How To Use Content Effectively in B2B Advertising
Everyone’s read that ‘content is king’. We see this at Right Percent - almost all advertisers that spend $100k or more profitably on paid social do so through either content or other incentive ads. Content is one of the most powerful tools in a B2B advertiser’s toolbox.
Why do content ads work?
Much of the time, your target decision makers are not ready to book a phone call with your sales team, or try out your online demo. But people are always ready to download something useful to them.
A well-run content advertising campaign this achieves three things for you:
You collect potential client contact information.
The reader associates your brand with useful tools.
Your sales team has a convenient launching point to upsell into your product
Further, if you only use “get a demo” as your offer, you will eventually hit ad fatigue. Ad campaigns with content ads mixed in see more stable CPCs over time.
Should you gate content?
Gating content means requiring prospects to give you their contact information to receive the asset. Most of the time, you should promote gated content vs ungated content in your ads for the following reasons:
People do convert into paying customers at scale from gated content. It’s a tried and true strategy.
Without gating content, it is very hard to get attribution and figure out which content campaigns are driving performance. This means campaigns can’t iterate and improve over time from learnings, which is key to long term performance.
The exception to this is for very small, proven audiences, especially for ABM. If you have a precise list the sales team is already reaching, you can serve ungated content as part of the overall marketing effort. You can test the impact of this ungated spend with a geographic or list based split test.
For more information on the gated content debate, see our article on Lead Gen vs Demand Gen.
What makes a content campaign well run?
First, you need an effective sales team to run content ads as a demand gen strategy. The fundamental format of content ads is:
The prospect gives you their information in exchange for something valuable.
Your sales team uses this to try to initiate a conversation with the prospect.
If the prospect shows interest, the sales person upsells them from content to your product.
You need a sales team that can close low-intent lead to makes this work. We recommend splitting out a separate sales team to handle these, or using the outbound team (who already works with low intent leads).
Beyond, there’s three golden rules to effective content strategy.
Content should be hyper targeted to your most qualified audience. It shouldn’t be interesting to the general reader, just your specific B2B niche. They should think: this was made for me.
Content should be directly related to your value prop. If you’re Bill.com, you shouldn’t run ads to content advising people on how to handle working from home. They should make content about accounts payable/receivable. This way, when sales calls and emails the leads, you can upsell them.
Content should be Action-Oriented. People should be able to immediately imagine how it can make their life easier. That’s why Checklists and Templates do so well - LinkedIn calls this “snackable” content.
Examples of the above: These were all top-performing content pieces for years.
How often should you add new content pieces to your campaigns?
Our rule of thumb is that a new content piece every 45 days is optimal. But in general, this depends on audience size, campaign spend, and how fast you fatigue your audience. Campaigns with high spend and very small (under 5k) audience sizes may need new content every week to stay fresh.