B2B companies face different challenges than B2C companies. From which stages you target in the funnel to how you measure your success to the team you end up selling to, content marketing can be a horse of a different color when you're business-to-business. In this week's Whiteboard Friday, Rand shares his tips for successful content marketing when you're a B2B.
Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!
Video Transcription
Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're going to chat about B2B marketing, specifically B2B content marketing, and some tips that I've got for you that are a little bit different from how we would do B2C or other kinds of content marketing.
I get it. A lot of the examples that you see in the content marketing world are B2C, or they're at B2B companies that are more like Moz where we have a B2C-like community and a B2C-like audience. So I think that when it comes to B2B, because there are some tricky elements, I wanted to try and walk you through a few of those.
Let's start with the funnel.
The B2B funnel is very similar to a B2C funnel. In fact, marketing funnels in general work like this. People become aware of a product. They have some consideration for whether it's something they might actually want to buy. They do some form of comparison against other solutions. They decide to convert or not. Then there's a retention element. Retention element is less true in a lot of B2C fields, especially eCommerce one-time purchases. It's generally more true in the B2B world.
Target the right stages of the marketing funnel
I think one problem that we have in B2B marketing is a lot of times we target the wrong part of the funnel. This is actually really common. In B2C, usually things that hit on one of these hit on a lot of them. The same things that create awareness about a product or a brand also help with conversion, also might help with comparison because of brand affinity, and also might help with consideration and retention. It's less true in B2B, not to say not true at all, but less true. So I think one of the jobs that we have is to look inside our funnel and then identify which part needs help versus which part works fine.
Another thing that is very important here: For the majority of your content, don't try to target it at more than let's say two of these stages. I might say, "Hey, I've got a piece of content that I think can work really well for awareness and consideration." Or it's much further down the funnel. It's for people who already know us and are already considering us. It's really about comparison and conversion or about conversion and retention. That's fine. I think when you get into trouble is when you say, "Hey, you know what, this is going to help throughout the funnel — awareness, consideration, and conversion." Well, that tends not to be the case. That's not to say it can never happen.
Actually design your content for parts of the funnel that need it
Try to choose. When you're creating your content, when you're designing the strategy for why you're going to produce a particular piece, decide what it's going to help with. Point it at the area of the funnel that is in most need of assistance.
Let me give you a quick example here. There's a company called PivotDesk. They're a fellow at Foundry company. PivotDesk does something really cool. They help small businesses — in particular a lot of startups and early stage companies — but plenty of regular small businesses, to find office space. They're very business-to-business. They're talking to landlords and they're talking to small businesses.
They have a great funnel, but they decide that they need more awareness, which is good. Good job PivotDesk identifying which part of the funnel is the problem. If you've seen that lots of people who are already aware of you and visiting you are converting and getting through this part of the funnel, then you don't need to focus your content efforts there, or maybe less of them. We could think about potentially saying, "Hey, let's say that awareness is our problem. Awareness to whom? Is it awareness to small businesses or is it awareness to the landlords?" Again, two different audiences. In this case, awareness to the landlords perhaps is the problem.
I'm making these up. I don't actually know if PivotDesk has these problems. If that's the case, maybe what we want is an interactive tool that's essentially part survey and part comparison, benchmarking metrics, that a landlord can go in and say, "My space is in Seattle. I have this much square footage of AAA space, and the current price is $31 per square foot triple net," and there's the average me versus what the rest of the Seattle market looks like. Fascinating, I am undercharging or I am overcharging, or I have less square footage than most folks have, or I'm missing these amenities or whatever it is. That could work potentially very well for this stage of the funnel.
This is the process that I'd urge you to use when you're doing that B2B content strategy. Target the right section of the funnel. Make sure it's targeted to the right audience, and then come up with a piece of content that's going to move the needle in the right place.
When you're measuring success in B2B, it is pretty different than B2C. A lot of the time unfortunately the metric by which you will be judged upon is number of leads created. B2B tends to be very leads-driven. There are a few folks who are in B2B who are also self-service, like Moz is. But for the vast majority, it's leads for the sales folks to follow up on.
Because of that, the classic metrics, like how many social shares you got across different networks and how much visibility and raw traffic and engagement and those kinds of things tend to be less important than quantity of leads generated. This is really tough when you get into these areas of the funnel that are not the conversion point. If I'm trying to create raw awareness among my audience, I can really get misjudged if my boss, my team, or my client is only looking at the leads.
What I urge you again to do is to take note of what you're trying to improve and apply the right metrics to it. Don't just take the same metrics that are used for obviously B2C and don't take the same metrics that are judged on conversion for retention or awareness for conversion. This is critically important, or you're going to focus on the wrong parts of the solution you're trying to create.
The overwhelming majority of B2B transactions don't just have a single buyer.
In B2C, it's really simple. I'm selling blue jeans. I'm selling them to a consumer. That consumer tends to be the only person who's in on the consideration. Maybe their partner is also thinking about it. For the vast majority it's just that one person I'm selling to.
That's not the case in B2B, not at all.
Oftentimes the person who ends up buying, who you interact with, who your salesperson reaches out to and has the conversation, that person is just one link in the chain of individuals involved from a corporate ecosystem in who makes the buying decision. For that reason, a lot of times content marketing that reaches this person does a great job of reaching that buyer but does a terrible job of reaching their manager or the CFO and the HR person who are all involved in these decisions as well might be less successful.
This is why we need an overlapping persona analysis when we do our content. It's also why, when we're thinking about the funnel, we can't think about it without regard for which target is in which stage of the buying process. It could be that your buyer is all the way down here, but you have no resources, no content that's going to help convince a CFO and an HR person up here that they should even put you in the consideration set, because you have no comparison against what are their other options and why do you help them save money and those kinds of things.
Be careful with this. Target your content to not only your buyer but other folks as well, especially if your sales folks are giving you feedback that that's where they're getting stymied.
With B2B, it tends to be the case that you can be much more aggressive with forms of remarketing and retargeting. That means paid content. That means amplification. It means spending dollars to promote the content that you've created. The reason that you can do this as opposed to a lot of B2C is because it tends to be the case that your customer lifetime value is way higher. B2B transactions, we're talking about usually many hundreds, if not many thousands or tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars per converted customer.
Cost of Customer Acquisition (CAC)
What you want to be looking at is not just the lifetime value but also the current cost of customer acquisition, or CAC, as it's called. There's a ratio that a lot of folks look at in B2B, which is the CAC to CLTV ratio, essentially how much does it cost us to get a new customer versus how much value does that customer provide. B2C folks look at this too, but B2B folks tend to be obsessed with it.
When I see the ratio is high or the CAC itself is low in comparison, this is, gee, $450 to acquire a customer versus $3,780 CLTV, that's like a 9 to 1 ratio, something like that. I have a ton of room to boost that. I could probably boost that. I could more than double it, and I'd still be fine with a four-to-one ratio or even a three-to-one ratio. I might consider spending a tremendous amount more money to get a customer. If I can see through my funnel that I'm measuring to see how content performs as it pushes people down this funnel and gets them to conversion, if I can see that for every 1,000 views or 10,000 views I'm getting a customer converting, well then I can go and I can amplify through paid channels, through retargeting and remarketing.
I can pay a lot of money to go push that content to more places and to more people. I can probably do things that I would almost never ordinarily do, like even buy paid search ads against a keyword that is very content-focused, not very conversion-focused, that lives up here in the funnel and I can still have success. This is something that very few B2B marketers are doing but some very successful ones are.
Last thing that I'll cover here, most B2B content does this... I don't know. It's like every B2B marketer reads from the same playbook. Look, I go through this process a lot because I'm interested in a lot of B2B content since Moz is a business that I'm trying to grow.
What happens is that the content exposes very little for free. I might hear about something and go, "Oh yeah, I am interested in the average lifetime value of self-service, software as a service companies." That sounds super corporate and boring. I'm deeply interested in it. It really affects Moz's metrics.
I might go look, and then I see I can't really tell what's in here, what's behind the wall. You're not showing me very much.
There's supposedly this amazing content, but I don't see anything there.
Then it asks me for too much in order to get access.
If you fill out all these 10 different form fields about your position at the company, and how much revenue you have, and how many employees you had, and what was your growth rate last year, and which other products in this field have you considered and so on, man, geez, I feel like I just had to sign a lease agreement in order to get a piece of content.
Then, that content is not web accessible.
I have to download it, which is insanely frustrating if I'm on one of these. It sucks. It's a terrible experience on mobile. It's even a bad experience on desktop. I don't want to have to download something and open it back up. That makes it less shareable. It's very hard for me to amplify that content if I'm interested in it. When I want to share it with other people I have to tell them, "Hey, you've got to go to this download link."
What happens? I'll tell you what happens. Every single time I download it and then I attach it in an email and I send it to every relevant person at Moz, that B2B company that made it only gets one email address, and I unsubscribe from their list.
Insanity.
Insanity.
If you can, fix this process by making your content web accessible, making it so that you're providing more of a teaser right on the page here so that more people are likely to go through here. Ask for as little information as you possibly can. You can get more later. You can learn a ton about someone once you have just one piece of information, their correct email address. If you have that, you can learn a tremendous amount about them. You don't need this. You've got tools like FullContact, where you can use the API plugin and email address and they'll give you all sorts of persona-type data about that person. You can go then research the company and get all the facts. Tons of stuff to do.
Then the last thing that I find that's oddly frustrating — I don't know why I'm frustrated about it, but you should be frustrated about it if you're a B2B marketer — is you don't reuse the audience for future content amplification. If you know that I downloaded this piece of content, I think it is perfectly okay to follow up with a personal message the next time you produce a piece of content like this and say, "Hey, we redid it and here it is again." That's not that hard. Hopefully, you haven't auto-subscribed me to an email newsletter and I'm getting tons of pieces of content that I care nothing about. What's far better is if you tell me, "Hey, we redid this piece," or, "Since you liked this piece, you'll probably be very interested in this other piece." That's going to work really well.
You can also do RLSA with this for more paid amplification. I can take a list of emails of all the people who've downloaded this, upload it to Google, upload it to Facebook, and then have this content accessible via these paid formats so that I'm bidding in Google and I'm showing the ads to people on Facebook or Twitter or LinkedIn, all that kind of stuff.
All right, everyone, hope you B2B marketers out there are doing some awesome stuff with your content in the near future. We'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.
Wow, this post is really interesting! I'm just starting to get in the SEO world and, in my case, I need a lot of B2B marketing to do cause I work with other companies too. As you said, I used to make the mistake of focusing on the direct consumer, I can see my mistake now! I know this might seem like a weird example, but for what I understood in here is that it's like selling a toy to a kid, you don't sell it to the kid itself, but to their moms? Anyway, always useful with your posts! Thank you :)
Its a simple but good example, I will try to use this if someone needs an explanation of what we need to do and where we need to focus. I guess sometimes this simple one will explain it way better than everything else.
Yes! A lot of the time in B2B marketing, the sales team only wants content that reaches the exact person who will be their "lead" at the company to which you're selling. But, in fact, reaching anyone who nudges/influences/manages people in that role at the company (or outside it - press/social influencers/bloggers/etc) is a pursuit worthy of equal effort (and can often dramatically expand your content opportunities).
That a very simple but very true insight. We often tend to target the buyer persona so much that we leave the potentials that could lead us to them.
I love that analogy...selling the toy not to the kids, but to their parents.... As many parties are involved in B2B marketing, best is to look at your target customer from helicopter point of view. Agree with Rand, first identify all the influencers and target them. And no hard selling please... nobody likes to be sold...
Targeting the moms and not the kids is a really good example to put things in to perspective.
That's such a good example! I'm also going to use it to explain people what we need to do.
I've spent my career in B2B marketing & search so it's great to read articles like this one. This reminds me of (what I consider) the best post on Moz from 2015 which was this:
https://moz.com/blog/keyword-research-for-the-mode...
I hope the author doesn't mind me using elements of his post verbatim here, interspersed with my own take on it. I urge you to read his orginal post in full!
The reason I refer back to this here is the funnel diagram, where crucially the "Awareness" stage is sub divided down into "Unaware of the problem" and "Problem Awareness". This is important because you've got two very different mindsets here.
Unaware of the problem I personally refer to as the "Unknown unknowns" - This is the very beginning of the process, when our prospects are fully 'at rest.' They don't know us, they don't what we do, and they don't even know they have a problem. The opportunity is audience development, and building an audience of people interested in related topics for businesses in general. The idea is that we can subsequently convert after they've grown to know and trust us.
We need to get the right people to our site and then bring them into a permission marketing asset – be it an email list (the best if you're set up with something like Eloqua for marketing automation; a real cornerstone of successful B2B marketing when done correctly), a social audience, or a retargeting pool for PPC.
Problem Awareness – “The ‘How do I?’ stage?”
This is the next step on the buying path. Our prospects know they have a problem and are actively looking for information, but they may not really understand what we do yet – or even what to do to solve their problem. At this point we can get ahead of the game by creating landing pages and content about their problems and pain points. This is classic SEO territory; creating useful assets on the website which we can specifically target to phrases we want to rank for as they will bring through increasingly relevant traffic; albeit in small volumes for many B2B companies.
Interesting B2B focussed WBF Rand, especially the area on customer personas. For us we ask our content creators to not just to reach out to our primary contact when making creating customers stories but to also involve the individuals within a decision making tree who invested in our products and services. This really enriches a customer case study, as we are able to effectively communicate the key benefits of the why & what of each person who was involved in the investment they had with our solutions.
The marketing team can then do there research on similar organisations using tools such as Sales Navigator from LinkedIn and deliver the right/relevant message within a case study to the appropriate individual e.g. financial benefits to the FD, organisational benefits to the MD/CEO, efficiency benefits to the CTO and so on.
David
Very smart David. I think there's lots of opportunity to generate content ideas and marketing tactics for reaching your targets with that discovery process.
great walkthrough Rand I got a little carried away with this comment - apologies. It is just that I'm passionate about the topic and eager to share. Truth is B2B sales is losing more confidence in content marketing every day. Why? Because the marketing qualified to sales qualified conversion metric that is so important to marketing typically does not result in an 'effortless' addition to the account reps pipeline. Given the choice there isn't a sales rep in the world that would not prioritize an honest to goodness real deal opportunity over an honest to goodness POTENTIAL deal opportunity.
This 5 second read illustrates why this mistrust exists. Fixing this is easy - we simply align first to the deal cycle and then reverse engineer our content so that it also addresses a particular area of the marketing funnel. Rule of thunb then is if a piece of content doesn't help move a prospect into or along in the actual sales cycle we shouldn't produce it. "What of awareness" is the biggest objection to this notion - rightfully so because we can't ignore that. This is addressed by driving activint into the funnel with the big idea of what yoru product or service addresses in the marketplace . The 'above the funnel value story'
Your suggestion to pay attention to the position of the funnel is spot on, doing so improves the quality of the lead when it is passed to sales. I also believe that there is a sea change happening right now where buyers have an expectation of prescription and not consultative solutions. Fan of the challenger sale and the idea in that book is that we get out ahead of the marketplace to inform them not of how we are going to solve the problem at hand, but to help them ID the problems they are not even aware of just yet.
Looks like our minds were going in the same direction today. Check out our blog post on Why there is no such thing as b2b marketing.
I like this. Also having a laser focused retargeting strategy can help move companies to the exact step they need to continue in the sales process. This is a big focus of ours for sure.
Incredible Article Rand, I am new to SEO and your recommendation on Content promoting framework for B2B will surly help me. Till now I am dealing with B2C. In any case, I am Planning to Start B2B also. Trust I will figure out how to get this with the learning you share.
For more information:https://snehablog.com/
Hello Rand,
From my point of view giving leads something like a 30 days free period of using a program like a demo with full functioning is a great way on making them see what you really can offer them. The same thing with the PDF docs. I love that the form for downloading a PDF doc is simple and efficient. The emails I got after that are related to the same subject. Make it personal even for B2Bs it the best!
Thanks for this new Whiteboard.
Best,
M.
Yes I agree, Moz is also doing the same.
For B2B channel, marketer needs to adopt a different approach. As far as focus concerns regarding leads generation, i guess even some retail businesses focus on more conversation than others. However, completely agree with structure you suggest to plan for targeting.
Another point to make on content marketing for B2B organisations, is that in a lot of cases, your audience has much less time to spend on your content. Even if they are engaged, they are unwilling to 'waste time' sharing, liking, and tweeting your stuff. All the more important to create concise, punchy content that benefits them! Fair point?
True. They often email it to other team members though.
Yes, although I'd also add that for some types of content in B2B, your targets will spend vast amounts of time and resources on it. Good example - as a consultant, I did some work in the commercial real estate field. There was an annual report on the state of the industry with all sorts of statistics, survey data, analysis, etc. that every company in commercial real estate read like it was a religious text each year it came out (can't recall the name now). It's not unlike how everyone in the tech/VC/startup world religiously reads Mary Meeker's annual Internet Trends report (https://www.slideshare.net/kleinerperkins/internet-...).
My point being - if you can create the right content that becomes essential to the industry's operations and how people do their job, you can receive remarkable, consistent engagement.
Though what you are saying is, it depends on the quality and the importance of the report to the audience. There are reports like Gartner for which pay a lot of dollars to read indepth.
Great Tips. Thanks!
It's been quite some time since I last read (or actually watched) such an interesting piece of content on B2B marketing. Everyone seems to rehashes the same old tactics, most of which frankly, sound good on paper, but rarely work.
One point I'd like to make though, is that CAC and LTV (or CLTV) are indeed vital metrics for B2B. However, it's not that easy to go from 9:1 to 3:1, because a 3rd important element is the *time* it takes to recoup your investment or the customers to reach their LTV.
For example, as a rule of thumb B2B SaaS want to recoup their CAC within 9-12 months at most. This is important, because it interferes with the company's cashflow among others.
Thank you Rand for this great Whiteboard Friday, looking forward to your next one!
What a great article, nice tips! It is really helpful for the most of the B2B marketers. Thanks Rand for your effort.
Thanks for the info, I try to apply it to my business online
thank you!
Thank you Rand! I completely agree that we ask for way too much. I recently changed a lead capture to just the first name and email and BOOM - much greater lead capture rates.
Nancy Deol
Thanks Rand for putting light on the B2B content marketing strategy.
This is astonishing, Rand. I simply imparted this to my entire group. Much obliged to you for clarifying everything so expressively!
For more information:https://snehablog.com/
Thanks a lot for the blog post.Much thanks again. Great.
This is a great post for an overview of content marketing's specific issues in B2B. We find some forms of content work much better than others, which tend to be the ones that don't take too long to read! We also find that content that talks about the customer's industry, rather than the marketer's works better e.g. we (as a marketing agency) get better results from a finance-specific article that is related to marketing, rather than a straightforward blog post or infographic about marketing metrics.
We've put together a little infographic with some of the forms we think work best for B2B, which you can find here if you're interested :)
Hi Rand,
i really enjoyed this post! Do you provide some more insights or workshops to help B2B marketeers do they content job well?
best,
I`ve read this yet in time to add some details in my 6-months content plan - particularly I was going around until after this read I realized I just need to determine the funnel first for where we stuck and have most of problems in product marketing/sales. Following this logic, I am now thinking of whether it is better to post/share your content based on the stage we target. Meaning, if we are on Awareness stage we need to post/be active as much as possible externally, while the Conversion phase needs more of a corporate blog, internal digest etc. To conclude, "where to speak to your audience" matters a lot based on the marketing funnel. Am I getting it right?
@Rand, thanks a lot for this post!
Really CONTENT MARKETING is important for us to attract and convert prospects into customers, and customers into repeat buyers.
your guides will helpful for us to set up a defined content marketing strategy, which we can plan, manage and optimise using our resources. Thanks for good Insights article.
Hi Rand
I am a big fan of your white board Friday. I love the way you explain a topic.However , one things which frustrates me every time is that the loading speed of your video presentation. Despite the fact that i use 1mbps connection , i always find it distracting while watching the white board Friday.I have tried to change the configuration by reducing the screen resolution to 224p and switching to flash format .But noting actually worked. Is there any solution of it ? I want to watch all your white board Friday without any distraction :)
Cheers !
Amazing video, so appealing as always.
In my opinion, although all the factors mentioned are important, two of them are critical, as they may determine the success of our strategy, no matter how good the other factors are implemented.
Firstly, identify the part of the funnel that needs our attention, and focus on it. Maybe it's the hardest stage because it's all about knowing and analysing ourselves and it can be hard to be objective and judicious. Secondly, identify the players involved (sometimes it even may be not possible) and then build an overlapping persona, which can be quite tricky, as there can be some traits incompatible and you have to find a way to fit them into the persona.
Great video, thank you Rand!
NO LINKEDIN share button though?!
Hi Rand Fishkin,
Greetings from sunny Jakarta, Indonesia.
I always thought that the best social media platform for B2B is LinkedIn...is this right ? Why I see no LinkedIn share button here ?I am just asking...
Thank you
Maria
Great Article Rand, I am new to SEO and your advice on Content marketing system for B2B will surly help me. Till now I am working on B2C. But I am Planning to Start B2B as well. Hope I will manage to get this with the knowledge you share.
I just think that this WBF is up there with the best. The marketing funnel breakdown for both B2C, and B2B is exactly what I was lacking, and always trying to market B2B content the same way. This is a great opportunity for anyone to really see some successful ways to market B2B businesses, and what to expect.
The part about the cltv and cac blew my mind as I stay away from non organic marketing efforts when tackling a client, but only for the reason is getting them to spend can be difficult, but when you can show the math right there it comes together like glue in terms of putting more money behind the content or just conversion.
B2B content is something that is always boring it seems and as you stated lacks info about what you are really buying, but I never thought about it when having to write it for a client and plan on amping up the tactics when writing for a B2B.
Thanks Rand & Moz
95% of our business is B2B, your post exposes an area for improvement by "Identifying all players involved." I drew (very poorly mind you) your "funnel & players" images on my whiteboard for continued inspiration :)
This is amazing, Rand. I just shared this with my whole team. Thank you for explaining everything so eloquently!
How can I convince my CEO that we need to work on awareness? Any good examples of how startups build awareness? We're moving our product to a new market (different country, different language, different clients) and he feels like we're at the stage of Comparison because on our original market we've completed the cycle and he can't imagine why would we start over. I'd show him this video, but he doesn't speak english :(
Yeah - Prodvigator is already in Buglgaria (and other markets). And bulgarian NetPeak make awesome job for popularization. You can ask Gennadiy Vorobyov he speak English.
Thanks Rand this time you discussed B2B content marketing strategy.Its really informative topic for me.and your article is really good all time because you write article as a think about audience.Your video is really good according to topic,Example of post is nice.
Amazing, That are some very interesting and insightful suggestions for content marketing. Although i am new in this industry but Moz is always the source of great learning for me. Thanks for sharing this.
Hi Rand,
Great content as always. Thank you for making it.
How do you feel the funnel changes for Reseller/Channel B2B businesses? I'm consulting for an IT channel business that makes cloud file sync software, so we primarily target our marketing at attracting resellers and converting them to signing up.
Our website is https://network2share.com/. We're really only just now starting down the content marketing journey.
We've found our conversion rates really good once we attract resellers into our funnel, but we're constantly having to battle for mindspace to get them using the product and then selling it. So from our perspective we have another phase after or in parallel to retention - push, to push them out at customers to go earn some revenue.
Do you or anyone else here have any insights on how B2B marketing varies with channel based businesses?
B2B is an entirely different world, where you have to discuss a lot on dry topics and getting the viral factor is always a big ask for any marketer. Totally agree with your point about expanding the strategic targeting to more than just the end user. I have been working for B2B industry for quite some time and you just need to have a lot of patience here to get something fruitful.
"Target the right stages of the marketing funnel" Yes Content needs to be directed to your ideal customer in the places where you expect to find them. Also one has to find the particulars of who likes to buy your product or service and then discovering where those types of people hang out will help you direct your content to the right places.
Really amazing article Rand, and very much at the right time for our company. Thanks
This is amazing, Rand. I just shared this with my whole team. Thank you for explaining everything so eloquently!
[Link removed by editor.]
For more information regarding latest government jobs https://latestgovjobs.com/
And what does it have to do with the post?