3 Tips for Developing Content That Will Reach Your B2B Target Audience

Content is easier than ever to find and consume, which is why it’s important to make what you say count. With constant streams across countless platforms, it can be easy to go unnoticed or get lost in the shuffle. Whether via unique information or highly tailored content with a creative spin, the ability to effectively reach B2B target audiences with memorable content remains a top challenge for B2B marketers.

When publishing content, the first thing to ensure is that it can be read and understood. Provide key takeaways – best practices, tips and hacks that readers can use in their daily work. Consider these tips to grab your audience’s attention in an environment saturated with information and messages from brands and individuals competing for their focus.

Useful, Valuable and Relevant Content Wins

Provide content that your B2B target audience will truly benefit from and leave them wanting more. A blog, article or even an infographic that they skim through, close and never return to isn’t ideal. What they consume should make them want to reread it or empower them with takeaways they can implement themselves.

Think twice before writing and publishing a blog or social post without a defined purpose. Always aim to educate, entertain or inspire on topics that audience members will want to learn more and read about. Ensuring your content adds value to your audience will increase the chances that it not only gets read but also shared. Shared content can be very valuable as it not only expands your audience but carries the credibility of someone else testifying to its worthiness.

Keep Buyer Personas and Buyer’s Journey in Mind

When developing B2B content, consider your different buyer personas and where your audience is in their buyer’s journey. Here are a few things to determine:

• Who your buyers are: This comes down to the buyer personas you have (hopefully) created. These details give insight into audience characteristics – their likes, dislikes and overall behaviors. This information informs the entirety of the content development process for your B2B target audience.
• What they are looking for: Use your understanding of your audience’s pain points and interests as a stepping stone for developing relevant content. Prioritize content that addresses the topics and trends they are interested in. Examine your content against these topics to ensure you create a diverse portfolio of content that covers all the important bases
• Where they are looking: Focus on the content distribution channels that your audience uses most often. This might be social media channels like Twitter or LinkedIn or it could be through email marketing. It’s important to practice “integrated” marketing here, meaning distributing your messages across multiple platforms or channels so that ideally audiences will see it in multiple places.

Marketers should also reassess buyer personas periodically because buyer behaviors, information sources, needs, and wants continually change to some degree. Staying as up to date as possible on this information will be key to your marketing strategy and help drive decisions.

Be Clear and Concise

To maintain interest and promote action, be clear, concise and consistent. Make it easy for readers to find exactly what they’re looking for by writing strong, focused content that’s easy to follow and understand. Staying consistent looks clean and professional while lending to credibility. This doesn’t mean you need to limit creativity or stay in a box – It simply means you should stay on brand regardless of the channel or audience.

Content marketing, if done effectively, can be extremely beneficial to your overall business goals. Not only can it help you connect with and grow your audience, provide value to prospects and customers, and position you as an industry leader, but it can also convert leads to sales, increase retention and amp up cross-selling efforts.