Are you looking to turn your B2B content marketing initiative into a sales-generating machine?
As a B2B marketer and business owner, you must understand content personalization for B2B audiences. And more importantly, you need to understand how to tailor your content to your B2B target audience.
Over time, nurturing your audience using personalized content can encourage brand advocates and loyal customers, positioning your brand as an industry authority.
If you’re ready to help your audience feel seen and hit your sales goals, stick around for six simple steps you can follow to embrace personalized marketing.
Understand your target audience profoundly
Who is your audience, really? Why are they ideal customers? What struggles do they face? What businesses do they run? What do they need help with? How can you provide tailored support that meets their needs?
Without a clear understanding of the answers to these questions, you won’t be able to tailor your content to your audience’s unique preferences and needs.
But you also need to dig a bit deeper.
Use SEO tools to discover your audience’s top searches and pain points. SEO tools can be incredibly useful for creating a content personalization strategy for B2B sales. By utilizing these tools, you can gain valuable insights into your target audience's search behavior, identifying the topics, keywords, and phrases most relevant to them.
Use these insights to inform your content creation process and build out your target buyer persona. By tailoring your content to your audience’s specific pain points and addressing their questions, you can do your part to ensure they feel heard, understood, and cared for. More on this in a bit.
Personalize your branding to your audience
Give your B2B audience a complete personalized experience by tailoring your branding to their preferences.
Pro-Tip: Save time personalizing your brand’s look and feel using an all-in-one branding solution like Tailor Brands.
With Tailor Brands, you can design a custom logo, build a website, create digital business cards, and print branded merch — all of which will have a unified look and feel.
Consider adding elements that resonate with your audience's personal interests and experiences. For example, if you've noticed that a significant portion of your clientele shares an affection for comfort food, integrating a banana bread motif or imagery might make your brand feel more relatable and homey. For instance, look at how Semrush, a popular SEO tool suite, uses a bright and playful website theme to target energetic marketing teams.
These branding elements also carry over to their merch. Even the socks look identical to the website homepage.
Here are some additional tips you can use to personalize your branding to your audience:
- Create a branded style guide your marketing and design team must adhere to when planning campaigns
- Create a banner at the top of your website’s home page that addresses a pain point and provides a personalized solution, i.e., “Tired of planning your sales calls in spreadsheets? Use our Smart Sales platform and never touch a spreadsheet again”
- Plan and integrate tailored value statements and calls to action (CTAs) throughout your blog, social media content, landing pages, and ads
Plan content pillars that cater to your audience’s preferences and solve their pain points
Review the top searches and pain points you discovered in your SEO research from step one.
Use these insights to plan main topics (the keywords you hope to rank for), content pillars (your go-to benchmark pieces), and clusters (relevant content used as sub-topics to support your content pillars). For instance, if you sell project management software, then you might have planned the following:
Audience insight 1: Our audience is always on the hunt for features that can help them save time planning project timelines.
A couple of the main topics we pulled include: “Project timeline” and “timeline planning”.
With this in mind, our content pillars will be: “How to Create A Project Timeline in An Hour Or Less” and “X Ways To Speed Up Timeline Planning”.
Our clusters will include:
- Timeline views
- Timeline integrations
- Building mini-project timelines
- Timeline FAQs
Audience insight 2: Our ideal customer dreams of interacting with clients and stakeholders within their Work OS.
A couple of the main topics we pulled include: “Client portal” and “In-app messaging”.
With this in mind, our content pillars will be: “How to Set Up Your Client Portal” and “Say Goodbye to Email with In-App Messaging”.
Our clusters will include:
- Client portal integrations
- In-app messaging integrations
- Client portal best practices
- In-app messaging FAQs
Don’t forget to solidify your CTAs when drafting your content to encourage more sales. Place CTAs in your article conclusions, at the end of your social media posts, and throughout your email campaigns.
Pro-Tip: Have no idea how to do any of the above? Reach out to an SEO agency or strategist for support.
Schedule topics as blog posts and repurpose them as social media posts and email campaigns
Once you’ve planned your main topics, content pillars, and clusters, use marketing automation platforms to schedule them as blog posts on your B2B blog.
Then, repurpose snippets from your blog assets and schedule them across your B2B socials and in your B2B email campaigns. Make sure your repurposed content looks native to the channels you’re publishing them on.
Work with subject-matter expert writers that have a firm grasp on your style guide, content goals, and audience. If you’re planning a massive content initiative, consider hiring account managers or project managers to help you organize this process as strategically as possible.
Don’t forget about graphics, images, and videos, too.
Add value-driven screenshots and custom images to break up text and illustrate main ideas. Or consider creating a series of videos based on your clusters or incorporating mini-explainer videos into your email marketing campaigns and social media posts.
And if you serve a global audience, you can use human-like AI voices to create videos in multiple languages and dialects to show your commitment to creating personalized content.
Differentiate between demand-generation content and lead-generation content and plan accordingly
Which topics or individual assets will you “give” away without asking for anything in return? Which topics will you reserve as gated pieces, otherwise known as lead magnets, where you’ll expect contact information in exchange for a download or freebie?
Get clear on which content pieces you’ll reserve for list-building campaigns and which ones you’ll post openly. Striking the right balance can help you cater to B2B target customers during all marketing funnel stages.
For instance, if you’re a new business, consider starting with mostly demand-generation content (un-gated assets) to start the process of building awareness and trust with your audience. Over time, consider weaving in lead-generation content (gated assets) to give your audience more value and nurture them closer to conversion.
For example, if you’re a sales coach for sales directors and managers, then you might offer helpful sales strategy infographics, sales tips, and sales analysis insights on your LinkedIn page, Twitter, and blog without asking for anything in return.
To encourage potential customers to hand over their contact details, you might consider creating an eBook or a sales playbook to use as a lead magnet. You could also offer ultimate guides, webinar tickets, and sales worksheets as additional gated content offers.
Pro-Tip: Don’t forget about running ads! Meet with an ad specialist with experience in your industry to plan pay-per-click campaigns and other relevant ads.
Link up with pros who serve your audience
Gain more traction by reaching out to pros that serve your target audience and have cultivated a loyal following.
Consider linking up with:
- B2B outreach experts
- B2B link-building pros
- B2B affiliate marketers
- B2B influencers
Take this tip up a notch by starting a user-generated content (UGC) campaign. Or, better yet, ask B2B influencers to run UGC campaigns on your brand’s behalf.
Wrap up
And there you go! Today we covered how to create a personalized content strategy to help inspire B2B sales.
Your next order of business?
Meeting with your marketing team to discuss the steps we covered today. Before embarking on this journey, it’s important to make sure everyone’s on the same page. It’s also crucial that the marketers on your team understand their unique roles in personalizing content and helping you drive this campaign forward.
Continue monitoring your content and look for ways to further personalize it to your audience. Consider dedicating marketing analysis to a few experienced team members so you can make the most of your personalization efforts. That’s it for now, friends. To your success!
