Content marketing is transforming; it has more depth and uniqueness. To demonstrate, we have handpicked four brands that reflect and represent this change.
Reports suggest that leads generated from inbound marketing channels, particularly content marketing, have high conversion rates.
While this might be true, let’s not forget the patience and consistency content marketing truly requires. It could have ample benefits for your business and still demand needle-like focus and all hands on deck.
Each nitty-gritty in content marketing must be paid attention to. Without correct ingredients and much-needed cohesion between them, your efforts will likely pack no punch. Whether it’s content development, distribution, or performance reviews.
Where do most marketers miss the mark? Each piece must have intent, purpose, resonance, and relevance to perform its best.
Most marketers overlook these factors because they believe marketing content is merely about content production and publishing it. The intricacies are either unaddressed or barely touched upon.
This minimizes your content’s performance from the get-go. Of course, it fails.
Marketers must move from the bottom up –
What is Content Marketing?
Salesforce defines it as:
“Content marketing is a marketing channel through which businesses create and distribute valuable and engaging content, articles, social media posts, videos, podcasts, or other types.”
But its true essence? Building a connection with your target audience and offering them value in a way that doesn’t encroach on their space.
There’s no rulebook for content marketing, just morsels that marketers often brush off. All because it isn’t included in their traditional content playbooks.
The truth is that you recognize unique and engaging content when you see it. It’s all in how the piece speaks to its audience – entertaining, engaging, and inspiring to take action.
Your content doesn’t have to make sense to everyone, but it must prove impactful for the right bunch. Through this, you’re building your credibility and elevating visibility.
It’s the key to effective and strong content marketing: focusing on what your audience would want to see and hear, and making them feel heard indirectly. You’re recognizing basic pain points even before potential customers have entered the funnel.
And in the long term, this establishes your brand as the thought leader and subject matter expert.
This leaves a silent trail of breadcrumbs. When prospects feel seen, they are highly likely to come knocking at your door, seeking answers and solutions.
A win-win situation.
Given the successes that consistent content marketing can afford, businesses have left several stones unturned in curating the right content strategy.
Most often, it works. But sometimes, there’s a missing piece in the puzzle.
We bring you four B2B content marketing case studies. Brands that don’t just follow trends. But have crafted content into their unique personality.
They aren’t just doing content right. But have mastered it by taking a step outside the box, which most marketers are still hesitant to do.
4 Best B2B Content Marketing Case Studies
Example #1 – Figma’s Creative-first Content
Source: Figma
Figma didn’t just market content. It redefined the medium.
With marketing losing its storytelling edge, Figma decided to do content differently. They didn’t broadcast it like other brands do – from production to distribution. But it is a medium to amplify the creative prowess of creators.
It’s safe to say that Figma doesn’t do blog posts in the traditional sense. They treat creators and designers as people who don’t want to be taught but participate in the creative process.
It’s a subtle way to mirror back the creator’s capabilities at them.
So, the design company has moved from treating content like a megaphone for various talking points. They do what their audience (again, the designers) wants from them.
Talking about products is an age-old sales tactic that isn’t fooling anyone. It’s too on the nose and takes away the interest as soon as it builds it.
But Figma does it differently. Their content doesn’t talk about the products. But establish the product as a canvas for content.
It’s a participatory medium, a tool for inspiration and building community.
Their “content” can be prototyped, experimented with, and is open-source. It’s how designers look at their designs.
Figma isn’t trying to control the narrative. It’s setting the stage and moving out of the way – putting up a mirror for the designers to glimpse into. By doing so, the audience gets a chance to step into its files, templates, and plugins and use them to tell stories by themselves.
Most B2B brands would shy away from this.
But in this landscape of stale strategies and templated content, Figma is reimaging marketing from a creator-first perspective.
It has spotlighted one facet that most creatives themselves have lost focus on – Content is an ecosystem that promotes collaboration.
Example #2 – Slack’s Resource Library
Source: Slack.com
Slack has become a leader in ensuring communication and collaboration between teams. Instead of offering space for long email threads, it focuses on real-time chatting.
With different groups and channels for distinct projects and teams. It has revolutionized workflows and cross-departmental functioning.
But there’s another add-on. Slack also has communication channels for external partners and clients.
And their capabilities sweep into the content they muster.
Slack’s content merges impressively with the workflow – it’s deliberate. Their brilliance hides in how they deliver their content. It doesn’t scream out to the users but whispers to them.
Their content is about making you the hero, not standing out as the hero amidst other B2B brands.
Slack’s user-first approach has made waves across the marketplace.
Even the content marketing route they take increases efficiency for the consumer, not dazzles them with flashy content. Added to their already robust content marketing is the resource library. From eGuides to eBooks to helpful tips, Slack has a digital library for all its keepsakes.
It helps users from different industries use and implement Slack effectively by not centering its content on itself but spotlighting the human experience – how teams work on Slack, not how Slack works.
In short, it’s informative, diverse, and consultative. And at the center of this is the human experience – workers are people, not leads.
For example, take its 2023 State of Work report. The no-nonsense report flags everything that’s wrong with the workplace. And highlights the challenges employees often face. And from this content report, it was evident that Slack doesn’t play around.
It facilitates a healthier work culture, avoiding the practice of shoving products down your throat – you happen to need them.
Slack is one such B2B brand that practices what it preaches. Its content isn’t here to bedazzle you with shiny promises. But it is effective.
In a landscape where B2B content often leans into dullness and monotony, Slack successfully stands out. Its storytelling has positioned it as the future of work, not as a messaging brand.
Example #3 – Salesforce’s Learning Hub for Sales Basics
Source: Salesforce
Content is at the heart of customers’ experiences with brands. And with the ever-evolving buying trajectory of each consumer, marketing and sales are noticing every slight change.
And parallel to this observation, they are pivoting towards what works best.
Salesforce is doing the same. They have realized that diminishing returns and flatlining traffic aren’t undone by merely buying more traffic.
There’s only a singular effective solution: a sound content strategy.
So, Salesforce has found unique ways to leverage content while also revolutionizing the landscape. At the crux is the digital customer experience, motivated by content. This is the sales giant’s underlying belief – integrating CX and content.
Their content marketing model isn’t just good. It’s something that other companies can’t easily replicate.
Salesforce’s structurally robust content strategy doesn’t take content for granted.
It means that where most businesses consider thought leadership content as ad hoc, the sales organization knows how to institutionalize it. They turn C-suite insights into recurring products, such as annual reports and Salesforce+, among others.
For them, thought leadership isn’t just about hot takes or staying up with the market gossip.
Additionally, Salesforce’s most underrated but authentic content strategy is the narrative IP. For example, its “State of” reports are built on memorability, given how the tone repeats across different reports but familiar stories. They have transformed dull market research into media assets with such powerful emotional language that establishes their authority in this area, even though competitors might come up with similar content.
Salesforce follows an annual rhythm in creating and distributing this content. It’s cross-functional and includes an executive standpoint (at least a summary).
They aren’t living up to industry standards but establishing them themselves.
Through their authentic content strategies, Salesforce doesn’t just inform but drives the narrative. And every content piece they create is part of a bigger why – something that transcends the mere selling of products.
Salesforce’s content strives to offer a comprehensive and expert POV on the future of the business landscape. That’s the underlying objective they hope to accomplish with every piece they create.
Moreover, Salesforce knows that B2B operations and decisions aren’t made on spreadsheets. Customers want to be seen and be a part of something. And their content heavily propagates this – who the customers will become, not what the product is.
Example #4 – HubSpot’s Library for Everything Marketing
Source: HubSpot Academy
HubSpot is another powerful name among the brands that are doing content marketing right.
Their platform shapes people’s opinions on modern business problems and how HubSpot’s solutions can solve them. It’s direct but sophisticated.
HubSpot’s design isn’t salesy; it’s methodological and intentional.
Their content has one central purpose: teaching how to do marketing right, by defining what “right” really is. Often, this aligns with the product’s strengths.
HubSpot’s content marketing approach establishes it as a teacher and a guide. It educates and directs customers toward the subsequent steps, blending fluidly into product descriptions and placements.
The software company understands that a customer’s buying journey doesn’t begin with pricing charts and demo requests. The first is always the mental exercise – there’s a psychological model that prospective buyers follow, one that should lead to the funnel.
HubSpot leverages this model. Through their learning academy, they build a foundation in the practitioners’ minds, even if they aren’t in the market.
This content marketing model’s design is purposeful – it aligns belief with the product. So, HubSpot’s straightforward marketing efforts are a marketplace favorite. Similar features might be offered industry-wide, but only HubSpot can connect the story they started.
Marketers build a story, but they often forget it in the sales stage. They are too busy closing the deal. HubSpot, through its Academy, births and instills an inbound philosophy that seems like the logical extension later on. It connects the gap.
Their focus is on a more strategic, long-term, and in-depth play.
What most B2B businesses do is try to sell way too quickly. But your pitch is only effective when you know it’s the right time. By building its educational content into the product ecosystem, HubSpot resists this impulse.
It sweeps in as the savior when a solution becomes inevitable.
HubSpot isn’t selling a worldview but engineering and helping customers adapt to it.
And how does it seamlessly do this? Content marketing efforts are directed to the right people at the right time. It’s about pushing out ideas and teaching a system – what you could do if you could do it like us .
From messaging to becoming a manual, HubSpot has flipped the script.
Content marketing is no longer treated as a marketing channel; it’s an operating model.
Weaved into the strategic layers with other business functions, content’s role in marketing has changed. It builds a market, establishes a system, and influences behavior.
It is not about what the product can do for you anymore. Content isn’t isolated from the broader business challenges companies face. Now, content marketing is more about changing how customers perceive products and services – what would the future look like for you if you adopted this solution?
These brands aren’t thinking of content in terms of blogging or SEO. It’s about creating an impact, integrating it into the business culture, and establishing an infrastructure.
One that helps you think in content.
