In the B2B world, unlike B2C, the strategic approach focuses on a longer and more complex decision-making process, with multiple stakeholders and attention to detail.
In this model, creating, optimizing, and distributing relevant content retail email list crucial to building strong relationships with potential customers. This is because in the B2B realm, purchasing decisions are often more complex and based on trust and perceived value. Companies can build trust by providing relevant and useful content that demonstrates their expertise and know-how .
Artificial intelligence can help meet these goals effectively, as in addition to helping B2B companies generate relevant and useful content, it can help them overcome challenges in lead generation, personalization, and content optimization.
In fact, according to a 2023 AI Marketing Benchmark Report , more than 60% of respondents have used AI in their marketing operations, and according to a McKinsey Global Institute report , up to 70% of companies will adopt AI by 2030.
How to build an efficient B2B content marketing strategy ?
You need to know how to build all the stages of a coherent and effective B2B content strategy and understand how AI can help in each of them.
Knowing and mastering these phases will allow you to develop a well-structured strategy, aligned with your brand's objectives and designed to attract and retain your target audience:
Benchmarking
The first step in a B2B content strategy is benchmarking . In this phase, you seek to gain insights into how other relevant players are approaching their content marketing and targeting a common audience.
Using data analysis algorithms and natural language processing (NLP), AI can gather different types of information about the content marketing of the studied referrers. That is, it can crawl and analyze large volumes of online content to identify patterns, trending topics, effective writing styles, and distinctive features of successful content.
With this information, businesses can make more informed decisions about what topics to cover, what writing style to adopt, and what approach to take with their own content.
Tools like BuzzSumo, Content Insights, True Content , or SEMrush provide content analytics to identify the topics, formats, and other content characteristics that work best for a specific audience .
Audience analysis and segmentation
According to Salesforce’s State of the Connected Customer report , 66% of customers expect companies to fully understand their unique needs and expectations. As such, B2B marketers must identify customer needs and preferences and anticipate their desires. This is where AI can step in to deliver a strategic advantage in the process. Let’s take a look at how:
Audience segmentation and analysis
Data-driven audience segmentation
AI can help segment audiences based on a variety of criteria, including industry, company size, behavior, interests, and search intentions of decision-makers and other strategic personnel within a business.
With this information, AI can build specific audiences, depending on how companies want to segment and target their target audience. For example, a company like Rockwell, which offers industrial automation and information systems, can segment its audiences by industry and customize content for each one.
Customer data analysis
AI can analyze large sets of customer data, such as CRM data, purchase histories, online interactions, and customer feedback. In terms of content, AI can identify content consumption interests, trending topics, format preferences, media viewed, and more.
