How B2B can ace Content Marketing in 2021
Insights from The B2B Content Marketing Report on the role of a blog, how educational content is the source of organic traffic, and the importance of a call to action.
In India be it for a B2B or B2C everything starts and ends with leads. One of the reasons why I avoid talking with startups. They will start with the content model and eventually, get to the point “How many MQL(Marketing Qualified Leads) can we get every month.” Obviously, they have pressure from their investors. And hence people started hiring “Growth Hackers.”
I never understood how one can predict monthly leads. Definitely, I lack the growth mentality.
By and large, if you talk about content marketing in the B2B space it will always start with a blog and then it will go down the boring lanes of content such as whitepapers, followed by social media and off late videos. In fact, for a very large time and even now marketers classified Facebook into the B2C space and LinkedIn into the B2B space. With social networks now cloning each other, the lines have almost blurred.
I have never understood why B2B needs to be serious and boring. Be it B2B or B2C eventually you are talking to humans. The idea of any form of marketing should be adding value to the target audience time.
Role of Blog in B2B content marketing
Blogs still play a bigger role in B2B - nearly 3 out of 4 companies have a blog says the latest research done by Backlinko. “72% of B2B companies have a blog. Put another way, 28% of B2B companies don’t have a blog,” says The B2B Content Marketing Report.
The report that analyzed 502 B2B companies to better understand how they approach content marketing informs only 8% of B2B companies solely use their blogs for sharing company-focused, PR-style content. This has been a big change in the last few years. Earlier majority of the blogs would be spammed by a company or product updates and even print media mentions.
You might remember the Content Marketing Benchmark 2020 data provided by the people at Animalz. “59.22% of All Blog Traffic Came from Organic Search.”
Organic is the only channel that compounds. The effort today will reliably result in more traffic next week, next month, next year, and years after that. Compare that to a social channel like Twitter, where the half-life of a post might be as little as 18 minutes. The ephemerality of social traffic, and even email traffic, means they aren’t sustainable channels for growth.
Simply put organic search is how blogs grow. And one of the ways of growing Organic Search is creating tutorial content.
If you read last year’s Google Search Trends “How to” and “What is” dominate the charts. Recently Backlinko analysed 306M keywords to understand the types of queries that people use in Google search. The study finds that 14.1% of Search Queries are Question Keywords. It further broke down the most common types of questions that people used.
Educational content source to organic traffic
B2B blogs are also walking the same path and creating educational content. According to the study blogs that create such content receives 52% more organic traffic than those that mainly publish content about their company.
“This finding isn’t entirely surprising: educational content is more likely to rank for a wider variety of keywords. On the other hand, a business that’s only publishing news is limited to ranking for their company name and a handful of other related terms.”
A mixed approach to publishing valuable or educational content and company news is favoured. “Most content is focused on providing valuable content that educates an audience on a problem they’re looking to solve. The blog is also where a company publishes company-focused content that position’s their company as an industry leader.”
Long-form content performs better
By now you know that Google gives preference to long-form or well-researched content but they have to be reliable. You can’t be feeding garbage in the name of long-form content. You will have to hire domain experts if you want to ace the game of Content Marketing in 2021.
“Content, longer than 3000 words get an average of 77.2% more referring domain links than content shorter than 1000 words. Additionally, long-form content generates significantly more social shares than short content,” says a study.
For B2B, the study highlights: “Long-form B2B content generates more social shares, backlinks, referring domains and organic traffic. For blog posts that rank well in organic search, the top 10% of posts are almost 3x the length of the bottom 10% of posts.”
Importance of call to action on blogs
The study finds that 23% of B2B blogs don’t have a call-to-action. While some of the surveyed B2B players have understood that a clear call-to-action can be a solution to lead or trail.
But at the same time, no one opts for a trial on her first visit to the blog. So data finds that majority of them have focussed on a call-to-action like “Related Articles.” It isn’t a bad idea since it can increase the time spent on your blog and pageviews. However, this will also depend on the value generated from previous content.
I would prefer the option of having related articles and subscribing to the newsletter. Just make sure you keep the related articles to a minimum of 2 or 3. You are not TikTok that people will spend hours on your platform.
The most popular type of call-to-action was to show-case related articles, used by 39% of companies. The second-most-popular call-to-action was to subscribe to their newsletter, used on 35% of blogs.
With 41% “Subscribe to Newsletter” feature is also the most popular type of pop-up.
Pop-ups are tricky they do remind you to join or do an action but just make sure you don’t stick on the face or kill the reading experience. A/B testing is the smart way to find out where and when to stick the pop-ups. I still favour embedding it on the website at particular junctions.
For example, I would recommend having a newsletter option right at the end of the article and then have the related articles. It makes no sense to stick a popup right when you have landed on the website. It is asking someone to buy a product without even having a look at it.
And let me end my post with Tom Fishburne’s take on “lead nurturing.”
