The Content Marketing Institute (CMI) publishes an annual survey of content marketers that explores content creation, distribution, measurement, and budgets and shows how the most successful content marketers differentiate themselves. One of the biggest takeaways from CMI's most recent report, B2B Content Marketing: Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends: Insights for 2022, was that brands' budgets were getting a significant boost for content marketing - team sizes weren't anticipated to change/grow.  

Since the beginning, brands have utilized content to help promote their products and services. However, brands must create consistent, high-quality content that reaches their target audience with Google's algorithms. This requires a strong strategy, so many brands turn to a trusted B2B content marketing agency like TrizCom PR.         

What is B2B Content Marketing? 

This is a bit of a loaded question because it depends on who you ask. Let's take a look at the five different content marketing definitions below:

Mailchimp defines content marketing as "a marketing strategy used to attract, engage, and retain an audience by creating and sharing relevant articles, videos, podcasts, and other media. This approach establishes expertise, promotes brand awareness, and keeps your business top of mind when it's time to buy what you sell."

Hubspot defines content marketing as "the process of planning, creating, distributing, sharing, and publishing content via channels such as social media, blogs, websites, podcasts, apps, press releases, print publications, and more. The goal is to reach your target audience and increase brand awareness, sales, engagement, and loyalty."

SearchEngine Journal defines content marketing as "the proven practice of generating interest in a business and its products/services by creating value for customers through engaging and informative content. As a marketing practice that spans traditional and digital channels, content marketing is an integral component of any successful marketing organization."

Oracle defines content marketing as "the process of creating and distributing digital assets, such as blog posts, videos, ebooks, technical and solution briefs, and a variety of other digital content to provide information to your audience. Content marketing is essential to search engine optimization (SEO) success. To rank at the top of online search results, you need to create engaging, high-quality, in-depth content related to your industry, business, and message."

Looka, an AI-powered graphic design company, defines content marketing as "a strategy designed for the creation and distribution of valuable content to attract potential customers.”

Regardless of the definition, we can all agree that content marketing involves creating good content for a particular audience and then sharing that content. 

Types of Content Used in B2B Content Marketing

There are hundreds of types of content. To help break down the various types of content, we recommend putting your content options into four main buckets – Owned, Earned, Shared and Paid. The largest content bucket will most likely be your owned bucket. For example, listed below are 20 different types of owned media content ideas: 

• Blogs

• Landing Pages

• Website Pages

• Case Studies

• White Papers

• Infographics

• Video Content

• Podcast Content

• Lead Magnets

• Press Releases

• Sales Presentations

• eBooks

• Templates

• Testimonials

• Guest Blog posts

• Newsletters

• Webinars

• GIFs/Memes

• Email Marketing

• Research/Original Data

The Content Marketing Institute's B2B Content Marketing Insights for 2022: More Budget, More Work, More Empathy Report, states, "among the areas of investment in 2022, more than half of the marketers expect increased spending in video, events (digital, in-person, hybrid), owned-media assets, and paid media."

Answering the WHY Question Before Beginning a B2B Content Marketing Strategy 

The biggest challenge we find with brands who create their content marketing in-house is differentiating from a tactic to a strategy. Let's explain—for many brands, the content is created before knowing the why behind the content. It's almost as if they are checking a box:

• December blog post written and posted

• December newsletter written and sent

• December social media post written and posted

A good B2B content marketing strategy agency starts with the why and then fills in the tactics. For example:

Your objective: Increase new organic website visitors.

Your strategy might be: Identify user intent keywords and integrate them into owned content.

Your tactics might include: 

• Keyword-driven blog posts

• Keyword-driven videos

• Keyword-driven podcasts

• Keyword-driven landing page

Measuring the Success of Your B2B Content Marketing Strategy Agency

Nothing drives us crazier than brands who invest in a B2B content marketing strategy agency and only ask for deliverables (tactics) without mentioning measurement. This is not surprising at all. According to ahrefs blog, 90.63% of content receives no traffic from Google. So basically, most web content is created just to have content—what a waste of resources. 

Sure, your B2B content marketing strategy agency can produce 24 blogs, two videos, a podcast and a landing page – but can they actually measure its success? The answer is a resounding YES! And if they don't or can't, you should look for a different B2B content marketing strategy agency–fast!

Ways to Track B2B Content Marketing's ROI

Let's suppose the objective is to increase new organic website visitors. 

Your strategy might be: Identify user intent keywords and integrate them into owned content for search engine optimization–also known as SEO.

The tactics you created were: 

• Three keyword-driven blog posts

• One keyword-driven video

• One keyword-driven podcast

• One keyword-driven landing page

Ways to track content marketing strategy ROI:

1. The most obvious is tracking your keyword placement – where did you start, and where are you now?

2. Number of blog backlinks

3. UTM campaign tracking

4. Domain authority and page authority

5. Content traffic (how much traffic is driven to your website from a piece of content)

6. Referral traffic

7. Bounce rates

8. Social media shares

9. Social network referrals

10. Inbound links

You don't need to track every single one of these metrics when evaluating your content marketing—we would highly recommend you don't. However, your B2B content marketing agency should be tracking a few metrics. 

Creating E.A.T. B2B Marketing Content 

Your B2B content marketing agency should recognize that not all content is created equal, and quality content will win almost every time. This is where E.A.T. enters the picture—it's one of the many ways Google ensures the content it's recommending in search results is accurate, truthful and useful. And when it's utilized correctly, a B2B content marketing agency will help your brand's business and produce results – not just tactics.

Google's E.A.T. Quality Guidelines:

• Expertise—the expertise of the creator of the Main Content.

• Authoritativeness—the authoritativeness of the creator of the Main Content, the Main Content itself, and the website.

• Trustworthiness—the trustworthiness of the creator of the Main Content, the Main Content itself, and the website.

Does your brand need help with your content marketing strategy? If so, give TrizCom PR a ring, and we can set up a free introductory call. You can reach us at 972-247-1369 or by email TrizCom@TrizCom.com.