When blog sites like Blogger started in the late 1990s, creators primarily consisted of individuals sharing their research and opinions in word processing-like format with hyperlinks. Early blogs were primarily personal and were often used to share information with friends and family. Commercial blogs quickly followed and the format—text with hyperlinks—remain unchanged. Blogging, which started nearly 25 years ago, was the earliest digital form of content development.
There are now young professionals who grew up considering the web browser as their first source for answering questions. They did this to conduct academic research and to solve personal problems. These users relied on early content, like blogs, to direct their online research. They carry these habits into their professional life. Many professionals now search for answers to business challenges as readily as they use search for their personal inquiries. It is time to bring what we know about B2C content creation to the B2B sales process.
Become a Trusted Resource with Original Content
The key to developing great content for a prospective customer is to have a firm grasp on what the prospect’s problem is. Understanding their pain points will help you to develop content that answers the question they ask when conducting research. You establish credibility by knowing a prospect and providing content, authored by your business, that is relevant and helpful. You turn an anonymous website visitor into a lead when the visitor deems your content as credible.
The consumption of original content establishes your authority in your domain in the mind of a prospect. So, not only do you gain credibility with topnotch content, but you also improve your chances of converting the lead to a customer. As you gain authority and build trust, you make the lead more amenable to your solution. This improves the chance of conversion as the hand-off from marketing to sales is effectuated.
Reduce the Noisiness of Available Content
If you know your prospects’ problems, you know what is important to them. Share information from relevant resources—not just those created by your team. This helps to establish your website and other digital assets as a go-to resource for industry knowledge. Relevant information could be from academia, market research reports, government agencies, news media or independent authorities.
By sharing this curated content through email, social media, podcast interviews or other online sources, you demonstrate an understanding of what is important to prospective customers. Potential customers are more likely to follow, like, read and otherwise engage with by your emails and digital assets when you are a go-to resource.
Put Your Content on Repeat
There are several reasons to reuse your existing content. Perhaps the best and often overlooked reason is that people absorb information differently, depending on how it is presented. Producing existing content in new formats (like transcribing a podcast interview into searchable text) creates additional opportunity for your content to be heard, understood and even shared.
Refresh content to maximize your investment in content development. Expect to put as much effort into the distribution of content as you do into the development of it. Putting content on repeat is not just about updating content for indexing web crawlers. It might include linking to cornerstone content in emails to new leads. It might be turning a blog post into a digestible infographic. Reimagine how content can be reused to increase market impressions.
As you build your B2B content library, be sure to create original content, curate relevant content and repurpose existing content. Your library will draw new visitors and turn them into sales leads.