Amazing B2B Content Marketing Examples You Can Copy Today

Do you know why B2B content marketing crossed the road?

To get on the other side and generate leads for businesses.

But you need a solid content strategy to wield that power. You’re on the right page for that.

‍TL;DR

Part 1: inBeat.co's Success Story

• SEO and link-building strategies for small B2B businesses.
• Utilize low-competition keywords and free tools.
• Content for both B2B audience and industry-relevant websites.
• Create a catchy, informative title and engaging introductions.
• Maintain an easily digestible content structure.
• Develop shareable tools and resources.‍

Part 2: Orbit Media's Unique Tactics

• Use original research to establish authority.
• Craft short, structured articles with actionable advice.
• Incorporate infographics and visuals for better engagement.
• Leverage insights from the sales team to create targeted content.
• Personalize emails to engage prospects effectively.
• Incorporate videos to enhance user engagement and trust.
• Upside-down funnel strategy: Target specific prospects for webinars.
• Offer free consultations to build trust.

Part 3: SEMrush's Education-Centric Approach

• Create actionable blog posts with clear structures.
• Develop polished, informative ebooks.
• Publish annual reports to establish authority and attract backlinks.
• Craft compelling case studies to showcase results and build trust.
• Offer courses and certifications through an academy.
• Value creation is key: Educate and empower your audience.

• Implement these lessons to optimize your content marketing strategy.
• Remember, successful content marketing complements a robust SEO strategy.
• Consider professional B2B content assistance, like Blue Things, to achieve rapid growth.

‍

This guide takes you through the best B2B content marketing examples in 2024 to achieve your marketing goals. We will:

• Dissect their content marketing strategies
• Discuss possible improvements
• Show practical steps that you can write down and implement today

Let’s start:

What Is B2B Content Marketing?

B2B (business-to-business) content marketing is a marketing strategy that aims to attract, engage, and retain a clearly defined audience of decision-makers in companies. These prospects are business owners, B2B marketers, distributors, etc. You need:

• Valuable
• Relevant
• Consistent content

B2B businesses usually produce blog posts, whitepapers, industry studies, webinars, ebooks, and more. These pieces of content are distributed mainly through company websites, YouTube, email marketing, and other industry websites. Some are shared at in-person events.

Remember: B2B content marketing’s ultimate goal is driving profitable customer action.

That means B2B differs from the B2C (business-to-consumer) content marketing game.

• B2B content writing is focused on a specific business or industry, whereas B2C content marketing is focused on individual consumers.
• B2B content often has a more professional tone and focuses on providing valuable information and insights to its audience rather than simply promoting a product or service.

3 Amazing B2B Content Marketing Examples

Yes, we know – most of our competitors feature 20+ B2B content marketing examples. But browsing a wide range of stories isn’t very helpful if you’re not learning or remembering anything.

If you’re like most people, you’re likely not even reading the whole piece.

We take a different approach:

We’ll delve into all the intricacies and practical steps of just three examples. This will help you jot down actionable steps and tools and actually remember memorable case studies.

Let’s begin.

1. inBeat.co: From 500 to 70,000 Monthly Visitors

inBeat is not a huge B2B corporation; it’s your average SMB with your average marketing budget.

The only difference is that inBeat worked with us to perfect a winning SEO strategy based on:

• Results-driven content marketing
• Link-building

Lesson 1: B2B content marketing needs B2B link-building to thrive.

That said, when inBeat started, it had between 8 to 30 visitors per day – including everyone’s moms.

We knew we had to accelerate inBeat’s organic traffic, so we focused on what works for small companies who are just starting:

• Low-hanging fruit keywords
• Free tools to attract authors from other websites
• Link-building through HARO, guest posts, and brand mentions

Lesson 2: Adapt your B2B content marketing strategy to your current market position.

Our goal for inBeat was to attract attention and build authority. Here’s how that worked:

1.1. Keyword Research for Search Engines Ranking

Effective B2B content isn’t just relevant, timely, and authoritative; it:

• Is visible: Search engines should be able to index it quickly to rank your content higher on the SERPs. That means more potential visitors can see your content.
• It responds to people’s needs: You want to match your keyword intent to your potential customers’ search queries. That way, more prospects will click on your website.

To achieve that, we focused on keywords with:

• Low competition
• High buyer intention

And we built topics around them. Here’s how that looks for the subject of ambassador marketing:

We’ll dissect the articles below. For now:

Lesson 3: Use a keyword discovery tool like Ahrefs or SEMrush. You’ll want to perform competitive analysis and in-depth market research before selecting your keywords.

For example, ambassador marketing is a keyword with a 40 difficulty score on SEMrush. That score is not very high, but it’s not low either. And the competitive density is just 0.13.

The CPC is good, though.

These tools also show you variations and related keywords with lower difficulty scores:

Once you pick the most profitable key terms for your strategy, it’s time to move on to the next step:

1.2. Topics for Your Audience and Other Autors

Let’s discuss inBeat’s articles on ambassador marketing.

inBeat has split this topic into useful content pieces to:

• Build authority with its B2B audience.
• Catch the attention of potential authors who want to write about a certain topic.

Insider tip and ultimate lesson: Don’t simply write for your B2B target audience. Produce content for relevant websites in your industry that will want to quote you.

Here’s a neat example:

Notice the title:

• This title is clear and straight to the point. No clickbait, no mystery. It informs B2B marketers they will get a thorough guide on launching an ambassador program. This benefit makes them more likely to click on and read the article. After all, everyone wants actionable steps.
• The “brand ambassador program” keyword is included in the first part: This helps with search engine indexing.
• The title is long: Studies show longer titles have 21% higher click-through rates.

Let’s review the introduction:

The intro works because it:

• Is short.
• Showcases benefits for the readers.
• Includes two links to internal inBeat articles.
• Ends with a CTA to move readers along.

Here’s how you can write a similar intro:

• Start with a catchy statistic, joke, or comparison.
• Explain what your guide is about in just a sentence.
• Highlight a few benefits people get from reading your piece.
• End with a CTA.

Remember: Don’t write a self-evident, fluff-filled intro; that will make your website visitors bounce back to Google or whatever other page they were viewing before.

Now for the article’s body:

• The article has a neat structure, following the original promise: The author, David Morneau (CEO of inBeat), touches on all the questions people might have. He discusses the advantages of ambassador programs, the differences between ambassadors and influencers, and the types of programs. Lastly, he discloses inBeat’s step-by-step strategy for setting and scaling such a program.
• The text is easy to read: The paragraphs and sentences are short, with plenty of bullet points, screenshots, and examples.

Pro tip: A table of contents at the top of the page would have made this article easier to browse. Be sure to keep that in mind for your longer guides, which delve into a slew of tactics and tools.

• The advice is actionable: People learn what they need to without returning to Google for additional info.

Just look how David shared the exact metrics marketers should centralize in their spreadsheets:

Side note: This content structure ensures marketers stay on your page and get valuable information. Boring content makes people bounce.

And it’s important to keep your readers on site because that will make them share the content with others.

Here’s something else that’s equally important:

Ensure websites in your niche will want to share that content.

inBeat’s brand ambassador article is quoted by 11 websites with high domain rankings across the world, thus increasing its exposure considerably:

Warning: 11 websites may seem like too few. But unfortunately, stats show that 66.31% of articles get zero backlinks. So inBeat is actually in the top third here.

Here’s how you can ensure other websites will pick up your content too:

• Include unique statistics based on your research.
• Add relevant infographics, tables, and examples that editors in your niche want to share.
• Focus on the information these editors are looking for and writing about. Ahrefs, SEMrush, and other SEO tools offer insightful competitive analysis, so you can research these editors too.

Lesson 4: Produce useful tools that other writers will want to mention and offer to their audiences.

inBeat, for example, has a massive toolkit that assists marketers with their influencer marketing campaigns. Here’s just a part of that:

Some tools are free, and some are paid, but they’re all easy to use, accurate, and fast. More importantly, they’re actually helpful so marketers don’t have to search for other tools online.

This strategy has increased inBeat’s exposure and link profile considerably.

High DR websites quote inBeat’s tools constantly:

1.3. Link-Building

Link-building is not completely separate from your content marketing plan.

While link-building outreach is part of another team’s work, the actual content writing is not.

B2B content marketing focuses on two main outlets:

• Your own channels (websites, social media platforms, marketing emails)
• Channels and platforms you don’t own

inBeat also focused on posting on other outlets.

We helped the influencer marketing company build a solid link foundation through:

• HARO
• Guest posting

inBeat CEO David Morneau constantly publishes guest blog posts on authoritative websites to increase his platform’s visibility and relevance:

This strategy works well in the B2B space because your target audience needs more persuasion than regular B2C customers.

They want to do business with reputable companies – aka experts they can trust.

Here’s how to find authoritative websites in your niche and start guest posting:

1. Google search by [your company’s keyword] + guest posting websites.
2. Analyze these websites through a tool like Ahrefs or BuzzStream to check their authority. BuzzStream also gives you the editors’ email addresses.
3. Look at the subjects these websites are usually talking about. Again, you can use BuzzStream or the competitor analysis tools in Ahrefs and SEMrush.
4. Consider the keywords you want to rank for according to your B2B content strategy.
5. Zero in on the winning topics and send your pitches.

1.4. Scale Your Campaign

The strategies we use for new companies need improvement once your visibility and authority take off.

For inBeat, we continue to:

• Find new short and long-tail keywords to rank for: For example, we aim to create individual influencer pages with all the relevant metrics to rank for long-tail keywords like “ariana grande engagement level.”
• Build links to money pages: To convince your B2B audience, you want to get links to relevant money pages, not just your articles. After all, your ultimate goal is to attract a qualified, paying audience.
• Constantly write new content: Aim for a good cadence of two weekly articles to stay in your customers’ minds.

Lesson 5: Constantly scale your content marketing campaign.

Your plan doesn’t have to look like what inBeat is doing. In fact, this plan can very well change at some point.

You can:

• Repurpose your old content in ebooks and infographics.
• Start participating in roundups.
• Build in-depth industry studies that will create buzz and be picked up by significant news outlets.
• Create helpful videos to educate your audience.
• And much more.

2. Orbit Media: 4 Unique Strategies for Business Growth

Orbit Media is a web design and development company in Chicago.

And it boasts four unique B2B content marketing strategies you rarely see. We’ll analyze them below.

2.1. Original Research

Original research is incredibly effective for B2B companies that want to establish authority and expertise.

Andy Crestodina, co-founder and the CMO of Orbit Media Studios, explains how he uses this strategy:

“For example, ‘What’s the lifespan of a website?’ I could not find a good answer to that, so I went ahead and had a virtual assistant go look at a ton of websites in the Wayback Machine and come back. And then I was able to publish a credible answer on the topic. And it turns out-here it is-the average lifespan of the top marketing websites was just two years and seven months. Very interesting, right? This data apparently did not exist before.”

Let’s look at the article Andy Crestodina published on this topic:

• The article is short: Original research doesn’t have to be long to make a difference. And even if it took you hours to write the piece, your readers don’t need all that background information. Andy Crestodina intuits very wisely that people are there for the conclusion – i.e., the website’s lifespan.
• The article structure is enviable: Andy Crestodina explains how he got the average website life. He then briefly explains ten factors that affect this lifespan and moves on to solutions.

• The solutions have unique names: Naming your techniques is a hook for other writers and authors who will quote your research. They will also likely present some of your solutions with your patented names. That will increase the chances of shareability and your perceived expertise. It’s like shooting two birds with one stone.

This specific article currently has 324 unique websites linking to it, with over 1,400 backlinks, of which 66% are do-follow:

Lesson 6: Fill your original research with unique data, conclusions, and techniques that hook potential writers researching a topic.

Here’s another neat example from Andy Crestodina:

This article is an excellent example of an in-depth industry study because it analyzes the top 50 marketing websites to:

• Discuss standard website features
• Infer ten best practices

Lesson 7: Don’t simply create original research to showcase your results. Use those results to offer actionable advice, such as solutions or best practices.

But Andy Crestodina takes this one step further.

This article is filled with original infographics and pie charts. Those visuals are incredibly effective baits for authors and industry editors, who will embed those specific visuals into their articles, giving credit to you.

Lesson 8: Use original infographics and visuals as clickbait.

We’ll go into more details about images and videos in a second.

For now, here’s how you can write and publish original research too:

1. Think of an interesting missing statistic in your industry:

• You can brainstorm this based on previous interactions with your customers, distributors, or stakeholders.
• Browse specific platforms and groups on LinkedIn or Reddit.
• Use BuzzSumo to discover market trends and topics.

1. Have a virtual assistant research specific companies, websites, or audiences on which your statistic is based.
2. Once you have the rough data, start drawing your conclusions.
3. Offer solutions or best practices for potential buyers who want to beat that statistic.
4. Optimize your article with unique visuals.

2.2. Zero-Waste Marketing Content

Orbit Media uses an interesting B2B content marketing tactic:

Writing content based on insights from the sales team.

This type of content is based on your prospects’ queries, so you’re sure you’re following their search intent. And you will likely get more shares because of your unique, in-depth answers.

Here’s how you can leverage this technique:

1. Ask your sales team to communicate your prospects’ most common questions to the marketing team.
2. Your B2B content marketers can now write valuable content about a topic that interests your specific audience. In doing so:

• They use specific keywords your prospects are using.
• They create helpful content that moves prospects through the marketing funnel.
• This content is consumed by qualified sales leads with the highest chances of becoming paying customers.

1. Once you write the article, have the sales team send a personalized email to the prospects who asked the question. Include the article to underline your expertise and create better engagement.
2. The content team can then update the money and service pages using this new perspective you got from your prospects.

Here’s a neat example right from Orbit Media’s homepage:

“What if I’m not 100% sure what I want?” is an extremely common question in web design.

Clients frequently change their minds based on the results they see. Other times, customers don’t know how to express their goals.

Orbit Media’s content marketing team took that question that web design companies get during the sales process and ran with it:

• The graphic on the left-hand side showcases how they can adapt.
• The right-hand text explains their approach after first sympathizing with the audience.

Lesson 9: Get insights from your sales team before creating content.

2.3. Video Content

Orbit Media uses strong visuals in almost all its articles.

But sometimes, it includes videos too. This tactic:

• Increases user engagement.
• Decreases bounce rates because your website visitors understand your content better.
• The conversion rate can increase by 350%.

Basically, this video helps your visitors understand the topic better. They are more likely to share this content with their peers then.

And writers and reporters in your industry are likelier to pick up this video, especially if you have unique insights.

Lesson 10: People buy from people – that’s also true for your B2B buyers. Seeing your face increases trust, strengthens your bond, and skyrockets your expertise.

2.4. Targeted Content Marketing with Webinars

The usual sales funnel entails starting from a broad audience and narrowing it down so only a few of the most qualified prospects become paying customers.

Top B2B content agencies know that targeted content marketing turns the sales funnel upside down.

So you will start with very precise targeting.

Pro tip: This strategy works best for B2B companies with smaller marketing budgets.

Andy Crestodina says this tactic usually gets him these results with approximately 30 hours of work:

• 10-20 prospect conversations
• 8+ qualified leads
• 1-2 typical projects ranging from $50,000 to $100,000

Here are the main steps you can copy:

1. Find your prospects, targeting them by:

• Industry
• Revenue
• Role
• Seniority level
• Location
• Existing relationships

1. Create a compelling piece of content to attract them. This should be:

• Original
• Actionable
• Highly relevant to your audience
• Relevant to your business

1. Turn this high-quality content into a webinar.

• Promote it with a video ad. LinkedIn ads are among the best because of their precise targeting.
• Send direct messages to people you already know and who might be interested in this webinar.
• Look for only a few people to register – up to a dozen or so. These are already pre-qualified prospects.
• Monitor the registrations and interactions with the webinar page.

1. Make sure the webinar offers targeted value and insightful, practical advice.

• Apart from the theoretical info typical webinars provide, use webinar participants as live examples. Of course, you will have to ask for their permission first. Give them live advice and discuss potential solutions they can apply immediately.
• Offer free one-hour consultations for your participants.

1. After the webinar, send highly customized follow-ups and turn the insights of your webinar into an ebook or PDF.

Here’s how that looks for Orbit Media:

Lesson 11: Offer free consultations to underline your value and generate more proposals.

3. SEMrush: Educate Your Audience

SEMrush is the embodiment of the famous saying, “Give more to get more.”

Educational content is an excellent long-term strategy that numerous companies in the B2B space are doing.

But SEMrush has fine-tuned this content marketing technique.

Let’s explain:

3.1. Actionable Blog Posts

SEMrush is a success story for writing actionable blog posts, such as this one.

Notice the clean and clear article structure.

This actionable guide consists of specific steps people should take to increase local business growth using Google Maps.

Each piece of advice is preceded by a screenshot that further explains the indications.

Lesson 12: Don’t write blog articles that are too generic or too theoretical if you want to educate your audience.

3.2. Ebooks

SEMrush offers numerous free resources, and ebooks are some of the best because:

• They look polished.
• Reading an ebook feels more valuable than simply reading a blog post.

Here’s the table of contents for one of their ebooks:

Notice that the whole thing looks like a scientific study. Ebooks take longer to create but support your expertise better than a regular study guide.

3.3. Annual Reports

SEMrush creates the annual State of Content Marketing Global Report:

A report like this establishes your authority and positions your company as a trustworthy source of information.

Even though it takes longer to create, it will get you:

• Numerous backlinks and shares, thus increasing your exposure.
• A hook to attract new interested prospects, moving them faster through the sales funnel stages.

Besides, these reports are evergreen relevant content.

When someone wonders about a specific stat from a few years ago, they will pick it up from your report.

This 2023 SEMrush report only has three backlinks at the time of this writing, but the paper is still new:

The 2019 Report has 40 linking websites in different languages. And some of these articles are written in 2023, not 2019.

That proves reports are evergreen.

3.4. Case Studies

SEMrush is a treasure trove of case studies:

Case studies allow you to present your results to convince more qualified leads to become paying customers.

To write a winning case study:

• Start from the beginning, discussing why a specific client came to you.
• Continue by showcasing your research practices.
• Explain how your insights from that research led you to a particular (and hopefully, very unique) solution.
• Take the audience through your campaign, product, or software creation.
• Discuss opportunities and threats.
• Share behind-the-scenes activities and explain what you could have done better.
• Analyze results and plans.

Lesson 13: Case studies work wonders when prospects want to get that convincing social proof in the consideration stage.

3.5. SEMrush Academy

SEMrush has created an entire academy with courses where people can get certifications.

These courses build awareness and visibility upon SEMrush tools. But even better, they teach participants how to use those tools for various purposes.

Here’s a neat example:

Digital marketers looking to optimize their companies’ LinkedIn profiles with SEO may easily take the course.

And they won’t just learn unique insights; they’ll learn how to use SEMrush for search engine optimization along the way.

As decision-makers in their business, they can then subscribe to SEMrush. If they’re not decision-makers, they can present this tool to the ones in charge.

Side note: The experts who prepare these courses under the SEMrush umbrella share them with their audiences. And that increases SEMrush’s online presence and organic traffic even more.

Lesson 14: Convert your video tutorials to courses with certifications to build your authority and visibility.

How to Implement These Lessons

All these B2B content marketing examples have one powerful thing in common: they produce value.

You can do that, too, following all the lessons and practical steps above. Pick just one strategy that fits your brand and start working on it today.

But here’s the thing:

A successful content marketing strategy can accelerate business growth, but content marketing doesn’t work in a vacuum.

You need to optimize your entire SEO to maximize your visibility, inbound traffic, and, ultimately, your sales.

Blue Things can make all that a breeze. Just like we pushed inBeat from 500 to 70,000 visitors per month – we can do that for you as well.

Let’s schedule a free strategy call right now, and we’ll discuss the best plan for your needs.