![\"How](\"https:\/\/searchenginewatch.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/How-to-create-B2B-content-that-ranks-and-drives-sales.png\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Content is crucial for just about any B2B business as it <\/span>drives traffic and convinces your leads to become your customers. <\/span>No wonder, <\/span>most B2B businesses are increasing their content marketing budgets<\/a><\/span> every year.<\/span><\/p>\n But do they use content marketing to its full potential? <\/span>How do you create content that serves several goals, like traffic acquisition and rankings?<\/span><\/p>\n While being extremely valuable to business success, B2B content is also extremely challenging for marketers to execute properly. The problem is twofold: <\/span>Targeting.<\/span><\/p>\n Unlike B2C content where you usually target a single human being, in B2B you have to keep the whole group of decision-makers in mind. This group is usually referred to as a DMU (a decision-making unit) and, depending on your platform and your target organizations, it can include the head of marketing, CEO, IT representative, CTO, etc.<\/span><\/p>\n In other words, B2B content targets <\/span>a group of decision-makers<\/b> and normally takes <\/span>more time (and more steps)<\/span><\/a> to convert.<\/span><\/p>\n Creating convincing content that appeals to every single person within a DMU is hardly possible:<\/span><\/p>\n Before you start creating your B2B content strategy for traffic generation, you need to know your decision-makers and be able to plan your content around possible conflicts.<\/span><\/p>\n In other words, plan your content assets that convey value and then decide which keywords you can optimize for.<\/span><\/p>\n So what is the best way to know who you are targeting? You already know your target businesses in mind (those you created that B2B product for) but how to better understand their internal decision-makers?<\/span><\/p>\n B2B audience research is different from B2C audience research: You can hardly apply your web analytics demographics info because you have to keep all those intra-organizational levels and politics in mind.<\/span><\/p>\n To better understand your target DMU, try several of these options:<\/span><\/p>\n Additionally, inbox Insight offers a handy <\/span>checklist<\/span><\/a> for you to organize your data and better understand your target DMUs.<\/span><\/p>\n From there, start creating a list of problems each person within a DMU may have and how your product may solve all of them. This is where matching those problems to searchable keywords is the required next step.<\/span><\/p>\n It is not often easy to identify how people may be searching for solutions and answers to relevant problems. While there\u2019s <\/span>no such a thing as an ideal word count<\/span> which would work in every niche, try and create a resource that will answer several related questions.<\/span><\/p>\n Google is now mature enough to steer your search into a more popular direction, so I suggest starting your keyword research by simply searching Google. Type the search terms as you yourself would use them, and pay attention to:<\/span><\/p>\n All of these will help you collect the core terms your target B2B customers are using when searching for solutions to their problems.<\/span><\/p>\n From there, use <\/span>keyword research tools<\/span><\/a> to extend your core terms and discover even more related terms.<\/span><\/p>\n Keyword clustering<\/span><\/a> is a good way to better organize your keywords by intent and identify some common searching patterns. Here\u2019s a good guide on using those <\/span>identified keyword clusters<\/span><\/a> to create a content strategy that will apply in both B2B and B2C.<\/span><\/p>\n Publishing your content is a good first step to start generating some organic search visibility. But unless you promote your content, you will not achieve much as search engines need more signals than just useful copy.<\/span><\/p>\n Promoting your content is a whole new topic that has already been covered in much detail. A lot of <\/span>content promotion ideas<\/span><\/a>\u00a0apply to both B2B and B2C content, including <\/span>social media sharing<\/span><\/a>, email marketing, and more.<\/span><\/p>\n When it comes to the B2B niche, some of the more effective content and link acquisition methods include:<\/span><\/p>\n Creating optimized content that targets different roles and comes in different formats will require a lot of organizational efforts.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Content planning and creation take a ton of time, so it makes sense to set up a content marketing strategy that serves several goals, like organic traffic and sales generation. Hopefully, the above tools and steps will show you some direction. Good luck!<\/span><\/p>\n Ann Smarty is the Founder of Viral Content Bee, Brand and Community manager at Internet Marketing Ninjas. She can be found on Twitter\u00a0@seosmarty<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n Subscribe to the\u00a0Search Engine Watch newsletter<\/a>\u00a0for insights on SEO, the search landscape, search marketing, digital marketing, leadership, podcasts, and more.<\/strong><\/p>\n Join the conversation with us on\u00a0LinkedIn<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Twitter<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Content is crucial for just about any B2B business as it drives traffic and convinces your leads to become your customers. No wonder, most B2B businesses are increasing their content marketing budgets every year. But do they use content marketing to its full potential? How do you create content that serves several goals, like traffic […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1092,"featured_media":143781,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,5],"tags":[28153,75,118,28065,271,100,22,13581,1119],"content_type":[],"class_list":["post-143778","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-content","category-seo","tag-b2b-content","tag-content-2","tag-content-marketing","tag-influencer-commentary","tag-keyword-strategy","tag-keywords","tag-seo","tag-seo-content","tag-strategy"],"acf":{"tad_independentcommercial":"Independent","tad_content_format":"Infuencer commentary"},"post_info":{"name":"idris.nagri@blenheimchalcot.com idris.nagri@blenheimchalcot.com","title":"","thumbnail_url":"https:\/\/searchenginewatch.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/How-to-create-B2B-content-that-ranks-and-drives-sales.png","category":"Content","timeago":"4y"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/searchenginewatch.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143778","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/searchenginewatch.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/searchenginewatch.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/searchenginewatch.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1092"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/searchenginewatch.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=143778"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/searchenginewatch.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143778\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/searchenginewatch.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/143781"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/searchenginewatch.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=143778"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/searchenginewatch.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=143778"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/searchenginewatch.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=143778"},{"taxonomy":"content_type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/searchenginewatch.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/content_type?post=143778"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}The big challenge with B2B content<\/h2>\n
\n
Knowing your decision-makers<\/h2>\n
\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/searchenginewatch.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/Checklist.png\")
<\/p>\nPlanning your keyword strategy<\/h2>\n
\n
![\"Rich](\"https:\/\/searchenginewatch.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/Rich-results.jpg\")
<\/p>\nPromote and repurpose your B2B content<\/h2>\n
\n
Conclusion<\/h2>\n
\n