Create Better B2B Content to Stand Out from the Competition

As more and more sales leads for businesses are generated online, creating helpful and unique B2B content has become more important. Companies doing digital marketing successfully know that valuable, relevant content is a key component of today’s marketing strategies.

In fact, in a recent report from Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs, 83% of the marketers asked said that producing better quality content is what sets them apart from their competition. It is often helpful and engaging content that draws potential customers into the sales funnel.

You can churn out wordy landing pages and cookie-cutter blog posts, but that isn’t what will attract and engage customers. Instead, creating quality content requires an effective B2B content marketing strategy that includes the right players, like SEO specialists, talented writers, and subject matter experts (often someone from your customers’ companies). To that end, it’s essential to remember that the purpose of content is to support, educate, guide, and benefit leads. Content created with that in mind helps develop brand awareness, increases trust, and helps establish the company as an authority among its peers.

Why Is It Important to Improve Content?

The most common strategy many B2B marketers have used up until now is to determine which phrases or keywords to rank for and then write as much content as possible using those phrases. While SEO is still an essential part of digital marketing, the “old” way of doing things produces diluted versions of information that are already published and available on a hundred other websites. And that neither answers users’ questions nor engages them enough to click on your site.

Creating quality content isn’t just good for your customers. It will also keep you Google’s good books. The new Helpful Content update from Google aims to rank sites with useful, unique content above those that are still doing it the “old” way. So, it makes sense to make the transition to helpful content.

How Do You Create Better Content?

Helpful content doesn’t mean abandoning your SEO efforts. It’s still what’s needed to boost the likelihood of searchers finding your site. What it does mean is that your priority needs to be people first, then the search engine. So begin with search intent and then use SEO to get helpful content in front of your target audience. That’s how you can really provide answers and value to the questions searchers have.

Here are some tips for quality, people-first content creation:

• Answer search intent – Provide the answers that people are searching for. Make sure that your content addresses the questions they are asking. Don’t use clickbait that doesn’t give readers anything of value.
• Stick with what you know – Don’t write content about topics that you don’t know or that aren’t relevant to your target audience. Instead, stick to what you’re good at and what will meet your audience’s needs.
• Become an authority – Use your expertise to produce content that contributes to your industry. Share insights that only your business can provide customers.
• Create content that outshines the rest – Your content should stand out from what your competitors are publishing. That means being clear and concise, filling in the gaps that other sites have overlooked.

Using the above tips puts humans first. When you approach content this way, it is helpful and relevant. That’s what Google is looking for.

Better B2B Content is Helpful B2B Content

Better, higher-quality B2B content must be written with a combination of the people-first approach and search engine optimization in mind – emphasizing the former. SEO works best when it’s applied to content that is written for people first. The goal is to create useful content that will leave readers feeling like they’ve received the information and answers they need to help them achieve their goals and that your company can provide solutions.

A successful B2B marketing content strategy produces high-quality, helpful, on-brand content that serves a specific purpose. When you make sure that the topics you write about will make viewers say to themselves, “I really need to read that,” when they see what it’s about, you will be on the right path to creating helpful, high-quality, lead-generating content.