The Most Comprehensive B2B Technology Content Marketing Guide You Will Ever Come Across

“Content Marketing’s way more than a buzzword. Currently, it’s the hottest trend in the marketing industry as it’s the biggest gap between what brands produce and what buyers actually need.”

- Michael Benner

According to BusinessWire, the content marketing global market value has been predicted to rise by $269.24 billion between 2020-2024. 

Nearly 91% of the B2B marketers have been harnessing the power of content marketing to reach out to their target audience in different organizations and turn them into paying customers. 

Forbes reported nearly 2.5 quintillion bytes of data to be created every single day on the World Wide Web, out of which most of it is content created by brands to boost their online presence. 

With this crazy amount of content published by brands each day, it has become almost impossible to put yourself in front of your target audience, especially in the B2B tech space. 

Did you know that 55% of the B2B marketers claim that there’s a humongous-sized lack of understanding, in terms of creating a successful content marketing strategy? 

The end result? 

Most of these B2B brands end up not focusing much on their B2B technology content marketing efforts and in the end, publish content that’s just dull and boring. 

What if I told you that upon building a killer content marketing strategy, most B2B brands have managed to boost their businesses to the moon?

Obviously, B2B technology content marketing is far more challenging then what it is for B2C. That’s because there’s not just one single buyer persona you’ll be targeting. But when done right, content marketing can become the backbone of your customer acquisition strategy, just like it is for some successful B2B brands out there.

In this guide, we’ll be covering all there is that you need to add fuel to your content marketing for a technology company and turn it into a phenomenal growth engine for your business. 

Keeping in mind B2B tech companies’ pain points, we’ve kept this guide as thorough and on-point as possible. 

Let’s get rolling!

B2B Tech Content Marketing: All You Need to Know

Let’s talk about some of the big guns in the industry, namely Moz, SAP, IBM, etc. 

These companies, undoubtedly, have managed to make it to the top, as a result of their marketing efforts and astonishing services. They already have hundreds of thousands of loyal customers/clients wanting to do business with them.

One might think that these businesses can go decades without posting a single piece of content online and it won’t hurt them even a bit.

But the truth is their marketing teams know that if these brands don’t keep up with the pace and stay relevant, then they will soon run out of business. Out-of-nowhere another brand may come knocking the door and steal the show. 

Moving forward, we have covered the top reasons why IT companies should focus on their content marketing efforts.

Why Can’t IT Companies Afford to Miss Out on Content Marketing?

Here’s a list of reasons why IT Companies should kickstart their content marketing journey, if not already, immediately:

• Outstanding ROI, When Done Right
• Increase Customer Engagement
• Truly Add Value to Your Audience
• Position Yourself as an Industry Expert, An Authority Who Can Actually Deliver Effective Solutions
• Build Trust
• Boost SEO 
• Shorten the Purchase Decision Cycle

Outstanding ROI, When Done Right

Marketing experts in the B2B space have reported that they allocate 39% of their overall promotional budget to content marketing. 

That’s because B2B brands that focus on their content marketing efforts are six times more likely to convert their website visitors into paying customers than the brands using other strategies. 

In the end, your partners or board members would be taking a look at the profit margins. 

Content marketing is one of the marketing tactics that has reportedly helped big B2B guns boost their ROI.

When compared to traditional marketing, content marketing can help you generate thrice the number of leads. 

And the best thing? It’s cost-effective. Your brand would be spending 62% lesser than what it would to run traditional marketing campaigns.

But that’s the bright side of it. 

You need to be extremely careful with your content marketing campaigns. Nothing’s set in stone. So, you may end up doing more harm than good.

Hence, my advice for B2B tech brands would be to, way before they get started with their content marketing efforts, build a phenomenal content marketing strategy, have an outstanding content plan, carry out thorough research and implement it in the right manner. 

So, it definitely makes sense to add content marketing to your technology company’s marketing activities.

Increase Customer Engagement

As a B2B tech company, your target audience might, in most cases, be the other business’ decision-makers. It’s them who you might want to target to sell your tech products or services. 

In a perfect world, you could out-of-the-blue call these higher-ups and have an amazing talk with them. In fact, you’d be converting them into leads straight away.

But say Hello to reality.

Most of them won’t pick up your call, reply to your email, or respond to your messages. 

But they do love reading and sharing meaningful content online that adds value to them. And they’ll trust me, remember you if your content focuses on their pain points and solves their problems.

With a killer content marketing strategy and perfect implementation, you would be able to not just increase customer engagement, but also build your B2B tech brand’s credibility the right way.

To do that, your main focus should be on adding value, not just selling your tech products or services, which brings us to our next point.

Truly Add Value to Your Audience

Let’s rewind a bit.

In the above section, we learned that the higher-ups i.e. the decision-makers do engage with brands online, love reading meaningful content, and sharing it online. And if it’s truly value-adding, then they’d love nothing more than scheduling a meeting with you.

Content marketing for technology companies is an inbound marketing tactic, i.e. it focuses on luring the target audience towards your brand and its products or services, rather than pushing it down their throats. 

“The best marketing doesn’t at all feel like marketing.”

- Tom Fishburne

When you truly are focused on adding value to your audience’s life and solving their problems, it won’t even-a-bit feel like marketing to both you and them.

So, the most important thing B2B brands should consider is learning about their target audience’s actual pain points and delivering a full-proof solution, based on what they have to offer. 

For instance, if your brand specializes in app development, then you should focus on topics like data migration, scrum project management, Swift, performance optimization tips, latest trends, et

Position Yourself as an Industry Expert, An Authority
Who Can Actually Deliver Effective Solutions

“Marketing’s telling the world that you are a rock-start, whereas content marketing is showing them you are one.”

- Robert Rose

These days, brands are always looking for the latest industry trends, experts’ opinions, something that could keep them not just 1 but multiple-steps ahead of their competitors.

Brands, especially in the tech space, will always look for a business that they can rely on, a business that truly knows what it stands for.

With a well-planned content strategy, B2B businesses like yours can become other brands’ go-to-source for value-adding information. 

In the end, other brands may approach you, without you even having to reach out to them.

Build Trust

In the online world, brands won’t reach out to you if they don’t trust you…period. Building trust is the key to achieving success in the online world, and this is not just applicable for B2B businesses, but also for B2C.

According to Forbes, about 64% of the B2B marketers have claimed that businesses reach out to the businesses they trust for their outsourcing purposes. 

By delivering highly-engaging content, you will be positioning your company in a positive light, taking the first step towards building trust.

Your continuous content marketing efforts will increase the number of times you put your brand in front of your target audience. This will, ultimately make them sign up your newsletter, reach out to you and build trust, opening doors for your sales team to convert them into paying customers. 

Boost SEO

Did you know that you will be losing out on 90% of your target audience if your brand doesn’t appear on the first page of Google?

Hence, it’s super-vital for brands to focus on their Search Engine Optimization. 

“Never lose sight of the fact that all the SEO ranking signals revolve around some kind of content, like always.”

- Duane Forrester 

The higher the quality of content you post, the more will Google love to boost your search engine rankings. 

Google’s search algorithm has always focused on delivering relevant content to people worldwide. And if your content isn’t really meaningful, you will definitely struggle with your content marketing efforts. 

However, the brands who truly deliver and publish meaningful content on their different digital channels manage to achieve that top-ranking most businesses desire for certain keywords.

Shorten Purchase Decision Cycle

In the B2B space, purchase decisions aren’t instant. That’s because there’s not one single person who holds the authority to make the purchase decisions all by him/herself.

B2B personnel reply to their team and higher-management, even the board members.

But with the right content marketing strategy, you can shorten this cycle. 

in the B2B space prefer extracting Roper Public Affairs stated that about 80% of the decision-makers information about a company through their articles plus other content pieces spread across the World Wide Web.

And if these decision-makers know you and start trusting your brand to take care of their operations, they’ll definitely reach out to you. 

With this in mind, content marketing isn’t all sunshine and rainbows. There are various challenges you’d have to face not just while building your content marketing strategy but while actually implementing it. 

These top marketing challenges, if not addressed or tackled the right way can ruin your brand’s reputation and end up costing you your top dollars.

Hence, way ahead of time, you should know about these challenges and prepare yourself to the fullest. 

Common Content Marketing Mistakes Tech Companies
Make – The Ones You Should Avoid

Even the top inbound marketing professionals make mistakes frequently, also the ones who are highly-experienced and have been in the field for almost all their life.

But in the world of content marketing, there’s little-to-almost no space for errors. Even the ant-sized mistakes could cause major chaos. 

To avoid these errors and save your tech company big bucks and countless hours, we’ve prepared the list of the most common content marketing mistakes tech companies make:

• Creating the Same Content Pieces That Others in Your Space Are
• Not Aligning the Content Produced by Your Brand with the Buyer’s Journey
• Not Implementing a Killer Lead Nurturing Strategy
• Not Carrying Out Thorough Research

Creating the Same Content Pieces
That Other Brands in Your Space Are

The first question that might pop up in the decision-makers’ minds is:

“What makes this brand truly unique and better than its competitors?”

Not having an answer to this question is dangerous.

The biggest mistake I’ve seen most marketers make is while building their content plan, they head over to Ahrefs, SemRush or Ubersuggest, enter in their competitors’ domains, and look for content that brings them traffic.

Covering the same exact topics won’t go you any good. There are definitely topics that need to be focused on and covered. But if you copy it blindly, then you might not be able to position yourself as a true industry expert. 

Instead, what you should do, while building a content plan for your business, is learn what problems your target audience face and how you can help them solve them with ease.

Not Aligning the Content Produced by
Your Brand with the Buyer’s Journey

“If it’s too generic, it’s disastrous.”

For tech companies who want to improve their inbound marketing results, you must make sure that the content pieces you are publishing are personalized plus on-par with your buyer’s journey. 

Each of your landing pages should match the requirements and needs of every single one of our target audiences. 

Hence, it’s mandatory to build highly-detailed buyer personas which include:

• Buyers’ top priorities
• Pain points of these buyers
• Clear identifiers
• Questions that your buyers might want solutions for

Once the marketing team truly understands and has access to all of this information, they will be able to create content that impresses the visitors, ultimately boosting the conversion rate.

Not Implementing a Killer Lead Nurturing Strategy

Nearly 80% of the new leads don’t translate into sales. But the brands who excel at lead nurturing generate about 50% more sales than the ones who don’t.

Most businesses after capturing leads think of it as the end of their marketing efforts.

But what they fail to understand is that they are just getting started. It’s now or never. Failing to warm the leads will result in you losing them forever.

Most tech companies don’t have an outstanding lead nurturing strategy for their business. Heck, some of them don’t even have one.

In the end, they struggle with sales, building long-lasting relationships with their clients, and bringing in higher profits.

Most people, these days, will head over to your website looking for information and not to buy your products or services. 

With content marketing, you will be nurturing these leads, providing them with the information they really need, helping them understand their actual problems, and how you can make their operations smooth.

Not Carrying Out Thorough Research

Tech companies can dig the world wide web and get their hands on value-adding data that they can use to take their business to heights.

But it’s not something most brands are really good at. 

Regardless of the world wide web filled with so much data, I’ve seen most brands suck at leveraging it to boost their online presence. 

Hence, my advice to you would be to leverage it, carry out thorough research, and create content pieces that your audience can’t resist to read.

On top of this, it’s equally essential to track each of your content pieces’ progress to know where you currently stand and what steps you should take moving forward:

Here are the metrics you should track:

• Page visitors
• Conversions from each inbound strategy
• Traffic:Conversions Ratio

Maybe you would have some content pieces bringing in an enormous amount of traffic to your website; yet are subject to low conversions.

In that case, it’s important to figure out what’s wrong and the steps you should take to tip the scales in your favor.

How can you tip the scales? That’s by familiarizing yourself with the top proven content marketing strategies, which will be taking a look next.

6 Content Marketing Strategies for B2B Technology Companies

B2B content marketing is hard and challenging. That’s because you aren’t just targeting a single buyer persona. Instead, you will be delivering value-adding content pieces for different sets of audiences with different goals on different channels and in different formats. 

Of course, it’s challenging. But challenging is what we are here to tackle, aren’t we?

There’s no room for errors and to avoid any, we’ll be now be taking a look at 6 content marketing strategies that have worked well for B2B technology companies in the past. Here’s the list:

• Collaboration, Data Gathering & Social Promotion
• Focus on Sales Content
• Pillar Pages
• Create Brand Media
• Create & Publish Infographics
• Start a Podcast 
• Conduct Webinars

Collaboration, Data Gathering & Social Promotion

What the marketing team at Databox, a popular business analytics tool, did was create a strategy based around the combination of influencer marketing, original research, and social promotion to boost their content marketing efforts.

Here’s what they did to boost their sales:

• The first step they took was to build a list of customers, influencers, friends, and partners.
• Build a list of exciting topics answering some common questions and triggering debate
• This was followed by emailing them “We’d like to feature you” to the relevant audiences in their list. Attached along with the emails was a link to their online survey, which included few questions, space where their audience could enter their best advice on topics, and their social media profiles
•  After getting a response from 20+ experts, they closed the survey
• The answers to these poll questions were turned into simple graphs by their designer
• Write value-adding content pieces 
• Shared these content pieces on social media tagging all the contributors
• Emailed the contributors with a “Hey! It’s live” message

With this approach, they took their content marketing efforts to the next level and now they are recognized all across the world for delivering outstanding content pieces.

Focus on Sales Content

Animalz, an SEO & content marketing company, is well-known for its sales-funnel focused content. They publish content pieces occasionally, but when they do, it’s to add value. 

This means they don’t focus on covering any generic topics or valueless articles, just for the sake of it.

Their buyers are the high-level decision-makers and the senior members in an organization, the topics they cover are more strategic. This means they cover the frameworks and models rather than those how-to-articles. 

They work with tech-SaaS businesses and most of their content is designed to support their sales funnel, through lead generation, assets that businesses can use during the follow-up process, talking points for sales calls, etc.

According to their VP of Growth Jimmy Daly, “Our main focus isn’t traffic, especially not the sessions or page views.”

Instead, their main focus is adding value to their most-valuable target audience, i.e. prospects. And that’s where they nail it.

That’s an approach you can consider for your business to boost your content marketing efforts.

Pillar Pages

People, especially the ones in the marketing industry, have been talking about pillar pages and their long list of benefits for quite some time. And trust me, it’s the real deal.

According to Neil Patel, a popular Digital Marketing expert,
“A Pillar Page is nothing but the topical cornerstone for a huge portion of your site’s content.”

Let’s break it down a little bit.

Think of how huge the tech industry really is. To be precise, let’s consider different technologies like Big Data, Cloud Computing, Artificial Intelligence, etc.

While all of it falls under the tech industry, it could be narrowed down further.

For instance, you can have one pillar page talking about Big Data, while another one talking about Cloud Computing. 

One of the most successful and my personal favorites is SMARTCARE’s “The subtle animation of Cloud Element’s ‘The Definitive Guide to API integration’” pillar page. 

This pillar page helped the brand boost its traffic up to 53% within 3 weeks and generate higher profits.

Pillar pages are known to clear a lot of clutter on the website, leading to clean website experience. On these pillar pages, you will be placing hyperlinks to the content pieces, making it easier for Google crawlers to know what each of the content pieces on your website is about.

Infographics

Data is the key to success.

People, these days, especially bloggers and industry experts would love nothing more than having access to high-quality relevant stats that would make their business go booming.

Creating and publishing infographics is another great way of boosting your online presence, by gaining backlinks.

Here are the top benefits of creating infographics:

• They are persuasive & eye-catching
• Help you position yourself as the expert
• Help attract higher traffic to your website
• They are easily readable and can be understood and remembered
• Help boost search engine rankings
• Portable & easy to embed
• Easy to track and analyze

So, if you can get your hands on value-adding stats and facts, you can creating infographics that people in your industry can link back to.

Start a Podcast

Some popular tech podcasts are:

• This Week in Tech
• Reply All
• Accidental Tech Podcast
• a16z Podcast
• TED Radio Hour 

Tech enthusiasts love tuning to these podcasts and listening to them on a regular basis. That’s because they provide a great deal of valuable information. 

And the thing about starting your own podcast is that the podcasting industry is gaining traction and has soon been predicted to go booming. It’s less competitive, way lesser than the blogging industry, and as a result, makes perfect sense. 

Some of the top benefits of podcasting are:

• The decision-makers tune into the podcasts regularly
• Less competition
• Increased traffic generation
• Easy to create
• Highly-engaging
• Widely accessible

Conduct Webinars

Experts, to be precise the true tech experts, who have been dominating the industry have one thing in common. 

And that’s conducting webinars. 

Even the C-Level Decision Makers register for webinars way ahead of time. That’s because they love interacting with tech experts and want to get their hands on any valuable piece of information they can possibly get to take their business to heights.

Nearly 73% of B2B marketers have claimed that conducting webinars is one of the best ways of generating high-quality leads. 

The top benefits of B2B webinars are:

• Position your company as an industry thought leader
• Add new leads to the top of your complex sales funnel
• Bring already-existing leads further down your sales funnel
• Strengthen bonds with already-existing customers
• Share your expertise on certain subjects
• Increase brand awareness

With these strategies in mind, you can effectively align your content marketing efforts with your goals.

But that’s not all it is to content marketing. 

To see actual results, you need to take care of a few things, which most B2B brands miss out on.

Let’s take a look.

How to Improve Your Content Marketing Results?

Achieving your goals with content marketing will only be possible if you take care of the following things we’ll be discussing now:

• Utilize Lead Magnet Inside Content 
• Add Personalized Call-to-Action
• Use Advanced SEO
• Answering Burning Questions

Utilize Lead Magnet Inside Content

While it’s a pretty outdated tactic, the thing most brands fail to consider is that it works.

And it works like a charm.

What you should consider doing is customizing your lead magnets to the top of the article.

Like, if you are covering an article on Big Data, then you should have a Big Data whitepaper at the top.

Add Personalized Call-to-Action

Let’s say you are covering an article on building an iOS mobile application and have added in detailed steps for it.

Here, you are targeting the audience who want to build a mobile application.

So, adding a Call-to-Action like “Let’s Build Your Mobile Application” at the top would create an outstanding impression on your audience.

However, you should consider personalizing the CTAs for each of the article topics you plan on covering.

Use Advanced SEO

Moving forward, it’s advisable to use some advanced B2B Tech SEO strategies to help boost your tech brand’s search engine rankings for specific keywords. Listed below are the Advanced SEO tactics you can apply:

• Crawl Budget Optimization: Crawl budget refers to the number of your website pages Google bots will crawl and index on your website within a set time frame. Crawl budget optimization can help you ensure that the Google bots are easily able to crawl and index on your website with ease.
• Content Re-optimization: Content Re-optimization is improving your underperforming your content for higher lead generation
• Featured Snippet Optimization: Featured snippets are the list of steps, tips, instructions, or items appearing at the top of Google’s SERPs for specific keywords. The ones you already own, you can re-optimize them to make sure that they appear at the top.
• Ranking for long-tail keywords: Top 10% landing pages convert at 11.45%, whereas the average long-tail keywords conversion rate is 36%. So, to boost your conversion rate, you should consider implementing long-tail relevant keywords in your content pieces.
• Relationship-driven link-building: Relationship-driven link-building is another one of the SEO strategies that you can equip to boost search engine rankings.

Answer Burning Questions

While creating buyer personas, your marketing team, without failure, will be carrying out research in terms of attitudes, aspirations, and any issues that have been affecting your target audience. Based on these issues, you should identify the list of questions that they’ll most likely end up asking.

Once you have these questions figured out, it’s time to deliver truly value-adding answers to each and every single one of them.

This will help you stay ahead of your competitors, as you will be adding value to your audience’s life. Upon doing it right, your customer service team will be getting fewer requests regarding similar topics. 

In the end, you will be saving a great deal of your time and take your lead generation and conversion rate sky-high.

Moving forward, I’d like to inspire you by showcasing the top B2B Technology content marketing examples that knocked it out of the park.

Top B2B Tech Content Marketing Examples to Inspire You

Here’s the list of brands with the best B2B technology content marketing campaigns:

• SAP
• IBM
• Netguru

SAP

SAP, a popular German multinational software giant, builds enterprise software, helping brands manage their business operations as well as customer retention effectively. This brand is highly popular as a result of its ERP software.

Here’s what I liked about their content marketing efforts:

• Customized content marketing for nearly 19 different customer segments
• Tailored messaging that covers different topics relevant to each industry
• Content that’s solution-based for each of the segments
• Utilizing the right content for each target, including tweets, email, LinkedIn status updates, virtual and live events, their own SAP community network, account-based marketing, outbound & responder follow-up calls.

IBM

IBM, an American multinational tech giant, produces and sells computer software, hardware, middleware plus provides consulting and hosting services in various areas.

The factors that make IBMs content marketing efforts a grand success and something to look forward to are:

• Advanced tech content
• Architectures visualization

Netguru

Netguru, a Polish software consultancy, and development giant, is highly-popular for providing top-notch software and product design, for both corporations and early-stage startups.

Here’s why their content marketing efforts never fail to amaze me:

• Custom-tailored content for different audiences and stakeholders
• Niche newsletters
• Acceptance of guest posts. They even ask people to submit their ideas
• Personalized CTAs

Wondering where you can post your content pieces?

Let’s take a look.

Content Distribution Channels for B2B Technology Companies

Here are the channels where you can consider distributing your content:

• LinkedIn Founder Pages, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn Company Page, and other social media platforms
• Slack Channels
• Facebook Groups
• Niche Quora Spaces like:
  • Smart Business
  • How to Build an App
  • Startup Founder 
• IndieHackers, GrowthHackers
• Republish content to Medium, Hackernoon (after rewriting it), and LinkedIn articles.

Summary

B2B Tech Content marketing, when done right, can take your business to heights. The key takeaways from this blog post are:

• Understand your buyers: To truly create highly-targeted value-adding pieces of content, it’s important to actually understand your buyers from tooth to nail; learn who they are, learn where they come from, the challenges they face, their pain points, the questions they have. Based on these questions, you can create helpful content that’s focused on helping them solve their problems, building a strong foundation for your long-lasting relationship with them.
• Be Interesting & Informative at the Same Time: There’s so much content on the Internet. Hence, you should be interesting and add value at the same time. The more engaging and informative your content will be, the higher will be the chances of attracting your buyers towards your business.
• Carry Out Thorough Research: Don’t just head over to your competitors’ websites, tools like Ahrefs, SEMRush, or Ubersuggest and type in your competitors’ domains and cover the same articles that they have been. Carry out thorough research prior to creating a content plan for your business.
• Keep it Simple: Don’t sound or appear as too salesy. It’ll just push your audience away. Offering the right amount of information at the right time will help you keep it simple and attract your buyers.
• Understand differences between outbound and inbound marketing plans: Sometimes, some techniques from both the systems will seem to overlap. And it may happen quite often. But, to create a killer content marketing strategy, it’s vital for businesses to keep in mind the differences between outbound and inbound marketing plans.
• Keep Yourself Updated with the B2B Tech Trends & Stats: Stats and Trends are the real deal. Naturally slipping them in your articles or content pieces will help you position yourself as an industry expert and boost your chances of turning your audience into paying clients.
• Invite, Don’t Intrude: Your B2B tech content marketing approach should be pull, rather than push. Don’t come up with too salesy content or CTAs. Instead, it should be more of an invitation, which will warm them.