[Outbrain Masterclass] Trends & Best Practices in B2B Technology Content Marketing

Trends & Best Practices in B2B Technology Content Marketing

From GE’s Txchnologist, to Adobe’s 99U, Intel’s IQ, Unbounce’s Page Fights with their focus on video content, or Australia’s MYOB End of Financial Year hub, leading B2B Technology brands around the globe have, in recent times, been investing in content marketing to provide value to their audiences and drive business results.

But if you’re a marketer in the B2B Technology space, you’ll know the challenges peculiar to your industry: from having to get buy-in from various stakeholders within your buyer’s organization, to aligning your content marketing messages with the evolving needs of buyers, to having to deal with long sales cycles that make it hard to prove the positive ROI of your content marketing efforts.

According to a recent study by tech media company TechTarget, when choosing a new software for an organization, buying teams often involve 4+ stakeholders, which means you need to reach and engage with various decision makers during their individual process of researching and selecting your product or solution.

Clearly content has become a must-have for B2B Technology brands, and marketers are looking at more innovative ways to create high-quality content that not only establishes authority but builds meaningful relationships with their target consumers.

Laying out your buying cycle or sales funnel before you start building your content is fundamental to the success of your content strategy.In the meantime, these are the steps that will help you transform your content strategy.

Build your buyer personas based on whether they are ready to make a purchase or not, and only once you have categorized your potential customers across each stage of the buying cycle you can start creating and distributing content.

Remember: at each stage of the buying cycle, your goal should be to support their current informational needs and move them through the funnel.

A great example is SAP’s Digitalist Magazine – a content hub aimed at creating an affinity for SAP products. The hub features great content that clearly speaks to audiences at different stages of the buying cycle – from answering early-stage buyer questions to driving calls-to-action from audiences who are ready to convert.

How buying cycle impacts your content marketing strategy

You may still wonder where content marketing fits into the buying cycle. The answer is everywhere.

A common misconception is that content is merely a tactic to drive awareness and traffic to your blog. However, as content marketers become more sophisticated, they are now able to prove the effectiveness of content across all stages of the customer journey.

Content Funnel via Outbrain

Solving the content ROI dilemma

As a marketer, you know that not all audiences are created equal, and your job is to find ways to measure the individual value of visitors to their content and understand how this value aligned with their overall marketing KPIs.

Technology brands are a the forefront of connecting their content marketing efforts to measurable results. A great example is TrendMicro.

The brand used content to cover important issues around Internet security. Through a careful distribution strategy, the reached potential buyers across around 100 premium German publishers, later expanding their focus into France and the UK as well. As a result, they saw a substantial increase in online revenue coming from new and returning customers.

TrendMicro Content Example

Lead nurturing: what to do with buyers that are not ready to buy?

Nurturing your leads is one of the most crucial areas of the customer journey.

By now you know how to attract, engage and convert leads into customers. But what about those who are engaged with your brand but not ready to buy?

You’ve already invested time, money and resources into getting those users to visit your site or content hub and educating them about your business, so you shouldn’t assume that they’ve just dropped out of your buyer cycle.

Here at Outbrain, for example, our Conversion Optimization experts have implemented several leads nurturing flows using email as a tool to reactivate users who have shown interest in our offering but may not have quite made it through the funnel to creating a content campaign.

Transform Your B2B Tech Content Strategy at our Breakfast Masterclass

Did you find these tips handy and want to discover more insights on how to transform your B2B Tech content strategy?

Outbrain is organizing a breakfast masterclass on September 7th, 2016 in Singapore.

Together with speakers from the B2B Technology marketing field, we will examine how B2B Tech brands can drive measurable results through content.

Some of the topics we will discuss include:

  • Case Study: Innovation in Communication From a Seasoned B2B Technology Marketer
  • Who Reads White Papers Today Anyway? Must-Have Skills & Formats for the Modern Content Marketer
  • Global Best Practices: B2B Tech Brands Around the World Build Demand & Generate Leads Through Content
  • Fireside Chat: Learning from Content Rock Stars in the Enterprise Technology Space

Date: Wednesday, 7 September 2016

Time: 8.00am – 10.00am

Location: Parkroyal on Pickering, 3 Upper Pickering Street, 058289

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