8 Tips For Creating High-Value B2B Content That Will Engage Your Audience

Is your content missing the mark ? Use these tips to improve your connection with your customers.
Engaging_B2B_Content

B2B marketing demands B2B content, which requires a different approach compared to content geared directly towards individuals. The way you create a narrative around your organization has to appeal to businesses you’re selling to, offering creative solutions to problems they’re experiencing, as well as relating directly to the real-world business landscape.

High-value content is vital to engaging your audience and generating real returns on your investment. Here are eight great tips for creating high-value B2B content.

1. Plug the Gaps in Your Competitors’ Content

Standing out from the crowd is the name of the game when it comes to B2B content, so you can’t keep recycling the same old industry ideas. By all means, look to your competitors’ content for inspiration, but with the aim of identifying what’s not being said. That will give you a whole host of ideas that you can use to engage your audience.

“Coming up with unique content can be challenging, but you don’t always have to start from scratch,” says Edward Sythe, a content expert at Researchpapersuk and Writinity. “Looking for a new angle on a popular topic gives you a place to start, and it helps that your audience will have some degree of familiarity with the subject in question.”

2. Ask the Audience

When you’re creating content for your audience, it’s vital to use your knowledge and expertise to produce something of real value. However, if you’re focusing exclusively on what you feel comfortable writing about, you’ll never hit the nail on the head for audience engagement. The best content emerges from the intersection of your specific knowledge and what the audience wants to learn about.

The best way to understand what your audience wants? Ask them! Thanks to social media, it has ever been easier to survey your audience for topic ideas. As a bonus, these engaging social interactions will boost your organic reach across whatever social media platforms you’re using.

3. Modernize Your Most Popular Content

Some B2B content performs better than most, and you should already be identifying your most popular pieces in order to replicate their success. But eventually, even the most popular posts grow outdated, presenting you with a perfect opportunity to create some high-power content to engage your audience.

Updating content gives it a new lease on life and often provides a great return on investment as you only need to make a few choice changes. Either update it to take into account new and emerging challenges, or consider converting it into a new format — for example, by taking a blog post and letting it grow into a fully formed e-book your customers will love.

4. Be Open About Your Failures

Finding ways to be relatable can have a powerful impact on audience engagement. Being open about areas in which your business has failed to meet its expectations demonstrates an authenticity that your customers will love, especially in today’s superficial digital landscape.

In B2B marketing, it’s especially valuable to explore innovations you’ve made that didn’t turn out how you expected. There’s always a lesson to be learned from failure. Share that lesson with your audience and demonstrate how you’ve grown as an organization.

5. Toot Your Own Horn

Alongside sharing your failures, it’s OK to brag about your successes from time to time. Although this requires caution in the tone you take — nobody likes a loud-mouth and you need to be careful to avoid condescension — publicizing the areas in which you’re excelling is a great way to kickstart a conversation.

“Framing your achievements around user-guides and actionable insights provides your audience with high-value B2B content that they’ll love,” says Sharon Church, a business writer at Last Minute Writing and Draftbeyond. “They may even share these guides with other businesses, expanding your reach ever further.”

6. Don’t Overcomplicate Things

It’s natural that you want to demonstrate your high-level understanding of sophisticated concepts in your B2B content. After all, you want to make sure your audience recognizes that you’re a leader in your field, and to put their faith in your company. However, this can take you down a rabbit hole of over-complication that might alienate your audience.

Try to simplify concepts in your B2B content as much as possible. Not only does will this make it more approachable to a wider audience, it actually demonstrates a greater understanding of a subject. After all, as Albert Einstein once said, “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”

7. Leverage Employee Knowledge

Your employees are on the front line of customer engagement. They know the questions your customers are asking, the pain points they’re experiencing, and even their most frequent complaints about your products or services. Listening to your employees can therefore provide an immensely valuable source of B2B content ideas that have an immediate impact on your audience.

Content that hones in on real and recognizable experiences that your customers are having will leave the biggest impact on your audience. Your employees have a direct insight into these experiences, so use it!

8. Build Tools Your Audience Can Use

Discursive blogs and written content are great for engaging an audience on a subject, but if you want to create really powerful B2B content, you should focus on giving them practical tools they can put to use in their own business operations. Think guides, tutorials and checklists that can have an impact in the real world.

From a content marketing perspective, one of the best ways to expand your reach is to provide something that your users are going to come back to day-in and day-out. As your content becomes invaluably embedded in your audience’s working processes, it won’t take long for your business to become equally important to their operation.

Get Creative with Your B2B Content Creation!

Recycling the same old content ideas year over year will alienate your audience and damage your business. Use these tips to get creative when it comes to B2B content creation and you’ll see a real increase in lead generation and customer conversion rates.



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