How To Create B2B Marketing Content That Converts – [Guide]

So what B2B marketing content should you create?

Knowing how to write great b2b marketing content that converts is fundamental in B2B lead generation. The purpose of the content is to help your ideal customer profiles (ICP) find the answer to the problem they need to solve right now.

Keep in mind that you are not writing for entertainment but solving prospects problems (teach-to-solve), so decide who your Ideal Customer Profile (company profile) and who in the organization experience this problem.

Know the ideal customer profile and the personas you are writing for…

We’ve found it most effective to consider your Ideal Client Profile and Persona before creating content. 

Once you know the persona and ICP, and the problems they are struggling with, it all becomes clear.

Interview your customers ….

Interview your customers to understand their biggest problems and what is holding them back from solving them.

When we create leads for our clients, we always interview their customers to identify the content we need to create. There is no need to guess when you have customers you can interview. Only interview the kind of customers you want more of.

Avoid B2C tactics like mining data on Google searches, Quora, etc. In many industries you will uncover unreliable data or understand the Persona’s point of view.

Identifying your Ideal Customer Profile’s pains …

Let us use an example of an it-service firm that, among other services, help their customers implement and support CRM systems and other cloud services. They wish to create marketing content that educate their prospects and customers, and help them make it easier to buy

Through customer interviews, the it-service company has realized that CRM & Marketing Automation software selection is a major area their ICPs struggle with. While they realize they need a place to manage all their customers and prospects, they struggle with: 

Pain points

• Defining the desired goals and what sales, marketing and service would like to be able to do
• Pinpointing the problems, collaboration blocks, delays they experiencing currently
• Which systems they would like to integrate with the CRM systems
• What is costs and how long it takes to implement

Create An Outline Of Your Content

Headline: How To Select Your CRM and Marketing Automation System [Buyer’s Guide]

Create a guide to help your customers and prospects understand the process of CRM software selection, integration options to other systems, licensing package, and implementation cost.

Describe your ICP’s pain points

Show the prospects that you understand the problem they are experiencing and how it manifests itself.

• Sales is not able to generate enough new leads and sales.
  • Not able to automate and scale the process of nurturing leads and identify those that are actively looking for a solution. Manual nurturing limits the amount of leads a sales rep can handle and the lead and sales growth we can achieve.

• Too many customer get too much discount
  • Sales is diligently trying to close all leads, including those that do not have a major problem, a problem that doesn’t necessarily justify our list price, and those that are not REALLY looking. In many cases sales manage to close them with a sizeable discount.

• Not able to identify the most active prospects and customers on the website
  • Because we can’t see the most active accounts on the website and match them with our ideal customer profiles, we can’t focus on the best, biggest, and most profitable prospects.

Describe your ICP’s desired outcome (goal)

Describe the goal of what the solution needs to do, to create clarity and structure to what they are trying to achieve but most likely not specified yet.

• When a contact, is active on the website, we want to be able to automate nurturing and communication to guide the prospects through their decision process until they are ready to talk to a sales rep. 

• When sales can identify and engage with the most active prospects, we give away less discount.

• When sales reps are able to identify the most active prospects and see if they are a tier 1 (ideal customer profile), tier 2 etc. that would allow them to close more customers, faster, bigger orders and less discount, rather than calling and emailing prospects that are not active or don’t belong to our group of ideal customer profiles.

“Teach to Solve” by explaining how the problem(s) is solved in steps

Now you can show HOW your solution solves their problem. Now why would the prospect go anywhere else now, when they found it? Other vendors will now be compared to your solution … POWER.

• Show how they create an ideal customer profile, the data points that is used and how it is set up in a CRM system

• Show how a sales rep is able to see the amount of active prospects and customers that fit the Ideal Customer Profile, what they have been active reading and downloading, so they can identify their area of interest and reach out by email or a call.

• Show how the nurturing and communication automation is set up to keep the prospect engaged.

Offer a “bribe”, the option to download high value content

Prospect takes action by downloading, in exchange of contact details, and sales is now able to see who is showing interest and active.

• The prospects would want to download the guide to “keep the information” in fear of not being able to find your blogpost again and for sharing with the project group that make the purchasing decision.

• Offer a video call where you take them through the process of how they solve the problems, dig deeper into the problem and the implications of not solving it, plus an offer to assist them in defining their requirements … building report, trust, and reciprocity.

EXAMPLES

Finish the guide and share it for feedback

Share your content outline with customers and sales for feedback to ensure that the guide answers the specific questions that your ideal customer profile has

Now you are ready to complete your b2b marketing content.

Write like you talk, it makes it easy and enjoyable to read

Provide visual content, lists and bullet points where possible to eliminate long text passages.

Examples of B2B Marketing Content Videos

Sometimes a video just does a better job in making you stand out, makes mundane products or services more exciting, showing the many problems a product solves, or crystalizing why your company is a better place to work …

More resources on B2B marketing content

Dan Martell: The Marketing Content Strategy That Works >>

Create Your Lead Magnet ….

What Should Your Lead Magnet Content Be?

For the “Selecting Your CRM and Marketing Automation System [Buyer’s Guide]” lead magnet we will create a simple “checklist” and a cost calculation template:

• a checklist that the prospect can use to compare 3 different CRM and marketing automation systems
• a “license and implementation cost” template they can use for their business case

Make The Lead Magnet Short & Actionable

The downloadable lead magnet, that helps you generate leads from your B2B marketing content, should not be a 20 page PDF. It should be a short and actionable checklist, guide, case study, whitepaper or similar.

In case the lead needs more explanation or background, you can always provide a link back to your website to that piece of content.