Everything to know about resourceful B2B digital content marketing

People continuously seek and consume content in this fast-paced world, where information is available at their fingertips. It becomes crucial for brands to allocate sufficiently in the marketing budget for creating quality content consistently. So, what is content marketing? And why is it important, you ask? The simple answer, as Bill Gates puts it, is ‘Content is King’. Today, it is the ‘content’ that drives the brand towards success.

Content Marketing Institute defines⁽¹⁾ Content Marketing as a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.

The idea is to provide truly relevant and useful content to your prospects and customers instead of pitching your products or services. Here is an overview of all the what’s and why’s of competent B2B Content Marketing:

What is B2B digital content marketing?

The definition of B2B Digital Content Marketing is the use of content in various formats to attract, engage, educate, inform, nurture, and convert prospective B2B buyers into qualified leads.

Getting found when business buyers search has become the most critical point in the B2B marketing channel. And, when done well, content creates brand equity. It means your brand becomes more valuable over time as you continue to create useful content consistently. Gradually, gaining reputation as a leader in the field.

Typical forms of B2B Digital Content Marketing include blogging, podcasting, emailers, newsletters, infographics, and videos being the new entry.

What are the complexities in B2B content marketing?

A 2020 FINITE survey⁽²⁾ of over 600 marketers highlighted that 70% of B2B companies find it difficult to keep the content quality and quantity high. It also stated that 35% of B2B marketers said producing enough content is their biggest challenge, while 26% of marketers said it was reaching the right audience and 16% said measuring ROI was a concern.

While it’s easy to create content, it’s tough to do this at scale, speed, and to maintain high quality. This can be due to a lack of resources, ideas, organization, and more. Following are some of the complexities B2B marketers face when it comes to content creation.

1. Diverse buyer persona

Buyers are diverse individuals in terms of gender, age, or interest. And each like to consume their content differently. It is crucial to think beyond these differences and recognize each of the various preferences. Consider building not just one but multiple buyer personas and then creating different content types to reflect this diversity. This will better your chances to reach the target audience effectively.

2. Positioning content through the buyer journey:

One of the most prominent challenges marketers face is ensuring that the right content is available to the buyer when they need it. To cater to this issue, you need to create engaging content for every stage of the buyers' journey. You can add value by making the content with the correct narrative and in a preferred format.

For example, written words in blogs/articles are a great way to raise awareness; videos and round-up pieces will aid buyers during the consideration phase, and case studies and demonstrations – either live or on-demand – help in decision-making.

While considering all this, make sure not to neglect your buyer personas. Supporting their ongoing needs can increase retention and encourage them to become advocates for your brand.

The challenge marketers face is figuring out how to deliver engaging, compelling content with speed without compromising quality and volume for every stage in the buyer’s journey.

3. Proving credibility and authority:

With the Internet, accessing and sharing information on the web becomes easy. This, in return, makes it difficult for the consumer to recognize the credibility of the content. Hence, the marketer must establish a credible and authoritative voice for their brands. Hiring the right talent or expert in the field can help you achieve the goal to cut through existing clutter and noise. It will help to convince the target audience and capture their attention in a better way.

This direction in content strategy will allow marketers to maintain the brand’s identity and boost marketing ROI while improving their brand’s authority and thought leadership in the space.

4. Linguistic barriers & cultural differences:   

When engaging in international business, it's essential to consider the languages spoken in the countries you're looking to expand. It would be best if you tried to either translate or create new content in relevant languages to cater to those buyers. However, it's tedious to manage and coordinate with translators to create content in multiple languages and release multilingual versions at the same time.

Another factor to consider while making overseas trade is the cultural difference. The arts, traditions, foods, and social holidays and norms followed by a specific group of people define culture.

So, when selling products to an international retailer or potential client or running an overseas production facility, demonstrating that you've taken the time to understand their cultures can project the respect and emotional intelligence necessary to conduct business successfully.

5. Channelizing content for digital content marketing:

Marketing is now a complex process involving technology, making it more personalized and intelligent. It also involves multiple stakeholders, outside agencies and suppliers, and multiple channels and media.

The growing distribution channel and various content formats driven by consumer personas and behavior changes add another layer of complexity in strategic content distribution. Such a landscape requires more intelligent marketing automation tools.

It would help if you considered using software like Adobe’s Marketo, HubSpot, Eloqua, Salesforce Pardot, and more. These tools enable all, or elements of the content marketing process, from creation to promotion and governance, to be managed.

Why are speed and scale important in B2B content marketing?

Currently, content runs the world. From entertainment and news to marketing to healthcare, getting your message out there has never been more important. Here are a few reasons why speed and scale play a vital role in digital content marketing:

1. Increase reach 

A great way to raise your marketing reach is by making content available both online and offline. It will also bring in more brand visibility. Often, great quality consistent content attracts more website visitors and newer leads. Also, their feedback towards the end will give you a better knowledge of what your audience needs and wants to see from you. Altogether, it’s a viable strategy to explore to reach your targets.

2. Top of mind (TOM) recalls

Brands need to create relevant– quality and quantity content to thrive. According to the 2018 Nielsen Total Audience Report⁽³⁾, nearly half an adults’ day is dedicated to consuming this content. In fact, American adults spend over 11 hours per day listening to, watching, reading, or generally interacting with media.

So, if you are feeding your audience with what and how they want to engage then there are great chances for your brand to stay in their minds for long.

And with feeds refreshing every second, high-quality content creation not only needs to happen fast but should also stand out for top-of-mind recall.

3. To stay relevant

With fresh content created every minute, the business needs to stay relevant in terms of sharing content.  Content creation can be a challenge initially. But once you have a solid, repeatable process to follow—and great tools to speed up your work—you’ll be able to produce the best content for social media, your website, and more without wasting any time. And to stay on top of the game, some companies hire a content marketing team for the task.

Scaling content is a fancy way of saying to create content in quantity. However, the team is already swamped with existing campaigns and coordination. So, what can you do to grow your reach and publish more while staying relevant? The answer to this is to expand the number of content contributors or increase efficiency.

Why companies are shifting more to digital content?

The way customer experiences any brand, and its products have changed dramatically. It's shifted from being traditional to more digital interactions. Whether someone is exploring options or making a purchase decision to users using the product or payer evaluating the ROI, customer's expectations about brand interactions are primarily digital. Every B2B marketer must realize and deliver to this newer customer expectations.

1. Improved productivity:

Thanks to marketing automation, marketers can now carry out their tasks quickly, autonomic, and competently. Also, monitoring the status of their campaigns and content performance in real-time and managing time becomes swift.

2. Time and cost advantage:

The improvement of a marketer’s productivity leads to significant savings in time and costs. In addition, with the adoption of new technologies, content formats, and innovative content creation methodologies, production times have been reduced. This enables the marketers to gain more benefits in given budget increases.

3. Improved customer connect:

Consumers digitize much faster than businesses. That is why a new edge digital content-driven marketing can achieve better customer connections than companies that continue with the traditional content.

4. Increased analytical capacity:

Opting for digital content formats facilitates the analysis of content reach, engagement, and customer behavior data. Further allowing content optimization for improved personalized interaction with your customers and prospects.

5. Expansion of geographical borders:

Digitizing content and customer engagements amplifies the reach and selective targeting. Content localization across borders helps improve the performance of marketing campaigns.

Why Ethosh plays a vital role in ramping your B2B content marketing?

The new-age digital content formats Ethosh can deliver at scale, speed, and cost-advantage to differentiate your brand engagement across buyers' journey are:

High-quality video content production:

Interactive digital content:

One of our clients already offered a product that simplifies research and aid in lab efficiency, but no one seemed to know about it. They wanted to inform their customers and allow them to test it out and see the efficacy before purchasing. To do this, they decided to create an engaging and interactive virtual experience for potential customers. The experience would ideally provide focused messaging to increase awareness about how the product assists scientists in their research and improves lab efficiency. 

Immersive digital content:

By well-planned immersive and interactive technology-based experiential content can significantly improve product adoptions and knowledge retention while reducing cost & time.

Augmented Reality ( AR): 

An ophthalmology-focused pharmaceutical company wanted to expand its reach and gain the confidence of HCPs and patients. We developed an interactive augmented reality (AR) app for iOS and Android to create greater awareness about glaucoma in order to provide comprehensive patient education and provide timelier diagnoses.

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Virtual Reality ( VR): 

Healthcare professionals prefer to experience the benefits of a product directly before deciding whether to adopt it into their day-to-day practice. While videos can demonstrate a product’s features, they are unable to provide the opportunity to “learn by doing” that would augment HCPs’ confidence in its operation and benefits. An animated and interactive virtual experience helped HCPs better understand the benefits of the device, which in turn increased their confidence in adopting the device in their practices.

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Ethosh advantage  

 1. Cost Savings

•   Competitive rates.
•   Investment in dedicated DM.
•   Volume Discounts.

 2. Agility

•   Ability to ramp up / ramp down at short notice.

 3. CX Leadership

• Ethosh team’s focus on, Transformation and Innovation ideas.

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