7 reasons why content marketing is important for B2B

In practice:

One of our clients came to us frustrated by rising ad costs and disappointing returns. They had relied heavily on paid campaigns to generate leads, but they were stuck spending more and more just to stand still.

We knew the right content marketing approach could help break that cycle and save them time and money — here’s how we did it:

• Optimized what they already had: Instead of producing endless new blogs, we ran an audit on their existing content. We removed or redirected pages and blogs that were underperforming or redundant, and updated others to target the right keywords. Those quick fixes helped immediately improve their SEO without adding more work to their already stretched team. 

• Targeted unique audiences: We identified that competitors were overlooking a valuable customer segment, so we developed a content strategy specifically targeting this underserved audience. This meant more traffic from an audience that was ready to spend more.

• Built content clusters to boost authority: We developed a series of connected blogs around key topics their prospects were searching for. This approach, based on our Content Branching Framework, helped establish topical authority and made it easier for search engines and AI models to understand their site. Plus, they helped guide potential clients through the decision-making process step by step.

• Cut reliance on paid ads: Within 12 months, their organic traffic had grown significantly, allowing them to scale back on ad spend by nearly 90%. Instead of paying for every click, their content now works in the background to consistently bring in new leads. 

The result? A more efficient marketing engine that saves time, reduces costs, and helps them attract their dream clients.

In practice: 

Let’s imagine you’re a 10-person SaaS company that offers a leading hiring software to help businesses streamline their recruitment. Your target audience includes tech startups and fast-growing companies looking for scalable, structured hiring processes. 

You’ve come to Scribly for guidance on content marketing.

To create a B2B content marketing strategy that benefits your SEO, we’ll:

• Audit your existing content to understand how well your current website performs organically

• Conduct a competitor analysis to determine where you stand in your industry (and how we can help you dominate!)

• Develop a keyword strategy using our proven Middle Ground Keyword Framework to ensure you’re ranking for keywords your target audience is actually searching for

• Develop a comprehensive content strategy mapped to buyer search intent at every stage of the sales funnel

In practice:

At Scribly, we develop a content strategy unique to your business goals and map it to buyer search intent and prospects' key pain points.

Let’s say your target audience is struggling to hire top talent — they keep losing out to bigger companies with stronger brand recognition and higher salaries. 

Based on this pain point, your audience might be interested in learning more about how to attract top talent or what benefits top candidates look for in a job.

To confirm that these topics are relevant to your audience, we’ll search for related keywords, ensuring they have search volume and match search intent. Example keywords include “attracting top talent,” “how to attract top talent,” and “attract top talent.” 

Then, we’ll write an SEO-optimized blog called How to attract top talent to your startup (and compete with bigger companies) to address the identified pain point.

Of course, the blog will follow all SEO best practices to help it rank highly in SERPs and get as many impressions — meaning a user has seen a link to your site in Google Search, Discover, or News — as possible, helping to increase your brand awareness. 

In practice: 

Beyond writing product-focused blogs, our goal is to build your industry credibility. So, as part of your B2B content strategy, we’ll write thought leadership blogs that tackle real hiring challenges your target audience is struggling with (remember those pain points we mentioned earlier?) 

We’ll address sensitive HR topics like hiring biases — not just in theory but with actionable strategies and real-world examples from other startups, so the content is as relatable as possible.

These customer-centric guides help your target audience improve their own hiring processes, whether they use your SaaS company’s app or not. 

By consistently providing valuable insights without a sales pitch, we help establish your business as a trusted industry expert. Over time, this credibility fosters stronger relationships with potential customers, making them more likely to turn to your solution when they're ready to invest in new tools.

In practice:

Remember the How to attract top talent to your startup (and compete with bigger companies) blog we wrote earlier? We know it’s relevant because it addresses your target audience's pain point. Let’s also assume it ranks on page one of SERPs. Now, our goal is to get users to click through to the blog, turning impressions into site traffic. 

Here, we’ll ensure the blog’s meta description has a compelling call-to-action (CTA) to encourage users to click through from SERPs, something like “Struggling to attract top talent for your startup? Learn to compete with big companies by leveraging smart hiring strategies and showcasing your unique offering.”

Then, we’ll keep users who click through engaged. We structure the copy well and make it visually pleasing. (All thanks to those SEO best practices we mentioned earlier). We want your content to not just drive traffic, but engaged traffic.

In practice:

At Scribly, we design content marketing B2B lead generation strategies to move customers down the sales funnel.

Part of mapping their pain points is identifying their thought process and obstacles at each stage of the buying process. That’s why some blogs are more informational and aim to increase brand awareness, while other blogs are more conversion-led and aim to turn leads into clients.

For example, your prospective clients might take five key phases to move from awareness to action. 

1. Researching all possible solutions: Your target audience is wondering how to hire effectively on a low budget. So, we’ll write a blog like How to hire top talent to your startup (without a big budget). Because it matches their search intent and pain points, your target audience reads the blogs and discovers that hiring software might be an effective and affordable way to find top talent. 

2. Considering hiring software as a solution: Now, your target audience wants to better understand what recruitment software is, how it works, why it’s useful for startups, how much it might cost, and more. So, we’ll create a series of blogs that respond to these key questions, including 10 benefits of recruitment software for startups and budget-conscious companies. Again, let’s assume that after reading this blog series, your target audience decides that using hiring software is the right decision for their business. 

3. Comparing hiring software: Now, they’re actively looking for and comparing different hiring software. To reach your target audience at this stage, we’ll create comparison guides like 15 best hiring software for startups to help them narrow down their selection (and look at your app as a serious option.) 

4. Considering your hiring software: Your target audience is considering buying your software, but they need proof that it works. Case studies and customer testimonials are really important here. We can help make these impactful, engaging, and user-friendly.

5. Converting: Your target audience is ready to convert — they just need the right push. That’s why we ensure all key conversion pages have clear CTAs that align with the action you want them to take, whether that’s “book a demo” or “sign up for a free trial.” We also help optimize your sign-up process to ensure they complete the action. 

In practice:

As an SEO-focused B2B content marketing agency, our primary goal is to help your website rank at the top of the SERPs. However, we also know that content isn’t limited to Google. That’s why we repurpose a lot of web and blog content for other marketing channels to help you reach your target audience in more ways.

Let’s say the startups you’re targeting are highly active on LinkedIn. It’s where they promote their own business and achievements — so we’ll want to promote yours there, too.

To help build your industry authority, we’ll repurpose thought leadership blogs into concise LinkedIn carousels. To demonstrate the effectiveness of your software, we’ll turn case studies into infographics. We’ll also repost customer testimonials as social proof to build trust and credibility with potential clients.