Table Of Contents
When it’s done right, content marketing is a valuable way for B2B organizations to connect with their audience, build their brand reputation, establish credibility, and become thought leaders in their niche.
The problem with a lot of B2B content today is that it comes across as inauthentic, salesy, and chock-full of self-promotion.
Unfortunately, that’s not what today’s audiences are looking for.
B2B buyers want content that is informative, helpful, interesting, engaging, and—most importantly—valuable.
What Is Valuable Content?
If you’ve spent any time in the B2B content marketing space, you’ve likely heard marketers push the idea that content must be “valuable” to make your brand stand out. But what exactly is valuable content, and how do you create it?
Valuable content is simply content that, as the name applies, is valuable to your audience.
What does it mean to be valuable?
- Educational
- Interesting
- Relevant
- Problem-solving
- Meaningful
- Quick wins
- Unique
- Exclusive
- Original
- Curated
- Fulfills search intent
When content provides these benefits to the reader (or viewer), it provides true value. In other words, it gives the people what they want—literally.
What’s not on the list? Discounts, special offers, self-promotion, and sales pitches. Selling has its place in content marketing, of course. (In the decision stage of the buyer’s journey, for example.) But the goal of a B2B content marketing strategy should be to balance sales and marketing content with value-added content that isn’t related to products, services, or purchases.
Quick tip: If you’re not sure whether content is valuable, ask yourself if you would read (or watch) it if you weren’t the one creating it.
The Importance of Creating Valuable Content for Your B2B Audience
Today’s internet is stuffed full of content from marketers that focus on quantity over quality. Too much B2B content is weak, poorly developed, irrelevant, and disconnected—and audiences are drowning in it.
Fortunately, with a bit more effort, marketers can create something truly valuable that will genuinely resonate with their audience.
Valuable content is an essential part of any successful B2B content marketing strategy because it
- Builds trust and credibility with your audience
- Makes your brand more relevant and likable
- Improves your chances of finding new leads and conversions
- Helps attract new buyers and retain existing customers
- Establishes a strong brand reputation
- Increases social engagement
- Drives organic traffic more effectively
- Creates a loyal brand following
Additionally, thanks to all its benefits, valuable content is more likely to be noticed by your audience. Because your audience is more likely to engage with meaningful and relevant content, it’s more likely to be shared and revisited. It will also get people talking—about your content and your brand—helping you to increase your popularity, gain a positive reputation, get your audience to believe in you, and achieve more conversions.
If you want your content to succeed, you have to focus on providing value.
How to Ensure Your B2B Content Marketing Strategy Provides Value: 11 Tips & Tricks to Follow
Are you ready to jump into the world of valuable content? We’ve created a guide to help you get started. Follow these steps and keep these tips in mind as you work to revamp your B2B content marketing strategy with meaningful, relevant, and engaging content.
1. Learn the Basics First
Before you start drafting valuable content, you need to know what your audience values. Learn the basics first:
- Why are you creating valuable content?
- What do you want to achieve with your content?
- What content resources do you have access to?
- What has worked in the past?
- What hasn’t worked in the past?
- Who is your audience?
- What do they want to see?
- What problems do your audience want to solve?
- What are their pain points?
Understanding the answers to these questions will help shape your content marketing strategy and make it easier to plan out a content calendar full of valuable content.
Spend some time researching your target customers and performing a comprehensive analysis of your existing content to get prepared.
2. Find Out What Makes Your Audience Tick
The foundation of valuable content is finding out what makes your ideal audience tick. Interview them, survey them, poll them, talk to them—learn their awareness levels, their pain points, their interests, their goals.
What makes content valuable is up to your ideal audience:
- If your audience wants to be entertained, they will value interesting, engaging content with strong storytelling.
- If your audience needs to stay informed, they will value industry news, unique perspectives, and up-to-date info.
- If your audience is looking to learn something new, they will value how-to guides and resources with actionable tips.
Therefore, the most important part of creating true value with your content is to understand what your audience values. Based on your customer research, you’ll be able to learn exactly what kind of content will be most relevant, interesting, meaningful, and helpful to them.
3. Share Actionable Strategies
Once you have identified the pain points of your target audience, you can provide solutions via your content.
Focus on solving your buyers’ problems by providing templates, tools, techniques, tips, and resources with detailed, actionable strategies that address those challenges. By providing straightforward, step-by-step paths to a solution, your content will be informative and useful—offering real, true value to your audience.
The key is to share real-world solutions, be transparent, and dive deep into the topic. Your audience will begin to see your brand as a helpful, informative leader in the industry, which will encourage them to make a purchase later on in the buyer’s journey.
4. Provide Different Content Forms & Types
People have different content preferences. Some have enjoyed the video craze over the last few years, and others remain firmly on the side of long-form written content. It’s your responsibility to provide valuable content in a format and type that is accessible to your audience.
Valuable content comes in many different forms, from blog posts and ebooks to videos and podcasts. Try to provide a variety of content formats that will accommodate preferences as well as attract people with different levels of interest in your brand. (For example, those without any familiarity with your business have the attention span to scan an infographic; once buyers recognize and trust your content, they will be more willing to watch an entire video.)
5. Look Past the Sales Pitch
When it comes to creating valuable content, the focus cannot be on (just) trying to make a sale. Your content must be authentic, understanding, interesting, and engaging. You want to tell the story of your company, share actionable strategies on topics that matter to your audience, and become a trusted brand in their eyes.
If all you’re doing is talking about how your business is amazing, your products and services are great, and buyers should purchase now, many members of your audience will be turned off.
Look past the sales pitch and focus on providing value. Then, after establishing a relationship with your audience, you can spend time selling.
6. Tell a Story
Make sure your valuable content is story-driven. It’s an easy way to make sure your content isn’t too promotional or salesy.
Valuable content should have a beginning, middle, and end as well as plenty of details to help your audience follow along. Think in terms of problem, solution, and lessons learned. And don’t forget to provide the context necessary for your buyers to understand the story you’re telling.
7. Repurpose Valuable Content
When you’ve created a piece of successful, valuable content, take advantage of the time and resources you invested into it by repurposing the content. Valuable content can easily be shortened or lengthened, repurposed, and transformed for new channels or into different formats.
Videos can be clipped for social media, a blog post can be expanded into an ebook or shortened into a newsletter, an infographic can be turned into a series of social posts, etc. The possibilities are endless.
Content repurposing provides the added benefit of ensuring your target audience is more likely to find your content—because you share it across all the different channels where they spend time online.
8. Be Specific
As of 2024, there are around 50 billion web pages on the internet. Whatever topic you want to write about, odds are that basic or general information on it already exists somewhere.
How can you stand out from the crowd?
By avoiding generic content and prioritizing deep dives with unique perspectives and engaging storytelling.
When you create specific, exclusive content that provides one-of-a-kind value to your audience, you will carve out your space on the web.
If you build it, they will come.
9. Make Formatting Your Friend
Every year, it seems like our attention spans get shorter and shorter, especially when it comes to the time we spend online. And there’s some research to back it up: A series of studies by the Nielsen Norman Group have found that people are more likely to scan content than read it word for word.
If you anticipate your audience will (mostly) scan your content—even your valuable, carefully curated content—you can encourage them to notice the most important information by playing around with formatting.
By using clear headings and subheadings, front-loading important information, incorporating bulleted lists, and bolding the most important information, you can make your content scannable and easier to read. Then, your audience will better experience the value you want your content to provide.
10. Talk to Your Sales Representatives & Customer Success Team
While your marketing team may be in charge of creating valuable content and implementing your B2B company’s content marketing strategy, there’s a gold mine of information hidden in your sales and customer success teams. Reach across the aisle and find out what they think about providing value to your buyers.
Customer success representatives are on the front line when it comes to engaging with customers. They have heard complaints and questions and likely have standard responses. This information can serve as the basis for publishing valuable content pieces.
Similarly, your sales representatives are an excellent source of information. They know what questions prospects are asking during product demonstrations, sales calls, and pitches, including why your products or services are not a good fit. You can address their concerns, problems, pain points, and questions in upcoming content to provide relevant value to your customers.
11. Focus on Quality Over Quantity
Valuable content is about quality over quantity. You can’t generate swaths of mediocre content and call it valuable—each value-added content piece must be high-quality, carefully designed, well-written, and based on audience research.
Get your head in the game when it comes to text and visuals. Are your images crisp, clear, and relevant? Is your text written with good grammar and in plain language? Any errors can detract from your authority, leading your audience to distrust you.
Gated vs. Ungated Content: Should You Gate Your Most Valuable Content?
Gated content is any content that requires information to access—in most cases, viewers have to share their contact information or other details (name, job title, company, email address, etc.) through a lead capture form before they can read it. Ungated content, on the other hand, is available without restriction to anyone on the internet.
The question remains: Should you gate your most valuable content?
After all, you’ve dedicated time and resources to creating unique and interesting content. Why shouldn’t you use it to generate more leads? And according to a 2023 report from Semrush, 17% of marketers and business owners listed gated content as their top-performing content pieces.
Keep in mind, however, that some of your prospects will turn away from gated content because they don’t want to share their information, no matter how valuable your content is—leading to lower engagement rates.
We’ve found the best approach is to have a combination of both gated and ungated content. That way you won’t limit your reach (ungated content) and can continue capturing qualified leads (gated content) at the same time.
7 Unique Valuable Content Ideas for B2B Marketers
You want to create valuable content. You’re ready to invest your time and resources into truly resonating with your audience. That’s all well and good—but when you’re looking at a blank document and suffering from that oh-so-famous writer’s block, it can be difficult to come up with valuable, engaging content marketing ideas.
Good news: We’ve got you covered.
Here are a few ideas for valuable content that you can start working on today.
1. Start with Your Most Popular Content
If you’ve struck gold with content in the past—content that really resonated with your audience or had lots of eyes on it—why not increase its value? Consider how you can repurpose or add value to your most popular content to create additional engagement on different channels or via new formats. By adding timely updates or statistics to a blog post or turning a how-to video into a downloadable template, you can get more value out of existing content.
2. Help Your Audience Learn a Specific Skill
A common reason people consume content online is to upskill—learn a new skill or improve an existing one—to grow and expand their abilities. Whether for personal or professional development reasons, helping your audience learn a specific skill is a great way to provide value.
Provide step-by-step instructions and share tips about how to master different techniques. Create quizzes and challenges to help your audience test their knowledge. Share your own story about how you learned the skill. Deliver personalized, highly actionable, and informative content that helps people acquire key skills.
3. Curate Information Your Buyers Don’t Have Time to Find Themselves
Help your audience stay up to date on breaking news in your industry by curating information and articles for them to read. They likely don’t have the time to search for relevant news themselves, so they will value you doing so for them. You will not only save time for your buyers but also cement your brand as an industry leader.
4. Create Helpful, Actionable Tools & Resources
Don’t let the value stop when your audience finishes reading or viewing your content—give them something to take with them when they’re done. Create helpful, actionable tools and resources to supplement your valuable content. Think checklists, tutorials, roundups, templates, workbooks, guides, quizzes, and more. Make it easy for them to do something with the value you’ve provided.
5. Share Unique Perspectives & Personal Experiences
Your unique perspectives and personal experiences are valuable to your audience. Why? Because they can’t get that information anywhere else.
Do you have a unique point of view on a popular topic? Have you collected data or created case studies you could share? Can you hold interviews with other influencers or leaders in your industry? Leverage your perspective and experience for valuable content.
6. Interview Industry Experts & Thought Leaders
Get in touch with industry experts and thought leaders. You can interview them on video, write a roundup that features commentary from multiple experts, ask them to co-host a webinar, or feature them as a guest on your podcast. Regardless of the format, you can bring their unique and valuable insights to your audience.
7. Answer Frequently Asked Questions
What are the questions prospects and customers ask your sales or customer success reps? What are their most common queries they share on social media? A great way to approach creating valuable content is to think about the FAQs they share, their pain points, and the problems they want to solve and then draft content that directly fills those needs.
Conclusion
On an overcrowded internet that is bursting at the seams with new content, it’s a constant battle to cut through the noise and capture the attention of your audience. To stay relevant and keep people engaged, you must create content that provides real value.
By listening to your buyers, establishing a content marketing strategy that prioritizes value, and following the tips we’ve shared, you can create valuable content that will build a loyal following and increase conversions over the long run.
And if you need help developing and publishing valuable content for your B2B organization, schedule a consultation with us today. At OneIMS, our content marketing experts can help your business drive traffic, leads, and conversions with value-added content as well as support your revenue and growth goals.
We’re ready to partner with you.
