5 Content marketing tips for B2B e-commerce websites

People fall in love with people, not business operations. To personify your brand, and build loyalty with your target audience and customers, the answer is Content Marketing. Having a great content marketing strategy will help you generate traffic, build trust and authority, supplement inbound marketing to raise your conversion rates, and even help with customer retention. Now the question is, how do you do that?

With creative, effective content marketing ideas, you can elevate your B2B e-commerce website to be an industry leader with a loyal following and customers in as little as a few months. Here are some of the best of those ideas and tips you can use to win in 2019.

E-mail marketing 

Social media is important, but e-mail is still one of the most lucrative marketing tools you can use. Not only that, but it’s the most secure.
B2B e-mail lists are also more lucrative than B2C. This is because your customers use their professional e-mails on a daily basis, meaning you’ll have a great chance of getting their attention.

The best way to make sure you stand out in the inbox and raise your bottom line with e-mail marketing is to keep it personal. The best way is to be as intuitive to the needs of your reader as possible. Use segmentation to send your readers relevant offers. If you speak directly to them, they are more likely to engage with your content or reach out to work with you.

Blogging

Search engine traffic is highly targeted and has the potential to pull in a high volume of customers to your sites. So, what do you need to do to rank on Google? You need to blog.

While blogging isn’t a default capability in Magento, the community supports e-commerce platforms that use blogs with extensions in the Marketplace. One of the biggest challenges for business owners is not knowing what to blog about.
To be effective in your blog content marketing, you will need to conduct keyword research to find the right focus terms for your site. Tools like SEMrush, or plugins like Keywords Everywhere, will give you loads of relevant, SEO-friendly topic ideas.
With these topic ideas, you can create content that is relevant for your customers.

How it works is that your audience will visit Google to find a solution to a problem. Maybe they’re even searching for the best B2B e-commerce provider for their needs. Then, you use the keywords tools to see what they’re searching for, and the exact search terms they’re using to search for it. The key here is to be intuitive. When your audience conducts a search it’s because they have a question, they need an answer to. But they don’t normally plug the entire question into the search bar. So, it’s up to you to find relevant keywords and ask yourself, “What question do they have that would make them search for this?” And then write blog posts answering those questions. Make sure you’re using the customer’s language, meaning you’re putting the keywords they plug into Google directly in the article as you write it.

Content upgrades 

B2B content allows for many opportunities to get creative and engage with potential customers. One of the best ways to make the most of your traffic is to utilize content upgrades. A content upgrade is an irresistible piece of content offered in exchange for a user’s email address. The purpose is to give users something interesting and grow your e-mail database. Your customer base is always looking for more information on how to improve their own businesses and utilize your services and products. Knowing this, you have the chance to offer them content upgrades in the form of tutorials, e-books, expert interviews, free courses, downloads, webinars and so much more.

Influencer content  

In an age where your audience is sceptical of (almost) everything they see on the internet; influencer content is priceless.

Influencer content is any content that uses the endorsement of an influencer to give it more authority and in a lot of cases more reach. This could be a guest expert blog post, a video interview on YouTube or even a video ad with the Influencer as the spokesperson for your brand. Strategically placing industry leaders in your branded content elevates your position to match theirs. This can make leads trust you faster and allows you to tap into the Influencer’s audience directly when they share the content through their social media channels.
For example, when you are a fitness B2B e-commerce store that sells gym equipment to gym owners. One way it could generate user interest is through reaching out to popular figures in the fitness world. For example, popular athletes, bodybuilders, and successful gym owners can endorse their equipment, making an industry-wide statement that they’re the best e-commerce fitness retailer.

Most influencers tend to have a solid online presence on social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter. B2B organizations can reach out to these influencers and invite them for collaborations.

Work with data

When you are working online you can collect a lot of data about your leads and target group. With traditional marketing, it is pretty difficult to get that data, but that’s not the case with online marketing.

You can start measuring data by installing Google Analytics on your website. With this tool, you can collect the data of which content is the most popular, but also you can figure out where your leads are coming from and which content isn’t popular. You can look at the data, learn what’s working and what’s not. If you know what isn’t working, you can make adjustments.

There are also a lot of other ways to work with data.
Like for example, Marketing Automation tools such as Hubspot and Marketo. The Marketing Automation tools can help categories your leads via their interests and with this help, you and sales can push content that suits those interests. Or if you want to go a bit further with your content, then you can use Artificial intelligence. There are several AI solutions that can help you predict important things with the input of your data. For example, you can predict what your customers are going to buy, what they are going to return, what the best prices are etc. Want to learn more about AI? See our modules here.

 

So, what can you learn from these five tips?

That your content is only “King” if you use it as a way to stand out and deliver a full experience to your audience. Use it not only to attract and convert, but build an authoritative brand presence, nurture your leads, and retain your customers. You need to create creative ideas to stand out in your industry and you have to focus on the questions of your target group and use the data that you collect. With this, your B2B website will be a success.