![Top 3 Content Marketing Tactics In B2B [Expert Interviews]](https://reply.io/wp-content/uploads/6-12-4-1080x608.png "Top 3 Content Marketing Tactics In B2B [Expert Interviews]")
Welcome to the 6th feature in our new Expert Interviews series by Reply.io where we invite a panel of leading industry experts to answer our customers’ most burning questions relating to growing their businesses.
One marketing strategy we’ve executed from the very start with Reply, is content marketing on our blog. The results have been truly remarkable with this single marketing channel being responsible for significantly growing our business.
I know many of our customers who are just starting out, are keen to develop their own content marketing activities to grow their businesses. They pay a great deal of attention to appealing topics and original content.
So I thought it would make a lot of sense to reach out to some of the leading content marketing experts and ask:
With that,I’m delighted to say we’ve managed to convince six of the leading authorities on content marketing to generously share their words of wisdom with our readers.
Ready? Let’s hear it from the Experts…
Kane Jamison, founder of Content Harmony, a content marketing agency based in Seattle, WA. Content Harmony helps our clients plan and produce great content, promote it to their target audience, and measure the results.
What are the top 3, B2B tech company, content marketing examples you’ve seen, and why?
Mailchimp Email Benchmarks.
Classic benchmarking statistics pulled straight from their email platform.
I love this because they keep it constantly updated, making it a solid evergreen resource, and because they’re making use of proprietary data that few other companies have at their scale, making it uniquely valuable in a way that written content often isn’t.
https://mailchimp.com/resources/research/email-marketing-benchmarks/
BigCommerce’s Guide To Selling On Amazon
Really love the design on BigCommerce’s site, and in particular love how they divided this guide into Chapters.
This structure is good for their SEO, and the chapters each answer specific areas where ecommerce sellers have questions on how to sell on Amazon.
They also mix in other content formats, like a checklist, and solicit content from industry experts, which gives them a reason to share and promote it.
https://www.bigcommerce.com/blog/selling-on-amazon/
STAT’s Featured Snippets Research
Similar to the Mailchimp example, I love projects that utilize a company’s internal data or platform.
The featured snippets research that STAT produced went above and beyond here in analyzing SEO factors related to Google’s featured snippets product, and provided solid industry data that can be used by other SEO experts talking about the topic.
Buzzsumo has also produced a lot of great content showing how original research projects are great for getting both shares and links.
https://getstat.com/blog/featured-snippets/
Simon MacTaggart, Founder at Growth Copy — the strategically led, persuasive copy and content consultancy that specializes in helping fast-growth B2B and B2B2C tech companies with cold email campaigns, LinkedIn sales campaigns, webpage messaging and content creation. Simon is also the author of The Ultimate Cold Email Copy Mistakes Checklist.
37 Signals/ Basecamp – for their blog strategy and books — Rework and Remote.
GrooveHQ — for their blog strategy.
WPCurve — for their blog strategy.
Two things I love about each of these examples;
They’re remote or virtual businesses, unable to create a physical culture typical of an office based business, so they used their blog to develop and define their company culture.
They totally nailed who their buyer personas, and then, rather than just blog about their product offering, they have looked past this and cover the wider business topics their prospects find engaging and useful.
Ross Hudgens, Founder at Siege Media — a content marketing agency specializing in content development, promotion and maintenance, with a specialty in SEO.
One of my favorite B2B content marketing examples comes from Moz’s beginner’s guide to SEO. This well designed, thought out piece is a long-term asset for the Moz team and funnels into their tools nicely, making it an end to end, truly valuable piece of content for them.
It’s a reference for anyone starting out in SEO and one I point to frequently.
Next, I love Software Advice’s Total Cost of Ownership calculator.
In the complex B2B software space, this asset generates solid search traffic, conversions, as well as links for their business.
It’s also a pretty clever idea that someone who doesn’t know the industry well would be likely to miss.
Finally, I biasedly love our post on how to increase website traffic by 250,000+ monthly visitors.
My team and I spent 200+ combined hours on this post, from crafting videos, to building spreadsheets, to creating the presentation version of the post that I recently added. It ranks well and has generated dozens of leads for us.
It works because it’s a process not many had talked about, and also, because it’s a real case study of how to grow a business.
Mike Allton, Editor at The Social Media Hat. Mike loves to help small businesses and organizations that are interested in using the Internet more effectively. He provides a comprehensive set of consulting services, which include Social Media, Blogging, SEO and Internet marketing.
What are the top 3, B2B tech company, content marketing examples you’ve seen, and why?
As a content marketing practitioner, I see and read about fantastic examples every day, often in the B2B tech space. Here are three examples:
AgoraPulse
Wishpond
Trafeze
All three are making great strides toward using the core content marketing principles, which are to provide engaging, relevant content to their audiences that demonstrate authority as well as offer inroads into the brand’s products or services.
Pam Didner is a marketing consultant, author and speaker, whose international book, Global Content Marketing, is the first to offer an accessible, comprehensive process to scale content across regions. She now leads a boutique-consulting firm that trains, coaches and provides strategic guidance on audience development, messaging architecture, editorial planning, content creation and media outreach on a global scale.
What are the top 3, B2B tech company, content marketing examples you’ve seen, and why?
Moz is fantastic. Just check out their blog. Full of relevant and useful content for their target audience. Some is closely tied to their product offerings.
Some content examples are purely for the benefit of their audiences. I especially like The Beginner’s Guide to SEO, very comprehensive and it has been read more than 3 million times.
Educational and useful content, yet it also converts.
Curata is another great company that hones content marketing as a way to market their products. Just check out the resource tab on their website.
It may seem busy, but it has pretty much all the topics you can think of relating to content creation, content curation, and anything content marketing.
OK, next is not a BTB example per se, but I love it.
Check out Patagonia which sells high-end and high-quality outdoor wear.
This company feels strongly about its environmental and social responsibilities.
They use long-form content to talk about the sources of their materials and their wearable technologies.
Since their sportswear sells at a premium price, they also show their customers how to care better for their clothes.
It’s a wonderful example of using long-form content.
Chuck Frey is the director of content marketing at Cultivate, a Milwaukee-based digital marketing agency. Prior to that, he served as director of online training for the Content Marketing Institute. He is also the founder and author of The Mind Mapping Software Blog, the world’s leading website covering visual mapping.
What are the top 3, B2B tech company, content marketing examples you’ve seen, and why?
Rockwell Automation has published a custom print magazine, The Journal, for 22 years.
The Journal has been a trusted source of news, information, and education about factory automation.
It also gets distributed to their partner network, 500 companies that supply parts and technology to Rockwell, forming a factory automation ecosystem that is hard for competitors to overcome.
Today, Rockwell Automation is one of the world’s leading companies in the factory automation space.
More details here: https://www.cultivate-communications.com/2016/07/rockwell-automation-magazine-yields-thought-leadership/
Widen Enterprises: One tech company that does an outstanding job of lead nurturing is Widen Enterprises, a developer of digital asset management cloud software solutions (DAM) located in Madison, WI.
Its website contains an impressive resource library that provides white papers, recorded webinars, infographics and other resources that map to each step in their audience’s buyer’s journey.
One of my favorite pieces in the Widen resource center is the DAM Decision Guide.
It enables potential buyers to clearly define their needs and ultimately purchase the best DAM solution.
It incorporates the customer journey as an organizing principle for the prospect’s DAM selection process, which is brilliant in a meta sort of way!
The bottom line is this: No matter where a prospect is in their DAM consideration and selection process, the Widen DAM resource center contains informational tools and resource that nurture them along the path to a sale.
CMI’s Chief Content Officer magazine: Early in the history of CMI, Joe Pulizzi and his team decided to follow the “three-legged stool” model for becoming the leading expert in its niche.
The three legs are digital, print and events.
During the last decade, CMI has pursued them, in that order. The theory is that if you have more opportunities and experiences for your audience to engage with you, then your audience will become more loyal and will buy more from you in the long term.
CCO magazine has turned out to be a great market intelligence vehicle.
When content marketers sign up for a free subscription, they fill out a form that asks a number of demographic questions – which you could NEVER get away with asking in online form for an e-newsletter registration form.
Recently, CMI took a close look at the magazine’s metrics to evaluate how strongly it was contributing to the success of the organization. Says Joe Pulizzi in a recent This Old Marketing podcast: “We can attribute approximately 10% of our revenue to people who subscribe to the magazine. In addition, the data profiles we gather from our subscribers help us better understand our audience, which enables us to make more competent business decisions and share the resulting insights with those subscribers.”
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What are the top 3, B2B tech company, content marketing examples you’ve seen and why?
