Top B2B Content Marketing Trends for 2018

There’s no doubt about why marketers and business owners are in love with content marketing – it generates 3x as many leads as outbound marketing and it’s 62% cheaper. However, content has changed its shape and form many times over the years.

As content marketing keeps evolving, there are new movements popping up and shaping the B2B marketing landscape. Here are some of the major B2B content marketing trends, and what you can do to jump aboard on time.

B2B is becoming more like B2C :

All the way back in 2013, HubSpot beautifully outlined the differences between B2B and B2C marketing. However, as times goes by, the lines are getting blurrier, and B2B content marketing is increasingly starting to look like B2C.

The first aspect where we can see this change is in the personalization of marketing approaches. No longer will it be enough to have the same message going throughout the sales funnel – and get as many leads as before using the same content.

Instead, even B2B companies are now working on creating customized content aiming at the right customers, at the right moment. Of course, this goes beyond blog posts, to landing pages, calls to action, content upgrades, email campaigns and much more.

To get with the times, simply think of B2B customers as individual buyers you need to woo, each step of buyer’s journey – and then create content that helps nudge them along the way.

More money will be spent (in some parts of the globe) :

Every other month or so, there seems to be a voice from the crowd stating that content marketing is dead. That content no longer serves its purpose and that the ROI is hard to prove. You would imagine that businesses all over the globe would be switching to more profitable marketing channels.

However, nothing could be further from the truth. According to Statista, companies in Europe spent about 740 million euros on content marketing in 2014. By 2020, that figure is predicted to rise to 2.12 billion euros – that’s a fact that’s hard to beat.

On the other side of the world, things are slightly different. According to the latest stats by the Content Marketing Institute, for 46% of companies in the Northern USA, their content marketing budgets in the next 12 months will remain the same. Moreover, 38% of businesses intend to increase their budgets for the upcoming year.

Does this mean that the USA market is saturated with content as a marketing channel? Most likely not – it just means that Europe is catching up.

You’ll write more :

B2C content marketers have known this for a while – long-form content wins. In the everlasting battle of quality vs. quantity, B2B brands have often settled for short, 500-words blogs that barely held anyone’s attention.

As backed by data (and Neil Patel – who knows a thing or two about marketing), long-form content simply performs better. As confirmed by Neil and many other sources, there are multiple benefits to longer content, such as…

–        More organic traffic

–        More backlinks

–        Longer sessions

–        Higher conversions

–        More social shares

Put simply, you’ll have to write more – perhaps not more often, but your content will need to be more in-depth. When choosing between four 500-word posts or one 2000-word post, go for the latter.

Conclusion :

One thing is for certain – content marketing is not going anywhere any time soon. And with the B2B world catching up and creating new trends, it will be interesting to watch what the years ahead of us bring to the world of content.