B2B SEO Content Marketing In Singapore

It’s through SEO content that Singapore companies grow their inbound traffic. It’s what helps them to stay on top of prospects’ minds and establish relationships with them over time.

Suffice it to say that customer acquisition is now web-centric. Potential leads are now turning to search engines, social media, and websites for answers before they can look into any other alternative. That explains why SEO content is still one of the most effective ways to grow your web traffic and generate sales.

SEO content is meant to attract potential buyers. It’s the most natural starting point for companies that want to market themselves online using SEO. 

B2B vs B2C Content

The SEO content you write can take various forms and shapes. Depending on who you’re marketing to, the content you write can either come as B2B (Business to Business) or B2C (Business to Consumer).

And even though you’re still trying to sell your products or services to someone in both cases, the difference that exists between these two types of markets runs deeper than you think.

B2C Marketing

When writing content to market to consumers, you want to make sure that your focus is on the benefits of your products and services. That’s because the decisions consumers make tend to be more emotional. Consumers are also different from businesses in the sense that they tend to demand intermediaries in the channels of distribution for convenience purposes.

Consumers also get bored much easily. They tend to lose interest whenever you target them with a lengthy marketing message. They’d rather have you cut to the chase and get straight to the point instead of taking the longer route, even if it means it’s the simplest one for them to understand.

Consumers most preferred way of understanding your content is skimming right through it. It’s your job to make it all easy for them by breaking your content into shorter paragraphs, as well as adding H1 and H2 tags.

Consumers also don’t like putting in an effort trying to understand what your content is all about. They’ll instead prefer it when you take the simpler approach by pointing out to the product benefits in a manner that’s both concise and clear to them. In other words, the message you send must be easy to understand.

Also, compared to businesses, consumers undergo a much short purchase process. Once they’re in the purchasing mode, all it takes to convince them to buy is to set them on that emotional path. This will see to it that they’re able to complete the purchase within minutes or after a few days.

B2B Marketing

B2B Marketing, on the other hand, is more focused on selling logic and product features. Unlike consumers, businesses are an experienced lot. They don’t make their decisions based on emotions but based on what makes more logical sense to them.

As a marketer, you have to focus on understanding the buyers and their mode of operation within the confines of the procedures that their organisations have in place. What do you think is important to them? What role do they play?

The approach you take while drafting content for B2B marketing should be one that’s more centred on the people that will be using your product and less about the product itself. It’s also demanded that you take a more in-depth approach. That goes without mentioning that the message you convey must be one that focuses on how your product saves money, time, and resources. Or how much return on investment (ROI) can a buyer expect after completing a purchase?

Here’s a real-time example of how it works:

Let’s assume you’re a software company, and you’re in the process of marketing some software that you recently developed. If your primary market target is businesses, then in the marketing copy that you draft, you must be able to convince the underlying clients how using the software will be saving them lots of money and time.

You can talk about how using your software helps with streamlining their work or how they’ll be able to get a lot done in the smallest amount of time. You can talk about how your software is the ultimate purchase for a business that purchases multiple software licences. Be sure to mention that you offer free training (if you do offer it, that is) or if you have any demonstration or a trial period that they can use to test out your products or services.

So what exactly is B2b SEO Content?

You might have guessed it – B2B SEO content is the type of content that’s intended to expand your business audience. It’s a type of content that’s intended to both develop and strengthen your brand affinity, and in the end, drive more leads and sales by winning over other businesses.

To put it quite differently, it can be defined as the art of you using content to appeal to other businesses. Unlike B2C content, B2B means that you’re simply making content that’s exclusive to businesses. You want to make convincing posts that will get them to change their mind and consider purchasing your products or hiring your services.

How Run Effective B2B Content Marketing Campaign

Now that you know what B2B marketing is and how it differs from B2C marketing, how about you learn how to get it done right. How can you take advantage of this particular channel of marketing and drive the best possible results?

Here’re a few tricks and tactics to help you out with this:

Identify Your Target Audience

It is simple logic: before you know what’s good for your audience or the type of content they crave for, you must first take your time to understand them. You have to begin by developing a mental picture of how they look like and operate.

At some point, you may be required to segment your audience based on the stage they’re in in the sales funnel. But even with this, you have to first understand that you’re not just with one solid audience block, but an audience comprising of individuals with unique needs and preferences.

In other words, your focus should shift from that of an ideal audience to that of your readers’ or buyers’ personas.

In this case, your audience is businesses. This is a much broader definition considering not all businesses you’ll be targeting are the same. What you need is to break the audience into its granular components. This demands that you begin by breaking the audience into the specific personas that together make it up.

Google Analytics should be the first tool you turn to for suggestions. What this tool does is that it tries to run you through the details of the people visiting your site. You can easily tell where they’re from? What’s their age and gender? And most importantly, what types of topics are they interested in the most?

All this information is crucially important in your B2B content marketing strategy. It might not be central to your business, but it can provide some new insight and relevant subject areas that you might want to focus on.

Google Analytics provides a series of data that might help you understand your audience better and draw meaningful conclusions. It lets you figure out how to target your audience better and speak to them more clearly and in a manner that they’ll have an easy time understanding.

Through the data, you can also figure out what type of content best resonates with your target audience.

At this point, Google Analytics has helped you understand your audience, to a lesser extent though. What next? How do you figure out what you should be writing about?

How to Develop New B2B Content Ideas?

The biggest hurdle content marketers have to face in any vertical is figuring out what to write about consistently. You can have several content ideas at the initial phase of setting up your business. But after you’ve been involved with content marketing for quite some time, ideas run dry.

It’s at this point that you have to figure out how you’ll be identifying new topics within your niche. Find out what your prospects are sharing or talking about on social media and forums.

Luckily for you, there exists a long list of content marketing and B2B marketing tools that can help you out with this. Among them is our all-time favourite, BuzzSumo.

BuzzSumo is the tool you use to scrap all major social networks for real-time data on the hottest topics within your niche. It’s the tool you use to know what topics are being discussed the most or gaining the most traction.

With the information you collect, you should be able to prepare content that strikes a chord with your prospects best. It also allows you to figure out the right angle to tackle any topic or feed your readers with the type of content that they crave for.

Based on your level of expertise, you can even come up with a counter topic debunking some common myth or the idea being perpetrated.

In addition to that, you have to factor in user intentions in the new ideas you come up with. You must also understand your target audience to the bone by examining their demographic data and everything else. Find out what your audience is anticipating to read. Find out about their goals and some of the things they wish to accomplish.

With intent, users only have one question in mind when contemplating on the decision to give your content a chance. What they want to know “what’s in for me?” Their intent is a selfish one. They want to find out what they’ll be gaining should they decide to go in business with you.

Sales professionals also bear the same question in mind whenever they’re interacting with a potential customer – and it’s the same question that you’d want to adopt as a marketer. 

Use Social Validation to Audition Your Content

This is one serious technique that you would want to jump on straight away to start churning out mindboggling web copies.

Essentially, the whole idea of using social validation to audition your content revolves around twitter. You’re simply testing your content on twitter and using different engagement metrics such as retweets and social shares to find out if they have the potential to do well.

Twitter is the preferred auditioning platform, over Facebook or any other platform out there – and that’s because most of these platforms have virtually eliminated organic reach. That means you have to promote your content on the platforms to find out if they have the potential to do well. Of course, this is a complete waste of time and resources.

Through this test, you should be able to find out if your content is the type that would be appreciated by your target audience.

How to Promote You B2B Content

You have to promote your content. While organic reach is of utmost importance in the current world of business, you can’t rely on it solely. You have the perfect content, but how are you going to get it to the masses?

The good thing with promoting your content is that it’s flexible enough to accommodate your budget, however small it is. This statement rings even truer with a social media platform such as Facebook. Don’t just make a post and forget about it. Once in a while, try to single out some of the best posts that you have and promote them to extend their reach and target relevant businesses.

If not for anything else, then you might want to promote your content for the flywheel effect. What this means is that the content you promote will earn you more followers, which will get your content to be viewed by a larger audience. The content will then get more social shares, and the audience grows again. It’s a complete cycle of growth; all facilitated through content promotion.

What to write about?

One thing with B2B content marketing is that there are plenty of ideas on what you can write about. Just learn how to think outside the box.

When planning your SEO content ideas, you have to consider:

• The topics that a journalist that’s operating within your line of business might be interested in covering
• What your prospects might be Googling to find the information they want.

One approach to take would be to come up with a detailed research paper that Google and other search engines might consider ranking it at the top of their result pages.

Be sure to include graphs, tables, citations, bulleted lists, numbered list, and everything that matters.

The idea is to be the best resource for your prospects. Of course, you have a long list of SEO and content marketing tools to help you out with this.

But that’s not to say that you cannot think of something to write about on your own, without involving a third party or tool. For instance, here are a few suggestions on what to write about:

• Write an article about what’s trending or what’s likely to trend in the future.
• Write about conferences and what you suspect will be discussed about in the conferences.
• Write about what has been discussed in a podcast.
• You can talk about what’s in a hype cycle.
• You can write about research
• Or you could write about the general trends in your industry.

Complete Guide to Promoting B2B Marketing Content

As a B2B content marketer, you will be spending most of the time creating content and revamping the already published articles with new information. The content should be detailed, relevant and based on research to attract customers. Already, we have touched base on what B2B content marketing is and its importance.

Let’s proceed and look at proven ways of attracting customers through B2B content marketing.

Write More Blog Posts

The customers need to feel a personal connection with the brand to convert. Writing more blog posts and publishing them on your website will exhume your inherent brand personality. The content will enable you to showcase your expertise and authority as you offer insights and advice to the audience. 

The most successful companies consistently publish research-driven articles with evergreen content related to their niches. Consistency helps the brands to remain in constant communication with their customers. In addition, the regular blog posting will enhance your brand awareness and exposure efforts.

Publish eBooks and White Papers

Google and other search engines are keen on ranking white papers and eBooks that are informative and relevant to the user’s search intent. Unlike the blog, a white paper goes deeper to highlight the unique features of a product, service, or solution. 

For example, if you sell treadmills, the white paper can offer detailed information on how to exercise using the equipment. You could go the extra mile to highlight the specific health benefits each exercise provides. For example, indicate the kind of muscles a particular exercise targets.

The same case applies to eBook. Make sure it contains valuable information to influence the customer buying decision. The two effectively attract customers as they perfectly complement each other to create persuasiveness. 

The goal is to sell the product or service by educating potential customers about the benefits and why they should consider buying. eBooks and white papers will enable you to sell your product to the customer without using salesy language. 

Host Webinars

Enhance your credibility in the market by hosting webinars several times per month. Be sure to inform the target customers about it to encourage their participation. Use the opportunity to speak directly to them and showcase your brand as an authority and the most reliable service or product provider in the market. 

Use social media platforms and email marketing to spread the webinars. Share the links and a copy of the recording on platforms such as YouTube to continue getting traffic and sales from the webinars weeks after you hosted it.

Case Studies

As a B2B business, you will often deal with business executives. They need to be convinced that your products or service will satisfy their needs amicably before buying. A sure way of winning their trust is by using case studies.

Case studies based on the previous projects will convince them that your service has the potential to get their brand to the next level. Be sure to include as many statistics as possible and testimonials from the clients. Such user-generated content will significantly help power up the case study’s ability to attract customers. 

Concisely, the case study shows that your product or service is not just theoretical. That it can be applied in real-life scenarios and deliver the expected results. Make it easy for them to understand the contents by using graphs and quality visuals to describe data and present reports. 

Videos and Podcasts

First, video content should be part of your content marketing strategy. In a recent poll, 87% of marketers said video helped increase traffic to their websites. 82% noticed an increase in dwell time, and 94% said video enabled them to describe how their product or service work to their customers.

Another study found that 86.5% of online shoppers polled listen to podcast ads, and 55.6% decide to purchase the advertised product. 

As you develop a B2B content marketing plan, consider using both podcasts and videos to pass the intended message to the customers. Both have stood the test of time and proven effective in establishing solid communication between brands and customers. 

In particular, podcasting will allow you to tell your brand’s story, reveal your brand’s vision and personality, and establish informed and knowledge-driven discussions with prospects. All these benefits will work in tandem for the good of your business.

On the other hand, engaging and informative video content will encourage the customers to either take the desired action (buying) after watching or visit your website to learn more about what you do.

Compared to text, videos and podcasts are easy to understand, engaging, and entertaining. They are also easily shareable on social media and other platforms than links to articles. If well-executed, the two can result in millions of people watching the video and contacting you for more information on how the product/service works. 

Create a YouTube channel for posting videos and podcasts. Familiarise yourself with YouTube SEO to increase the visibility of your content on the platform. Note the key differences between YouTube SEO and Google SEO to avoid optimising the videos using the wrong keywords. 

Newsletter

Earlier, we mentioned the need to connect with the customers through consistent publishing of fresh content. Go the extra mile to create and distribute newsletters via your mail list. The information in the newsletter, such as trends, predictions, and controversial topics, will show the audience that you are knowledgeable and trustworthy.

Make sure that the newsletter is not sent out too frequently. Give the audience enough time to read and internalise the content before a new one lands in their inbox. Include visuals, CTA buttons, and links to other resources such as videos posted on YouTube that the audience can read to understand the concepts more.

Paid Ads

Sure, posting content for free on social media and sending out emails with CTA buttons to landing pages can help generate sales. However, it would be best to do more by investing in paid ads. From experience, the LinkedIn paid advertising program is the best for B2B businesses.

The ads are displayed to business executives who are likely interested in doing business with you. Don’t limit yourself to LinkedIn, though; consider running similar ads on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Google. 

Check out this article on how to advertise on LinkedIn. The ads will increase your brand’s organic reach and generate more sales. 

Create Checklists and Templates

Free templates and checklists will help you generate qualified leads from your target market. Make sure that the recommendations and guidance offered by the two are accurate and implementable in real life. 

Confirm the feasibility of the template by doing split tests using it before making it available for download on your website. The same case applies to checklists. Consult other industry leaders, and don’t hurry to avail them to potential customers. 

Otherwise, if the templates or checklists contain errors, your credibility will be affected. The main goal is to generate leads by showing the customers that you are an authority. 

Freemium Tools

Businesses are always looking for new tools to enhance their processes. Offer automated software and other tools your ideal customers need through your website. If possible, the tools should be cloud-based, so cushion them the pain of downloading and installing them on desktop.

Also, the beauty of cloud-based freemium tools is that you can offer recommendations or generate reports in real-time. Hence, you can engage and convince the customer to try the premium tool on your website thereby giving you an excellent opportunity to convince them to buy. 

3 Step to Start Your B2B Content Marketing Journey

A robust B2B content marketing strategy will give your brand direction and provide a clear roadmap on which processes to execute at different intervals or stages. We have already scratched the surface on how to create the strategy, but let’s now dive deeper to look at three primary steps you should take to create a solid content marketing plan.

• Map Out Customer Personas

One of the common reasons most content marketing strategies fail is the lack of information about the audience. Take time to identify or instead map out your different customer personas. The personas will guide you when creating content.

Without a clear understanding of the customers, engaging with them will be difficult, and you may end up spending thousands of dollars creating content but get no tangible results. Use all the information you can get to make the personas, such as personal values, personal motivations, the preferred mode of communication, personal goals, and visions.

Once you have successfully grouped the target customers into groups, you can start researching the best forms of content to display.

• Map Out the Sales Funnel

What is a sales funnel? Simply put, a sales funnel the specific steps or journey that potential customers take on their way to buying your product or service.

Different businesses have varying sales funnels, so you shouldn’t imitate your competitors. Sure, you can check their sales funnel to understand how they win customers, but create your own. 

Even if you are in the same industry, the needs and expectations of your customers may be different. Mapping out the sales funnel will let you know which stages the content you create fits in best. The potential customer stage in the funnel will determine the kind of information that you display to them. 

The ultimate goal is to develop a strategy to target qualified leads at every stage. Due to the complexity of the creation process, we recommend contacting a reputable digital marketing agency, MediaOne Marketing, to help you do it correctly. Simple flaws in the design and implementation can ruin your business, and it may take months to bounce back to profitability if you don’t have a team of experts on your side.

• Set Clear and Measurable Goals

Every piece of content that you create should have a purpose. Set clear and measurable goals to keep you focussed and help monitor the performance and suitability of the strategy to your business. Here are some of the questions you should ask yourself when setting goals.

• Is your aim to earn backlinks from authority websites?
• Do you want to increase engagement levels on social media platforms?
• Do you wish to increase organic traffic to your website by a given percentage within three months?

The list of questions you should ask when setting the goals is endless. Whatever the goals you want to achieve, you should know them before creating the content. 

Finally, you need to come up with ways of cranking up the visibility of your blog posts. Here are tips to help you achieve this objective without spending a fortune.

• Post links to the blog posts on social media platforms that your target customers frequent. During the initial stages, it’s not wise to spend money on sponsored ads. Learn how the audience engages with the posts to know if you should buy the ads. Engage with the readers in the comment section and remain professional at all times.
• Build links between the blog posts to offer the audience direct access to more relevant information to their search intent. That is link posts that cover the same topic using backlinks and internal links.
• Promote the content on online platforms that the audience frequently.
• Target specific audiences with sponsored ads. Make sure that you change the ad campaign settings to ensure that the ads are displayed to the right audience. For instance, specify the locations to avoid getting clicks from readers outside the regions you service. 
• When hosting webinars and podcasts, promote the content by including links to the articles in the description. 
• Increase the lifespan of content that’s still relevant to the audience even though you published it months ago by adding fresh information and promoting it on social media and via your mailing list.

The Final Thought

Hopefully, this post should guide you through the process of creating amazing B2B SEO content. Your focus should be on creating content that aligns your brand with the path of your prospects whenever they’re out looking for something to buy.

Use the above tips to create a solid B2B content marketing strategy. Get in touch with MediaOne Marketing for quality content marketing services. Our team will guide you through the process and ensure that every goal on your list is achieved.

As always, get to us via the contact box at MediaOne and let’s talk about this topic or SEO content in general. We look forward to being at your service.