Marketing has usually been one of the earliest departments to get cut when companies are under financial stress, however you can show with content marketing that this investment was valid.
The truth is, successful B2B content teams know how important data-driven, organized and efficient processes are. Here, though, are a few helpful tips:
Developing Personas
Creating audience personas enables you to create content that really resonates with your target buyers. Your personas will help you determine which types of content marketing such as infographics, videos or podcasts will work best when targeting this audience segment.
For example, if your B2B software targets small business owners like James who rely on social media channels for business news and information say LinkedIn; generating videos and infographics specifically for this demographic group makes it be served to prospects at the time they want it leading to more leads.
Survey your audience or have your customer service team record frequently asked questions in order to find potential pain points and develop content around them. This helps identify pain points and create content which addresses them directly.
Build a Strategy
Content strategies provide businesses with a clear vision of how they will create and distribute their contents so as to attract visitors, generate leads and convert leads into customers. Additionally making one enables the company to set goals that can be measured over time.
Ideally research methods such as interviewing existing clients or monitoring competitors social media feeds or review portals might be used in order to establish trends or common interests among your target market. Based on this data buyer personas may either be expanded further or narrowed down into specific groups.
Testimonials serve as an excellent way of showcasing the advantages of using your product/service. Testimonials play a significant role in humanizing brand through video testimonials or text reviews creating trust among prospective buyers.
Make a Calendar
Content calendars can help outline goals and timetables for your content strategy while also ensuring all the different aspects of it are covered. In this case, if your goal is brand recognition or marketing-qualified leads (MQLs), your calendar should not only reflect this but also set timeframes.
Your content calendar ought to be in line with your company’s sales cycle as this can impact on both the type and timing of content creation. Besides, monitoring what others do concerning their content marketing strategies may inspire campaigns and dictate sorts of posts that will engage audiences.
Do a Content Audit
Content audits are systematic methods for checking out your existing marketing materials to see what to keep, improve, update or repurpose depending on your content strategy goals. It should ensure that current material fulfils those stated within it.
B2B firms often focus on developing awareness and education stage contents yet forget about consideration, evaluation and rationalisation level information which would position them as a viable choice for buyers. Identifying gaps with the help of conducting a content audit would go a long way towards ensuring all stages of the buyer journey are catered for.
Compile all your data into an Excel spreadsheet to analyze easily, and then use the same table to find out what patterns or trends might be helpful in future campaigns. Next, classify marketing content according to its potential impact on your target audience and business objectives.
Performance Measure of Your Content
To ensure that your content is generating the desired outcome, it is paramount that you establish specific goals as well key performance indicators (KPIs). A good measure is how many leads each piece of content generated.
The other way of measuring success for individual pieces of content is by tracking engagement metrics. For instance, an infographic on energy efficiency receiving many pageviews but only brief periods of engagement could signal it may need some revision to make the content more compelling.
To determine which KPIs are relevant, one must first carry out a research so as to gain a deep understanding about their audience. Thus, either conduct surveys among existing customers or do competitive analysis so as to get an insight into your market needs – this will help you develop targeted buyer personas and plan for appropriate content marketing strategies offing better results
