2022 Trends in B2B Content Marketing

Creating content is the hallmark of a typical marketer’s job in 2022. In B2C, content creation involves casting as wide a net as possible and hoping for conversions. But in the B2B world, marketers must understand the business challenges and operations almost as well as their clients do.

So what’s trending right now in terms B2B marketing content?

We spoke with a few marketers who told us what they’re doing to better-target their customers.

Re-using great content

According to Lindsay Tjepkema, CEO of Casted, marketing teams need a plan of attack for strategies that put quality over quantity of content execution. Tjepkema’s “three As of content marketing” — access, amplify and attribute — is that plan of action.

“Access helps guide and ensure teams are on the same page. Instead of creating more and more content with the potential of duplicating work, teams should focus on communicating a clear goal and providing access to a shared hub of information and assets. Strategic alignment allows consistency in goals, expectations and the resources necessary to execute marketing strategies.

“Amplify means teams maximize the value and lifespan of an idea. For example, a subject matter expert’s discussion of a topic during a webinar can become new assets across multiple marketing channels. Content teams can take the recording of a webinar, transcribe the messaging and easily turn it into a blog post while simultaneously pulling quotes and pictures for social media from that same webinar. They can include a blurb from the webinar in their newsletter. From one rich, expert conversation, teams can amplify a shared message across multiple channels without duplicating efforts.

“Lastly, teams attribute identifying what is working in their marketing strategies with better metrics. Marketing teams need reliable ways to understand what engages audiences while they’re reading and watching. Success metrics such as the content being shared most frequently, content with the most engagement and where viewers are spending the most time all help teams to understand how their efforts best make an impact on their audience.

Amplified marketing is not a one-and-done strategy. Marketing teams can continue to use conversations to drive and amplify thought leaders’ voices in the marketing strategy, drawing on past content and making connections to new conversations.

Repeating the process of hosting conversations with previous leaders, as well as new leaders, can help information grow and stay relevant while reaching back to include past talks.

“For example, when a content team reengages with a thought leader to see if anything has changed since the last conversation, they can pull from previous conversations to enrich this new conversation and get more value out of existing assets to provide new, fresh, engaging content that meets the needs of an audience.”

More time on less content

Does the above subheading seem absolutely mad? Maybe it should — but let’s explore it’s meaning.

Daniel Nilsson, CEO at MuchSkills, says many B2B companies have low budgets per pieces of content. This means they create low quality content that later don’t give any effect and no one wants to read.

“If you want a better effect, spend more time/budget and focus on creating things that are truly valuable for your customers. Focus on ultra-high quality content that takes an experienced writer at least 2 weeks to research and make.”

You may end up writing less as a result, but in the B2B space, we’ve consistently seen that quality is better than quantity.

Valuable SEO tools

Jamie Irwin, eCommerce Manager at Straight Up Search says their content strategy centers around SEO tactics and in-depth keyword research.

We’ve written before about how technology marketers can utilize SEO, and we will certainly be covering more of that in 2022.

But in a nutshell: you can use tools like AnswerThePublic to search for a topic your audience might care about (“outdoor LED screens,” “secure matrix switchers,” etc.) and receive a list of specific things Google users around the world have searched for about that topic.

Mind you: the more broad your search term, the more likely it is that some of those keywords aren’t as relative to your target audience. But the more specific your search term, the less data there will be available for that term. So it’s a balancing act in many respects — but it will give you ideas for what topics and questions to address in your writing.

“As a tangible example: we identified that our target audience were searching ‘do you need a license to start a tutoring business?’ and we created an in-depth piece answering exactly this,” Irwin says.

“We also tailored this information to primarily cater for our USA audience while appeasing the core UK traffic.”

“Generally speaking, many B2B advertisers are already seeing the value in investing in creating and distributing content with businesses practicing in-house, while some outsource their content creation and distribution to agencies.

“We have a hybrid approach — our content is generated in-house with our subject-matter experts (naturally, we’re a tutoring software company), and then we use the expertise of a SEO consultant to make sure our content is optimized for search engines.”

User-generated content

Shaunak Amin, Co-Founder and CEO at SnackMagic, says one of the biggest B2B content marketing trends for 2022 is user-generated content.

“Our customers are typically B2B, specifically B2B2C- gift-givers such as event professionals, event decision-makers, senior-level execs or managers, and HR professionals who give SnackMagic to global teams, event attendees, or business partners.

Read Next: Most Effective B2B Content Types for Lead Generation

“We Send satisfied customers to our G2 reviews page, which is an industry standard for software companies to collect reviews and prospects to compare and contrast products/services. The reviews are all credible and honest, and interested prospects will come across these reviews when searching Google.

“This makes for an organic way to collect content that you can then share in your social media. And it’s customer-centric.”

Parts of this story originally appeared on our sister site, M-2-I.com (Marketing to Integrators).