B Corps Need a Content Marketing Strategy 

If your company builds an amazing solution in the woods but customers can’t find it, was it really a great solution? Content marketing is the flare that gets your brand above the treetops – so you can make connections with the right people and show your value. There’s a good chance that you’re fighting an uphill battle with competing brands that take shortcuts or simply don’t have the same values. Unfortunately, Google doesn’t favor altruistic brands, but with content marketing you can build up your online presence to show more people that there’s a better way to do things. We know you’re dedicated to being a force for good, and content marketing is a great way to show how you put people, community, and the world above all else. 

If you’re curious how content marketing works, we’ll break it down for you … 

What is Content Marketing? 

Content marketing is all about gaining market exposure, building traction on search engines, and moving the sales funnel by creating materials that directly solve your customers’ questions or challenges. It could be a blog, whitepaper, telegram, or anything else. 

Your prospects are out there, right now, surfing the web for answers. They trust search engine results and click away – the same as you probably do in your personal or professional life. By creating materials that address people’s online searches, you give your brand a chance to make an impression that could lead to a long-time customer. 

When your content focuses on addressing customer challenges instead of your solution, you’re:

• Proving that you know the industry, trends, and customer challenges 
• Showing interest in helping – not just profits 
• Building trust with potential customers and search engines like Google

How Does Content Marketing Help with Sales? 

Content marketing focuses on the customer, not products. Not talking about products might sound counterintuitive to selling. We’re not saying to throw out your product brochures. But, we are saying that there’s a lot of research going on before people are ready to buy. Whether you’re selling beer, bras, food, or are an investment firm or bank, people are tapping away at their phones or computers looking for info. Content marketing fills the information gap. It puts your brand on the radar while prospects gather information and prepare to make a decision. 

Content marketing isn’t a sales strategy, but it is often great for B2B sales enablement, lead quality, and conversion. When sales teams push a solution too hard or too early in the process, it can do more harm than good. First, people tune out the sales pitch. Second, when businesses get to the request for quote (RFQ) or bidding stages without any groundwork, they end up in bidding wars because they have no other leg to stand on. In this scenario, partners are often picked based on side-by-side feature comparisons, reputation, and costs. This is an uphill battle. It forces businesses to maintain bottom-dollar prices while launching revolutionary features to stay ahead of deep-pocket enterprises and new players trying to disrupt the market.

The best customers come from a good fit. Content marketing allows you to build a reputation before the first call or demo. In this scenario, prospects are finding your content, consuming information willingly, and learning more about your brand with every click. 

All of this content consumption before the sales process weeds out less-than-ideal prospects and warms up good leads. When they’re ready to talk, content marketing already broke the ice. The prospect may even have grown attached to the brand as a trusted knowledge resource. Now you can focus on solution selling based on your prospect’s challenges and needs — leading to more engaging interactions. 

As your content marketing strategy matures, you’ll see less poor leads while the progress you’re making in search engine rankings will bring in more quality leads. 

What is Great Content?

There’s more to it than just “doing content marketing.” Content marketing isn’t a get-rich-quick scheme or a few pieces of content. It’s a strategy and investment that builds. But, what is good content marketing? It’s a tough question, because the value of content marketing comes down to your business goals. At the highest level, good content marketing achieves three things:

• Solves a reader challenge or provide some level of insights
• Boosts search engine visibility and inbound traffic 
• Ties back to a business goal 

Developing a content strategy will identify key challenges to address in your content, business goals, and search engine optimization (SEO) needed to give you a foothold in search result pages. Goals vary by company, but some common examples include increasing website traffic, form fills, or lower costs per lead. 

When getting into specific topics, we focus on a customer-oriented scope for each piece of content. A piece of content might help with: 

• Awareness: Coverage of current or upcoming industry and world events
• Decision-making: Information on best practices and industry trends
• Overcoming challenges: Tips and educational materials on specific topics
• Aspirations: Providing perspectives to help businesses or individuals achieve a transformative goal or milestone

These are high-level, but you’ll notice everything focuses on a benefit to the reader. We generate topics based on what people actually search for, and we mix in knowledge found uniquely within your organization to put a spin on content that only you can provide. 

Why work with New Leaf Marketing Solutions for your Content Marketing?

We deliver much more than blogs to fill up your website. We invest in aligning our content strategy with your business goals, getting to know your ideal customers, understanding the competition in your industry (and for your key search terms), and put together a comprehensive program that helps you get the most out of everything we create. 

We’ve been doing content marketing for almost two decades before content marketing was even a recognized term. As a small agency, we can give focused attention to your business needs and truly get to know your team, solutions, and audience.

Above all else, we care about our impact on the world and want to help businesses with worthwhile causes. We’re on a mission to help with your mission.