Smart B2B Content Marketing Examples You Should Follow

In our many years of digital experience, the biggest challenge before any B2B content marketing agency is how to differentiate their line of communication from B2C engagement. Considering their target audience, B2B communicators cannot go pedestrian in their content tone. They necessarily have to pack in higher intellectual, than entertainment quotient in their content and it must also have a clear purpose — what is the company trying to convey to the other business and what possible strategic advantage can it draw from it?

Those are essentially the two questions that need to inform your B2B content marketing strategy. This blog with share a few case studies to drive home the point and explain how to sharpen your B2B content marketing strategy.

In 13 amazing examples of b2b content marketing by Digital Marketing Institute, the blogger shares a few very interesting case studies of efficient use of B2B communication that are worth recounting here:

Case Study 1: LeadPages
In direct competition with the better-known HubSpot, LeadPages is in the business of offering ready-to-deploy landing page templates and testing services to start-ups that often don’t have in-house resources for developing these. To beat competition from HubSpot, LeadPages came up with the following B2B communication strategy:

The Strategy

• It rolled out an expert marketing blog focused on lead generation and A/B testing to generate content and do cross-promotions on social media to stop lead leaks
• The service expanded their content to offer free educational resources in the form of digital courses, eBooks, infographics, and case studies to their portal users
• They roped in Tim Paige to roll out a very popular marketing podcast, “ConversionCast”
• Simultaneously, they started a weekly webinar series on educational marketing

The Results?

In the words of LeadPages Founder and CEO, Clay Collins, the online service soon acquired 35,000 customers in less than three years and hit over $16 million in revenue in 2015.

Take Away

Educate the audience; feed them with information that is relevant to their needs. They will respond and connect. So, they know it’s not just about getting the business but also looking out for their clients. Reach out with a genuine aim.

Case Study 2: Simply Business

A second, illustrative study shared by Digital Marketing Institute is that of Simply Business. This is the largest insurance broker in the UK.

The Strategy

Simply Business decided that they didn’t have to focus on insurance to sell it. Instead, they focused on creating content that could guide their prospects on various insurance-related issues. They implemented this strategy through:

• Email marketing
• Google Ads
• WordPress blogs
• Social media

The Results?

Eventually, they succeeded in increasing their rankings for major keywords and saw significant increases in organic traffic.

Take Away?

No hard core selling, the approach of your brand should be — assisting the consumers with their problems without expecting immediate returns. It will build a conversation and then a relationship through ‘organic traffic’.

Case Study 3: Salesforce

Salesforce is the world’s largest supplier of CRM software.

The Strategy

Salesforce had to increase their search and paid traffic sources using a number of tactics that included:

• Entertaining videos about sales and marketing
• The first stop-motion SlideShare in the world
• A customer success Prezi

The Results?

In three months, their strategy saw an 80% year-over-year increase in traffic. They also saw a staggering increase in traffic generated from their social pages by 2500%. Their eBook downloads reached 10,000, and their newsletter gained 6,500 sign-ups.

The Takeaways?

Video messaging is the most effective and the fastest growing medium of communication, so your media mix must include video in some form. Another useful B2B tool that is less exploited is e-books. Small, snippety e-books are easy to digest and keep for periodic reference.

Case Study 4: SAP

Another worthy case, worth learning from.

The Strategy

With such a diverse target, SAP focused on segmentation that included:

• Customized content marketing for 19 customer segments
• Tailored messaging covering topics relevant to each industry
• Solution-based content for each segment by demonstrating the industry-specific benefits of their product
• Using the right content for each target, including email, Tweets, blog posts, LinkedIn status updates, their own SAP Community Network, virtual and live events, outbound and responder follow-up calls, and account-based marketing.

The Results?

SAP saw Marketing Generated Ops to the tune of $3,675,000, and marketing touched pipeline growth equal to $50,037,709.

Take Away?

For an enterprise-level service provider like SAP, LinkedIn and Twitter updates appear to generate the maximum ROI from the companies media spends, and is the recommended route.

Case Study 5: Raise the Bar

The Strategy

Another good example of effective B2B strategy is that of online search company’s Mattermark’s newsletter Raise the Bar.

“Raise the Bar rounds up the best stories about a variety of different industries, giving me a great snapshot of trends to watch and news stories to follow without having to search for them myself,” Anderson quotes Sophia Bernazzani, Editor, HubSpot Customer Success Blog.

The Results?

Raise the Bar is counted among the best circulating B2B marketing blogs in the internet world.

Take Away?

News is often the best means to grab and retain a business customer’s attention, and Raise the Bar is using it to their strategic advantage.

Case Study 6: Baremetrics

As the name suggests, Baremetrics is about Metrics. The B2B company provides metrics to help businesses segment, compare and track their growth.

The Strategy

The B2B service provider runs a blog, Baremetrics targeted at troubleshooting the problems of startup founders, managers, digital marketers, and developers. There is a lot of story-sharing and learning in this blog from other start-up founders that are lapped up by others of their ilk.

The Result?

Through this blog, Baremetrics very effectively manages to create awareness about their SasS product.

Take Away
C suite executives like to listen to and learn from their peers and the best platform for this experience sharing is well-targeted blog, which is what Baremetrics is doing.

Case Study 7: Buffer

Through content marketing alone, Buffer grew from nothing to tens of millions of dollars in worth.

The Strategy

Content marketing is their primary strategy for growth. The Buffer blog discusses issues related to creativity, productivity, transparency, work culture, social media and online marketing.

The Result?

Buffer is effectively using Twitter and Facebook to promote their SaaS product and has some 940,000 followers on Twitter and over 100,000 fans on Facebook.

Take Away

If you have a large following on Facebook and Twitter, you probably don’t even need LinkedIn for social media promotions, the Buffer case study reveals. Between these two social media platforms, you are well-covered.

Case Study 8: John Deere’s “The Furrow”

The Strategy

The founder of John Deere was a blacksmith who helps farmers with newly-designed agri-tools. Later, he rolled out a magazine, “The Furrow” to help farmers learn the latest technology advancements and solutions to their existing problems. Notably “The Furrow” doesn’t help sell John Deere’s brand. It helps farmers solve their vexing problems. That is an epic B2B content marketing example.

The Result?

Today, when print is a dying medium in the West, “The Furrow” is still being published in a magazine format, and of course online.

Take Away

Print has always, and still does carry a kind of credibility which works very well with constituencies with traditional media consumption habits. To some elderly people in the hinterland, what is published in magazines and newspapers s gospel truth, as reveals The Furrow case study.

In the final analysis, a necessary condition for effective B2B marketing is not just aggregation of a bunch of useful links, but drawing up an intelligent insight from those links to deliver to the readers. Experts recommend the use of clever subject lines, and the use of an overarching humorous tone to keep B2B marketing content relevant, engaging and also ‘human’ for the senior lot leadership team being targeted.

The Long and short of this blog is that for any B2B content marketing agency, the most tested and effective tool for engaging their client’s targeted consumer is NOT, through memes and short posts, but through informative, long-format blogs.

Period.