Content marketing insights (MQL)

Content marketing insights (MQL)

This blog post explores the nuances of content marketing, its significance for small and medium-sized B2B software companies, and how it differs for vertical and horizontal software providers. From automation to common pitfalls, we delve into the essentials of a successful content marketing strategy.

Introduction to content marketing

What is ‘Content Marketing’?

Content marketing is the art of regularly publishing and distributing valuable content that educates, informs, and keeps your target audience interested in your product and you as a company. It's about building trust by showcasing expertise and addressing the audience's needs, all while steering clear of self-promotion. The ultimate goal is to convert qualified leads into loyal customers without ‘blowing your own trumpet’.

Why is it important for B2B software companies?

For small B2B software companies that do not enjoy visible brand recognition, trust is paramount. Content marketing helps to build a foundation of trust with potential clients by offering valuable insights and positioning oneself as an industry expert. Content marketing is not a campaign; it's an ongoing commitment to establishing credibility.

Content marketing could take the form of written content such as blogs, newsletters, audio or video content. Written content is much more common as it is cost-effective and easy to set up.

Content marketing plan

A clear content marketing plan allows you to generate the best out of the planned process. This is not meant to burden the existing leadership team/marketing personnel with hours of work. It simply means planning ahead of action. In our experience having a simple plan that covers the most basic aspects tailored to the organisational needs, allows us to allocate resources efficiently and anticipate challenges. At the fundamental level, the plan should cover the following aspects:

  • Spelling out your target audience and content relevant to them,
  • Mix of content medium to be used and steps associated with them
  • Content calendar that clearly maps out when what needs to be completed and sent out/uploaded onto the website.
  • Use of external resources (more on that below)

A lot hinges on what has worked / not worked in the past and the budget at your disposal. It is important to continuously assess your content performance in order to establish a feedback loop.

Content marketing is not self-promotion

One prevalent mistake is treating content marketing as a self-promotion platform. Focusing solely on oneself leads to disinterest. Companies often miss the mark by neglecting to address the buyer's problems and needs, hindering the establishment of trust. The key is to deliver value, showcasing a deep understanding of the audience's challenges.

Content types - choose what suits your needs

Content marketing could take the form of any of the below 10 mediums.

  1. Blog posts: Write and post informative and educational articles relevant to your industry or niche. The content for the blog should come from you or your leadership team in the context of the solution that your product offers.

    2. Long gone are the days when 300-600 words were considered standard blog post length. Search engines do not typically rank you as an authority if you don’t have blog posts that are longer. Also, you will not have enough room to go in-depth on a topic with such a short length. The ideal blog post length is between 1,500 and 2,500 words.

  2. Whitepapers: It is not always possible to share content with your audience via blog posts. With Whitepapers, you could share in-depth reports that explore a specific topic, often presenting research findings, industry insights, or solutions to a problem. In essence, they are longer-form content pieces that delve into a topic in-depth, providing valuable information for your target audience. Whitepapers are i) longer (between 2,000 and 10,000 words), ii) carry a professional tone (vs. the more casual tone of a blog post) and iii) focus on educating the reader and providing a solution to a problem.
  3. Case studies: Case studies cover analyses of successful projects or partnerships, showcasing your company's expertise and results. Blog posts and whitepapers show your understanding of the problem and the solution you offer but case studies go above and beyond in proving your ability to solve the problem.

    4. A good case study covers i) the problems your customers faced, ii) how your product proposed to solve the problem, iii) the before and after of using the product and iv) the measurable positive impact as shown in the metrics. Here are some tips to make a good case study, great.

    1. Focus on customers’ perspective, not yours - The case study is to showcase your customers perspective of the problem and the solution. It makes the case study honest and appealing if you include direct quotes from customers.
    2. Data is a powerful friend - You should include data points as it makes the solution far more credible. An interested reader who can see the solution work through data is persuaded to take the next step.
    3. Engaging content - The focus and the tone should focus on weaving a story. The content has to be engaging rather than being academic in nature.
  4. Infographics: Visual representations of data, statistics, or processes, making complex information more digestible. Pros include heightened brand visibility through easy sharing, showcasing industry expertise, and enhancing user engagement. However, it involves time-consuming creation, quality control challenges, and offers limited SEO benefits due to text being part of the image. It also is a potential oversimplification of data. The effectiveness of Infographics depends on audience relevance and content quality. In our experience it valuable yet potentially resource-intensive content marketing tool.
  5. Videos: Engaging video content such as product demonstrations, tutorials, or interviews is a powerful medium to share messaging with your target audience. Compared to other forms of content, video content is often more engaging and can convey information more effectively. We have found that the engagement wanes out if the content is longer than two minutes. Video content definitely has an emotional connection with the viewers and has better shareability, increasing the brand’s reach. It comes with a few disadvantages - it is expensive to produce high-quality videos, videos cannot be updated or revised and it doesn’t offer SEO benefits as in-video text is not read by search engines.
  6. Webinars: Webinars are an increasingly popular format of content marketing, especially for B2B small software companies. They come in the form of live or recorded online presentations, workshops, or discussions on industry-related topics. In our experience, Webinars are effective if they are not more than 45 min.

    7. According to research, 90% of B2B marketers consider webinars the best way to generate quality leads (OPEN Source). Webinars provide an interactive platform for companies to educate their prospects about industry trends, pain points, and solutions. They help spread awareness around a topic, solution, or company. They aid customer retention as they can be used to teach existing customers and users to optimise software usage. They help close the deal - 60% of webinars aim to turn leads into loyal customers.

  7. Podcasts: If webinars are for an interested prospect, podcasts are for the nerdy ones. This audio content form allows your audience to consume information on the go, featuring industry experts or discussions.

    8. Podcasts foster community building by creating a dedicated space for engagement around the brand. They enhance brand awareness, enabling discussions about diverse topics, solutions, or the company itself. Additionally, podcasts elevate a company's status as a thought leader within its industry, providing an interactive platform to engage with customers and educate prospects on industry trends, challenges, and potential solutions. They are comparatively cost-efficient, requiring lower investment compared to video-based marketing strategies like vlogging, ensuring a feasible option for businesses with limited resources.

    However, podcasts come with notable disadvantages. Bandwidth costs can be a concern, potentially becoming costly as podcasts consume data when downloaded or streamed. Additionally, tracking return on investment (ROI) from podcasts is challenging, making it difficult to measure the effectiveness of the efforts. Maintaining audience engagement requires consistent and compelling content creation, which might strain limited resources, risking a loss of audience interest if not consistently met.

    The ideal length of a podcast can vary depending on your topic and audience demographics. Based on studies, the average length of a podcast is anywhere between 30 minutes to 42 minutes long.

  8. Surveys and Research Reports: Conducting surveys and sharing the results can establish your provide valuable insights to your prospective customers. They offer a unique blend of data collection and analysis, making them an effective medium for engaging with prospects and current customers.

    9. Surveys are a practical and cost-efficient way to gather quantitative data from a large demographic. They provide fast and comfortable results. However, you need to work hard to ensure that you have a representative sample from which to collect data. You will also have to execute it well so that the surveys are not long or confusing, so as to generate incorrect results.

    Research reports provide an in-depth analysis of a topic, backed by data collected from surveys. Research reports are often unbiased, providing a better picture of what’s really happening in the market. However, research reports can be prohibitively expensive at times, especially if it’s exclusive research specific to an industry.

  9. Templates/tools - This typically takes the form of
    1. Interactive Content: Quizzes, polls, assessments, or calculators that engage your audience and provide valuable insights. They are excellent tools for the audience who’d like to know the products better.
    2. Spreadsheet tools: This is self-explanatory. Spreadsheets allow the audience to put the template to use immediately.

The effectiveness of each type of content may vary depending on your target audience and the nature of your B2B business. It's often beneficial to use a combination of these content types to create a well-rounded and engaging content marketing strategy.

In the context of small businesses, you might not have enough budget to go after all the content forms. In our experience, the best content forms for small B2B software companies to focus your efforts are Blog posts, Whitepapers, Case studies and Webinars. Running a content calendar covering these four content forms could be taxing. Out of the four, Webinars are the most challenging but we can reassure you that it will be quite rewarding.

In the next part, we will give you a guide to creating good blog posts, whitepapers, case studies and webinars.

Blog posts should feature your primary keywords

Content is king, but format should not be underplayed.

The obvious things to keep in mind are to have an introduction and conclusion (takeaway is key!), sticking to the main message and breaking the post into meaningful paragraphs. Always choose headers that are easy to read and understand. The takeaway should be clear - remember this is the focus of the post.

In our experience, most successful blog posts follow simple rules that go beyond the obvious. You need to determine what keywords your audience will likely search for. For example, if you are serving customers in the retail sector in retail space planning, you could choose “Retail design”, “Retail architecture” or “Retail store surveys” as your primary keywords. You should incorporate these primary keywords in strategic areas of your post such as in the title, introductory section, and description, and sprinkle them naturally throughout the post. This assists search engines in recognising the relevance of your content to the search query, thereby increasing the likelihood of your blog post ranking higher in search results.

Building whitepapers is a continuous process

It is not every day where you generate insights for an entire whitepaper - it is an iterative process. It is impossible to build it from scratch. Outsourcing thought leadership is difficult because you know the market better than anyone else. In our experience, a good approach is as follows:

  1. Pick four topics of interest. The topics should ideally have depth and offer solutions to problems of interest.
  2. As and when you or the leadership team meet the customers you capture little nuggets of wisdom. There are several methods of note taking but the one we’ve found the most useful has been the “Zettelkasten” method. It is a dynamic approach to note-taking where you keep adding to your content on a particular topic continuously over a period of time.
    3. 👉🏻
    Internally, we use Notion religiously to capture notes from all conversations, meetings, board discussions and lessons learned from external sources (books, podcasts, business videos). This helps us augment existing content or create new content for our playbook.
  3. You take a cut-off to draft the whitepaper based on the insights you have collected over the period. Don’t hesitate to use AI tools to make the tone professional and to help organise the content into different headers.

Webinars

Webinars are driven by two things - Content and Speaker. A distant third is managing your audience. Let us explain.

  1. Choice of content: It goes without saying that the topic for the webinar should evoke engagement among the leads and existing customers. It should be a topic of interest to your audience and one that offers solutions for problems that are important to your prospects. The topic should provide an opportunity for you to be able to have a conversation.
  2. Speaker: It is good to make sure you have the right speaker you want to get on the webinar to talk about the topic. In our experience, really good customers are happy to get on a webinar. Just make use of the moment. Their enthusiasm to come on a webinar doesn’t mean it is necessarily easy, you still need to coach or prepare the speakers. This involves discussing the questions beforehand, exploring ideas of how they’d what they are going to say, and how they’d respond to questions. Large B2B customers typically don’t like it if you spoon-feed them. So preparing them would be to hand in the questions beforehand so they could organise their thoughts. You should try and allow enough time for your speakers to get back to you for questions or feedback.
  3. Audience: You also want to manage your audience to ensure the webinar is informative and engaging. You don’t want to go to a webinar with less than 20 participants as this could be embarrassing, to say the least. If you are expecting a large audience, you might choose to collect questions in advance. This way you not only understand your audience better but also prioritise questions that provide the best marketing platform to showcase the product.

Timing: The best time to host a webinar is the time after the lunch hour. And we have noticed that Wednesdays are best to run a webinar, with a response rate of 26% (OPEN Source).

AI tools and copywriters are your sparring assistants

You or your leadership team should write the bare bones of the content yourself. You know the exact message you’d like to convey to your audience. Once you have the bare bones of the post written, do not hesitate to get an AI tool such as Chatgpt to develop the content for you or to get Chatgpt to get the tone right. For example, you can prompt Chatgpt to rewrite content in a confident tone.

If you are still not satisfied with what the AI tools are doing, then you can hire a copywriter. Make no mistake you need to know the nuances better than anybody else because an AI tool or a third-party copywriter will not communicate the insights that you would like to spell out. With copywriters, you have two options:

  1. Enter freelancers: With a team of contract workers, you can enjoy the flexibility that comes with hiring on an as-needed basis, while avoiding the overhead that accompanies permanent staff. Above all, you’ll get the talent and experience that fit your project. Freelancing is more popular than ever, so the talent pool is immense. This means you need to know how to find, hire, and work with the right freelancers to make your ad hoc hiring strategy pay dividends.
  2. Tools are another option: Content marketing tools do everything from content ideation and origination through to writing, delivery and SEO. It could be ideal only when the blog posts would be more than 800 words. You could create the first one and then use it as a template for all subsequent ones. Tools such as Scribly offer the option of subscription with a monthly package. You could also work ad-hoc but may work out more expensive as keywords are charged extra.

Tips for writing effective content

Irrespective of whether you decide to write your content on your own or hire a copywriter, it is important to learn how to write good content.

Here are some tips for writing good content.

  • AIDA: The AIDA Formula is often used as a gold standard in content writing. AIDA stands for
    • Attention: grab them with the first line
    • Interest: created with a bold promise
    • Desire: something that anybody reading the copy would want
    • Action: Call to action to keep reading
  • Use short sentences: Short sentences = better copy. Bottom line: they're easier to read and understand
  • The slippery slide: The slippery slide is when you add something to your page to keep people reading. As copywriting legend Joseph Sugarman once said, "The sole purpose of the first sentence is to get you to read the second sentence".
  • Super specific headlines: They're headlines that tell your reader exactly what they're going to get (example of what not to write -- "Save more time the easy way", good example "Save 2 hours a day with these productivity hacks"
  • Use FOMO (fear of missing out): Generates strong reactions from prospects and makes them want to listen closely to what you have to say (i.e., adding a deadline at the beginning of the copy). Doesn't work for every situation in the context of B2B sales.
  • Write strong leads: Leads follow right after the headline

      • Three tips to do it:

    1. Use a hook in your first or second sentence (i.e., "Are you afraid of taking your business to the next level? Here's what to do")
    2. Make your lead 6-8 sentences max
    3. Use mini-stories in your leads
  • Don't use big words: Use words that are easy to read and understand
  • Benefits over features: Always prioritise the benefits that the reader will achieve. Nobody cares about the product features if one doesn’t know what it brings to them.
  • Get out of the friend zone:
    • When customers and potential clients like what you're selling but not enough to buy
    • What is then the solution? Address their objections (i.e., "it's too expensive", "not a good time for me")
  • Solve the "Social Proof Paradox":
    • Feature your strongest form of social proof (doesn't have to be sales. I.e. if sales haven't taken off yet but four people love the product, feature them as testimonials.
  • Use non-round figures as they are more believable than round numbers.

Thought leadership paradox

Sometimes we see companies misuse content marketing, such as product FAQs and demos. These are not content. They are marketing strategies which shouldn’t be confused with content.

The ability to produce thought leadership through content is what differentiates good from the great. It is important to differentiate what is and what is not thought leadership. In that context, some content forms are not pure “thought leadership”. For example:

  1. Product demos: They showcase your products or services through live demos or recorded videos. It is a reaffirming content type rather than one that offers novel insights into the problem and the solution.
  2. FAQs and knowledge base: They are essential components of an effective marketing strategy. However, providing answers to common questions and creating a knowledge base to support your audience is not thought leadership.
  3. News and Press Releases: These are excellent forms of content to keep the audience informed about company updates, product launches, or industry news but nothing more.

Deliver content using social media

It is not enough to create good content. You need to leverage the right social media channels to publish and promote your content. We have found these six channels as most used platforms for B2B content marketing. In order of priority:

  • LinkedIn stands tall as the most used B2B channel with over 92% of B2B businesses3^3 using it. As a central professional platform globally, it is no surprise that LinkedIn is the go-to platform for B2B content marketing. 
  • Twitter - Twitter is ideal for sharing short updates and news, and for engaging with followers. It’s also a great platform for real-time customer service.
  • YouTube - YouTube is the second largest search engine after Google. If your content marketing strategy includes video, YouTube is a must. 61% of B2B businesses3^3 use YouTube.
  • Facebook - With over 2 billion monthly active users, Facebook is the largest social media platform. It’s a great place to share both short and long-form content and engage with your audience. 64% of B2B companies use Facebook for their content marketing.
  • Instagram - Instagram is a visually oriented platform where you can share images and short videos. It’s great for brands that have visual appeal.

Beyond these six channels, there are other channels including WhatsApp, Quora, TikTok, Pinterest, Snapchat and Reddit but less than 10% of B2B businesses3^3 use these channels.

LinkedIn

In our experience, LinkedIn is the best channel out there. You can choose any of all of the channels but in our experience, LinkedIn alone is most sufficient. There is really no evidence to suggest any other social media being better. LinkedIn is also the most interactive platform.

While using LinkedIn, there are two scenarios that have helped us maximise engagement:

Scenario 1: Let’s take the example of a blog post. First, you post a blog post on your company’s LinkedIn page. You and your leadership + marketing teams then re-share the post on their personal pages. This has networking effects and helps reach each of the over one thousand followers and connections you and the team would have.

Scenario 2: There is no content to post. You simply post a question related to the problem that your product addresses. This creates interest and attracts engagement on LinkedIn. You add a link to the website. On average, you could do one such post every week. You could also do more of these posts. If you want to do more of these say, three times a week, you've got to have something meaningful to say in less than 20 words or 30 words. With scenario 2 there is no clear data on how effective these are no evidence that this generates meaningful marketing qualified leads.

Email content marketing

If you have the ability to reach your leads directly, then email is still the best way to reach them and share content. Therefore you should email your content to all the people in your database.

Content calendar

It is important to organise and manage the execution of your content. This is where a content calendar comes in very handy.

A content calendar typically lists out the exact content description and release dates on a simple Excel sheet and acts as a tracker that allows to manage the execution. (see template attached - UntitledUntitled)

In our experience, the annual calendar should plan for

  • 12 blog posts (once every month)
  • two to four Whitepapers (as it takes time to build high-quality content of over two thousand words)
  • two case studies which are spaced out to reflect positive reflections of the different versions of your product
  • two webinars that are well spaced out to engage with prospects.

Delivery mechanism

  • Email - track opens, clicks and website engagement
  • LinkedIn - post on the company page and re-post on each management team member’s individual page.

Combine these 3 approaches to win over your qualified leads

Content marketing is not just about attracting qualifying leads at the top of the funnel. Its importance flows through the funnel. Here are three things that are crucial to understanding when it comes to mid and bottom-funnel content.

  • Sell the sizzle, not the steak: As leads move beyond the top of the funnel, shift from detailing product features to focusing on desired outcomes. Understand and align with the prospect's goals to enhance resonance.
  • Mid-funnel content: As your qualified leads move through the mid-funnel it is crucial to ensure that they are clear on the problem and how you intend to solve it. Share content that acknowledges the prospect's problem, educates on your solution's superiority, and includes case studies and buyer's guides.
  • Social proof injection: As prospects get closer to the purchase decision it is important to emphasise the superiority of your product vs the competitors. At this stage aka bottom of the funnel, utilise customer testimonials, reviews, and case studies to provide assurance. Focus on the positive outcomes and results your solution has delivered.

Content marketing tools

Several tools empower B2B software companies in their content marketing journey. This goes from content creation platforms to marketing automation software, choosing the right tools can make a significant impact. The choice of tools depends on budget and business needs, target market, ease of use and implementation among other factors.

In a nutshell

Content marketing is a commitment to consistently deliver value and build trust for B2B software companies. Knowing how to write good content, which content formats and channels to use is essential, and utilising the right tools ensures a seamless content marketing journey. In the ever-evolving landscape of B2B software, mastering content marketing is undeniably a winning move.