Business to business digital content marketing: marketers’ perceptions of best practice

TLDR

B2B digital content marketing is an inbound technique that addresses the declining effectiveness of traditional interruptive marketing. The study highlights the emerging B2B digital content marketing phenomenon, offers insights on best practice, and advances theory on digital content’s role in marketing. The authors conducted semi‑structured interviews with 15 B2B content marketers across five sectors in the USA, UK, and France, and identified that effective content requires a publishing mindset, audience‑centric value, and a cultural shift from selling to helping, supported by new objectives, tactics, metrics, and skills. B2B digital content marketing, delivered through web pages, social media, and value‑add content, is viewed as a useful tool for building and sustaining trusted brand status, with valuable content characterized as useful, relevant, compelling, and timely, and the study establishes a theoretical foundation and research agenda for this emerging practice.

Abstract

Purpose – This paper aims to draw attention to the emerging phenomenon of business to business (B2B) digital content marketing, offers a range of insights and reflections on good practice and contributes to theoretical understanding of the role of digital content in marketing. B2B digital content marketing is an inbound marketing technique and hence offers a solution to the declining effectiveness of traditional interruptive marketing techniques. Design/methodology/approach – Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 15 key informants involved in B2B content marketing in the USA, UK and France, in five industry sectors. Findings – B2B digital content marketing is an inbound marketing technique, effected through web page, social media and value-add content, and is perceived to be a useful tool for achieving and sustaining trusted brand status. Creating content that is valuable to B2B audiences requires brands to take a “publishing” approach, which involves developing an understanding of the audience’s information needs, and their purchase consideration cycle. Valuable content is described as being useful, relevant, compelling and timely. Content marketing requires a cultural change from “selling” to “helping”, which in turn requires different marketing objectives, tactics, metrics and skills to those associated with more traditional marketing approaches. The article concludes with a theoretical discussion on the role of digital content in marketing, thereby contextualising the findings from this study within a broader exploration of the role of digital content in marketing and relational exchanges. Originality/value – As the first research study to explore the use of digital content marketing in B2B contexts, this research positions digital content marketing with regard to prior theory, and provides both an agenda for further research, and suggestions for practice.