Jeff Coyle of MarketMuse on Creating Effective B2B Content Marketing

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In this episode Jeff Coyle, co-founder and CSO for MarketMuse – a company specializing in helping the content marketing agency plan and craft content marketing campaigns to maximize results – talks about what type of B2B content marketing creative is most effective and how he uses natural language processing to help clients determine the topics and subtopics they should be covering.

He shares insights on B2B content marketing strategy, buyer personas, content creation, content distribution, SEO, lead qualification, AI-assisted content marketing, and how to let the world know you’re an authority in your field by authoring content that appeals to the specific needs and preferences of your B2B customers.

“If you’re writing and focus on very differentiated content, but also doing your research and covering the entire buying journey, everything there is about something, you have a perfect chance to compete with the people with the largest pockets,” says Coyle. Search engine optimization (SEO) plays a crucial role in B2B content marketing and techniques for optimizing content for search engines.

Until recently, most SEO consultants prioritized their actions based on Google search volume. Coyle says that doesn’t tell people if someone has authoritative content and is trying to shift the paradigm. “We basically had to change the market to start to thinking about quality and comprehensiveness.” Effective B2B content marketing starts with a deep understanding of the target audience. Businesses need to know their customers’ pain points, challenges, goals, and preferences to create content that resonates with them.

B2B Content Marketing: Jeff Coyle on Topic Modeling

So how do you find your unique differentiator and the right B2B keywords in such a crowded space? For Coyle, if you have a number of “deadly competitors”, you have to know everything they’ve done, everything they’re doing and where they’ll likely go, so you can put a dent in their growth.

Figure what stages of the content marketing funnel they’re not covering, or have covered with low quality content, as opposed to your unique or novel insight? “You beat them by understanding the customer, and their journey, and covering that journey.”

So expertise is at the center of everything, but you have to find the right ways to show it. “You can’t beat them with a blog that has one link at the bottom, or a blurb in the category page. You have to really invest in a user experience that shows that you know the buyer, so that they’ll trust you and buy from you, especially if your product isn’t differentiated.”

Search intent must also be accounted for – Somebody might be looking for something, and Google will show them multiple intents in what is known as “intent fracture.”

B2B Content Marketing: Analytics and Optimization

So if each intent is relevant to your business, you have to write something that covers them all to usher prospective buyers through the b2b customer journey, but once again encompasses the whole buying cycle. “That’s the e-commerce problem right now. They think they just have to put transactional content, or buying content, without covering the rest of the cycle.” Jeff warns that businesses that move away from content creation and just want to sell their stuff will rapidly go down.

MarketMuse’s AI-assisted content briefs are a great way to implement all these goals, indicating what topics to include in your B2B growth marketing campaigns, what questions to answer as well as internal and external links.

They’re offering a trial brief for free, so it’s a great time to learn what AI can do for your B2B content marketing efforts. “Our goal is to really inspire and amplify subject matter experts, and also rid the world of low-quality content,” says Coyle. High-quality content is essential. It should be informative, relevant, and valuable to the audience. Content should address specific problems or provide solutions that align with the needs of businesses.

Building Topical Authority through B2B Content Marketing