You don’t have to come up with B2B content marketing ideas all on your own. Instead, spy on what other successful companies in the b2b space are up to, and apply the right ideas to your company.
We’ve taken a look at what B2B companies and SaaS companies do and selected the most engaging content campaign ideas. Keep scrolling for fresh ideas, why the idea is useful, and examples.
Content marketing ideas that we’ll cover in this guide:
- Create a resources page
- Target more horizontal keyphrases
- Make your recurring webinars specific to each audience
- Source content from experts and influencers
- Target short-tail keyphrases in your blog
- Teach your audience about the cost of *not* using your solution
- Compare your solution to an unideal alternative
- Solve really difficult problems for your audience
- Offer virtual events for your audience’s long-term goals
- Build a separate brand for your owned media
- Survey your audience and create a report with the statistics
- Build a true community
- Broaden your blog content categories
- Create extra content for your most profitable vertical
- Appeal to your audience’s desired lifestyle
Tip: Save time executing your content strategies by bringing SEO, writing, reviewing, publishing, and promotion together in one beautiful platform. Start your free plan now!
1. Create a resources page
Over time, your content marketing team will undoubtedly make a lot of awesome content. It’s a bit of a waste to not organize this for your website visitors and customers.
Take a page out of Pipedrive’s book and create a dedicated resources page. Pipedrive uses this page to link to their sales tips, sales management thought leadership, templates, and tools, their CRM education resources, and their blog. You can learn more in our Pipedrive content marketing teardown.
2. Target more horizontal keyphrases
Are you targeting all of the horizontal keyphrases that could be a great fit for your business? Lucidchart has some impressive rankings for high-volume keyphrases that stretch across all of their target audiences.
Lucidchart is a flow chart tool that can be used by business owners, executives, teachers, etc. So, it’s understandable that they would want to rank for horizontal keyphrases that cut across all of those verticals.
Even if you only target one vertical (freelancers for example), it can still be useful to rank for horizontal keyphrases because your target audience might be searching for that. So, if you offer a client management portal for freelancers, aim for target keyphrases related to client management, not just freelancing.
StoryChief's AI Keyword Generator quickly identifies areas where your content may be lacking and provides you with valuable keywords based on real-time data analysis. To ensure optimal keyword placement within your article, StoryChief's editor offers built-in SEO optimization tips for a set keyword, based on 15+ metrics for search engine optimization. Try it free.
3. Make your recurring webinars specific to each audience
Do you offer webinars to help new users and prospective users get up to speed with your product? Or maybe your webinars explain the value of your services? Regardless, you probably use the same content for every target audience.
Try offering webinars that target each audience individually. You might experience higher registrations, show-ups, and completion rates. ClickUp offers on-demand webinars for real estate brokers, property managers, bookkeepers, agency owners, freelancers, and software engineers.
Consider your top 3-5 audiences and customize your webinar content for them. Learn more in our ClickUp content marketing teardown.
4. Source content from experts and influencers
“Guest blogging” is a loosely used term. Some guest blogs are utter garbage written just for the sake of a backlink. That’s not the type of guest blog content we’re talking about here.
It is possible to source really high-quality content from customers, relevant experts, and industry influencers. Influencer marketing is a great way to reach new audiences and for increased brand awareness.
DesignFiles does this well. Their software is a design and client management platform for interior designers. On their business blog, they have several guest posts written by interior design coaches who help new designers build successful businesses.
The key is finding really aligned influencers who have relevant expertise but who are not competitors. If you can make it a win-win, you’ll have tons of B2B content marketing ideas streaming in from your guest content writers.
5. Target short-tail keyphrases in your blog
In the SEO world, everyone talks a lot about long-tail keyphrases, and how they’re easier to rank for. But what about short-tail keyphrases? If you don’t take a swing at them, your competitors will rank for them and steal your organic traffic.
It’s important to balance less competitive keyphrases with highly competitive ones. After all, if you don’t try, you won’t rank.
Here at StoryChief, we’ve been working on content for more competitive (and higher volume) keyphrases lately, like this recent post on marketing operations.
So, if you’ve been counting yourself out of the game and going for long-tail only, one of the simplest B2B content marketing ideas is to create content for more challenging SEO opportunities. Learn more in our Lucidchart content marketing teardown.
Tip: StoryChief's AI Keyword Generator quickly identifies valuable keywords based on real-time data analysis of both your own content and that of your competitors. The tool helps you discover new topic ideas as well as optimize existing content.
6. Teach your audience about the cost of *not* using your solution
What will happen if your prospective customers don’t do business with you? What’s at stake? Do you have enough content telling this story?
Many marketers are so focused on results and benefits, that they forget to create content around the potential downsides. Check out this example from QA testing company Testlio. The blog post shares the cost of software bugs, from bad customer experience to extreme distrust.
If you use the StoryBrand philosophy, where your customer is the hero of the story, then you know that what potential buyers want to avoid is a big part of their buying decision. So don’t leave that out of your content.
Brainstorm all of the downsides of not becoming a customer and work those B2B content marketing ideas into various blog posts, webinars, and email newsletters or in an ebook.
We implemented this approach with StoryChief and considered the consequences of not utilizing our content marketing platform. The possible consequences of not using StoryChief include missed deadlines, disorganized reporting, a shortage of leads, stunted growth, limited capacity for new clients, and losing money in the long-run. Don’t believe us? Believe our customers. 😉
7. Compare your solution to an unideal alternative
If potential customers don’t use your B2B product or service, what else might they use? Would they use a different strategy or method? What’s wrong with that method? The answers to these questions can inspire really great content.
For example, Givz is a donation-driven marketing platform that Shopify stores can use to offer donation incentives to their customers. After a qualifying order, customers can donate a flat-rate amount to the charity of their choice.
This donation-based strategy can be used instead of discounts. So, instead of offering $10 off any order over $60, an ecommerce store can offer a $10 donation for any order over $60.
Because this solution can replace discounts, Givz creates content about the downsides of ecommerce discounts and how to market without discounting.
It’s important to create content about your in-direct competitors. Figure out the methods that competitors audiences use and tell the story of why those methods are the wrong choice.
8. Solve really difficult problems for your relevant audience
No matter who your target customers are, they have problems. We all do.
Do customer research (calls or surveys), to gather audience data and find out what their most stressful problems are. Then build your b2b content strategy around creating content that solves their business problems.
For example, Blackboard created a guide to running labs online. Obviously, teachers who had to switch to remote instruction during the pandemic had tons of hurdles to jump. Running a science lab online is especially difficult because of resource availability as well as security.
By helping teachers learn how to run online labs safely and effectively, Blackboard can acquire new website visitors looking for a solution to this problem.
Plus, the company also shows their current customers that they are a helpful resource for content, not just software.
9. Offer virtual events for your audience’s long-term goals
It’s easy to just look at the immediate results that your product or service provides, and ignore the long-term ones. But doing so produces missed opportunities.
Symba is an internship management platform that enterprises can use to manage the legal and logistical aspects of running a large internship program, as well as communication and collaboration.
Their marketing team doesn’t just cover the short-term benefits of using their platform, like storing intern contact information. Instead, they go deeper by showcasing the long-term benefits as well.
Intern managers don’t just want to manage interns. They want to convert those interns into new hires and retain top talent. So Symba created a webinar to showcase how their product can help b2b customers achieve this goal.
Consider the long-term effects of using your product or solution. How do these results align with customer business goals? How can you spin this into quality content across multiple formats?
Focusing on big, long-term goals will help your content stand out from competitors.
10. Build a separate brand for your owned media
Creating a separate brand for your owned media channel isn’t the right fit for most businesses. But if you have the budget for it, a separate brand can help your content live a life of its own.
Design Better is InDesign’s hub for super high-quality design guides, articles, and podcast episodes. By living under its own brand, the content becomes less commercial and more of a community for designers.
It can be easier to get involvement from other companies and experts when the content isn’t focused on selling your business. If you want to source a lot of content from people outside of your organization, this might be the right strategy for you. Learn more in our InVision content marketing teardown.
11. Survey your audience and create a report with the statistics
Drift recently released their 2021 Marketing Leadership Benchmark Report, a survey of marketing VPs, directors, and managers across multiple industries.
53% of business leaders said content marketing will be the most important specialization to their team’s success over the next 5 years. - Drift’s 2021 Marketing Leadership Benchmark Report
The report includes tons of insights. Marketing leaders say that email marketing is the top digital channel, and that content marketing is the most important internal specialization. It also includes quotes from marketing leaders about how they think marketing has changed. Many said that creative talent and human connection are critical and that technology should support these capabilities—not replace them.
Creating your own survey is one of the best B2B content marketing ideas, because of these smart benefits:
- Engage your audience with the survey
- Create proprietary statistics
- Promote your statistics with digital PR and influencer outreach
- Offer interesting, valuable content to your audience with the report
Creating your own report doesn’t have to be difficult. Drift surveyed just 100 marketing leaders. Shoot for a minimum of 100 respondents, and make sure that you control who’s responding. Send out the survey to a segment of loyal customers or email subscribers to ensure quality responses. Learn more in our Drift content marketing teardown.
12. Build a true community
The whole point of content marketing is offering your profiled audiences free content and experiences in the hope that they will convert into new customers down the line.
A community might be a smart content marketing strategy for you if your target audience falls under a single category. For example, Webflow is used primarily by website designers. Their community helps designers find resources for designing, collaborating with colleagues, working with business clients, and growing their businesses.
If your product or service is used by very different types of people, it might be hard to build a community around your business, so try one of these other B2B content marketing ideas. Learn more in our Webflow content marketing teardown.
13. Broaden your blog content categories
Are you only writing about topics that are relevant to your product or service? If so, you might be missing out on a big opportunity to win over your target audience.
For example, the FreshBooks blog doesn’t only bookkeeping and accounting.
They also discuss business management topics that matter to their small business audience, such as client relationships, time tracking, and collaboration. Learn more in our FreshBooks content marketing teardown.
14. Create extra content for your most profitable vertical
While it’s important to create content for all of your verticals, you absolutely should make more content for your most profitable vertical.
For example, FreeUp is a platform for hiring virtual assistants. It can be used by anyone: small business owners, executives, professors, non-profit directors, the list goes on. But FreeUp continues to create quality content for their best audience, Amazon sellers.
FreeUp creates horizontal content about hiring virtual assistants that can appeal to any audience. But they typically only stray from that when they are covering Amazon selling. Figure out who your most profitable customer is and create content for more of their needs, not just what is related to your business.
15. Appeal to your audience’s desired lifestyle
What does your audience really want? What lifestyle do they want to be living? Are you taking into account their audience demographics? Teachable is an online class platform that coaches, consultants, and experts can use to teach their target audience any skill.
Teachable customers want freedom from the 9-5 or service-based work. So, Teachable serves up content that satisfies this desire. For example, an upcoming webinar is all about how to create subscription-based courses, which provides recurring revenue that can provide a lot more lifestyle freedom compared to one-off launches.
Consider what your target audience truly desires, and come up with more content topics that hit home.
More great B2B content marketing ideas
Once you’ve got ideas, it’s time to release them out into the world. StoryChief is a content operations platform that makes it easy to brief, assign, review, publish, and promote content all in one place.
Publish better content in less time with StoryChief.
