What Is Content Marketing? 

Content marketing involves creating and publishing engaging and valuable content for your intended audience to help solve their challenges and meet their goals. By delivering helpful information, your business will strengthen its relationship with customers and prospects. And by positioning yourself as a trusted resource, you’ll gain new customers and retain existing ones, as well as boost general awareness of your brand among industry influencers. 

Content marketing is an approach based on attracting prospects, not selling to them; on being audience-centric, not company- or product-centric. It’s not about slick advertising or hard-sell product pitches. Instead, your goal is to deliver content that addresses your audience’s informational needs and questions at every step of the customer journey, whether they’re at the beginning—researching best practices or solutions to a problem—or close to a purchase decision and evaluating vendors.

Approaches to Content Marketing 

Savvy marketers rely on content to build brand awareness, generate and nurture leads, educate customers and prospects, and establish trust and credibility. Content assets can support the customer journey at every stage of the marketing funnel. For example, thought leadership articles or e-books with how-tos and best practices can drive leads at the top of the funnel (awareness), while customer case studies, customer videos, and product comparison sheets can be leveraged at or near the bottom of the funnel (decision).  

But success requires more than just producing and distributing content assets. Teams must take a strategic approach based on business goals and audience needs, articulated in a strategy (also known as a content marketing framework). 

How It Supports B2B Marketing 

Content marketing is arguably an even more important strategy for B2B marketing than for B2C. Consider that B2B buying cycles are often longer and more complex, and today’s buyers conduct extensive research on their own before making a purchase. That means B2B companies need to deliver a steady supply of valuable, high-quality content that meets the informational needs of buyers at every step and keeps them engaged over time.  

To deliver results, B2B content needs to be done well. That means bringing creativity and fresh perspectives to technical topics or articulating a forward-looking perspective that establishes your brand as a bona fide thought leader. It doesn’t help that a glut of below-average content has saturated the market, so you need to make yours worth people’s time. 

Does Content Marketing Work? 

The ROI of content marketing is well established, and it has become a near-ubiquitous strategy among B2B companies. Consider the following Content Marketing Institute statistics: 

• Content marketing boosts brand awareness: Eighty-seven percent of B2B marketers say content marketing helped create brand awareness over the past 12 months.  
• It generates demand and revenue: Almost three-quarters (74%) of B2B marketers say they successfully drove leads via their content marketing efforts. Meanwhile, 49% say content marketing generated sales.
• Content marketing increases brand loyalty: Fifty-two percent of B2B marketers say loyalty among existing customers grew, thanks to content marketing.

Need Help Taking Content Marketing to the Next Level? 

Tendo can help you generate brand awareness, pipeline, and revenue with our strategy-led content marketing services—as we have for some of the world’s top B2B brands. Let us know what your needs and goals are—contact us today.