B2B Content Marketing Needs Content Discovery

Many content writers involved in B2B content marketing do not really understand that a lot of research has to be done for simply coming up with content topics. I’ll give you a simple example for why this needs to be done. Let’s say I’m writing for a client who provides recruitment services. I can either write about “7 Hiring Mistakes HR Managers Make” or I could try a more trending “What’s new in Recruitment in the Insurance Industry?”

I got the idea for the latter from Epictions Epicbeat, a free content discovery platform that tells you the hottest trends by topic, industry or website. Writers need this help because we are not know-it-alls. As writers, we do not follow every industry that we have clients in. It’s not humanly possible. That’s why we need help to discover topics that will appeal to our clients’ target audience.

Here are some popular content discovery tools:

1. Epictions Epicbeat
2. Buzzsumo
3. SocialAnimal
4. Twitter search (just search for the industry or area of interest and you’ll see what’s trending)

Not all Research has to be using Google

Once you’ve chosen the topic, you need to actually find the meat to write it. Most writers will Google the term, pick from websites they find on the first three pages. And voila! The article is written. Nothing wrong about this…it does the SEO job. But such articles score less on the readability index. It gives nothing new to the reader. Instead, try and expand your research to reports and books. For the former, ask your client for a subscription or a resource that they consider high ranking thought leadership material. If your client doesn’t have anything to offer, you could still use these resources:

1. Google Books
2. Oz Content
3. Industry-specific e-magazines or blogs – like Spacebar’s blog on content marketing 😉

Now, Share

Content marketing in India is in its nascent stages, which means that your website isn’t probably the go-to resource for others in the industry. In such a scenario, you need to bring traffic to your page. Use social media (both organic and sponsored posts) and ads to pull people to your blog. For B2B content marketing, I suggest sharing your blog post using:

1. LinkedIn
2. Facebook
3. Twitter
4. Google Ads
5. Content syndication websites such as Medium

Learn by Analyzing Engagement

It’s not enough if you just share. You’ve got to see what content piqued your audience’s interest and what didn’t. Analyze engagement and traffic using:

1. LinkedIn analytics
2. Facebook analytics
3. Twitter analytics
4. Google Ads analytics
5. Content syndication analytics
6. Google analytics (that you have set up on your own website)

The whole process is a cycle, really. Use what you have learned during the analyses to further narrow down topics during your content discovery process. And tell me if this works better for you as compared to the process you followed earlier. Or if you use tools that you think work better, let me know and I’d love to try them out too!