Top 5 B2B Content Marketing Tips

Social media in the B2B space, whether your are a small business or operating at enterprise level can often seem like  either a whole other job, or a political minefield. Here are my top 5 tips for marketing your people, content and events in a social way.

Make your content digestable

Complex and difficult to interpret information, often held up in long PDF's can be a sure-fire way to lose a reader. By taking the key statistics and presenting them graphically in a infographic you create not only content that user can absorb quickly, but through including and "embed code" for that graphic, you can create a piece of content that can be shared with others in a matter of second.

Create content collaboratively

When people have been involved in the creation of content they place far higher values on it. We all love to share our own work. Open up work when it is still in BETA form through posting outlines of documents of draft version on a company blog or Wiki and invite selected people to comment and add to it. That way when the final work is ready to share, those involved will be incentivised to share something they helped create.

Bring the debate to you

Anything that's worth talking about will invite commentary somewhere on the internet. Make sure you bring the conversation to you. Whether its a white-paper, annual report or CEO video address, setting up a simple video conference, webinar of Google+ hangout to have a discussion about the content with you can be a way of curating the conversation, and opening up new leads at the same time.

Make your events work harder for you

Big and small companies alike love running events. Whether it's a simple roundtable debate or a full blow week-long international conference - events bring people together, generate ideas and birth new relationships. However many companies fail to make their events work harder for them. By setting up a simple Linkedin Group or encouraging attendees to share their responses to the content of the event on twitter, using a simple #tag (e.g. #DellB2B, #WIRED11 or even #bbcqt) you can keep track of conversations and maintain open dialogue with the event community.

Optimise your enterprise

Whether it's finding a contact on a social network, looking for a video or presentation from a recent event or even just a company website, the first port of call will 9 times out of 10 be a search engine. Making the likes of Google or Bing be able to find your content, people and web presences is a fine art form, but you can help yourself by getting staff to clearly sign post their online profiles by using the correct company names, keywords related to their industry and official event title to make sure your content gets found first.