The content marketing landscape is shifting for B2B marketing in 2022. Consumers are expecting content to be relevant to them and their particular stage in the buying journey.
As the sales process is becoming more self-service for B2B products, content becomes integral to moving people along to the next stage in the process until they are ready for a direct sales team led conversation.
Effective content marketing has the consumer at its core. Like finding the perfect product-market fit, reaching content-market fit creates powerful connections with your consumer.
The challenges for marketing and sales professionals alike are:
1. Discovering buyers who are currently in the market.
2. Knowing where in the buying process they are.
3. Delivering the content to them at the right moment.
Data Everywhere
If there is something we aren’t short of in 2022 its data. As consumers we interact with businesses daily in our personal and professional lives. Professionally, we may search for answers to specific questions, interact or start conversations with specific topics on social media, engage with companies, or visit particular websites.
Essentially consumers are signalling when they are in the market for the type of product or service that you offer.
Whether that be at the top of the funnel, when they’re searching for information, at the middle of the funnel, when they’re searching for solutions, or at the bottom of the funnel, when they’re evaluating their options.
Intent data organises these signals so that you can clearly identify which consumers, or prospects are searching for a solution to a problem that you can solve. If identified early, a great content marketing strategy can help shape the prospects’ wants and needs around the solution that your company provides.
So what exactly is Intent Data, I hear you all ask. Intent data is a data set of consumer digital activity gathered through a culmination of data sources – 1st, 2nd, and 3rd party data sources in our case. According to Inbox Insights 57% of marketing and sales professionals harness intent data to identify buyer interest early on, prior to them engaging with the company.
Creating Content with Intent
Buyer Intent is great for getting content in front of interested buyers, but is also extremely useful for developing the right content that interested buyers will engage with.
By this stage, you already know who your ideal customer profile is, so you can analyse what they’re searching for when looking for solutions. Look for key topics they are engaging with, events they are attending, and pages on your website they are visiting. Create content around these topics that address their goals and concerns
The benefits of developing a content marketing strategy using intent data are:
1. Identify keywords to use throughout content to improve SEO.
2. Identify any content gaps from common search queries.
3. Creating content that you already know interested buyers are engaging with.
4. Developing content in the medium that interest buyers find engaging.
All together this improves overall content performance, and allows content creators to focus on content that works. When looking at this from a holistic approach this means that buyers become aware of your products and services earlier,  they’re more informed and familiar with the particular message of your company when they reach the sales team, and demo conversion rates will increase.
Now you have the skills, we have the tools to help you put it into action.
The combination of our Audience Hub, Content Hub and Intent Data tools make it easy to create a content marketing strategy driven by intent data. Our Audience Hub holds the key to your Ideal Customer Profile, document who that is, and use intent data tools to discover their engaging keywords. Our Audience Hub and Content Hub work together to ensure all content is mapped to these keywords, and that you have content for each stage of the buyer journey. Store all your content within the Content Hub to quickly access it for marketing campaigns and sales tactics.
Interested in creating a data-driven marketing and sales strategy with the Zymplify platform? Sign up for our 14 day free trial or chat directly to our Zymplify experts for a personalised demo.
