B2B Content Marketing in the Age of COVID-19: How to Leverage AI-Powered Content to Deliver Business Outcomes

Fact: B2B marketers are actively looking for content to engage with from potential business partners & brands. 87% of respondents surveyed by the CMO Council said that content has either a major or a moderate impact on their decision-making process. For B2B marketers, some of the biggest challenges are just finding these buyers and continuing to hold their attention.

B2B brands need a completely connected, non-siloed, full-funnel content marketing approach to drive awareness, consideration and business outcomes; in order to properly deliver optimized ROI from content marketing. This hurdle is even more critical for businesses to overcome in response to COVID-19: MarketingProfs recently noted that B2B marketers are also struggling to demonstrate a return on ad-spend, which has only magnified in its importance. This week we’re breaking down three easy steps B2B brands can take right now to successfully bring potential new customers down the funnel of consideration during the Coronavirus pandemic, and see real ROI from their content campaigns:

1. Focus on engagement, not clicks or impressions, to measure ROI and return on ad-spend.

Clicks and impressions are baseless metrics to evaluate whether or not your digital marketing strategy is working. This is a clear pain point for the industry, as 37% of B2B marketers recently said that measuring performance with content campaigns is one of their most significant challenges during COVID-19.  By using engagement as the standard to evaluate success with content marketing, it allows B2B businesses to gain a true understanding as to what content is resonating with their consumers, and when a pivot in content strategy is needed. inPowered’s technology is centered around moving this click-based economy into an ecosystem of engagement, as well as helping brands to understand that clicks or impressions won’t satisfy larger KPI’s. Our AI-powered platform scans each piece of content with distribution, testing thousands of variations of each piece of media to understand what audiences are spending the most time with. Additionally, focusing on engagement will allow B2B marketers to significantly cut costs with their marketing campaigns. We’ve seen with clients decrease their CPL from $4 to $1 by switching to an engagement-focused evaluation of content success; a significant money-saving strategy that’s sure to bring greater awareness and insight as to if content marketing campaigns are truly being effective.

2. Implement a “Call to Action” optimized by AI across each piece of content.

It’s simply not enough to post a piece of content and hope that the consumer will continue down their purchasing journey – how can B2B brands instill a sense of urgency and connection with their target clients? Answer: Calls to Action that are optimized by AI. inPowered’s artificial intelligence allows a CTA to be easily implemented on each piece of content and help consumers to take the next step in purchase/consideration. While we’ve typically seen this CTA being implemented around the 15s engagement mark (i.e. appearing after the consumer spends 15s reading or watching the content), our AI actually optimizes the time and placement for each campaign to ensure that the right call-to-action appears at the right time to engage & capture consumers. It’s important for marketers to utilize a CTA to stay aligned with where each piece of content fits into the consumer journey and ensure that it’s aligned with the logical next step for individuals to want to take. inPowered’s clients has averaged a next action CTR around 11% for B2B and financial brands, which is far superior to the industry standard benchmark of 2.55%.

3. Collect data to create a qualified 1^st-party audience and use for future retargeting efforts.

MarTech Series said it best – quality is far superior to quantity when it comes to capturing first party data for B2B marketers. Increasing data privacy regulations like CCPA & GDPR have only increased the need for brands to create their own data pools; not only to engage individuals who have shown a clear interest in taking the next step in their consumer journey, but also to retarget those who may not have made it to the bottom of the funnel. With efficient content amplification by inPowered, you will see a higher volume of qualified traffic coming in.  This leads to a larger cookie pool with more qualified audiences; and as a result, marketers can scale their existing retargeting tactics with more efficiency. On average, we’ve seen clients using our AI-powered retargeting efforts result in to 3 – 4x higher efficiency in comparison to previous content campaign benchmarks. The ways marketers acquire and use audience data is ever-evolving; but the need to focus on collecting first-party data into any successful content campaign will only strengthen.

Attracting – and keeping – the attention of busy B2B marketers may appear to be difficult: these individuals are elusive and are often turned off instantaneously with sales-y content campaigns. By using AI to amplify content that has been crafted to bring consumers down the funnel of consideration, inPowered’s B2B partners are finding success in overcoming this challenge and seeing long-term success with their content campaigns. eMarketer recently reported that in spite of COVID-19, B2B marketing is actually growing at a rate of 22.6% — why miss out on this golden opportunity to take your content strategy to new heights? When B2B businesses work with inPowered, we provide them with the data and intelligence needed to overcome this industry-wide struggle; so that our partners no longer have to wonder what is actually moving the needle. Don’t guess what’s working – KNOW it, and then use these data points to achieve tangible business outcomes with your B2B marketing campaigns.