How to Create Engaging B2B Marketing Content

If you read last week's blog post, you learned how to develop an editorial calendar. That post focused on organizing your publication schedule. Getting organized is important, since we’re all busy and have no time to waste.

Following a well-thought out editorial calendar to implement your strategy ensures you focus your time on the right content at the right time.

Engaging Marketing Content

But that’s only a piece of the content marketing puzzle.

An equally important piece is creating marketing content that engages your audience. 

In today’s world information overload, you must create the right content.

You must write content that ENGAGES. 

What exactly is that?

Without going in to buying personas and the buying cycle, this post explains how to write engaging content for any situation. The diagram above lays out how to create engaging content.

Engage Your Audience with B2B Marketing Content that Adds Value

Effective content marketing breaks through the daily noise when it adds value. That means you have to create content that benefits your customers.

Content that’s helpful grabs your customer’s attention. Your customers come to you for solutions to their problems.  Your products and services fill their needs. Now it’s up to you to tell your customer how your products and services will help them.

New offers also help to engage your prospects. In today’s fast-paced world, customers are always looking for an edge. They follow trends and want to be on the right side of those trends. 

To add value, publish new offers stressing key features and benefits important to your future customers.

In B2B marketing, people make buying decisions. That’s why you have to cover both personal and professional aspects of your audience. 

Your content adds value when it includes how to address the related risks the purchase of your products and services may entail. Some of those include training, time to implement, and cost.

Finally, marketing content adds values when it discusses relevant and significant issues. Namely, it contains content that’s meaningful and essential to your customer. Marketing content engages when it addresses “What’s in it for me?” (WIIFM).

Tell a Story to Engage Your Audience with B2B Marketing Content 

You can engage an audience in many ways. But one of the most effective ways is to tell a story. Before written history, we passed on significant events by word-of-mouth. We’re wired for stories because they help make a connection.

Today, we've taken story telling online and engage in communities. Telling stories with social media engages all the senses as we interact with our audience. This reinforces the point about touching on personal and professional concerns.

Compelling and engaging stories entertain as well as inform.

Engage Your Customers with Different Types of B2B Content

A content marketing strategy works best when content revolves around your customers. Because all customers are not alike, you must create content your audience prefers.

Not everyone consumes information in the same way.  Some like to read, others like audio, while others prefer visual content. Still others like detail and crunching numbers. And some only want the big picture.

Fortunately, you can meet these needs with little effort. Popular marketing content comes in a variety of formats like articles, blog posts, presentations, white papers and video, to name a few.                

     

Your challenge is to provide content in the way your audience prefers. You can accommodate your prospects, by re-purposing content from, say, a white paper into an audio or a series of blog posts. You’ll learn their preferences by listening to them on social sites.

Engage with Social Media Content to Build Long-Term Loyalty 

Much has been written about the value of social media in B2B. As you may gather by now, social media reinforces engagement.  It does that in two ways.

First, it distributes your content quickly and widely. It clearly maximizes dissemination.

Second, the mere use of social media helps foster long-term relationships. You can deepen customer relationships through webinars, chat sessions using circles on Google + or with exchanges on LinkedIn.

Intimate social contact strengthens bonds between you and your customer. You’ll gain useful insights into your customers’ thinking.

Align the use of social media with your customers’ needs and concerns and you’ll engage them. Using social media strategically, allows you to generate and nurture leads and build loyalty.

If you have any questions about how to create engaging content, please let me know.

Or if you'd like to share a story about how your business creates  engaging content, please feel free to share it. 

Have a great week!

Alex Milo

B2B Copywriter and Consultant

“Helping Transportation and Logistics Companies Generate Leads with Compelling Content”

Phone: 256-886-4684
Email: amilo@b2bcopywriting-alexmilo.com

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