Content Marketing Blog mint

Content Marketing Blog

Yes, Content Marketing Works…Even for B2B!

Let Your C-Suite See How
While many B2C companies may not have a documented content marketing strategy, it’s easier for the marketing team to get senior management’s consent and a budget to work with. In the B2B world, this is a bigger challenge and quite a struggle.

The 5 most common objections raised by the C-Suite at these B2B organizations include:

  • “It’s yet another expense item and we have a shrinking budget. We don’t have the resources.”   
  • “We don’t have anything interesting to talk about.”
  • “Why should we give away all our trade secrets and let the competition in on our strategy?”
  • “Content marketing is too unfamiliar—why burn our fingers doing what we don’t know anything about?”
  • “How do we know it will work?”   

5 Steps to Convince Senior Management that You Need B2B Content Marketing

Let’s look at how you can handle each of the above objections and get C-Suite buy-in for content marketing within your B2B organization:

  1. Show How Much You Can Save: Your senior executives have a responsibility to run a tight ship, show revenue growth and maintain a healthy bottom line. It is understandable that they are vary of allowing a budget for content marketing, a tool your company has never used before. The lack of in-house resources means having to pay external providers. Talk to these executives about reducing the cost of paid advertising by driving organic search traffic through quality content on your site, blog and social media channels.
  2. There is No Boring Content, Only Bored Content Creators: We wrote about this on our blog earlier. Show your senior executives good examples and prove to them that there are thousands of companies producing engaging and stimulating content about seemingly dry and boring subjects. After all, if you run a profitable business, with paying customers who are interested and have a need for what you offer, it’s impossible that you have nothing to say!
  3. If You Don’t Share Secrets, Your Audience Will Look Elsewhere: Online audiences are bombarded with meaningless content, and a lot of it. They consider this distracting and just “noise”. What they want is education, information and entertainment of true value. If you don’t give it to them, your competitors are only a single click away. When you do offer it, you earn their respect, attention, and over time, loyalty. No C-Suite executive will reject these benefits.
  4. You Don’t Have to Learn Everything: Do you produce photocopiers, software, automation systems, furniture, carpets, computer hardware and accessories, paper, and everything else that your business needs to function? Yet, you use all of these items and services by simply sourcing them from trusted and experienced providers. Why does content marketing have to be any different? There is merit in partnering with a content marketing agency that can define a suitable B2B content strategy for your company, implement it skilfully and deliver the results at a much lower cost than it would take to do everything in-house.
  5. You Won’t Know Until You’ve Tried!: How do you know anything works until you have tried it and seen it in action? Now, of course, you can’t ask your CEO or CIO that question without being severely reprimanded—so please don’t! Instead, gather evidence of other organizations within your industry and similar verticals that have seen success with content marketing. Share best practices and educate your C-Suite on what works, what doesn’t, what best-in-class companies do, and so on. Be very clear when explaining:
    • How the content marketing strategy will be implemented, who will do what, what resources are necessary and how much they will cost.
    • Create a content blueprint to get their thoughts and pre-approval on topics, types of content, tone and voice that will be used, etc.
    • Identify the distribution channels, both external and internal that will be used to publish your content.
    • Specify the content measurement benchmarks and metrics that you will use to show ROI—the C-Suite loves that word!                                        

Ready? Now put on a bold, confident smile and go knock on the door! If one were to take a clue from the Sermon on the Mount, “Ask and you shall receive”! :)

Wondering how your B2B company can embark on an effective content marketing strategy with the support of your C-Suite? Give us a call at 888-646-8003 or send us an email.

Share


Recent Posts

Sheetal Pinto - 3/16/2023 00:00

Content Marketing Best Practices that Garner Attention

Remember the movie, “Field of Dreams”? It made popular the phrase, “If you build it, he will come”. Shoeless Joe and other baseball legends may have magically appeared on a cornfield-turned-baseball diamond. However, when it comes to content marketing, your audience will need more than a field of dreams to attract their attention. If you’re trying to get more traffic to your website, don’t wait for your local SEO efforts to direct your audience. Give them a hand with these proven content strategies.

Sheetal Pinto - 3/2/2023 06:00

How to Use a Pillar Page to Improve your Content Quality

Consider the dictionary meaning of ‘pillar’ – “a firm, upright support for a superstructure”, also defined as “a fundamental precept”. Your content marketing campaign is your ‘superstructure’ that requires a ‘firm, upright support’. That’s the key function of content pillar pages. Without these essential supports, your ‘content superstructure’ will neither stand strong, nor will it attract the right attention.

Sheetal Pinto - 2/23/2023 06:00

Two Proven Ways to Organize Products with Similar Keywords

In business, cannibalization typically refers to a loss of sales. A company introduces a new product that displaces sales of an older, usually more outdated, product. Instead of having an increase in sales, the market growth remains stable. What does this mean in the world of SEO and content marketing? Keyword cannibalization occurs when two products have similar keywords or phrases and confuses the search engines about which page is right for which query. Instead of competing with other businesses for search traffic, you’re competing with your own web pages. Here’s why keyword cannibalization is bad for business and how you can overcome it.

Sheetal Pinto - 2/9/2023 06:00

How to Optimize your Content for a Global Audience

The global market is much smaller than it once was.  Statista reports over 5 billion internet users globally, or about 63.1% of the population. Reaching out to a broader market can help your business grow, but it’s not as simple as updating your website in a new language and simply hoping your audience finds you through search.

Sheetal Pinto - 1/26/2023 06:00

How to Build a Functional Content Marketing Funnel

Most people don’t wake up and think, “oh, today is the day I buy my new mattress,” unless they’ve researched different brands and checked pricing at different stores. Modern customers often take their time with major (and even minor) purchases. Using that information about today’s shoppers can help you design a content marketing map, or funnel, that guides the customer to your product.

Sheetal Pinto - 1/12/2023 15:49

Draw Insights from Your Competitors' Success 

According to Ahrefs, organic search drives over 53.3% of global traffic. Creating an SEO strategy is key to increasing your reach through search. As you’re setting new SEO goals for 2023, it may be useful to analyze what is working for your competitors. Also look at what they’re missing, to build that effectively into your own SEO strategy.

Sheetal Pinto - 12/15/2022 15:14

5 Proven Ways to Improve your Website Ranking

The rules of SEO can often feel elusive, as if SEO is a great big experiment in which the parameters keep changing. Search engines keep updating the algorithm. User behavior is evolving and adapting to circumstances, all the time. You don’t have any control over how pages rank, or do you? Google will never share how it determines SEO ranking. Customers change how they search and shop. We may not fully understand the complexity of search engine algorithms, but we can test different elements of a webpage to see how customers and search engines respond to your content marketing strategies. It’s called split testing.

Sheetal Pinto - 11/24/2022 16:42

Good today and gone tomorrow! That is the way of trends in the world of SEO and content marketing. What may generate interest right now can fall out of favor due to the ever-changing search engine algorithms. What can you do to ensure that you’re up to date? One useful method is to utilize Google Trends to find useful metrics that help you stay relevant. To make your way to the top of search engine results pages (SERPs), it’s important to use a variety of proven methods to create quality content. Read below to learn how Google Trends can help you gain insight on popular trends, seasonality, regional demands, and your competitors.

Sheetal Pinto - 11/10/2022 06:00

Revitalize, Refine, Repurpose

The Pareto principle is also known as the 80/20 rule. About 80% of your best results will come from 20% of your efforts. When you apply that to a creative endeavour like content marketing, you might be undervaluing some of your content creative efforts. It can be expensive to create content, from scheduling videographers, photographers, models, or even having quality copywriters write a blog post. Chances are that you have some valuable content that can be recycled or repurposed with a little elbow grease.

Sheetal Pinto - 10/27/2022 06:00

How to Create Content that Ranks Higher on the SERPs

With every Google update, there’s always some concern about page rankings. The most recent update, “helpful content,” is part of Google’s ongoing efforts to make sure that users get quality content in search results. If you’ve been using SEO best practices and providing content that is relevant and useful, you shouldn’t lose page rankings. It’s always a good idea to check your content marketing strategy and make sure it aligns with Google’s algorithm updates.