The benefits of value-adding, informative B2B content for product sales

The average B2B buyer now consumes 13 pieces of content before deciding to buy. That’s up from seven pieces of B2B content just a few years ago. How can businesses make sure that they’re keeping their product front-of-mind during the long buying cycles of B2B commerce? One way that has proven increasingly effective is creating value-adding, informative content.

B2b content is great as a top-of-the-funnel conversion tactic but it also has a crucial role to play in moving customers further down the funnel, eventually helping close deals. Because content is so successful at conversion, the B2B sphere is now saturated. A quick scroll through your LinkedIn feed and you’re bound to see posts offering whitepapers, eBooks, and studies.

The level of content consumption is good news in the sense that users are still happy to interact with this type of marketing material. Giving potential customers valuable content helps close deals, but creating that content is a time- and labor-intensive process, especially for small businesses.

To help you start or increase content creation we’re going to look at some of the most tried and tested formats and offer you some top tips.

Whitepapers are a great way to start or join a conversation in your industry. They’re an effective method of demonstrating thought leadership and they help to build brand trust. If your research and opinions can be trusted there’s a good chance your product or service can be as well.

Whitepapers should be a couple thousand words long and include visuals throughout. The best ones are based on original research and statistics but it’s perfectly ok to reference multiple sources.

Concentrate on strong section titles and summaries as readers will often treat whitepapers like blog posts and will only skim read. Bullet points, lists, and visualized data are a whitepaper’s best friends.

Top tip: Unless necessary for the subject of the whitepaper, avoid adding dates to keep content relevant and ever-green

Sometimes called success stories or customer testimonials, case studies are all about showcasing your product or service as it’s used by customers. Usually, a customer with a recognizable brand is asked to give their experience of being a customer. The best ones contain extensive quotes from the customers and the story of why they chose a certain business or product. Check out some Shuup client case studies.

Top tip: The best case studies use data to show how the company in question improved—whether that’s increased sales, efficicies etc. Highlighting data also makes it far easier for you to share the case study on social media e.g. “Company X increased sales by 14% by implementing Product Y.”

Video is pretty much a must-have for B2B companies. Use it to add a different way of educating potential buyers about your product’s features, functionalities, and benefits.

Video testimonials are an effective alternative to case studies. Seeing a real person talk about how a product or service has improved their own business is far more powerful than reading about it. Video b2b content is also far more shareable.

Top tip: Has a prospect reached the end of the sales cadence and there’s no hope of him or her scheduling that demo? Record a three or four minute version of your demo and embed it on a landing page, add calls-to-action (CTAs), and send the link.

At this point you might be wondering how you get all of this content in front of a prospect? Well, that’s email’s job. Email should be a central component when it comes to nurturing leads.

The best way is to create automated email workflows based on user behavior, funnel stage, buyer persona etc. You can set up simple automated campaigns in Shuup or integrate third-party tools like MailChimp.

Top tip: Send personalized video message email from your sales team (or you!) using Vidyard. It’s easy to ignore an email, much harder to ignore someone when they’ve put a face to the name.

A lot of people won’t have the time or the inclination to read your whitepapers or case studies but they’re still interested in learning about the important details of your product or service.

Create a one-pager (it can be two pages at most) and include: social proof, customer logos, data points demonstrating how your business can help them, the main standout features of your product (with links to relevant pages), and a simple pricing chart.

Top tip: Embed a clickable tracking link into the PDF to direct users to specific pages such as free trial or directly to a category or product page.

We’d suggest investing in creating a mixture of b2b ecommerce content types and testing them out. You can analyze your funnel and behavior flow to see what’s working and what isn’t in your Shuup Store. Once you’ve got enough data you can start replicating the kind of content that’s working for you.