B2B content marketing needs to make the most of owned media and be given “time to breathe”, according to a prominent practitioner of the art.

Sade Laja, editor-in-chief of Booking.com’s digital B2B publication, Click, addressed this topic at the recent Digital Marketing World Forum in Amsterdam.

She explained how her remit is to put together a content offer of premium articles, interviews, podcasts, and comment pieces that address the pain points of hoteliers – things like no-shows and delayed payments that typically aren’t covered in other publications.

If you want to do content as a brand, you need to act like a publisher, she maintained. And that means doing content for a reason: choosing a focus and pursuing it because it’s what your potential audience wants, not what the brand wants to say. (For more read WARC’s report: How Booking.com built a content strategy beyond page views.)

And while content marketing – or a content offer in the case of Click – can benefit from paid media, the sweet spot is really to cultivate owned media and to give it the “time to breathe”, Laja added.

By doing high-quality, original reporting, stories that Click has published have been able to gain traction in industry publications and a part in some of the discussions of the moment – invaluable in a B2B space.

But getting to that point hasn’t been straightforward. Apart from building her own understanding of the company and who to speak to about what, Laja also had to work out what her audience wanted to hear.

And that was neither easy nor cheap. “There’s no silver bullet,” she said. You need to survey the audience in order to understand its pain points in a way you can then talk about, but doing so thoroughly is a worthwhile investment. “It’s not a mouthpiece – it’s a service.”

Sourced from WARC