Content Marketing Benefits: Why Consider a Content Marketing Strategy?

Written by Patrick Socha

Patrick Socha is the founder and managing director of Sonan Digital Inc. He is a seasoned business growth professional with a background in B2B Sales.

November 11, 2021

Considering the benefits of content marketing? In the world of modern digital marketing, buyers can often be bombarded with options. They are able to compare and contrast alternatives faster than ever before, with ample information available and low friction. As a business growth leader, ensuring that you develop an awareness of what your brand stands for is key. The B2B buying cycle is often a lengthy one. In any given quarter, 95% of typical target buyers are not currently in-market. This presents both a massive challenge and opportunity. By focusing only on the bottom of your funnel, you can easily be bested by your competitors. That’s where the benefits of a strong content marketing strategy come in.

Part of The Founder’s Guide to B2B SaaS Content Marketing. Available as a PDF and Video Series.

Content for Awareness: Reaching Your Target Buyers

Large firms in the B2B SaaS space spend millions of dollars on the creation of strategic content. Examples such as Salesforce, HubSpot, and even Linkedin with their Sales Navigator products come to mind. By engaging with their target audience through events such as Dreamforce, and Inbound, they’ve built their brands. Their audiences become aware of their products and services through information they enjoy.

In the world of B2B, this is often done poorly. How engaging is content that simply repeats product selling points? Instead, by creating content that is genuinely useful you build trust. The emphasis should be on entertaining, educating, or helping visitors reach their goals.

This can take a variety of formats, from blog articles to videos, and live events. Effective content marketing can take many forms and exploring all the options is often key to developing a winning strategy. By strategically selecting the right medium and channel, you maximize your chances of developing a strong following and creating true value (and conversions).

As an example, let’s say your product helps companies monitor their website performance issues and downtime. By creating content around the most reliable hosting companies, or easiest to use content management systems, potential buyers are exposed to your brand. They may not need your product yet, but clearly have website reliability on their minds. You now have the opportunity to interact with them further by having them follow you on social media or subscribe to your blog for future posts on the topic.

Content for Sales Enablement: Engaging With Prospects

In the long buying cycle of B2B, it is often helpful for business leaders to give their sales team content to connect with buyers for a deeper relationship. Instead of another follow-up, your sales team can now provide resources that are genuinely useful. This is called sales enablement content, and can often be a huge differentiator. Buyers today are more information-hungry than ever before. By helping them through their buying journey, you can build trust and ultimately improve the likelihood of success.

How to See Content Marketing Benefits?

If there is anything that a great content creation strategy should revolve around—it is value creation. Companies often make the mistake of trying to extract results before building an audience. By first and foremost focusing on building your audience, you have a shot of success. Often content marketing needs to be used in parallel with other performance-based marketing strategies including B2B search marketing. Therefore, it is often helpful to have two separate teams working on each. One focused on generating leads as cost-effectively as possible and the other on building an audience and establishing your brand. Content creation is often a long-term game, but if executed correctly—the potential results can be huge.

Part of The Founder’s Guide to B2B SaaS Content Marketing. Available as a PDF and Video Series.

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