Content Marketing for B2B Marketplaces: A Complete Guide

In the B2B marketplace world, credibility and ecosystem trust shape every transaction. If you don’t invest in demonstrating your expertise, buyers and sellers may never adopt your platform.

That’s why you need to do content marketing for your B2B marketplaces. A well-organized piece of evergreen content can pull in qualified leads for years and build your credibility in sectors defined by drawn-out, competitive decision processes.

At Perceptric, we’re a content marketing agency that helps B2B marketplaces like yours produce content that builds credibility and ecosystem trust. Our work is designed to help you attract both buyers and sellers and position your platform as a reliable trading environment.

Based on my experience working for a wide variety of companies in the industry, I will share:

• What’s unique about content marketing for B2B marketplaces
• Our Knowledge-Narrative approach to content marketing
• How to do SEO content for B2B marketplaces
• How to do thought leadership content marketing for B2B marketplaces

Alright, let’s dive in!

Why does B2B marketplaces need content marketing?

Content marketing is the practice of informing and engaging potential customers through valuable digital content. The core idea is simple: teach, be open, build trust, and customers will naturally come to you when they’re ready to make a decision.

Online behavior has shifted, and today’s buyers prefer to research on their own before choosing a product or service. That’s why content marketing plays such a crucial role in digital customer acquisition: it supports people as they learn, compare, and build confidence, which gives them the knowledge they need to make informed decisions.

But do you really need content marketing? The answer is yes, very much so:

• More than any other industries, it’s incredibly important for content in B2B marketplaces to showcase expertise: Buyers on B2B marketplaces want trustworthy sellers and smooth transactions, so your content should help them understand your value and trust your platform. Clear content also improves your visibility on Google.
• Your content should either solve problems or be memorable: Content should address the trust, liquidity, or workflow issues that users encounter in B2B marketplaces, helping them feel confident in your platform. It can also express the commerce principles your brand believes in so your marketplace becomes more recognizable.
• Good content is the only thing that ranks on Google: If you don’t create exceptional content, it’s hard to compete with the big fish. AI-generated content may sound like a good solution to create content at scale, but over a long enough period of time, people notice that you’re using AI, and they’ll lose trust in you. Besides, AI can’t write original content. Only humans can.

My approach to doing content marketing for B2B marketplaces

I use a very simple approach to content marketing for B2B marketplaces (and for virtually any other industry that my clients are in). It is called the Knowledge – Narrative approach.

Put simply, it’s about creating two types of content:

• Knowledge content, which answers questions and solves problems that your potential clients have. This type of content is usually optimized for SEO.
• Narrative content, which is basically just thought leadership content that showcases the philosophy and unique insights/POV that your brand believes in thanks to your experience in the industry. This type of content is meant to establish your brand as the expert.

A combination of both approach gives you the best of both worlds.

• Knowledge content brings in new audiences through SEO. Publication content keeps that audience engaged by showing thought leadership and perspective.
• Knowledge content is algorithm-friendly because it satisfies Google’s need for structure, clarity, and depth. Publication content is audience-friendly because it satisfies the reader’s need for voice and authenticity.

For B2B marketplaces, my Knowledge-style content can be topics like how digital procurement works and how buyers choose suppliers, while my Publication content can be thought leadership on B2B purchasing behavior and insights on marketplace economics.

Most effective content marketing types for B2B marketplaces

Content marketing for B2B marketplaces works best when it’s built on a strong story: a real belief, a real point of view, or a real problem you’re trying to solve.

When that foundation is solid, every content format becomes effective, because they’re all expressing the same core idea in different ways.

With that said, here is my opinion on the types of content that you can use:

Content Type	Ease of Getting Started	Time to ROI	Best Fit For
Short-form Blog Posts	Easy to write and publish. Great for quick wins and early traction.	Medium. Builds traffic over time, but can rank fast for long-tail keywords.	Brands needing fast educational content and SEO momentum.
Long-form Blog Posts	Harder to create. Requires depth, clarity, and expertise.	High long-term ROI. Ranks well, attracts high-intent traffic, builds authority.	Brands wanting strong SEO positioning and deep trust from readers.
Ebooks / PDFs	Medium difficulty. Requires structure and design, but highly doable.	High. Great for list-building and lead magnets with ongoing value.	Brands that need leads, gated content, or a strong reasons to subscribe.
Whitepapers	Hard. Requires expertise, research, and strong reasoning.	Very high for technical or regulated industries. Converts educated buyers.	B2B, technical markets, and companies selling high-ticket or complex products.
Short-form Videos	Easy to create today. Low production requirements.	Fast. Great reach with strong storytelling and consistency.	Brands with personality, compelling visuals, or educational angles.
Long-form Videos	Medium to hard. Requires planning, scripting, and editing.	Strong long-term ROI. Great for trust-building, demos, and depth.	Educators, experts, product-led companies, and brands needing explanation.
Case Studies	Medium. Requires customer coordination and storytelling.	Immediate to medium. High trust and high conversion impact.	Brands selling services, B2B tools, or anything high-ticket or relationship-based.
Infographics	Easy to medium. Requires design but delivers clarity fast.	Medium. Highly shareable and great for top-of-funnel visibility.	Brands with complex data, technical topics, or visual stories.
Thought Leadership Articles	Harder. Requires a strong point of view and real expertise.	High. Builds authority, recognition, and trust over time.	Executives, industry leaders, and brands shaping the direction of their category.

Remember: all content types have potential, but you must be careful to not spread yourself too thin!

If your budget is in the nine figures, it’s a lot easier to run 2 podcasts, a video channel, a blog, and a magazine. But when you’re just starting out, focus on ONE channel that you believe to be able to deliver the best result, and double down when it starts gaining traction.

How to plan for content marketing in B2B marketplaces?

Most B2B marketplaces believe content marketing is just putting articles on their website. However, these are often built from surface-level e-commerce ideas rather than true procurement or buyer–seller insight.

So before you launch your content marketing campaign for B2B marketplaces, here’s what I recomend:

• Laser-focus into one content marketing channel and do it very well. Trying to manage too many channels at once leads to diluted effort and mediocre output. You’re better off mastering the channels that matter most.
• Start your content marketing strategy by targeting potential customers who are close to buying. Do not focus your content on simple definition queries like “What is [XYZ]?”. Those readers are too early to convert. Go after the searches tied to pain points and decisions instead.
• Have a distribution strategy for every piece of content. Many B2B marketplaces create useful content yet assume buyers and suppliers will see it. For content to work, you need a distribution plan — through email, LinkedIn, or search.

1. Do audience research

Before you write content, make sure to conduct a good audience research. Audience research is simply the process of gathering and analyzing information about the people you want to reach with your marketing. It’s understanding your target audience’s motivations, pain points, and behaviors.

There are a lot of ways that you can do audience research to inform your content marketing activities:

• Talk to your Sales team — Yes, Sales people are literally in the trenches, so they know A LOT about your customers and what audience you attract. If you don’t talk to Sales to extract insights, you’re probably missing out.
• Social media discovery — Go to the social media channels and check out the posts and creators your audience follows to understand what they care about.
• Competitor analysis — Analyze competitors’ content, SEO, reviews, and digital presence to learn what resonates with your shared audience.
• Communities & forums — Lurk in Subreddits and online groups to hear unfiltered discussions and real pain points that people in your niche has. Reddit is especially useful because it has every communities imaginable on the planet, so you’ll probably find some subreddits talking about your field.
• Surveys & polls — Run short surveys or social polls to gather direct feedback at scale.
• Customer & prospect interviews — Talk directly with customers and ICPs to understand motivations and how they describe their problems.
• Search intent analysis — Study keywords, SERPs, and “People Also Ask” results to map what people are actually trying to solve.
• Website & content analytics — Use analytics and heatmaps to see how users behave on your site and what content truly performs.

2. Do keyword research

Once you have insights, it’s time to start keyword research. This should inform your content creation activities later.

A lot of content marketers in B2B marketplaces start their content strategies by starting off at the “top” of the marketing funnel. In other words, they target people who are only looking for definition of a concept, not people actively looking for a solution. This often means creating broad, brand-awareness pieces on basics like “what is a B2B marketplace” or “how do buyers and suppliers connect online.”

Anyone could be doing research on those generic terms. A grandma, a 10-year-old kid, a random college guy. it doesn’t necessarily guarantee they could become your customer.

Instead, you need to create content at the Bottom-of-the-funnel. That’s where the money lies. People searching for those terms usually know they are having a problem and are actively looking for a solution.

I categorize BOFU keywords into 3 major groups:

• Listicle Keywords – These are roundup-style searches like “Top 10 companies for [niche].” These attract users actively comparing options and help introduce your product/services as one of the contenders.
• Pain Point Keywords – These keywords are the real problems your audience is trying to solve, like “how to fix X” or “why Y happens.” Write a stellar article showing how to solve it, positioning you subtly as the ultimate choice to solve those problems. You can mine those keywords in forums and niche industry communities.
• Lead Magnet Keywords – Target people looking for resources with phrases like “free template for X” or “downloadable guide to Y.” These are great for capturing leads in exchange for helpful content. Build assets that directly match these needs.

Let’s say I am doing content marketing for a B2B marketplace called WriteMeContent, who connects industrial suppliers with manufacturers, here are the keywords I’m targeting for them:

• Listicle Keywords: best B2B marketplaces, top supplier networks, best procurement trading platforms
• Pain Point Keywords: how to improve supplier matching, why buyers churn, how to streamline procurement
• Lead Magnet Keywords: sourcing template, marketplace onboarding guide, buyer requirements checklist

Once you’ve tapped out the pain-point and bottom-of-funnel keywords, you can move upward in the funnel and begin producing MOFU and TOFU content.

How to write SEO content for B2B marketplaces?

SEO content is amazing because it brings in consistent, evergreen traffic (and conversion) as long as you write content that genuinely resonates. Although it’s a relatively long-term game, the compound rewards are totally worth it!

My advice when choosing SEO as one of the content marketing channels for B2B marketplaces is that you should publish the most value-packed, transaction-focused guide available online.

When someone Googles something, they’re hoping the answer comes from a person who’s lived it, not just read about it. That’s why content shaped by real human experience often performs strongest.

But it might just as well be an AI-generated draft that’s factually sound and double-checked by a human. Google has openly said it isn’t concerned about whether a human or an AI wrote the content (at least for now). And if you bring real experience to the table, readers with expertise can always tell.

And when you actually write good content:

• Readers stay on your page for longer (which boosts SEO)
• Readers share your content to their coworkers and make discussions (which affects final buying decision)
• Readers remember your brand, and will return to consume more content from you (more traffic!)
• Readers are interested enough to check your products and services (which also affects their buying decision)

Here are the steps I would do to write the best piece of content:

1. Open an incognito window and Google the keyword to figure out the search intent. In other words, what types of pages are showing up in the top three results? Deep-dive into that page. I usually check the depth of those top articles (and where I can beat them).
2. Next, build an outline with clear H1, H2, H3, and H4 headings. The H1 is your main title, the H2s are your primary sections, and everything below that becomes supporting subheadings.
3. Use keyword research tools like Ahrefs to research additional keywords to work into your article and guide your on-page SEO.
4. Then write your content. If your outline is solid, all you need to do is fill in each section. And make sure your intro pulls people in.

Here are some best practices I apply for writing SEO content:

• Keep your H1 title tag under 60 characters, ideally in the 56–58 range to avoid truncation and keep the headline tight.
• Write a meta description under 155 characters and include your exact target keyword somewhere in the copy for clarity and relevance.
• Set your URL slug to the exact keyword. Most CMSs auto-generate the slug from your full title, which is rarely ideal. Always edit it so the slug is clean, short, and keyword-only. I still can’t believe how often this has to be repeated to content teams.
• Use JPGs for images that don’t need transparency, and keep them under ~100 KB. Compress them or convert PNGs to JPGs using online tools. If they’re still too large, resize them. On Mac you go to Preview → Tools → Adjust Size → set width to ~1280 or ~1080 and let the height scale automatically.
• Add ALT tags to every image. This is essential for accessibility and helps screen readers describe visual elements to users with impaired vision.
• Save your thumbnail image as a JPG and name the file using your exact target keyword. This boosts your chances of appearing in Google Image Search. The same applies to every image you upload: use descriptive filenames, not random strings. File naming plays a bigger role in image search than most people realize.

For B2B marketplaces in particular, here are some of my recommendations:

• When you publish supply/demand-side marketplace breakdowns, founders treat your content like strategy guidance.
• Payment flow explainers attract backlinks because early-stage teams constantly search for clarity.

How to write thought leadership content for B2B marketplaces

Thought leadership emerges when your ideas and your communication style work together, whether you’re writing or speaking. When you hit that balance well, you rise above competitors and earn the trust of your audience.

Just remember that thought leadership doesn’t always come from bold, groundbreaking statements. You don’t need to push against the grain to earn credibility. A detailed look into an overlooked topic can deliver plenty of “hidden gem” value.

For example, here’s a thought leadership post from Noah Greenberg, CEO at Stacker. He’s just expressing his ideas in a very simple, even casual fashion, and yes, I would say that it is a piece of LinkedIn thought leadership content:

The problem is that in most companies the founders and senior leaders are sitting on a goldmine of sharp opinions, but almost none of it ever gets written down. These ideas stay locked in their head. Without a system to extract that knowledge and turn it into clear, compelling content, the company never actually produces real thought leadership.

Your in-house marketing team, unfortunately, are just executors, not subject matter experts. They can package the ideas, polish the writing, and publish the content. But they’re not the ones shaping the industry. They didn’t found the company. They aren’t defining the strategy. They didn’t build the product.

When creating thought leadership content for B2B marketplaces, you have several options:

1. Ideas rooted in your company’s origin story and the problem you set out to solve
2. Ideas shaped by your strategic positioning and worldview
3. Insights drawn from the actual nuance of what you build or deliver
4. Strong opinions informed by years in the industry
5. Proprietary data and patterns no one else sees
6. Case studies that reveal details only insiders would know

So here’s how I’ll do thought leadership content marketing for B2B marketplaces:

1. Find your story: Almost every B2B marketplace starts because founders saw buyers and sellers struggling to find each other, compare pricing, or transact smoothly. They built the marketplace they wished they had. That’s their disruption story. Interview the founders and tell that story. Lay out the pain points that led them to start their company, and explain the unique solution they developed to solve those problems.
2. Find smart people with unique insights: Sometimes it’s just the reality is that most companies don’t have that “groundbreaking” story. However, they usually have smart people in the company. In B2B marketplaces, category managers know the subtle dynamics between buyers, suppliers, pricing, and demand — nuances that shape how the entire ecosystem functions. Engage with them, and interview them to write an insightful piece of content. You’ll be surprised at how much content can be produced simply by talking to experts in the team.
3. Produce proprietary data: In B2B marketplaces, users look for pricing trends, demand patterns, and category-level insights — but most marketplaces don’t analyze this deeply. They link to whoever shares real data. Publishing your own insights gives you instant thought leadership.

How to distribute your content?

After you produce content, you can’t expect people to find it by themselves. SEO naturally brings in traffic, of course, but you must be proactive about content distribution too.

Here are some of my favorite content distribution channels for B2B marketplaces:

• Your company blog: Always start here. Link your articles together to take visitors from one page to another. For example, in a generic How-to article, try linking it to your thought leadership content. That helps siphoning some traffic from an high-discoverability page (thanks to SEO) to a low-discoverability page (thought leadership).
• Newsletters: A newsletter is the BEST way to distribute content. In the beginning, building an email list can take a lot of time and effort, but over time, it becomes a powerful owned channel for promotional content. Some of the good newsletter platforms I recommend are beehiiv, MailerLite, Kit, and Substack.
• Social media: LinkedIn is usually the best platforms for B2B marketplaces content distribution. Simply break your articles into smaller snippets and share it on social media. However, you need to share it on personal accounts rather than company pages (people don’t really read information from a Company page).

Choosing the content marketing agency for B2B marketplaces

Okay, since I’m writing this article, this is going to be quite a self-promo. But Perceptric is born out of my deep understanding of what’s lacking in the way content marketing is done in many B2B marketplaces. I saw how:

• Pain point 1: Content team is too disconnected from the Sales team to effectively collaborate and create content that really drives Sales.
• Pain point 2: Content team doesn’t focus enough on Bottom-of-the-funnel queries and topics that drive revenue. They chase entry-level keywords that may bring in tons of traffic (but none of them have the pain point that your products/services are solving).
• Pain point 3: Content writers tend to have not enough subject matter knowledge to write content for such a highly technical field.

That’s why I create Perceptric to solve those pain points for content teams in B2B marketplaces. We’re committed to crafting exceptional content that rises above the noise.

Here’s how I do content marketing differently:

1. I use the Knowledge – Narrative approach to balance between SEO and thought leadership content
2. I focus on creating content for the bottom-of-the-funnel that answers very specific pain points that your customers are having.
3. I also help you build thought-leader/opinion content pieces (sourced from experts in your field) that reflects what your brand believes in. Content marketing, at the highest level, becomes brand building itself.
4. Finally, I help you distribute those content pieces by repurposing them into formats suitable for social media

If you’re looking for a content marketing partner who genuinely gets what it means to do marketing for B2B marketplaces, I’d love to help!

B2B marketplace marketing Frequently Asked Question

1. Why is content marketing important for B2B marketplaces?

Content marketing helps B2B marketplaces prove value through pricing transparency, supplier insights, and demand data. Clear explanations build confidence and encourage more buyers and sellers to onboard.

2. What’s the biggest mistake B2B marketplaces make with content?

Many B2B marketplaces push brand narratives but neglect high-intent content around pricing transparency, supplier quality, and demand data. Lead with what buyers and sellers care about.

3. How should B2B marketplaces measure content marketing?

Beyond traffic and engagement, {Industry keywords} should track sales-related outcomes rather than vanity metrics like traffic. This includes:

• Number of leads generated
• Deals/conversions attributed to content
• Deals/conversions influenced by articles

4. What type of content works best for B2B marketplaces?

For B2B marketplaces, start with BOFU queries like “industrial parts marketplace.” Then expand into supply insights and industry trend content.