their budgets? I think the very first question you probably have to ask yourself is who is the audience? Where do they hang out? What are their problems? What kind of things can be helpful and what kind of things you can help with? You then have to decide on channels. So is it going to be blog content, is it going to be informational guides, eBooks, is it going to be social media? All of the above combination of, so yeah, there's a lot really that goes into that kind of plan. Mel creates these quite frequently, and I think by and large, Mel, you tend to default back to the three month at the moment, don't you? It usually
Three to six, but I like to leave a bit of room for flexibility. I still, even though evergreen content is typically the kind of thing that you cover in B2B marketing, I like to leave a little bit of manoeuvre for topical stuff because sometimes those things can do really well. So for example, a good B2B example would be one of our clients, DD DD sell dental supplies to dentists, and we wrote for them a really interesting piece on changes to fluoride in water and the changes in government regulations on it and something like that. A change in legislation that comes up that would be useful for your market to know about. It's good to leave a bit of flexibility in your plan to accommodate things like that so you can shuffle, shuffle what you've got planned around.
Do you know the other thing that's great for as well, and this comes back to the purpose of the content. So the purpose might be to drive traffic purpose, might be sales copy to convert the purpose might be to push people through the funnel. Purpose might be awareness. In that case, the fluoride content actually was fantastic for link acquisition as well. That generated a lot of back links. It's a lot harder to build back links than it is to create content that resonates with people to generate organic back links. So it is just another benefit really of having a great content plan. If you can have topics that really resonate with the rest of the industry, chances are that'll really help with backlinks.
And digital PR is another great example of where you can build brand awareness and links back to your site if you are willing to be flexible. Proactive as well. Absolutely. Because there are a lot of requests for information from journalists out there that you can use in B2B to gain exposure, and you have to put yourself out there because clearly you're expressing an opinion on something, and so it's not for everybody, but it's incredibly powerful if you're willing to do it.
So coming back to what you said, Mel, about evergreen content, for someone listening who might not quite understand what Evergreen is, does anyone want to try and explain what evergreen content is? Do you want to have a go Emma?
Go on. So evergreen content is when you write about topics that are not necessarily directly about your business, but it impacts your business. So the topic is still relevant, but the content is always, it doesn't have a shelf life, so it is always relevant and it is not going to change.
Yeah, it's not topical or seasonal or
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, shelf life's a great way of describing it. It is evergreen in the sense that the leaves don't fall off. It's relevant all the time.
That makes sense. Have we got any examples from Marketing Labs where we've written some evergreen content or maybe some that aren't evergreen?
Yeah, we wrote a piece on the best Christmas advents in 2021, and that's an example of a piece of content that's not evergreen, just because it's got quite a short shelf life. People are probably not going to be interested in that come 20, 23, 22. And then a good example of evergreen content is your product descriptions. They're very unlikely to change the product's still going to be the same unless a different product comes out that's new and then you write a new product description.
Yeah, that makes sense. Interesting. Nice. We had a template for that. We
Do have a template for that still on the website. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Little plug,
Google Marketing Labs product description template. You'll find it Nice. Yeah, it's a great piece of content there as well. If I do say so. Who
Wrote that?
I did, but I think we might have assigned it to someone else.
Me,
I think when someone rebuilt the website and they filtered all the content around the team, it might have ended up with someone else.
Josh, I think it's Josh. Josh did one actually on a divvy coupon. He did. He did. That's really good.
Very popular. Really well, yeah. Yeah, very popular. That
Again, that's a good example. Nice. So we've talked quite a lot there about different forms of content types and things like that, but are there any specific strategies for tailoring content for maybe different bio journeys? How would we approach that? Obviously you've got social for top of the funnel and so on.
Yeah, social is great for awareness, great for building a community. I guess there's different journeys, so it's important to think about. Now, if you assume that content has multiple roles, one of those roles will certainly be off page. So the communities you build on social media may be content, you write on other websites, digital pr, as Mel said, all sorts of other tactics. But then you've got what you could potentially call on page, which is on your own website, and again, you'll have different journeys within that. I would say very much top of the funnel, you've got your blog content. Generally, it's not to say they can't convert. We produce blog content that does convert often, but that's not its primary goal. Primary goal is to drive awareness, is to bring traffic to the website and potentially help customers, things like that. But then you've got to funnel them.
You've got to silo them through your website to potentially becoming a customer and to one order at some point. So taking them through that journey through informational content, potentially through to understanding who you are as a business. And this is probably quite important as well, to mention things like about pages, team pages, that's still content still very important. I'd argue. It's extremely important actually. So when we analyse the statistics, we were looking at this recently for a client and 80, 70, 80% of all their conversions, the page before they is their team page. I looked at ours and it's extremely high. Then I looked at another client, it's extremely high and it makes sense in B2B very specifically because that's the team you're potentially going to be working with or needing to support. So all of those pages contribute towards pushing or pulling visitors towards being a customer.
It's building trust, isn't it? I dunno how many conversations I have with clients and I'll mention to them, how's your team page look? And they're like, oh, we haven't got one,
Don't have photos,
We don't really need it. Yeah, you do.
You do need it. B2B, you have to have it. Yeah, I would go so far as to say I wouldn't work with a company or buy a product from a B2B company that doesn't have one.
No, that's a good
Point. If we were looking to engage with a business to help us in whatever area, it could be hr, it could be sales, could be accounting, whatever. It could be literally anything where we might need support. If they had no team page and no information about who they are, I'd move on every time.
Would you say that's quite a good example of how B2B and B2C has changed over the years?
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. And also they're coming closer together as well. So I would say that's more important for B2B, but you know what? I think that's really also becoming quite important for B2C as well. I think generally that's probably one of the most important rules of any website to portray trust is actually to display who you are, explain who you are, tell people the story about how you exist, why you exist, everything about you go to town.
I had a really good example of that. We bought some cakes from a, they were based in London, but they're only a small sort of online cake business called Cutter and Squidge. I really like the name and their branding, but they had a good story about how they set up the business. It was quite authentic and I think that in itself converted me, to be honest, because I was looking to send a client some brownies and you want to know that you're helping a small business as well. You get that sort of feeling that there's something there
And genuine and honest. I think naturally as buyers, most people are attracted to that kind of business. It's like a magnet that pulls you in when they tell you a story about what they stand for and who they are and that they're a genuine business that really value every customer. When you get to a certain size, it's very easy to lose that. So again, it's another piece of content that should form part of that user journey all the way through to then the sales page, which again needs a slightly different approach.
I guess it's repurposing as well. If you've written a blog to help educate, then you can always repurpose that into a smaller format for socials and so on to help educate in a, I dunno, the top tip or top
Takeaway. You'd silly not to, wouldn't you? Yeah, it takes a lot of effort producing content, it's time consuming, all the research, the planning, understanding your audience, the challenges they face. It's a big old effort producing a piece of content, so you'd be silly not to reuse it whenever you need to. That can be reused on social media in smaller form content, in potential conversation points, email marketing, it's a great story to tell.
Nice. Moving on then. Are there any realistic goals or KPIs, metrics that businesses should track when monitoring their content strategy or efforts? Who wants to have a go at that? I know we monitor them for clients, but
We do that as part of our monthly reporting. And I think the main thing to mention here is that in terms of choosing the right metrics to track, you need to know before what you were trying to achieve so that you can measure the right thing. Because otherwise you'll have a very skewed picture of the outcome. So start with that. Start with a goal, start with understanding what your objective is and what success looks like, and then you can choose the right metrics to accompany that. So if your goal is increased visibility in search results, then clearly obviously keyword rankings and positions and movements in that are really important. But if conversions are more important, then OnPage tracking and a number of visitors and the duration on page, I won't say bounce rate because there's a very good reason for, I would say taking bounce rate with a pinch of salt, although it's not called bounce rate now, is it's
Engagement rates like a reverse of bounce rates sort of.
But as Matt said previously in all podcasts, and it's a really important point that if you've answered somebody's question and you've done it well, don't be shocked when they leave the page fulfilled because you've done your job.
And if they don't visit another page, that's a bounce technically. I mean, this is why engagement rate's probably better, isn't it? In reality?
Yeah. I would say for me personally, in content, the biggest indicator of a successful piece of content is time on page. For me, that's really, really important because if somebody has looked at your content for a few seconds, it's not done its job for some reason, it's not done its job. But if they've stayed on that page for a number of minutes, they've obviously taken the time. Scroll depths as well is another one. How far down the page have they got? I think that's really important as well. If they're engaged in what they're reading, they'll spend longer on the page and they'll make their way further down it. And to me, in terms of quality of content,
That's the most important metric.
Absolutely. Just to add to that as well, so one of the things I've been looking at, so on my blogs, on my personal website, I have a sidebar where you can click the headers and it takes you through each section. So I've been monitoring whether they're being clicked, which is quite useful. In some ways I think about that and I think, but is it because they're not interested in all of the content? But then I think about it that everybody needs something slightly different from that piece of content, and they've also found it in different ways. They've probably searched for different keywords in Google to find it, so only certain sections are relevant to them. So actually that shows you that they're engaged on the page.
Are you talking about the table of content?
Table of content. Table of content, yeah. It's like a links that take you to specific sections of the content. Yeah, so that's also, if that's the goal, then that's also quite useful. Again, Mel's spot on though. It depends on the goal. If the goal is, if you are creating product descriptions, for example, you probably want to be monitoring conversion rates and those kind of things, that'll be very different to informational content and anywhere in between keywords are always a good one because it doesn't matter what the type of content is, you probably want it to perform in search. So that's always a good thing to monitor how well it's performing for keywords.
Nice. I'm going to ask you then, Emma, what about content specifically for socials?
So content for socials, you've got your visual, you've got your content, your actual written content, and I guess it comes back to what we were saying earlier about how B2B and B2C have kind of, they're not so separate anymore because obviously on socials you need to look at what the trends are, and especially in ads, ads are more and more looking like posts these days. And one thing that I've noticed is that your social content for businesses is getting a bit more personal as well. Your business front is talking like a person rather than your bog standard. These are the services that we can offer. And I think it is quite interesting because you think that business posts would be just really quite formal with no fun or anything. And I think that's where, like I said earlier, it's quite different. You can still be fun and creative with the content that you put on social, so it's not like you have to completely separate yourself from that just because you are wanting to hit them business audiences. But yeah, I mean, I think for me personally, I really enjoy the trying to hit the target audiences with adding the business's personality in with the posts and in with the graphic design, getting the brand in right as well.
And that actually is a great point because there's something I want to add to this. Can I add how not to do it? Yeah. This is super useful I think for businesses. Go for it. We did a short on this recently and we called it the impact test. So people want to buy from people a smiley face, a personality adds a huge amount of authority and trust a huge amount. Now, every time you think of a piece of content as a business, if you think what the impact test of that is, so impact test meaning are people going to care? Is it going to resonate with them? Does it solve a problem? Is it just shouting about ourselves? If it actually solves a problem and you're not shouting about yourself is a good piece of content. If you're just talking about yourself, no one really, no one cares about that.
No one is going to care about you just saying, yeah, this is Matt and I do SEO. No one gives a shit. What they do care about is highlighting how I can help them solve their problems or achieve their goals. There's a massive difference between those two things. You see, it's all too common, especially on social media when you just see businesses, they'll upload a post and publish their brochure and then they'll do it again, and then there'll be an image of them cleaning a window and it's like, really? You've got to try and pull your audience in, make it look real, make it look genuine, build yourself as a real person, as a trusted person. And actually that might perform much better. He almost certainly will perform much better.
Nice. I think we'll wrap it up there then.
Yeah,
I enjoyed that. You do, Mel.
Thank you. Tom
Sounded really fun. You love doing that, don't you? Thank you, Tom.
Thank you.
First pod, done and dusted, Emma. Yeah,
Well done. Yeah, I did. Actually, I need to get better at though.
Don't think it's hard.
It is really hard. It
Is hard.
Well, thank you all for coming on and we'll see you next time.
And that's today's episode done and dusted. Guys. Today we explored why content is crucial in B2B marketing, the differences between B2B and B2C, and there's actually not that much difference anymore, how businesses can effectively identify and understand their audience. We also delved into some strategies for tailoring content to different stages of buyer journeys, the most effective types of content for the B2B marketing industry, key steps to developing a useful content strategy, setting realistic goals and KPIs, and then also some of the best channels for distributing your content. Thank you for the team Marketing labs, sharing their insights. And thank you to the listeners for tuning in. If you enjoyed this episode, then please subscribe, leave us a review, connect with us and share it with anyone who might find it helpful. It's all for that purpose. We're here to educate, we're here to help. So we really appreciate anybody that does share. Until next time, my name's Tom. I'm signing off from Marketing Blas, and happy content creating. Bye-Bye.
