Building brand is all about telling stories. Content marketing has emerged as one of the most powerful means of providing valuable information and establishing your company as an industry leader in a world of B2B buyers who are increasingly avoiding traditional – marketing channels while making their buying decisions.
Docurated, a document management vendor, asked 46 content marketing strategists for their most effective tactic for B2B companies. Here are some highlights:
Create a content marketing editorial calendar.
It’s a one-time effort, but it’s the elephant in the room that most marketers aren’t addressing. Winging content creation and distribution efforts is not only naive, but dangerous for the bottom line. A content calendar is a core part of an effective digital marketing campaign. Regardless of how hard it’s going to be to create and stick to it, business owners and marketers should suck it up and take the time to do it once.
– Hitesh Sahni, a freelance digital marketer, content developer, trainer and consultant
Get your stakeholders involved.
Instead of restricting the creation of content to just the marketing team, reach out to colleagues, vendors, customers, advisors and every type of stakeholder for your business. These stakeholders are not only advocates for your business, but for your industry, too. Involving stakeholders also results in a unique mix of insights and voices that the marketing team might not have been able to achieve alone. While engaging with your stakeholders for your content strategy, think of creative formats for the content, like videos, infographics, microsites and podcasts.
– Swetha Venkataramani, manager of communications and content at gLenses.
Market the people of your business, not the business.
At the end of the day, we’re all looking to tell a story about our brand to develop relationships with our target audience. B2B marketing means being able to tell that story to different people at different levels of the business and having your content resonate with each of them. Content marketing has allowed us to see the people behind the businesses once again and target them much more effectively, resulting in stronger relationships and ultimately a stronger conversion.
– Christine Rochelle, director of digital marketing and operations, lotus823
Align your content with the buying cycle.
Content should never be created for content’s sake; it should be created to accomplish very specific objectives and must focus on the buyer rather than your company or product. Buyers only care about getting their questions answered and what you or your product can do for them. Designing content to answer your buyers’ specific questions at each phase of their buying process is a winning strategy that will accelerate buying cycles. Once your content is complete, use your marketing automation system to drip the right content to the right buyer at the right time. Here are seven steps to developing buyer-focused content:
1. Develop detailed buyer personas.
2. Understand how your prospective customers buy. This can be accomplished by interviewing your current customers.
3. Document the phases of the buying process.
4. Understand your buyers’ goals and questions at the various phases of the buying cycle (Aware, Curious, Considering, Buying).
5. Build a content map that aligns specific content with key groups of questions.
6. Develop content that answers your buyer questions and enables them to accomplish their goals at the various phases of their buying process.
7. Use custom drip campaigns to deliver the right content at the right time.
– Gary Brooks, CMO of Urjanet
Feature or quote a number of industry experts.
Not only will this content be extremely relevant, as it contains information from or about leading influencers, but the people mentioned are likely to share it via their social profiles. To take it even further, many experts will have their companies or employers share the post as well, thereby exposing it to yet another interested audience.
– Quincy Smith, inbound marketing at Uplift ROI
