Are you having trouble getting your leads to engage? If yes, then it’s time to refresh your approach with some handy B2B content marketing ideas.
This article explores eleven ideas to help inspire your content strategy, engage more ideal customers, establish thought leadership, and drive business growth.
Let’s start planning your next most successful marketing campaign👇
1. Host webinars tailored to audience segments
Webinars are an excellent way to engage with your audience in real time, offering them value while showcasing your expertise.
Each webinar should be specifically designed for the audience that’s engaging with it. After all, a CFO doesn’t want or need the same content as a marketing manager.
Segment your audience based on industry, business size, or pain points to create valuable content that fits your specific audience’s needs. This will allow you to craft webinars that feel more personalised and deliver laser-focused value.
Add some bells and whistles—think live polls, interactive Q&A sessions, and humour to keep attendees engaged.
This content marketing strategy increases attendee engagement, improves conversion rates, and enhances alignment with customer needs.
For instance, Cognism offers a range of webinars that cater to different industries and business challenges, ensuring that each session is relevant to participants. Check them out for some excellent marketing content ideas!
Tips for effective webinars:
- Choose topics that address your audience’s pain points.
- Invite industry experts to add credibility and attract attendees.
- Record sessions and repurpose content into blog posts, social media snippets, or follow-up emails.
2. Share thought leadership across LinkedIn
LinkedIn is one of the most powerful platforms for B2B marketing. It allows brands to share insights, network with industry peers, and establish thought leadership.
Get your team leaders involved by sharing insights that follow the latest trends and industry developments. Cognism executives such as Alice de Courcy, Liam Bartholomew, and Fran Langham consistently share valuable insights, demonstrating thought leadership in B2B sales and marketing.
Here’s a great example from Alice, based on the recent launch of our new product, Sales Companion:
It’s key to not just provide boring corporate updates but also tell a story, as Alice has done above.
Creating content that tells a story and brings out emotions in your audience can improve your B2B revenue by 55% long-term.
This makes storytelling a tactic you should use with thought leadership and company LinkedIn posts. Storytelling builds an emotional connection with your customers. It’s a great way to convey how your product or service can make someone’s life easier without being pushy.
After all, people remember how you make them feel, not how fantastic you think your company is.
Your audience will appreciate content marketing ideas that include wisdom wrapped in humour, insights mixed with personal experience, and actionable advice with easy-to-follow steps. Bonus points if you use GIFs, carousels, and polls—because, let’s face it, nobody can resist clicking a poll.
How to maximise LinkedIn thought leadership:
- Share data-driven insights, industry trends, and best practices.
- Engage with your audience by responding to comments and starting discussions.
- Publish long-form articles to establish authority on key topics.
3. Collaborate with industry experts and influencers
When it comes to social media marketing content ideas, partnering with industry experts and B2B influencers is a great one! Not only can it significantly amplify your content’s reach and credibility, but you’ll also build B2B brand awareness.
To implement this idea, find industry influencers with an engaged audience and reach out. If they agree to work with you, start creating content, whether it’s a spicy LinkedIn debate, a collaborative report, or a webinar where you play off each other’s insights.
The key? Make it fun and engaging—nobody wants to sit through a stale discussion that feels more like a corporate hostage video.
Cognism does this well with Morgan J Ingram. You can see most of their collaboration over on our SDR Zone. But here’s a quick video if you’re pressed for time:
Best practices for collaborating with influencers:
- Identify B2B experts who align with your brand values.
- Co-create content such as webinars, blog posts, or social media campaigns.
- Leverage their audience to promote your brand and increase credibility.
4. Create sharable reports, workshops and courses
Educational content like courses, workshops and reports help nurture leads by providing them with valuable skills and knowledge. This establishes trust and positions your brand as an authority in your industry.
To implement this digital marketing content idea, start by conducting original research, analysing market trends, and publishing insightful reports that others in your industry will want to share.
But here’s the catch—nobody reads 50-page PDFs anymore. Turn data into bite-sized, snackable content: think animated charts, one-minute video breakdowns, and colourful infographics. If your audience isn’t sharing it unprompted, it’s time to return to the drawing board.
At Cognism, we’re no strangers to creating valuable content, from our cold calling workshops to our demand generation playbook. But our ultimate marketing report is our annual cold calling report, which many readers find valuable.
Check it out 👇
Practical course and workshop strategies:
- Offer both free and premium content to cater to different audiences.
- Incorporate interactive elements such as quizzes and live Q&A sessions.
- Provide certification to enhance perceived value and encourage participation.
5. Google retargeting campaigns
Google retargeting campaigns help keep your brand in front of potential customers who have already shown interest in your content. This strategy improves brand recall and increases conversion rates.
But here’s the twist—ditch the dull, pushy ads. Instead, make your remarketing campaign feel like an ongoing story. Remind them of what they’re missing out on, show them testimonials from their peers, or add a little humour to nudge them over the edge.
Cognism CMO Alice de Courcy highlights how effective retargeting strategies can maximise marketing ROI in her book ‘Diary of a First-Time CMO.’ Check out the chapter on remarketing ads here.
Best practices for Google retargeting:
- Segment your audience based on behaviour (e.g., website visits, content downloads).
- Use compelling ad copy and visuals to re-engage prospects.
- Test different creatives and messaging to optimise performance.
6. Build nurture campaigns
Instead of bombarding leads with sales pitches, guide them through an engaging content journey, i.e. nurture campaigns.
Lead nurtures help move leads through the sales funnel by providing relevant content at different stages of the buyer’s journey.
To do this, create email sequences that contain a mix of educational emails, case studies, and interactive content that nurtures relationships over time. And no, a weekly “Just checking in” email doesn’t count—think videos, quizzes, and insider knowledge that makes recipients feel like they’re part of an exclusive club.
Key elements of a successful nurture campaign:
- Personalised email sequences based on user behaviour.
- A mix of educational, product-focused, and testimonial content.
- Regular performance analysis to refine and optimise campaigns.
7. Stop gatekeeping
Stop hiding the value of your content behind long forms and endless email submissions. Ungated, easily accessible content builds trust and encourages sharing—making your brand the go-to source of knowledge. Give your audience a taste of real value, and they’ll return for more (without you needing to hold their email address hostage).
Alice de Courcy’s Diary of a First-Time CMO exemplifies this b2b marketing content idea. Not only are volumes one and two available to purchase in book format on Amazon, but you can also listen to an ebook or read it online for free.
If you’d like to read volumes one and two of Alice’s best ideas for content marketing, click the banner 👇
Why ungating content works:
- Builds goodwill and fosters long-term relationships.
- Increases content reach and engagement.
- Encourages organic sharing and brand advocacy.
8. Build interactive tools
Interactive tools provide value to users by offering personalised insights or solutions and showcasing the value of your product or service.
It’s not the easiest idea for content marketing, as you’ll need a development team to create interactive tools, but they generate higher engagement, better-qualified leads, and stronger conversion rates.
Think about developing ROI calculators, interactive quizzes, or industry benchmark tools that give users personalised results. Not only do they provide value, but they also collect data that helps you refine future marketing efforts.
An example of a tool like this is Cognism's TAM Calculator practical utility to users.
9. Embed self-guided demos
Buyers often feel pressure to choose products based on whatever research they can do online. They have to find, research, and contact companies to make a purchase.
With self-guided demos, the pressure is off. Potential buyers can test out a product at a time that suits them—and it makes a huge difference!
To implement this idea, offer self-guided product demos that allow potential customers to explore your SaaS platform or service at their own pace.
Give them the ability to interact with features, watch quick how-to videos, and understand the value without scheduling a sales call. Make it intuitive and fun, and for the love of engagement, avoid a clunky UX!
Tips to effectively market your product:
- You can learn your customers’ challenges and needs through intent data and analytics, making it easy to market your product as the perfect solution.
- These insights can also increase visibility for customer mapping, allowing you to be there for your clients when they need you at every stage of the buyer journey.
- Remember to keep your messaging casual, especially when using a bot for chat interactions. With today’s technology, bots don’t need to be obvious automation. Give them a name, a photo, and a fun personality.
Check out Cognism’s Demo Centre for an excellent example of this strategy in action. Or play around with our demon of Enrich here 👇
10. Get on YouTube
YouTube is a powerful platform for B2B brands to engage audiences with educational content. In turn, you’ll find higher brand visibility, better organic lead generation and increased audience engagement.
To implement creative content marketing ideas like YouTube videos, create video content that answers burning industry questions, showcases case studies, or provides step-by-step guides. But don’t just sit in front of a camera and talk—use engaging visuals, animations, and storytelling. People will keep watching if your video content is fun and visually appealing.
11. Host giveaways
Hosting giveaways on LinkedIn, Twitter, or through email marketing can increase engagement and brand visibility.
One idea to try is to offer prizes. They don’t have to be anything too fancy, like a Tesla.
Consider t-shirts, printed versions of your eBooks, a free consulting session or an Amazon voucher. Make it fun and relevant, and avoid the “like, share, and tag 500 friends” narrative that most prospects ignore.
12. Put your customers first
It’s no secret that good B2B marketing sells something, but consumers are tired of being sold to.
H2H marketing* stands for human-to-human and means connecting with customers on a personal level. It’s an innovative marketing approach that helps brands rise above the competition and align with their customers’ needs.
Marketers are often too focused on selling their brand and not on the people supporting it.
This leads to a disconnect that impacts your incoming revenue.
To fix this, you must focus on putting your customers first and creating an experience that matters to them.
This doesn’t mean throwing out your book of industry jargon. It means discovering what they care about and trying to care about it too. It means displaying appealing human qualities like loyalty and authenticity.
It’s recognising that you’re selling to actual humans and conveying this in your speech and the topics you choose to discuss.
Tips for doing H2H marketing right:
Be honest
No one wants to invest in a company inundated with bad reviews, but at the same time, fake reviews are easy to spot and even worse for your reputation as an organisation.
Your prospects want authenticity, so be honest! Use case studies and real customer stories to show how you’ve solved problems like theirs.
Take a step back from selling
You don’t always have to push for a sale. Sharing content that speaks to your customers, offers them value, or brightens their day will go a long way to building brand loyalty.
For example, we spotted an opportunity to create videos based on our content but aimed at one of our largest social media demographics —millennials!
To connect with this audience, we specifically tailor our content to be fun, fresh, and engaging. We convey complex subjects in an easy-to-digest way, with a human face😊 Cognism’s Video Manager, the charismatic Emily Liu.
With this human-to-human approach, we’ve seen more followers and engagement on YouTube, LinkedIn, and Instagram.
More B2B content marketing ideas from Cognism
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*H2H is the registered international trademark of H2H Companies LLC
