As a B2B company, you may sometimes find it challenging to build rapport and relationships with your customers. However, it turns out there’s a surprisingly simple way to build the brand loyalty and customer engagement your business needs: content marketing. From educational papers to interactive widgets, this blog post will cover a few ways that B2B marketers can make their businesses more approachable and nurture their customer relationships through content marketing.
Educational Content
We’ve covered in detail how financial literacy content can help banks and other financial institutions build relationships (and profit!). However, this is a truism for all B2B companies: empowered customers are customers who are confident enough to buy. Regardless of the products or services you provide, enabling your customers to make informed decisions about your offerings will make them feel more comfortable with a purchase or signup. Plus, by providing content that informs and educates without agenda, you build both trust and good will, leading to increased brand loyalty and, in turn, more leads when your customers recommend you to their networks.
Educational content can include white papers, infographics, case studies, and how-to videos.
Interactive Content
Of course, you want to do more than just inform. You want your customers to feel they can actually engage with you, and building a sense of one-to-one interaction can be invaluable for long-term relationship building. To do this, there is actually a large number of offerings you can build on your website and share via social and email to get the greatest number of eyeballs looking (and fingers clicking). Transform a white paper into an interactive page on your site where customers can answer questions or engage with statistics. Create calculators to help customers plan purchases or expenses. In so doing, you can become a trusted resource not just for information, but for planning and decision making as well, keeping your business top of mind even after a purchase has been made.
Interactive content can include widgets (such as calculators and calendars), interactive infographics and white papers, and assessments or audits.
Entertaining Content
However, don’t forget to let your hair down, too! While you should keep your branding in mind (that is, there is such a thing as too silly), fun content can endear you to your customer base and significantly increase your chances of content getting shared and talked about on social media. Listicles on your company blog are a sure-fire way to earn clicks and win smiles if the topic is right. Try creating fun videos that feature your employees, such as a day in the office, or a meet and greet with the company dogs. The possibilities here really are endless depending on the type of persona you want to build for your brand.
Entertaining content can include most of the above-mentioned types, such as funny videos, playful emails, and silly infographics. You can even go interactive with, for example, a branded card builder that lets customers send out funny out touching messages.