B2B Content Marketing: Writing Articles To Promote Your Business

If you compare digital marketing to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, article marketing would be somewhere at the top. Where a client gets to your website, it’s well optimized and has a lot of quality content. At this point, you’ve already tried contextual advertising and targeting, which means you’ve already covered all of your ‘basic needs’. That’s when the next phase needs to get underway. It’s hard to work with external resources (we don’t mean link exchanges, copying other people’s materials, or other ‘gray’ methods of getting publications and links). But you can get completely next-level results.

“Content marketing is a form of marketing focused on creating, publishing, and distributing content for a targeted audience online,” according to Wikipedia. Article marketing, as an integral part of content marketing, includes writing articles to promote your business, optimizing them with particular search queries, including backlinks, and publishing them on popular topic-specific websites and platforms.

Why is content marketing important for B2B?

B2B content marketing has a ton of advantages. The first of them is generating PR for your company (increasing brand recognition). Secondly, it helps you get traffic and orders from publications. Thirdly, writing articles to promote your business is a proven method of improving your website’s search engine ranking. All of this happens because:

• These articles are not perceived by readers as advertisements. They don’t stand out from the rest of the website’s content, which is why they read these articles to the end.
• Readers comment on the articles more willingly and share them on social media.
• For search systems, this kind of activity (mentioning the brand, links to the website, good behavioral factors) is a clear sign that the website is popular and trusted by users.

An example of B2B content marketing

We’ll explain how writing articles can promote your business using an Alconost client as an example. The case is especially interesting because the work had to be conducted in several countries, meaning the promotion was multilingual.

The owner of the website (a well-known platform in its own niche) contacted us with a pretty complex job. They were willing to pay us to find a way to get free publications on industry-specific news websites. Paid publications were out of the question because the articles had to look as natural as possible in the newsfeed without any ‘affiliate content’ labels. The task was made even more difficult by the fact that it had to be done in countries located in Western and Eastern Europe, as well as Asia.

If you’ve ever tried to publish your articles in major media outlets, you may know how difficult it is. Difficult but still possible. One just needs to find a contact person who can affect editorial decisions (either an editor or a journalist covering the subject) and produce a unique and relevant story. Our client had a newsworthy case, which helped us a lot when holding negotiations with editorial boards.

We won’t go too much into detail about the process. We already described this in our case study about promoting cryptocurrency websites in articles. But here’s what we’d like to focus on: the material published has worked in several ways:

• Informational. It was, first and foremost, an announcement about a service update.
• Advertising. Say what you will, but it was perfectly concealed website PR.
• Promotion. Backlinks embedded in the article positively affected the positions leading to various pages of the client’s websites from thematic sources.

So we hit two birds with one stone with one article in multiple locales. Needless to say, the expenses for promoting the website made a return on investment multiple times over.

How to use B2B content marketing in multiple languages

Some may think that working in multiple languages complicates things and makes website promotion via articles costly. After all, you need unique content in different languages, new agreements, an understanding of a different mentality, etc.

But that’s not quite the case. We don’t write separate articles for each and every market. There’s no need to do that, especially if there’s only one news story. We also don’t do a rough translation because the translated article could look like a calque. Transcreation works great for article marketing. A native speaker, someone from the target audience, translates, optimizes, and adapts the source text in one go. This method eliminates the need to duplicate the article since the reworked text looks completely different from the original.

With an article being published in one country, it’s way easier to negotiate publication in other countries, especially when we’re talking about an international network of media outlets and their regional branches.

It’s better to work on marketing a website with articles in a centralized way — i.e., through transcreation, agreements, and approvals — because everything will be taken care of altogether.

The less obvious benefits of B2B content marketing

In addition to improving your website’s ranking and brand recognition, article marketing can also help:

• Increase website visitors with highly-targeted traffic;
• Increase sales through greater visibility and traffic;
• Reduce marketing costs. Unlike contextual ads that require constant investments and have short-term effects, content marketing and other SEO promotion methods yield strong, long-term results without additional expenses.

It’s true that it may sometimes be easier to launch contextual ads and get a quick traffic boost to your website. And yes, some may find it easier to buy links on markets and pray Google won’t ban the whole project. It’s also true that it may be easier to pay for promotional articles and not to bother with writing an engaging text. But you’ve probably already tried all that, right? So, maybe it’s high time to try something new and invest in the content.