20 Best Tips on the Tech Stacks of B2B Software Content Marketers: Advice from Experts
Running a successful B2B content marketing campaign for your software company can help you attract and retain customers, establish your brand as a thought leader in your industry, and increase your website traffic and conversions.
A lot can go into designing a successful B2B content marketing campaign- whether it is studying your target audience, developing a content strategy, locking in goals and objectives, creating high-quality content or even understanding the distribution channels.
In line with this, we compiled Trends in B2B Software Content Marketing 2023, in which B2B content veterans and marketing leaders shared their insights and ideas.
Their last marketing campaign had taught them the power of integrated efforts, the boons of experimenting with cold outreach, customers look for real feedback and real product feature videos, investing time in building relationships instead of selling can help later, personalize messaging according to the platform, incentivize as much as possible, have a spearheaded clear-cut strategy before executing, build SEO-optimized high-value content, collect customer interviews, employee advocacy on social media can do wonders and short term less-expensive experiments fare better.
Check out these awesome tips we got from the experts for your content marketing campaign.
The latest lesson learned is around persona targeting on social. It is not just as simple as targeting your ICPs on various platforms with your messaging. It is tailoring that messaging for that ICP based on what they are on that channel for, at that time. Just because you can find your ICP on Instagram for instance, does not mean that when the are scrolling through at 8 pm on Friday night they want to see your ad or engage with your brand then. Figuring out time/place/message mix take some testing and a willingness to experiment.
The biggest thing we learned from our last marketing campaign is that employee advocacy is really the way to get traction on social media. We put it to the test for ourselves and found that people just don’t want to engage with brands as much as they used to on social. They want to engage with other people. Using employee advocacy to simultaneously transform our employees into thought leaders while amplifying our brand message led us to earning 266% higher conversions in just one quarter.
We’ve been experimenting with cold outreach with different levels of success. What we learned is that it’s extremely important how the list is built. Initially, we hired an agency to outreach a high number of potential leads. Later we dropped the agency, pruned the list and reached out to people who we knew would be perfect fit customers, which generated better results. We also learned that time of year matters, for example during summer months it was harder to get replies because people were out of office.
We don’t typically run campaigns, but short experiments that last anything from a few days to max 2 weeks. We do this to improve the speed at which we learn, compared to running long campaigns that span weeks or months or even a whole quarter!
One recent learning is that we can build social mentions by featuring high profile people in our space and reaching out to let them know. For example, in our quotes roundup, we featured 50+ experts, all of whom have big audiences. A few of those people shared our resource, which helped get a lot more eyeballs on it and win us some all-important links.
Test, learn, implement, and repeat. It’s always an experiment and it’s ok if things don’t work out, but what is important is that you learn from the failures and bounce back stronger and wiser the next time around. Also, having a robust testing strategy for all of your customer journey pieces will help you continue to optimize the way you do things. E.g. Setting a set time to review A/B tests on different channels, analyzing results, gathering feedback.
Our last campaign taught us the power of integrating our efforts. We recently moved towards fully integrated campaigns, and these efforts have been far more impactful than other events or programming we’ve launched ad hoc.
It certainly takes longer to coordinate efforts, manage timelines, and produce assets at scale, but the results have far outperformed our previous approach. So, we plan to continue with this integrated approach and see how we can make them even bigger and better in 2023.
I really believe in high-value content with unique perspective written by the industry experts – over outsourced or AI-generated content. Not only does it rank better on Google but it’s also something that shows your competence and builds trust.
If you have the wrong people targeted, all the copywriting and strategies implemented don’t matter. We recently tried to launch something, and it landed flat because we weren’t targeting the right people.
Having a streamlined process that makes it easy for writers to know exactly what’s expected from the article saves tons of time in the long run. The fewer times an article needs to change hands back from editing to writing the faster you can get through the content.
Asana and Trello are fantastic for this. All items necessary for the writer to have are easily laid out, when the writing is done it’s passed off to review or editing and can be picked up by the next person seamlessly.
With each and every campaign, there are new learning opportunities. We’ve recently launched our resource newsletter, Win/Win and we’ve discovered that our audience loves a strong content-first approach, as our open rates and click-through rates would suggest. This brings us joy as we live to win together.
We learned that for B2B businesses targeting high-level executives, their marketing campaigns shouldn’t be based on immediate sales (especially if it is paid ads) but on relationship building.
We have executed tens of split tests and experiments and discovered that more than 90% of high-level managers don’t convert on their first time on your page.
You effectively need to stay in their eyes. Maturation from cold prospects to hot leads may take more than five months of diligent lead engagement and strategic retargeting.
I am a fairly new addition to the Userlist team, having joined barely 5 months ago. It’s overall been a great learning experience, as I’ve never worked in such a small but such an efficient team before.
However, most recent learning from a marketing campaign would most likely have to do with our recent user onboarding roundtable. I’ve joined a bunch of B2B and PLG related webinars and workshops before and I have *never* seen such good chemistry between the speakers. Just proving that even seeminly “”uninteresting”” niches like can be made engaging and leave an impression with the right set of people.
Too many strategies, channels, audiences, tools, and formats is no strategy at all. And constant grasping at the next thing leads to team burnout. B2B SaaS C-suite and middle management have a limited understanding of what it actually takes to fund a successful campaign. They are also fearful in the current market climate.
They tend to have an ungrounded view of what’s possible from their limited marketing teams (by size and budget) when they’re comparing themselves to more mature competitors or companies and products with more overall resources. This siloed viewpoint leads to shiny object syndrome, shifting priorities, and underinvestment in what’s needed to execute. The outcome can be detrimental and can cause: confusion, diffuse and ineffective messaging and campaigns, team burnout.
Customers want to see and try the real product
For our buying process, you won’t live or die by one campaign (the results overall weren’t good)
Preparation breeds success.
Cold Emails are much less effective than content collaboration with thought leaders and those who already have a relevant audience and influence.
Incentivized offers work well
One thing we learned is to not relying on tools so much when scheduling social media posts. Sometime they show that the post has been published, but the post does not go to the social media account. Manually check the post if it is on the account.
Customer interviews can improve the direction of your content marketing strategy.
That giving your content a ’tilt’ or a ‘unique hook’ is actually what converts. Since there’s so much content online, your audience is looking for differentiators when seeking information. This could be how you narrow down the focus on one aspect of a topic, the collaterals you provide with it and so on. The idea is for you to create an end to end resource that shares information beyond the thousand other articles on the internet!
It is impossible to imagine a B2B company today that has made it big without the hours of brainstorming and sweat that their content marketing team put behind their campaigns. It’s therefore important for us to hear about what goes on behind the scenes.
This guide is sponsored by Content Beta – a video and design service for B2B marketers.
In this year’s Trends in B2B Software Content Marketing 2023, Content Beta talks to the B2B content experts whose clever marketing tactics grabbed attention.
You can get insight into all the current trends in this report.
Grab your copy grab your copy of Trends in B2B Software Content Marketing 2023 here.
Put on your noise-canceling headphones and get ready to dive into this report. You can thank us later!
Believing you with an outline of the few steps you can take to create a successful B2B content marketing campaign for your software company that helps you achieve your objectives and build long-term relationships with your customers.:
Some key elements of a successful B2B content marketing campaign include having a clear strategy, understanding your audience and their pain points, creating high-quality and valuable content, using multiple channels to distribute your content, and measuring and analyzing your results to continuously improve.
Metrics such as website traffic, engagement rates, leads generated, sales conversions, and ROI can help you measure the success of your B2B content marketing campaign. Identifying areas for improvement and optimizing your strategy accordingly should also be done through regular audits and analysis.
B2B content marketing is crucial for software companies because it allows you to educate and inform potential customers about your products and services, showcase your expertise, and build a relationship with them. It helps you establish your brand as a thought leader in your industry and attract leads who are already interested in your solutions.
Founders can track the success of their B2B software content marketing campaigns by using analytics tools such as Google Analytics, social media analytics, email marketing analytics, and marketing automation platforms. These tools provide insights into key metrics such as website traffic, engagement rates, and leads generated, allowing founders to evaluate the effectiveness of their campaigns and make data-driven decisions to improve their results.
