At its most basic, B2B content marketing is about creating and sharing relevant and valuable information with your target audience to engage with them and drive sales. In today’s info-saturated world however, this is not the easiest task. It requires delivering quality content consistently across numerous channels that address a B2B prospect’s interests, needs and problems with the goal of building trust and credibility, eventually transforming that prospect into a paying customer.

Many enterprises are currently facing what can be called a content marketing conundrum. Once you build a content marketing strategy that adds value to your business, you need to keep that content machine running continuously, standing out from the crowd in quality to stay successful. What does that take? This requires businesses to publish for instance from 3–5 new and updated posts per week on a company blog according to Hubspot.

Whether an SMB or a large enterprise, the next question is how does one meet these intensive content standards? This requires manpower, money, and time. For in-house content, you need to hire staff that know the product and the industry, and constantly builds on their ideas and expertise. Sourcing talent like this doesn’t happen instantly, is not cheap, and often when you do have the staff, the content marketing can take them away from core day-to-day business functions.

Therefore, the answer often is to outsource content. There are several factors, however, to take into account when deciding whether to outsource content creation or keep it in-house and these pros and cons need to be weighed-up depending on business needs.

Creating content in-house:

There are both pros and cons to charging your in house marketing team with content creation, should you have the necessary talent and resources available – designers, content writers, SEO specialists and the list goes on.

An in-house solution could be to invest in a qualified, dedicated content team that can establish authority and build the brand. But this can take years to become an effective source of content, and can be costly, as you need to pay your internal content-writing staff salaries, instead of by project hour. In the short term, or when your need results quickly, the in-house option can be limiting.

The Pros:

• Control – Producing content in-house allows for more control over your content strategy, the writers you work with, and the quality results they deliver.
• Convenience – Presumably, those that know your brand best are in-house.  The flow of communication among an internal content staff can also be easier.
• Knowledge growth – Your content team will not have all the quality from the get-go, so the skills and expertise of your staff will grow the more content they produce, which will benefit a long–term content strategy. If you have the significant resources and time for this, this will support a long-term content marketing strategy.

The Cons:

• Time – According to a study by Ragan, a 1000-word blog post can take approximately 4-8 hours. As mentioned earlier, keeping the content machine running consistently with 3-5 posts a week, for many enterprises takes more time than they can afford internally.
• Resource Intensive – Time spent researching, writing, reviewing, publishing, and promoting content is less manpower focused on the core business, such as focusing on strategy, generating new marketing ideas, learning trends, and engaging with your customers. Also, having to hire content creators full-time, aside from the elevated cost, also limits flexibility and may not be the most efficient way to scale.
• Limited Expertise – Just because you have the expert on your product and customers in-house, doesn’t mean for example that writer is also a SEO expert. Or that their perspective and knowledge captures the latest and most relevant industry trends or have extensive insights on the competition. There could also be a risk in bias, not to mention a lack of diversity by limiting content creation internally. And this could impact content quality too.

Outsourcing B2B content creation:

According to a 2022 B2B Benchmark report by Content Marketing Institute, 57% of the most successful content marketers outsource content, while half of all B2B marketers outsource at least one content marketing activity. Outsourced content creators and agencies don’t have to replace your in-house team, rather they should be used to support them and enhance your strategy.

The Pros:

• Quality – If you outsource your content, you are dealing with professionals that produce quality content. It’s their bread and butter. These content teams have expertise in your industry, in SEO, in multiple forms of content for a variety of audiences, mainly because their business reputation depends on it.
• Fresh Perspective – Outsourcing content creation introduces a valuable dimension of fresh perspective to the work. External content creators, unburdened by internal company dynamics or biases, often bring a novel and unbiased viewpoint to the table. This external lens can inject creativity, diversity, and innovative ideas into the content, offering a unique and engaging perspective that might be challenging to achieve solely through an in-house team.
• Consistency – Outsourced content pros focus only on content and quantity. They are not focused on other business activities like your internal staff are. They work on a project basis with a budget and meet accelerated delivery times. This allows for ongoing consistency in meeting your content targets.
• Cost-Effectiveness – As mentioned earlier, in-house content writers are more expensive than hiring outsourced professionals to write. You don’t have to pay taxes, benefits, or social security. While the hourly rate for outsourced content writing is higher, you set the budget up front for the content that’s produced in much less time.
• Scalability – If you need more content for a special campaign or to confront a branding opportunity or emergency, you can scale much more effectively via outsourcing. This flexibility also allows you to experiment with different perspectives and expertise in the field. And if strategy changes, and you need to reduce content for a set amount of time, this is easier to manage through outsourcing.

The Cons:

• Control – When outsourcing, there can be some miscommunications along the way. While this can happen with in-house content writers as well, externally there is greater sense of lack of control.
• Confidentiality – Sharing sensitive company information with third-parties has its risks. There could be leaks to the competition or cybersecurity breaches outside your enterprise that can cause significant damage to your content strategy. However, contracting quality content creators with a solid reputation will limit these risks.

Content Creatr by BNZSA

Content Creatr by BNZSA provides companies with the resources they need to create high quality content at scale. We are specialists in the tech industry and have proven results in turning content projects around quickly and with the highest quality for top clients in the tech field.

From social media advertising and email nurture tracks, to longer form content such as whitepapers or in-depth webinars, our team of content writers, graphic designers and videographers are on hand to create bespoke and engaging content that will land your messaging with your target audience. We help you in building brand awareness, establishing credibility through consistency, and driving sales.

Learn more about BNZSA’s digital and content services.

In an increasingly digital first B2B world, companies looking to expand their total addressable market and connect with the right decision makers can reap the benefits of integrating digital awareness campaigns into their outreach programmes.

From programmatic advertising, paid media, and email nurture there are many options for companies to boost awareness and engagement with their brand digitally. When integrated correctly, focused digital awareness campaigns can be integral towards achieving specific goals throughout the sales cycle.

Digital marketing challenges for B2B marketers:

Digital can be hard to get right, especially in the B2B space and 39% of B2B marketers say that one of their biggest challenges is balancing traditional and digital marketing channels.

The digital space is a highly saturated environment as people are inundated with content whether it be in their social feeds or email inbox. This puts the pressure on for B2B marketers to stand out and be relevant to their customers’ needs in order to break through the noise and grab their attention.

Additionally, whilst digital activity encompasses a wide range of actions and platforms, businesses can risk spreading their marketing resources thin trying to cover all their bases on each platform. However, the most effective strategies for digital outreach are focused on matching the right audience to the right message on the right platform at the right time.

Steps for successful digital outreach:

Before launching your digital campaign, it’s key to take the time to determine your strategy and complete the following steps:

1. Position your brand: The most important questions you should be able to answer are: How is your product different from other brands? How does it solve your customer’s problems? Determining and communicating your unique selling proposition (USP) is key to raising awareness of your brand.
2. Identify your target audience: Once you have established what your USP is, you need to know who you need to speak to and who is going to buy your product, so you can understand their potential needs and pain points. Typically, the ideal customer profile (ICP) in B2B will be decision makers and influencers within your target market. E.g., IT Managers if you’re selling IT hardware.  
3. Segment your market: Different messaging will resonate with different profiles within your target market. Dividing your outreach by vertical, job title, management level will help you to tailor your messaging based on different needs and expectations of the different groups.
4. Understand your competitors: By researching your competitors you can better understand the current market landscape. This will help you build your messaging to differentiate your product or service. It is also an opportunity to identify any gaps where your offering can be improved to address more niche problems that are not being solved by you or your competitors.   
5. Integrate your online and offline outreach: Although digital is highly important in building brand awareness and trust, people still like to buy from people. So, if you don’t have BDR and SDR resources in place to add a human touch to your outreach, it’s harder to convert your clicks and impressions to closed revenue.  

Digital marketing strategies:

There are different aspects of digital marketing that can be included in your strategy. It’s important to tailor your approach and choose the best communication channel to connect with your ICP to maximise budget spending.  

1. Content Marketing: This focuses on customer education rather than direct sales by creating informative long form content such as blogs, whitepapers, and articles. Content Marketing is an opportunity to use thought leadership as a way to attract potential customers.
2. Email Marketing: Incorporating email marketing allows you to build a more direct relationship with your prospect. Emails can be used to follow up content marketing strategies, provide prospects with regular updates about your product or service or to nurture middle of the funnel leads. It’s important to use segmentation so your message lands with the right people at the right time.
3. Paid Social: Social media platforms such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter are invaluable when trying to reach a large audience. While you can push content organically on these platforms, paid advertising ensures your campaign will be seen. Social media ads are typically very visual which can help familiarize your audience with your brand even more.
4. Programmatic advertising: This method involves the use of automated systems to purchase and display ads across various digital platforms. Programmatic advertising is a highly targeted approach that ensures your message reaches the right audience at the right time. By using real-time data and algorithms, you can optimize your ad placements for maximum efficiency.

Benefits of digital awareness campaigns:

1. Building trust and thought leadership: Digital awareness campaigns, particularly content marketing, provide an opportunity to position your brand as a thought leader in your industry. By offering valuable, informative content, you build trust with your audience and establish yourself as an authority, which can lead to long-term customer relationships.
2. Expanded reach and visibility: By using various digital platform you can reach a diverse audience, including prospects who you may not have been able to connect with via traditional channels. With the right strategy you can land your messaging in your target markets.
3. Enhanced customer understanding: Digital marketing gives fantastic metrics that can not only demonstrate the value of the marketing team’s hard work, but also give you valuable insight into what your prospects are interested in and their behaviour.
4. Data driven insights: Once you gather your metrics and insights, these can be applied to optimizations of your campaigns to improve your strategy and boost awareness even further amongst your target audience.
5. Improved customer experience: By engaging with your audience through various digital channels, you can provide a more personalized and responsive customer experience. Responding to inquiries, addressing concerns, and offering timely support fosters a positive relationship between your brand and your customers.
6. Enhanced lead generation: When integrated correctly, focused digital campaigns can be integral towards achieving specific goals throughout the sales cycle. When digital campaigns are run simultaneously with a complete BDR outreach strategy, this can aid customer education, identify in-market customers, warm up and nurture leads to push them through the funnel and optimise pipeline.

Unchain your growth with BNZSA’s Digital Awareness services:

BNZSA has recently launched its new and improved digital services to help our clients get in front of their customers and build brand awareness. The new offering consists of three different packages (Curious Minds, Restless Brain, and Stellar Executors) which build from early stages of awareness to high-level visibility and reach.

Our specialisation in the tech market gives us a unique expertise to build campaigns with a B2B focused approach. Additionally, our extensive experience in telemarketing allows us to offer integrated campaigns that mix digital and telemarketing outreach.

Additionally BNZSA inTNT, our newest intent data solution offers enhanced human and AI verified, digital activation to generate compliant leads while also boosting brand awareness.

To learn more about our Digital Awareness packages, get in touch today.

As we head into Q3 2023, businesses are still facing uncertain economic conditions due to the cumulative effects of adverse events over the past three years – most notably the Covid-19 pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. This has had a negative knock-on effect across multiple industries, and even the tech sector has not been immune to cutbacks and mass job cuts.

Layoffs in the tech industry were mostly due in part to inflated hiring in the early days of the pandemic which saw an increased demand for hardware and software products and services as companies frantically tried to adjust their infrastructure to accommodate remote working conditions. This demand has eventually stabilized, leaving a surplus of workers within the industry who have been laid off in an effort to counteract soaring expenses and reduced profits.

Despite inflation remaining high, falling energy prices and improved global supply chains are signaling that the economy is slowly stabilizing. A cautious optimism is growing about the outlook of economic conditions according to McKinsey & Company as 48% of respondents in a recent survey had a positive outlook on conditions now compared to 6 months ago – the highest figure since June 2022.

Largely as a result of job cuts that continued into Q1 and Q2, companies had to overcome slower sales cycles with reduced sales teams which only adds to the pressure on staff to bring in new business.

Now, many commentators are predicting that it is vital for companies to build on this momentum of recovery by optimizing their sales outreach in Q3 and build a strong pipeline for Q4 to end the year on a positive note.

Igniting the lead gen universe

Companies often invest in resources and do a lot of work to map out their addressable market, identify their Ideal Customer Profile and build a database of relevant contacts. But how can you get started and ignite sales pipeline?
Gaining clear user consent among your target audience is perhaps the first priority. From here you can get the ball rolling and start building brand awareness, identifying in-market customers and aiding customer education on complex products.

This can be done in different ways:

Programmatic advertising:

By using intent data to determine purchasing intent and define audiences, programmatic advertising can be used to target prospects with specific messaging depending on where they fall in the purchasing cycle. The ads can be used to drive decision makers to specialized landing pages where they can not only access curated content to educate themselves on the product or service, but it is also an opportunity for them to digitally opt-in by using gated content.

BDR outreach:

Due to GDPR and other privacy regulations, gaining clear consent from your prospects is non-negotiable. Phone outreach is one of the most straight forward ways to achieve verbal consent. However, it also gives BDRs the opportunity to gain further insights such as confirming job titles, contact details and identifying other key stakeholders in the purchasing process, information that is invaluable for follow-up activity. BNZSA’s Consent Buildr removes the uncertainty of compliance as our team of BDRs gain the prospects consent on our clients’ behalf via phone.

Engaging prospects with the right message at the right time

Once you gain compliant consent, you can reinforce your outreach and engage your prospects with relevant content at the right time when you have identified they are in market or have a need for a particular product or service. In order to create a meaningful engagement with your prospects and generate a reliable pipeline, you need to understand their needs and pain points. More than ever prospects want to see that the sales agent reaching out to them not only understands their needs, but also their role in the purchasing process.

Content marketing:

Companies often find that prospects can get stuck in the middle of funnel without ever converting. Targeted content marketing using strategies such as programmatic advertising and email nurturing can help direct prospects to specially curated content hubs where they can self-serve content and further familiarize themselves about your products and services.
In particular email marketing can be a valuable strategy to drive prospects through the funnel as more and more, decision makers prefer to be contacted via email, (66% according to LinkedIn’s State of Sales Report 2022), and more importantly they expect a heavily personalized message to show that the sales rep truly understands what they want and what they need.

BDR activity:

Digital activity is a valuable tool in generating consented contacts, however it can be difficult to determine where in the buying journey they currently are. It’s necessary to filter through and determine which prospects are hotter opportunities by verifying interest. Intent data and digital activity can generate valuable insights for BDRs to personalize their messaging whether their outreach is via phone, social media, or email.
BNZSA’s Lead Verifyr service helps cut through the noise of digitally generated leads gaining valuable insights such as confirming intent and identifying buying committees.

Seal the deal and close top opportunities

By using Q3 to build momentum and engage with prospects, you can build a strong pipeline with opportunities more likely to close in Q4 as companies distribute remaining budgets for the rest of the year.

For companies who are struggling to build momentum in their pipeline generation efforts, BNZSA’s BDR and SDR Sales-as-a-Service offering can reinforce and support existing sales teams. Our teams of BDRs and SDRs not only give support for pipeline generation, but our SDR-Sales-as-a-Service model allows you to avail of SDRs who act as a full-time sales resource who handle the deal throughout the entire sales cycle.

BDR-as-a-Service:

A comprehensive solution designed to augment your in-house BDR team's capabilities. Our service provides immediate resources and multilingual support in 26 languages, ensuring the generation of credible and compliant opportunities at a more advanced stage in the sales cycle. Our skilled BDRs excel at account profiling, following up on digital interactions, lead qualification, and identifying key decision makers and buying committees, gaining valuable insights through their conversations.
When a prospect is identified as a sales-ready opportunity, we facilitate a Warm Handover^TM call, where our BDR acts as a bridge between the prospect and the client in a three-way call. BDRs are available on a time-based leasing model and can operate with a client email, making calls on behalf of the client. We recommend providing training on the product or service to our BDRs before they start engaging with prospects.

SDR-as-a-Service:

Similar to the BDR-as-a-Service model, the SDR-as-a-Service offering provides our clients with an SDR who serves as a dedicated full-time sales resource.
The primary distinction between the BDR and SDR models lies in the scope of responsibilities. In the SDR model, our skilled representatives handle the entire sales cycle, from lead generation to closing sales and driving revenue. We collaborate with clients to create a strategic partnership, agreeing on a commission structure that aligns with mutual goals and objectives.