How many times have I spoken with a potential client, asking “Why do you want to run this content marketing campaign?” only to get a response that pretty much sounded to me like, “Uhhh…awareness I guess.” Many businesses have their sales and operations figured out, but have no clue on how to strategize for marketing, much less content marketing. While B2C businesses have no other choice but to perform a full social media and SEO blitzkrieg, B2B content marketing works a little differently. With varied business objectives, product and service lines, and audience groups, content marketing for businesses needs to be based on a well thought out plan. And if you have no prior experience in B2B content marketing, you need to outsource.

Lead generation just got cheaper

One of the biggest objectives that B2B content marketing helps achieve is lead generation. With effective content creation and delivery, you can attract potential customers at less than half the cost of sales-driven approaches and at significantly lesser costs as compared with traditional marketing media. A good B2B content marketing agency understands this and creates content keeping this objective in mind.

Thought leadership is your biggest weapon

B2B businesses should not create content for the masses. You do not need a video to go viral. This literally means nothing to your business. Your organization must create content to position itself as a thought leader in your industry. Organizations need to:

• evaluate what areas to focus on for the creation of thought leadership material (e.g. your industry, your product and its competitors, your customers’ changing tastes, etc.);
• identify creative ways to process these areas (e.g. research, surveys, internal data analyses, etc.); and
• deliver the content in various forms (e.g. white papers, data sheets, case studies, etc.)

An outsourced B2B content marketing firm can assist you in strategizing, brainstorming and executing such full-fledged content projects.

Not all marketing teams understand content marketing

Traditional marketing teams are typically trained to focus on designing brochures, websites and presentations. They do not fully understand the power of SEO and social media, and how this power can be leveraged to achieve tangible business growth. Basically, they lack expertise. Even if some team members are trained in content marketing, they tend to be fresh graduates because content marketing is such a new area. So, they lack experience. Lastly, most marketing teams fail to understand the nuances of complex businesses in more technical industries such as healthcare, IT, logistics and so on. This lack of industry knowledge leads to content that fails to be in-depth. To find the sweet combination of expertise, experience and industry knowledge is difficult. In such cases, look to outsource to B2B content marketing agencies that specialize in developing content teams keeping this combination in mind for every project.

Remember though, a content marketing agency does not replace your marketing department, but works in alignment with it. I have worked on several projects where our team worked in tandem with the marketing goals and strategies laid out by the organization’s internal marketing team. This kind of arrangement has always been the most successful for us.

You can demand more from a B2B content marketing agency

For most businesses, the marketing department serves as a cost center, without any measurable ROI. With an outsourced agency, you can demand more, with the help of an outcome-driven SLA. A disclaimer though – no content agency will agree to an SLA if your goals are short-term. Achieving lead generation or good SEO is not a three-month job. You need to give it a minimum of six months to bear fruit. Agreements need to be drawn up accordingly.

Having said all this, the content marketing space is very unorganized today, full of freelancers, wannabe writers and ‘cool’ startups. These guys do not realize the homework that goes into content marketing for businesses that aren’t as trendy as the Vogues, Amazons or Googles of the world. When you outsource, look for a B2B content marketing agency that has the expertise, experience and industry knowledge to give you real results and not just a happening social media page.