Have you ever come across a website that is entirely bland and has insufficient information? What was your reaction? Did you leave the website in agony or did you move on to check their other pages if they were reliable? It’s a human tendency to feel lost or get annoyed when you’re not given the right information.
Content marketing – if your business is not doing it, you are losing out on customers. This is a powerful method of giving your business a big boost across multiple platforms. Content marketing for B2B business requires a different playthrough. Probably the best way to learn and understand how to execute B2B content marketing is to learn from others.
How do you start marketing your business? What type of marketing works the best? Which marketing tool doesn’t work well with your business? If you’ve had these questions in mind for quite some time now, then you must have definitely heard about ‘content marketing’. Although content marketing is not a new concept, it can be something new to you if you haven’t considered it yet.
In the mid 1990s, access to the internet introduced the umbrella term ‘online marketing’. The early 2000s revolutionized the way people and businesses connected with each other as social networks were born. The late 2000s witnessed the world of content strategy whirl around smartphones. The game, therefore, has never been dull and mundane. And this is especially true for B2B content marketing.
Content marketing is all concerned with the creation, processing and distributing valuable content to the target audience. The target audience can be individual consumers or businesses. The content that you develop should be useful in attracting, acquiring, engaging and eventually, converting the prospect into a sale. Today, there is an increasing demand for creation of B2B content marketing strategy to achieve the desired results.
Content marketing institute’s recent report provides an insight into the current state of B2B content marketing as well as how successful content marketers do things differently. There is no doubt that content marketing is an evolving discipline. The reports show that content marketing is flourishing; with as many as 89% of the B2B marketers using content marketing.
In April 2013, I started Spacebar with just one employee. Today, we are 9 people in office and I hope to grow larger. We have gotten thus far with no real sales team. It’s now time to get aggressive with sales and increase market share. Our initial competitors were freelancers. Now, we have started competing with other small agencies. The future is Artificial Intelligence.
In 2013, when I started Spacebar, I was sure I wanted Spacebar to be a Content Solutions firm.
“We don’t just write, we strategize and create solutions for our clients.”
When you deliver content solutions – and not just content writing services – to your clients, you dive into other aspects of their business such as social media, SEO and digital marketing. And you notice how difficult it becomes for businesses to choose their marketing style. If I had to write a book on Marketing in 2014 for Dummies, I’d segregate all kinds and forms or marketing into two simple buckets:
Before businesses go big, before businesses become MNCs and before businesses start dolling out money, there was just one person. A lone entrepreneur trying to get an idea working and get a business rolling. When Apple first started in a garage, at least Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak could support each other. You, on the other hand, have to bare the burden on your own. Creating a successful business is just like climbing up a mountain. It is a step by step process which is very difficult and at every moment, part of you wants to call it quits and at times, you may have almost reached the peak. So how do you keep yourself motivated and continuously push yourself to not give up on your dream?