B2B marketing managers must understand different content types and how they support an overall strategy to reach and engage target customers online.
This guide explains the essential content marketing types with examples. We’ll also provide actionable tips and strategies to help content leaders decide which content marketing types work best for attracting B2B customers.
What is a content marketing type?
Why do content types matter to marketers?
Content marketing types
Blog posts
Writing high-quality, engaging, and educational blog posts helps B2B content marketers establish their business as an industry thought leader or provide useful tips and tricks about products. Blogs drive highly-targeted web traffic to a brand’s website or landing pages.
For example, marketers can raise brand awareness for a new product or service and generate new sales leads using keyword-optimized blog content to attract upper-sales-funnel target audiences. This blog content is created to rank high on search engine results pages and drive links back to a branded landing page or website via social media shares, comments, and likes.
Visit the LinkedIn Ads Blog for inspiration.
Case studies
Case studies are like a short story for how a product or service provider helped its client overcome a significant business challenge. A case study can be formatted as a Challenge > Solution > Results one-pager or summary.
Case studies can also be an engaging longform feature story or video about how a business partnership evolved from a particular business need or crisis and the creative solutions the two organizations discovered together.
Both options, among many others, function as social proof for a business—demonstrating the effectiveness of a product or service to build trust with prospective customers. The ideal case study format will be dictated by the B2B brand's voice and tone.
Read LinkedIn’s Adobe partner case study for an example of a one-pager case study format. It includes an embedded video that acts as a feature story, showcasing the client’s perspective on how they overcame their business challenge with the help of LinkedIn Ads.
Videos
Creating, hosting, and sharing video content on social media is very beneficial, creating highly engaging and entertaining content. Video content helps B2B marketers convey information quickly using sight, sound, and motion. This type of content can vary in length and format based on the marketing objective.
For example, the tone of a lead generation product explainer video might be serious and educational, running a few minutes long. Whereas the tone of a brand awareness video ad might be more entertaining and funny, running just thirty seconds or less.
Whoever the target audience is will dictate the video script tone, visuals selected, and where it will show up for viewers. Review LinkedIn’s Video Ad Guide to learn more about crafting video content to reach and engage ideal target audiences online.
Infographics
An infographic is a visual illustration of important selling points, data insights, or research report findings that a B2B content marketer creates to make information accessible and easier to understand. The insights and imagery in an infographic are also easily scannable and readable, which can help make the key points more memorable.
Refer to the LinkedIn Premium infographic below for inspiration when creating a product promotion or research report highlights infographic.
Podcasts
Branded podcasts are an audio storytelling format that helps businesses start a conversation with target customers focusing on products or industry topics, appealing to their business challenges and needs. They function similarly to a radio broadcast but the podcast episodes are often pre-recorded and accessible to listeners on-demand.
Brands can boost awareness and generate leads using podcasts by offering their own narrative and perspective about their business and product. Additionally, by inviting industry experts to join their podcasts as guests, a brand can better establish itself as a thought leader.
Social media
Social media is both a content strategy and a distribution channel for content marketing types and assets with online target audiences. Social media content helps to amplify and grow the reach of various content asset messages (e.g., promoting blog posts, ebooks, research reports, webinars, and live-streaming events).
Ideally, such social media posts help drive engagement (e.g., shares, likes, and comments) for branded content assets to boost product or service awareness or position a B2B brand as an industry thought leader.
Many B2B sales organizations develop separate social media content strategies for product launches, evergreen content, or specific brand or industry topics. These strategic posts are crafted and monitored by a social media manager or specialist who aims to create unique and engaging messages to grow the brand's word-of-mouth marketing, social following, and favorability online.
Email and InMail
Email marketing has been around since the early days of the Internet ands still considered a valuable content marketing type to directly reach potential customers. Ideally, emails helps B2B marketers create and foster a dialogue with their existing customer base. Emailed newsletters or sales promos help marketers drive traffic back to their branded websites and nurture new sales prospects into qualified sales leads.
Marketers can move prospects through the sales funnel using conversational messaging with targeted users through LinkedIn Conversation Ads. This choose-your-own-path InMail messaging experience allows B2B marketers to initiate conversations with members when they’re ready to engage.
Advertisers can use multiple call-to-action buttons in a LinkedIn InMail message, allowing prospects to access preferred content and offers, such as a whitepaper or event pages, all in one ad.
Webinars
Webinars are another useful content type to engage directly with prospective customers. Users must provide their email addresses and other professional contact details in a signup form to watch live or view later the contents of a webinar. This content type helps brands generate new leads while boosting brand awareness.
Webinar presentations and live video panel discussions need to be engaging to keep viewers' attention. These content formats may also provide new information about a compelling industry perspective or leader, or product-related topic that helps attendees excel in their jobs or grow their businesses.
Interactive content
Interactive content is meant to be an engaging, helpful content type unique to a business and its customers. Interactive content can be really imaginative but focused. For example, an accounting software-as-a-service website might build an online calculator business customers can use to estimate their quarterly or annual tax contributions.
Interactive quizzes or polls on social media posts or landing pages on a website are familiar distribution methods. This content type is another, low-lift way to boost user engagement. User quizzes, in particular, might ask about a prospect’s business challenges to lead them to specific information about which products or solutions best serve their needs.
Whitepapers and ebooks
Downloadable whitepapers, research reports, and ebooks are valuable content types that help sales organizations attract and capture qualified leads via Lead Gen Forms. These content types help increase brand awareness with upper-funnel sales prospects interested in learning about industry topics or trends.
Customers need to provide their information—such as company email and title—so it’s another direct way to get information about a particular audience.
Templates or worksheets
Templates and worksheets are another downloadable content type for prospective customers with challenges related to a product or service.
For example, LinkedIn offers downloadable marketing or advertising templates that B2B marketers can use for online media planning and buying. Templates are often offered in either a PDF or Excel spreadsheet format.
User-generated content
In addition to creating content internally to promote a brand, many businesses encourage and incentivize industry thought leaders or social media influencers to create content related to that business’s product or service. For instance, many ad agencies or consultants create content about how to advertise on LinkedIn.
Sometimes user-generated content (UGC) is created in partnership with a company. UGC content relies on the partner to create a story or POV about a brand or its products and their experiences. Like a case study, UGC provides first-person anecdotes and examples for potential customers to use in information gathering, and acts as another form of social proof for the brand itself.
How to choose the right content type
Step 1: Identify the target audience
A business needs to identify intended goals and a target audience before selecting any content as support. B2B marketers need to take time to develop buyer personas and ideal customer profiles, conduct research on their online behaviors, and put together a more detailed portrait of a customer to inform content type messaging and preferred formats.
Within these target customer profiles or personas, use demographics (e.g., age and gender) and psychographics (e.g., interests and specialized skills) to inform a content and marketing strategy.
If a content marketing campaign targets multiple countries, copy or video may need to be translated or available in other languages.
Step 2: Define marketing objectives
What business goals does a content marketing campaign achieve? Define marketing objectives to ensure any metrics or leads goals are met.
Content marketing objectives may include:
- Growing brand awareness with engaging and educational content.
- Generating new leads through downloadable content assets that capture target buyer information via Lead Gen Forms.
- Influencing purchase consideration and conversions through thought leadership and research content.
- Customer retention with product content and case studies.
Some content types can simultaneously influence multiple campaign objectives, provided they are speaking to the right target audiences online.
Step 3: Select the right content types
When considering which content types best support a business’s campaign goals, be aware of how much budget is available, if internal resources can help, or if an agency or freelancer needs to be retained to complete the work. These will help inform which content type is ultimately best and feasible to complete.
For inspiration on what types of content to choose for specific objectives, read LinkedIn’s Content Marketing Tactical Plan ebook.
The matrix below, taken from the ebook, outlines which content types work well for B2B marketers when planning a content mix or strategy on LinkedIn.
Step 4: Track and measure content marketing success
It helps to set SMART goals: simple, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. This method helps create specific marketing objectives.
Metrics to track may include the total number of leads generated per downloadable asset, total pageviews, average time spent reading blog posts, video views and completion rates, and social media engagement (e.g., comments, likes, and shares).
Marketers can track content marketing campaign performance via third-party website analytics tools. Or refer to ad campaign performance monitoring for content promotions like Sponsored Content or Video Ad formats.
