Build a B2B Affiliate Content Marketing Strategy in 3 Simple Steps

Successful B2B content marketing depends on an in-depth understanding of your target audience’s needs and when they need it. Without this understanding, you’ll constantly struggle to produce valuable affiliate marketing content.

What is B2B Content Marketing?

This is an easy question to answer. B2B content marketing involves using creative and informative material to promote your affiliate marketing company’s core product or service to other businesses.

Plain and simple, this content marketing is geared to promote a B2B business. Are you still unclear about whether your business operates in a B2B environment? Here are some examples:

• Shopify: A business that helps entrepreneurs to set up online stores and sell their products remotely.
• HubSpot: A sales and marketing platform that helps companies to convert leads into actual clients.

In contrast, here are some well-known B2C business examples:

• Amazon: An e-commerce store that sells household items, toys, books, music, and other products either directly to customers or as a middleman for other retailers.
• Walmart: A physical store which sells food items, cosmetic products, clothes, household products, books and other items directly to customers.
• Netflix: A subscription-based streaming service for watching TV shows and movies.

As you can see, it’s not that difficult to differentiate between a B2B and a B2C business. A B2B business sells to other companies, whereas a B2C business sells directly to individual customers.

In a previous post, we discussed how you can use the different types of content marketing to boost your business. Today, we want to discuss how to use these types of content marketing to increase your affiliate marketing brand in a B2B market.

Why Do You Need B2B Content Marketing?

If you’re operating in a B2B environment, then investing in content marketing can be beneficial in a few ways:

1. Building Thought Leadership

Sharing valuable content over time can help you establish your affiliate marketing brand as a thought leader. Once you become a trusted authority in the industry, other businesses will likely turn to you to solve their problems.

2. Boosting Your SEO Rankings

Consistently providing valuable information helps you rank higher on search engines. This will help potential clients searching for your affiliate marketing services find you more easily.

3. Increasing Web Traffic

Repurposing and sharing your content generates curiosity about your affiliate marketing business. People who see the content you share on social media will want to check out your affiliate marketing website to learn more about your services. In time, this will increase traffic to your affiliate marketing website and general awareness of your brand.

4. Saving Time

When you operate in a B2B environment, it’s normal for users to request the same piece of content repeatedly. For example, people will ask to see the same demo video or webinar recording over and over again. Having this content ready in advance will help you save the time you would’ve spent scrambling to produce it every time someone asks for it.

B2B Content Marketing vs. B2C Content Marketing

Okay, now you understand how content marketing can benefit your B2B business. But do you know how it differs from B2C content marketing?

Most people make the mistake of assuming that content marketing for B2B should be focused more on your core product or service. These people often default to producing content that is more informative than it is engaging. In other words, producing lifeless and dull affiliate marketing content is easy if you get into content marketing with this mindset.

In reality, the content for your B2B business should be just as engaging and fun to consume as it should be for a B2C company. After all, the priorities for your content marketing are the same: to connect with potential clients and convert them into actual clients.

The difference in content marketing for B2B and B2C businesses isn’t the strategy – what you want to do. As we just said, in both industries, the aim is to connect with your target audience. The real difference lies in your tactics – how you will do that.

Why is it so important to focus on the how of it all? Because there are two differences between the target audience for B2B and the target audience for B2C.

Firstly, the purchase journey – the time it takes for a potential client to buy your product – is extended in a B2B environment.

Secondly, the sales funnel—converting a potential client to an actual client—is more complex.

To meet the needs of this complex marketplace, it is essential to refine your affiliate marketing tactics.

How to Create a B2B Content Marketing Strategy in 3 Easy Steps

So, how do you develop a content marketing strategy that’ll work for your business?

1) Build a Client Persona

Yes, it’s essential to understand your target audience regardless of whether you are a B2B or B2C business. However, since converting a lead to a paying customer in B2B takes longer, understanding your audience is even more crucial here. If you want to convert leads to clients, you must take time to understand the needs of these people.

When building a client persona, you need to go beyond the obvious. It is essential to go beyond the demographics of your target audience so that you can also understand their psychographics – what matters to them.

Understanding your target audience’s psychographics will help you produce content that consistently meets their needs. If you can meet their needs over time, you will create an audience that relies on you as a source of valuable information. This is good news because people who trust you will likely purchase your core product or service.

2) Chart Your Sales Funnel

The second part of your content marketing strategy should be charting your sales funnel and defining what needs to be done at each stage.

Are you hearing the term “sales funnel” for the first time? Don’t panic. Before we get into the deep end, let’s define it.

Picture an actual funnel. It’s wide at the top and narrow at the bottom, designed to guide a large amount of material into a different container in stages. This is exactly what your sales funnel does with potential clients.

A sales funnel is a strategic process that guides leads from one stage of content marketing to the next, ultimately converting them into paying customers.

In this sales funnel model, businesses usually start with many potential clients, but only a few eventually convert into paying clients. However, it would be best if you didn’t let that discourage you from your content marketing efforts. B2B clients stay with you for a longer time than B2C clients do.

As an affiliate content marketer in B2B, each piece of content you produce is an opportunity to move your potential customers further along their journey to becoming actual customers. To successfully move clients from one stage to the next, you must understand their needs at each stage.

Stages of the Sales Funnel

A potential client typically goes through 4 stages, which can be described using the AIDA model:

1. Awareness: when a potential client first becomes aware of the business problem they must solve. At the same time, they’ve just heard about your affiliate marketing brand and the product you’re selling.
2. Interest: the potential client starts to evaluate whether your solution is a good fit. They also start comparing you with your competition.
3. Desire: the potential client starts to evaluate your solution’s value to their business.
4. Action: the potential client makes a decision and becomes a paying client.

You must strategically use your content to move your clients from one stage to the next successfully.

What Do I Need to Do at Each Stage of the Sales Funnel?

Awareness: At the awareness stage, you need to educate your clients on the problem they’re dealing with and inform them that you have the solution.

Interest: At the interest stage, you must convince them that your solution is worth investing in. This is an excellent time to get a small commitment. For example, you can ask for their email address.

Desire: At the desired stage, you must build a relationship by offering them value and giving them reasons to trust your solution.

Action: You must offer a unique and memorable experience at the action stage. This will turn them into repeat customers and encourage them to promote you to their friends.

What Type of Content Is Best for Each Stage?

Use online advertisements, landing pages, videos, and infographics to educate your target audience.

To entice and build a relationship with your target audience, use other types of content marketing, such as blog posts (including guides and how-tos), social media posts, white papers/eBooks, case studies, webinars, interviews, and Q&As. You can also use podcasts, reviews and testimonials, and email marketing.

To offer a unique and memorable experience, use surveys, demos of how to use your product, and simple tools to send beautiful and engaging emails.

3) Evaluate the Results and Adjust Your Strategy

A guide like ours is always good before producing affiliate marketing content. Even so, content marketing always involves a bit of trial and error. For this reason, it’s important to keep analyzing how each piece of content performs. In the long run, this will help you develop an affiliate marketing content strategy that works for your business with content your audience enjoys.

As you can see, developing a content marketing strategy for your B2B business isn’t hard. It is crucial to understand your client persona and sales funnel. Once you understand both those elements, you’ll be ready to develop an effective strategy.