Conquering the Major Obstacles in B2B Content Marketing for Big Corporations
In the world of business-to-business (B2B) marketing, content plays a pivotal role in engaging potential customers and driving growth. However, large companies often face unique challenges due to complex organizational structures and buyer committees.
High-quality B2B content marketing is key to overcoming these obstacles. By sharing compelling stories and case studies that demonstrate how a business's product or service solved a customer's problem, companies can build trust and establish themselves as thought leaders in their industry.
Managing complex sales cycles is another challenge in B2B content. This can be overcome by implementing lead nurturing campaigns and adopting a multi-touch attribution model. Consistent, high-quality content is essential for maintaining audience engagement, improving visibility on search engines, and building a trustworthy brand.
One company that has mastered these challenges is General Electric (GE). Their online media portal, GE Reports, focuses on telling stories about technology rather than promoting the GE brand. As a result, they have managed to engage their target audience and build a following of over 100,000 subscribers and 3.7 million monthly visits in 2021.
IBM is another example of a well-known B2B company that has successfully navigated content marketing challenges. They focus on their audience's wants and needs, as demonstrated by their IBM Wild Ducks podcast, which encourages linked mentions from other companies by promoting their good work first, thereby also promoting IBM indirectly.
The UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center ran a story on how IBM's super-computer Watson is being used to help treat people with cancer, further showcasing IBM's commitment to solving real-world problems.
To ensure content marketing success, it's important to define clear goals, know your audience, embrace data, align your messaging, and track both direct and indirect benefits and ROI. Measuring content marketing ROI can be difficult due to benefits often materializing over the long term, but it can be overcome by aligning content marketing goals with business objectives, using advanced analytics tools, and mapping out the customer journey.
Scaling content production involves producing multiple types of content and targeting multiple markets. This can be addressed by outsourcing content creation to content agencies or freelancers. Companies like Turnitin have successfully addressed B2B content marketing challenges by focusing on their target audience's needs, using unified sales enablement platforms such as Highspot to centralize marketing materials, tailor sales pitches, and conduct intelligent, customer-focused conversations that improve sales outcomes.
Maintaining the balance between quality and quantity in content production is crucial for large B2B companies. To overcome the challenge of producing high-quality content consistently, businesses can tap into customer feedback and data analytics, and develop a comprehensive content calendar.
Services like ClearVoice can help businesses navigate their B2B content marketing challenges and find the right content creators to drive their brand's growth and success. As more and more B2B marketers recognize the importance of content marketing, with 71% of B2B marketers considering it more critical to their organization in the past year according to a 2023 Content Marketing Institute research report, the future of B2B content marketing looks brighter than ever.
