Corporate Content Centers (hence the three Cs) in B2B Marketing place your high-quality content not someplace across the web, but right with your target audience.

Marketing managers in B2B industries are facing major challenges in view of the current pandemic. COVID-19 pushed B2B marketing to undergo a rapid change: due to the sudden disappearance of traditional marketing and sales activities such as trade fairs or face-to-face business talks, the customer journey is becoming an almost exclusively online experience. 

To reach their audience and stay relevant at the same time, organizations in the B2B space need to add more digital touchpoints in their user journey. These digital offerings might have been triggered by the pandemic, but they’re here to stay and the trends in online customer acquisition will continue to grow.  

Lead nurturing versus lead generation 

Content marketing offers various opportunities to systematically develop digital touchpoints. Providing useful content and having it precisely marketed via search engines and social media, creates awareness for your business among relevant target groups.

The earlier a B2B company is ready to provide guidance alongside the customer journey, e.g. by providing customers with helpful and informative content, the higher the chances to transform a casual contact into a qualified lead. The B2B Buyer Experience Report by Showpad  shows that B2B buyers are receptive to in-depth information and very much rely on their own research, especially in the early stages of their journey.

To identify (trending) topics that resonate with your target customers and to use those insights to fine-tune your own marketing and sales activities, activate your social listening skills. Social media and online analysis provide valuable insight into your target groups’ current issues and needs – because this is what you want your own marketing and sales activities to focus on.

However, to be thorough in your digital marketing approach, it requires more than publishing some tweets or blogs on popular social media channels. Especially B2B companies often have complex products which are anything else but self-explanatory. For B2B businesses, a more expedient solution to spreading its content across the worldwide web is to create an exclusive Corporate Content Center that hosts all business-relevant content – a place where content is controllable, searchable, and available at any time.

Corporate Content Centers – digital platform for all your content

A Corporate Content Center is hosting all your communications initiatives and is the place where your content is bundled and interlinked. A Corporate Content Center could take the form of e.g. a blog, a website or microsite, or a digital magazine.

All target group-relevant content converges on this central platform. Your content addresses the problems, wishes and needs of your potential customers, but more so, also guides them through their customer journey, bringing them closer and closer to you.

A Corporate Content Centre offers your customers information they need at exactly the moment they need those information – it adapts perfectly to their customer journey.

Content sells

Whether it is your own content or curated content on business- and target group-specific topics: your Corporate Content Center s variety. Offer your target groups the information and depth of information they need in the various phases of their decision-making process – answers to specific questions and challenges, which could include everything from infotainment to hardcore expert advice. The more variety, the better: blog posts, e-books or whitepapers, info graphics, webinars, podcasts or customer advocate videos.

With a Corporate Content Center, a B2B company strengthens its expert reputation vis a vis potential customer in that it will be recognized as expert and considered first point of contact for certain specialist topics.

Content gets you new customers

Aim of all your content activities is to provide your inbound marketing with “magnetic effects” to attract potential customers and to generate leads. Content creation and -marketing is becoming key for B2B companies, since GDPR makes is increasingly difficult to obtain qualified customer data on the market; B2B companies are forced to grow their customer contact database organically now. A good way to do so is by limiting free content in your Corporate Content Center. Your general content is freely accessible, but more specific and in-depth information will become gated content. Only registered users – those that are providing their contact information – have exclusive access to gated content, e.g. a whitepaper on a trending topic or participation in an online conference.

A Corporate Content Center also supports reach of your content via search engines and social media marketing. A strategic search engine optimization (SEO) paired with content in multiple formats which covers your “expert topics” leads to good SERP rankings: Google evaluates content as relevant and therefore ranks it higher in Google search results. Your company, your products and your services will create more online attention and thus will be much better found by potential customers.

Social and Search are just distribution channels that promote your content and are used to lead potential customers to your Corporate Content Center.

Content on social media has a short lifespan and you cannot control these platforms. Your Corporate Content Center, on the other hand, is a powerful tool in digital marketing as your content is always available and can be accessed quickly and easily.

Would you benefit from a Corporate Content Center? Well, I would say that a made-to-measure Corporate Content Center in combination with an effective digital marketing benefits any company that is faced with the challenge of explaining complex products and services towards hard-to-get customers. It is a powerful tool for your B2B communication to get in contact with potential new customers and convince them of our offer.

Six good reasons why you should consider implementing a Corporate Content Center: