Out of the many ways of attracting business clients, copywriting and social media content can be the most difficult to pin down. B2B content writing plays by different rules and should be approached accordingly. This article will go through B2B messaging, copywriting, and social media content workflows that can help you improve your company-to-company communications.

B2B Message Strategy for Effective Growth

Let’s start with the message strategy. Why? because all content (especially for B2B) originates from the marketing message and goals. If you want to learn more about messaging and setting up messages, we have a dedicated article on that.

As for the basics, all your messaging needs to originate from your marketing goals. Here are a few typical messaging goals that optimize B2B Growth Marketing:

• Awareness Strategy: For the initial stages of the funnel. Content such as infographics, videos, or introductory articles that highlight the business issue you are solving for potential customers.
• Lead Generation: The kind of content meant to specifically target leads and push them down the funnel. This is a more targeted and specific kind of content that sets out to solve a particular business issue for your clients to get them to the final stages of decision-making.
• Product or Service Differentiation: Particularly useful in industries with high competition. This is content designed to set you apart from the competition. This can involve comparison articles, price compare tools, or even articles that make use of competitors’ keywords or product names to attract their clients.
• Branding: Building up your own brand is crucial and content is a great way to do that. Social media and website content are more personal than ads and allow room to play with brand identity.
• Customer Retention: Once you have customers, it’s important to make them feel involved. Keep them in the loop with emails, content updates, newsletters, and videos.

Creating a Marketing Messaging

You can choose whatever strategy most suits the needs of your company and tailor your message around that. Remember to add these elements:

• Brand essence (voice, tone, personality): Are you formal or informal? Friendly or professional? Cutting-edge or classical? This should be rooted in what emotion you want customers to feel.
• Tagline: A phrase that instantly brings your company to mind (McDonald’s has “I’m lovin’ it”, Nike has “Just Do it”).
• Value proposition: What do you offer that no one else can, both cognitively and emotionally? E.g, “We build cars that embody the feeling of power and class”.
• Brand messaging pillars: How do you bring your value proposition to life? Following the car example above, “latest technologies, legacy designers, and exclusive client selection to make our cars rare”.
• Proof Points: Be more than just talk. Show your customers that you can physically deliver on the promises your messaging carries. Give some stats and customer reviews to spice up the sales pitch.

B2B Copywriting For Growth Marketing

So, let’s discuss a few copywriting secrets and rules of thumb for B2B articles. One of the big ones is that sometimes less is more. You don’t need verbosity because the Internet is a far more visual medium where images can get a point across neatly. If you want to stand out and truly capture your brand identity incorporating more images is the way to go. After all, a block of text is far less engaging and data shows articles with images tend to flow better for readers.

Creative copywriting for B2B is generally less emotional and more functional, so be precise in your language. The person reading your articles will be business-savvy and not in the mood for the soft sell. Give them the value proposition and tell them what problem you are solving. This constitutes your top-of-the-funnel strategy.

In B2B content, creating a smooth flow for the onboarding process is essential. To this end, once you acquire an interested customer, you need to have the bottom-of-the-funnel content to complement the journey of the customer and allow them to make the best use of your product. You can add FAQs, tutorials, field questions from social media for blog posts, add infographics, and much more.

After onboarding, you still need materials that focus on retention. Keep your audience engaged by talking about the latest updates, reminders to use the service, new deals, and remarketing.

B2B Social Media Marketing Content

A B2B social media strategy can be tricky since your audience has very different needs than the average consumer. Your social media copy needs to help engage and build the brand but is somewhat more limited in scope if your company only serves professional clients.

Different social media channels can serve different purposes for B2B communication. LinkedIn is the obvious choice for B2B, so let’s start there. Using InMail and reaching out to potential clients is a crucial tool when harnessed correctly. Copywriting and testing messages for InMail requires a bit of trial and error so it’s handy to keep multiple versions of any message on-hand.

When it comes to other social media platforms, it can be beneficial to know your audience first. It’s also important that the chosen channel serves your main marketing and messaging goals. While Instagram isn’t a B2B tool for every company, the visual arts and fashion industries make great use of it. Similarly, having a Facebook page or Reddit community can be a great way to keep your community updated and engage in retention strategy content.

B2B Marketing Automation & Content Tools

With all the tips we’ve outlined, you may feel overwhelmed. However, there’s no need to worry because there are ways to automate your content and marketing workflow. Here are a few tools that can help with that:

• HubSpot: Fantastic for publishing, tracking, and automating content. The blog ideas generator can help when you’re having a bout of writer’s block and the WP plug-in is equally handy. With a plethora of other tools that make it an all-around Swiss army knife of business tools, there’s a lot of content and growth marketing capability HubSpot can offer.
• SEMrush: Generate SEO keywords and content templates to help research search engine trends and write with keywords in mind. It can be a great assistant to bounce ideas off of when it comes to topic research. It can also be great for finding out how people interact with a topic you want to write about (are they looking for information or do they want to purchase something?) which can be useful in strategising around funnel stages.
• Sortlist: A B2B tool for connecting to businesses. The feature for posting case studies comes in handy because you can gear any content you write on the platform directly to businesses. It’s handy if your end goal is to obtain more leads.
• Smartlook: While not a content tool per se, its data applications can make it a formidable tool to have. Smartlook displays and records user interactions on your pages with simplified on-screen navigations and heatmaps. It allows for a real-time understanding of how visitors use your site and you can filter data using geography, pages, device types, and more.