Business-to-business (B2B) marketers are well aware of writer’s block, based on March 2015 research by Kapost. Among B2B marketers in North America, nearly four in 10 said it was difficult or somewhat difficult to come up with ideas for content marketing, and half said they didn’t have enough ideas to fuel such efforts.
Everyone needs help when one considers that B2B content marketers polled estimated they needed 67 ideas per quarter to be successful.
To get you started — or re-started — with your content marketing, we’ve compiled a list of 44 B2B content marketing ideas. Not all of these will work for every company, so feel free to choose the the ones you like and get started blogging!
Lots of content marketing ideas for B2B companies
Blogging
- Need a quick start? Blog about writing. Or write about blogging. These two are NOT the same.
- Write about other bloggers’ best posts.
- Write about your area of expertise.
- Write a Do/Don’t list, and fill it with unique examples of best/worst practices.
- Use the slides from your most recent presentation and expand upon the topic. (This might turn into a series of blog posts!)
- Record a short video interview with someone in your company.
- Pull the statistics from an older presentation and turn iy into a list of tweetable stats. Or head over to Slideshare.com and create a compilation of stats for your industry.
- Showcase an in-depth case study of one company that’s using your product or service to illustrate your knowledge and indirectly provide a third-party testimonial.
- Ask one of your employees to write a “day-in the-life” post, describing what they do in their position.
- Interview your sales team to find the 17 most frequently asked questions (and their answers). This easily turns into 17 blog posts and a follow-up ebook!
- Break the news. Surely your company has some news this week?
- Write a tutorial.
- Create lists of things to do, not to do, include, not to include, or things to try.
- Write an opinion piece. Or take a contrarian view to another blogger’s opinion.
- Do an interview with a leader in your industry.
- Interview a customer.
- Have someone interview you.
- Create a summary of a webinar’s key takeaways; use a past webinar or search slideshare for some ideas.
- Poll your readers on a topic and post the results.
- Write a post about what’s being done wrong (in your industry) and how to correct it.
- Create a long list of tips for your industry or customers.
- Write Part 2 for any of your posts that are extremely popular.
- Write something to inspire and motivate your readers.
- Create a short, funny video that makes a point. Post it on YouTube.
- Invite readers or leaders in your industry to guest post for you.
- Check out your competitor’s archives to find topics you can write about.
- Create a list of your best posts.
- Create a how-to list for your customers.
- Take one of the how-to items and post about it in detail.
- While at a live event, video an interview with someone.
- Assign a theme to a particular day of the week and post about that theme weekly.
- Find one or multiple partners and launch a content marketing project together.
- Find at least three thought leaders in your organization and have a panel discussion about a topic that they are all experts in. Turn this discussion into a blog post (and consider making it an ebook, too).
- Start a training series of posts, or a [topic] 101 series.
- Turn your white papers into infographics. Take this one step further and turn your white paper content into a video series.
- Use Google Alerts to identify various conversations happening across the web that are related to the product or service you offer. Instead of posting a very insincere one-line comment and dropping a link to your website in the comments section, consider creating a blog post (or video) that summarizes the discussion taking place, then provide your own solution to any problems discussed. Remember to give credit to the original source in your blog post.
- Identify popular discussions related to your industry. Write down any questions you find in those discussions that your product or service can help solve. Develop blog posts, videos, infographics, or even webinars that address those problems.
Ebooks
- Create a 10 Best Practices for [your industry or topic] (this could then be broken down into 10 blog posts.)
- Write a Checklist for Evaluating [your product or topic]
- Write an Introduction to [your product or topic]
- Pick a different topic and write another Introduction to it.
- Write a 9 Mistakes to Avoid When Buying [your product or topic] ebook.
- Create a 50 [your industry or topic] Statistics for Better Decision Making ebook.
- Curate a [number] [your industry or topic] Experts Share Their Insights ebook. These are a lot of fun to put together and make a great offer (or a series of blog posts).
This list won’t make the process of creating create content any easier — but it sure beats looking at a black screen and trying to figure out what to write about!
And if you’re not Inbound Marketing Certified, you should seriously consider spending the time to get certified. And make sure all the marketers on your team are certified, too.
The Inbound Marketing Certification is a comprehensive marketing course that covers the core elements of the inbound methodology. The self-paced curriculum introduces the fundamentals of how to attract visitors, convert leads, close customers, and delight customers into promoters.
