If you want to grow your customer base, you’ve got to make prospects aware of who you are and what you do, be seen as trustworthy, and provide an efficient, affordable solution for their problems. Sounds easy, right? 

As we know, it takes a concerted effort to find, engage, and nurture prospects to build that trust before they will ever do business with us. To make things more complex, B2B marketing efforts need to be both broad-based and highly targeted to provide the right content.

It’s a challenge. 

However, there are B2B marketing strategies you can employ that will significantly improve your odds of success.

Here are five ways to increase B2B content engagement and improve your conversion rates.


1. Define Your Target Audience


Marketing personas help create a composite sketch of your ideal buyer. Then you can paint a picture of your target’s age, location, position, experience, type of company, etc. However, this process can get complicated quickly when you realize that many B2B sales include buying committees or multiple stakeholders in the process. Each may have different goals and approach purchase decisions in different ways.

It will take some research to define your target audience. A good place to start is by working with your sales team to identify their high-value customers. By looking at the common traits of high-value customers, you can begin to craft buyer personas to find similar companies and customers.

You’ll also need to identify what it is you do best and which audiences you do not want to target.

When you apply Account-Based Marketing (ABM) strategies, you can further define your target audience to create more personalized content strategies. For example, you can leverage data insights to help define your target audience in multiple ways to shape your content creation and delivery:

  • Audience segments
  • Account insights
  • Account interactions
  • Account behavior
  • Account conversions
  • Account impact

Measuring content performance during each stage of the buyer journey can also provide the insights you need to optimize content performance.


2. Create Great Content


All the science and data you have won’t do you any good if you don’t have great content at the heart of your content marketing strategy. If your content quality is poor, it reflects badly on your company and your products.

Quality content will help attract the right audience, keep them engaged, and build trust.

According to the Content Marketing Institute (CMI), quality content needs to meet three specific goals.


User-Focused and Engaging


Brands often spend a lot of time talking about themselves rather than focusing on their customers' needs, problems, and challenges. If you want to improve your engagement metrics and help develop qualified leads, you need to create content that demonstrates an understanding of your customer’s concerns and provides solutions to their problems.

The CMI says quality content should be:

  • Jargon-free: Ensure customers can understand your offerings and don’t have to work to decipher complex or unfamiliar terms.
  • Written in the appropriate style and voice: Language and tone should be appropriate to the industry and customers you are targeting.
  • Built for response: Every piece of content should have specific marketing goals and be built to trigger the next action.
  • Properly structured: Content needs to follow best practices for structure and format to aid in discovery through organic search and to make it easy for users to find important information within your content format.

Meets a Business Purpose


You’re not creating content to check off a box. You’re doing it to educate and inform customers to build trust, but with a specific business purpose: to get prospects to become customers. Whether you’re trying to capture them as a lead, nurturing them during their research phase, or trying to close the deal, you need a defined business purpose that forms the foundation for your content marketing strategy.

One of the best ways to engage your target audience is through storytelling. When you can demonstrate the challenges your customers face and provide a solution to their problems, you can get their attention. Great storytelling can hold their attention and keep them coming back for more.


Easy to Find and Share


If you create great content but nobody can find it, what’s the point? This problem is more common than you might think. The American Marketing Association reports that 90% of the content created by marketing is never used by sales and that sales teams spend an average of 30 hours a month searching for relevant content or creating their own sales materials.

Sometimes, the content exists but sales teams simply can’t find it. That means customers won’t find it either. 

Marketing and sales teams must be aligned in the decisions about what content is needed to support the buyer journey.


3. Develop Content for Each Stage of the Buyer Journey


At any given time, you’re going to have prospects at different stages of the buyer journey. It’s important to develop the right content at each stage to help nurture them in the process if you want to improve engagement.


Awareness

  • Customers may be looking for industry information and realizing they have a problem they need to resolve.
  • B2B marketers are trying to raise brand awareness and capture leads.

At this stage, potential customers may not know your brand or only have limited knowledge. You need to get a prospect’s attention and raise your brand profile.

So much of sales is about risk mitigation. If a prospect doesn’t know who you are or what you do, doing business with you is a risk. By exposing your brand, demonstrating that you are trustworthy, and letting customers know what you do, you are reducing that risk and hopefully luring them into your sales pipeline as a lead.

Content at this stage often describes common challenges and problems without a heavy dose of self-promotion.

Effective content at the awareness phase includes:

  • Blog posts
  • Articles
  • Landing pages
  • Social media 
  • Infographics

Consideration

  • Customers have identified a problem and are researching solutions.
  • B2B marketers are providing valuable content to help guide the discovery of solutions and drive customers to the next stage.

As customers research and assess different solutions, they begin focusing on specific information. B2B marketers must explain the value of the solutions they provide and how they solve problems.

Content needs to be honest, accurate, and authentic with a focus on providing the specific information buyers are seeking when doing their research.

Effective content at the consideration phase includes:

  • Case studies
  • Explainer videos
  • Webinars
  • White papers or eBooks

Purchase

  • Customers are making purchase decisions.
  • B2B marketers are driving conversions.

When customers are ready to purchase, B2B marketers must focus attention on why they should buy your products or do business with your company versus a competitor. At this stage, it’s all about convincing and influencing buyers that your solutions are the best solution to their specific problem.

Effective content at the purchase phase includes:

  • Demos
  • Free trial offers
  • Testimonials

4. Personalize Conten


The more someone finds content relevant to their business, industry, or situation, the more likely you are to improve content engagement. While writing great content and developing content for each stage of the buyer journey is essential, getting consistent customer engagement requires personalization.

This goes beyond defining your target audience. It includes bringing in buyer insights, such as first-party and third-party data, intent data, and a strong sales orchestration strategy. To manage content production and personalize at scale, you need a robust tech platform.

The Folloze Buyer Experience platform brings all of these elements together to combine deep buyer insights, artificial intelligence, and efficient sales orchestration to help manage your content strategy. This allows you to tailor the buyer experience and provide the relevant pieces of content, types of content, and information buyers need to help create demand and convert them. 

Along the way, this also helps content performance and improves the user experience because Folloze uses all of this data to recommend the right content for each buyer at each stage of their journey. 

When you can personalize at scale, you significantly improve user engagement, content engagement rates, and conversion rates. 


5. Test and Optimize


Tracking the performance of your content is key to improving performance. When you know what content is delivering on its goals — and what is falling short — it helps you optimize performance.

A study by the Content Marketing Institute and Marketing Profs shows that three-quarters of organizations measure content performance. Sixty-nine percent said engagement provides the greatest insight. Yet only 36% said they are doing a very good or excellent job at it. Yet, this analysis can pay great dividends.

By constantly measuring and A/B testing content and content elements, you can continually evaluate and improve performance. The right tech stack can go a long way here by testing all sorts of things such as:

  • Email subject lines
  • Content titles
  • Images
  • Opt-in forms
  • Calls to action
  • And just about anything else you produce

It Takes a buyer-centric Approach

It can be easy to get caught up in vanity metrics when you are reviewing the performance of your digital content. Using Google Analytics or other analytic tools, you can track so many things, from website visitors, unique page views, average time on site, average session duration, bounce rate, and more. It’s not that these metrics aren’t important, but they are only a single piece of the puzzle. 

Your digital marketing is intended to produce bottom-line results. Ultimately, B2B marketers will judge success based on ROI.

At Folloze, we know that a buyer-centric approach delivers results and growth, such as:

  • 4X greater engagement
  • 10X greater pipeline growth
  • 5X increase in customer lifetime value

We accomplish that by providing a series of tools that allow you to:

  • Create interactive experiences to aid discovery, education, and engagement with valuable content in different ways.
  • Leverage data and intelligence content to optimize the buying team’s journey.
  • Support a flexible and collaborative process for buying teams.
  • Create value with relevant content and interactive content that builds trust.
  • Empower your frontline marketers with the tools they need to execute efficiently, quickly, and at scale.
  • Provide buyers with self-service tools that support their discovery process.

Folloze is the easiest and most powerful buyer experience platform. 

Request a demo today and see how Folloze can improve your B2B content engagement and drive sustainable growth for your business.