For people to buy from you, they must know you exist. So, it’s essential to make people aware of your brand and what you offer.
But trying to win over people who you don’t already have some kind of relationship with seems intimidating. Doesn’t it?
Some might say that’s what a website is for. However, “build it and the crowds will come” is not a winning business strategy. Especially when less than 10% of content on the internet gets any traffic from Google.1 Even then, only a small percentage of people who visit your site will ever become customers.2
The bottom line is you must work smarter and harder to attract more of the right kinds of visitors in the first place.
How?
You need to increase B2B brand awareness through content marketing. There are two essential steps involved:
- Provide value by publishing content your audience will find relevant and useful.
- Promote and optimize that content over time.
Here are some ways to increase B2B brand awareness through content marketing:
Publish Content Your Audience will Find Relevant and Useful
To attract prospects you must grab people’s attention. To convert them into customers and build trust over time, you need to deliver value. Useful content that helps people solve real problems will attract more readers.
1. Build – and optimize – a website in order to publish content and reinforce your brand.
In case it wasn’t obvious, you will need a website with a content management system (CMS) to publish your ideas and interact with your audience. If you don’t already have one, you might start researching WordPress, Drupal, and the various themes that work with them.
What’s more likely is that you’ve got a website, but you’ve been too busy to develop content for it. Publishing fresh and optimized content allows you to launch marketing campaigns meant to drive return visits and increase B2B brand awareness.
2. Identify your most likely prospects and work to better understand the challenges they face.
For your content to be effective, you must know who you’re writing to, and demonstrate how you can help solve their problems. The first step toward that is to create buyer personas.
Buyer personas are semi-fictional representations of your ideal customer. What would someone in each of say, three relevant roles be responsible for? What are their biggest day-to-day challenges? What events do they attend? What industry publications do they read?
Sometimes you can develop good buyer persona profiles based on information online – but there’s nothing like conducting a few short persona interviews by phone or video to learn how prospects perceive your offerings, your brand, and the biggest challenges they need help solving.
3. Build a content strategy that addresses the challenges your audience faces each day.
Create specific content for each stage of the buyer’s journey. Top-of-the-funnel (TOFU) content should be a lot like what you’re reading now – probably a blog post, infographic, or video. Here, the main objective is to attract readers, drive traffic, and build awareness.
Conversion (or gated) content often comes in the form of a white paper, eBook, or video. An asset like this would usually cover a topic more in-depth, which is why prospects are willing to engage with you (ie: share their email address) in order to get it. (There is an example of this at the end of this post.)
Middle-of-the-funnel (MOFU) content like product spec sheets and case studies should be designed to push your prospect closer to purchase.
Bottom-of the-funnel (BOFU) content is meant to finalize or reinforce your customer’s buying decision, then encourage loyalty over the long-term.
To strengthen your content strategy, take what you’ve learned about your prospects’ biggest challenges – and position solutions for them across their buying journey.
4. Gather, organize, and present ideas that help your prospects address those challenges.
I’ll let you in on a secret.
The longer you focus on content marketing, the more you might start to suspect there’s a lot of research and writing involved.
Unfortunately, it’s true.
To increase B2B brand awareness you’ve got to publish content your most desired prospects will view as valuable. To do that, you’ve got to consult your internal experts and conduct online research to find all the best advice that can help address their challenges.
Eventually, you’ll want readers to view your offerings as a big part of their solution. But at this early awareness stage, it’s more useful to focus on building trust with your audience.
To strengthen the argument you’re making, look for stats or quotes from independent publishers (rather than competitors). Put the advice into an order that should make sense to your readers. Also, keep careful track of where you are getting your information – and make sure to apply credit and links to any quotes, stats, or ideas that aren’t your own.
5. Perform research on the SEO keywords most relevant to the content you’re developing.
Like many topics covered in this list, SEO deserves more study and practice to get right than we have space for here. But after you’ve researched a topic you’re shaping into content, you’ll be in a better position to know what terms people will use to search for it. To attract more qualified traffic, shape your content around long-tail keywords rather than more common (shorter) ones.
Take this piece you’re reading, for example. Though our aim is to educate you on “brand awareness,” that’s too broad a term for us to expect online traffic from. But, since we’ve long-focused on helping business-to-business brands, it makes perfect sense to shape this content around a longer-tail keyword like, “increase B2B brand awareness.”
6. Create targeted content that helps your prospects solve a problem or make a decision.
What’s behind any given web search? Most business-related web queries are driven by the need to solve a problem or make a decision. If you’ve invested good work in the buyer persona, content strategy, and research phases, you should be on the right track. As you shape the ideas into objective, organized content, guide your readers to conclusions that help make their tasks or decisions easier.
7. Speak clearly and directly to your target audience through your writing.
Never forget that you’re trying to forge a connection with each reader on a personal level. Tone and writing style matter. So do brevity and clarity.
Imagine that you’re offering clear advice to a good friend, and you’re in the right frame of mind.
It’s worth repeating, though. Speak clearly and directly to your target audience. In fact, this should be a guiding principle for all your communication.
8. Develop a brand story that helps differentiate you from competitors.
Your brand story should be about what makes you interesting, different, and better. It’s the story you tell about your business – and about why you exist. Your purpose. Your raison d’être.
For example, here’s a short brand story for Spark Creative:
Following an education in publishing and marketing, I earned promotion a Marketing Director role by my mid-twenties. Later, while running the day-to-day at a small communications agency in lower Manhattan, client work slowed dramatically amidst an economic downturn. Luckily, I’d been managing a successful client relationship with a well known brand that had no plans to slow down their content marketing and sales support initiatives. I partnered with the owner of that agency to found this one, called Spark Creative. For more than a decade, we’ve helped dozens of businesses improve their copy, content, and marketing results.
Ultimately, your brand story is about the quality of the product or service you deliver. And … about the relationship you work to build with your customers.
The fact is, people want to buy from people they like. In fact, some people are even willing to pay more if they like you. “Among U.S. customers, 65% find a positive experience with a brand to be more influential than great advertising.”3 So, let people in on your brand story.
Promote Your Content and Optimize It Over Time
Once you’ve got some high-quality content posted, turn your attention to spreading the word. Certainly, you can invest budget toward advertising, sponsorships, and industry events – but sharing ideas via social media platforms is a lower-cost way to increase B2B brand awareness.
9. Publish articles on LinkedIn.
Some people see Linkedin as a professional version of Facebook. On a superficial level, there may be truth to that. One downside to Linkedin from my point-of-view is that engagement doesn’t seem heavy or consistent.
Many of our colleagues and contacts are more likely to log in and participate when they are on a job search or prospecting for business.
But don’t discount your ability to drive interest and traffic back to your website from Linkedin. Though the interface and presentation aren’t overly elegant, the platform allows you to write and post articles in your feed.
Shorter, summarized versions of longer posts can encourage people to take a closer look at what you offer.
When you share posts, try posing a question that drives further engagement. If your colleagues react to, comment on, or re-share your posts, they are helping you boost brand awareness.
10. Schedule targeted ideas with hashtags via Twitter.
If you’re not using the micro-blogging platform Twitter, you’re missing a great opportunity to raise your profile, drive website traffic, and boost B2B brand awareness. Though you should definitely aim to personally comment, reshare, and generally engage on Twitter each week (if not every day), you can use a scheduling app to post targeted messages with hashtags and links that help more people become familiar with you.
11. Post useful or engaging videos on YouTube.
Though they may require more planning and production, videos are an excellent way to entertain, educate, and get your message across. A growing number of people rely on Youtube videos to learn how to either solve a problem or accomplish something.
Think about a few topics your brand can be an authority on. How to’s, tutorials, educational explainers, reviews, and interviews can all help you increase B2B brand awareness and drive traffic. When scripting your videos, don’t forget to factor in a few key sequences that can be repurposed as short teasers.
12. Experiment with other social media platforms.
Though Linkedin, Twitter, and YouTube are generally the most B2B-friendly social media platforms, try experimenting with a few others, especially if your content or offerings are well-suited to them. If your message can be communicated with interesting photos, Instagram and Pinterest might be good platforms to help boost B2B brand awareness.
Don’t overlook adding social media share buttons to your content. Making it easier for visitors to share our content via any of the common social platforms is a simple way to raise your profile and drive more traffic.
13. Get creative with email marketing.
Email is rightly viewed as a channel more practical for converting prospects, building relationships, and encouraging loyalty over the long-term than for driving awareness. But don’t forget, each marketing effort allows you to gain more exposure. B2B brands should send at least one email per month – but at least one reliable survey suggests that performance really drops after five.4
All your staff interact with outside business colleagues via email. Most email services allow you to place images in the signature area of everyone’s email. So, why not create attractive banners that promote a critical piece of content on your site?
Once you’ve got most of these lower-cost brand awareness tactics covered, you might turn your attention to efforts that require a little more investment:
14. Set up a targeted PPC campaign.
Why rely on SEO alone to drive traffic from web searches? Setting up a targeted PPC campaign enables you to put strategic ads in front of searchers who may not have otherwise discovered your content but are still good prospects for your offerings. Even if you establish a campaign with a very limited budget each month, you stand to learn a lot about the messaging, ads, and strategies that work best.
15. Consider sponsored updates on Linkedin.
Sponsored updates are a form of native advertising in the LinkedIn ecosystem. If you decide to test sponsored updates, pay particular attention to your Company Page as a first step. It gives you a great opportunity to share your brand story to a wider audience.
If you can build a following through sponsored updates, it can boost your organic reach quickly and effectively.
Have you got some top-performing tweets that are particularly short? Linkedin might be a great place to test them. The platform provides extensive analytics to help you measure the effectiveness of these efforts, so sponsored updates become another great way to boost B2B brand awareness.
16. Collaborate on thought leadership pieces or survey results reports with a strategic partner.
A big challenge to generating reliable surveys is that you need a certain number of qualified respondents to make the results viable. But there are publishers out there that do have access to audiences large enough to make a survey credible. Although “collaboration” often amounts to another form of paid advertising, the ability to help shape the survey questions and then generate a sought-after asset can really help drive awareness for your brand. Thought leadership provides a similar opportunity. If you can generate content on topics that your partner’s larger audience finds interesting, it exposes your brand to more friendly, qualified readers.
17. Attend, and participate in, relevant industry events.
Perhaps attending industry events is neither new or groundbreaking. (It’s downright conventional!) But I thought I’d reinforce an idea that’s stuck with me over the years.
If you’re going to all the trouble to attend an industry event, make the most of it. Maximize your participation. Look for panel and speaking opportunities to drive name recognition for yourself or your internal experts.
If you have the kind of budget that allows sponsorship of specific networking areas or events, aim to creatively link your brand and value proposition to the event. Make it memorable.
Summary & Takeaways
This post outlines a number of ways to increase your B2B brand awareness.
The truth is, busy marketers usually don’t have the bandwidth to implement all these ideas effectively all by themselves. But, don’t put the initiatives off indefinitely. Consider collaborating with a content strategist (or team) to implement some of them.
Practically speaking, the first steps are usually the hardest. So augmenting your team with a specialist who can guide you through the various account setups, processes, and first drafts can be a great investment. Once you’re set up, you can measure which efforts bring the most return, then direct more of your resources and attention there.
Start Boosting Brand Awareness Now
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Sources include:
1. “90.63% of Content Gets No Traffic From Google,” Time Soulo, Ahrefs, 2020
2. “7 Conversion Rate Truths That Will Change Your Landing Page Strategy,” Larry Kim, Search Engine Land, 2014
3. “Experience is everything: Here’s how to get it right,” David Clarke & Ron Kinghorn, pwc, 2018
4. “Email Marketing in eCommerce,” DMA, 2019
5. “Top Marketing Trends For 2020,” Christian Thomson & Forbes Agency Council, Forbes, October 2019