Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to educate, attract and retain a clearly defined audience with the goal to convert prospects into paying customers, while keeping current customers interested and retained.
Content marketing is a marathon, not a sprint. We take a long-term view of how you communicate with your customers. Because if your customer loves your content, that means it’s meeting the needs of the people you’re trying to reach.
Content Marketing Process
Create Buyer Personas
A buyer persona is a representation of your ideal customer. They are developed based on customer demographics and behavior, along with your own understanding of their motivations and challenges.
Buyer personas help you:
- Determine what kind of content you need
- Set the tone, style, and delivery strategies for your content
- Determine the topics you should be writing about
- Understand where buyers get their information and how they want to consume it
Create content that builds trust and supports the buying process
- Clone your thought leaders and product experts
- Address specific issues and pain points in the market – Answer Questions
- Use authentic conversational content that addresses frequently asked questions
- Use webinars and case studies to show how your products help other companies that suffer from similar problems
- Use Landing Pages and Microsites to make it easy for buyers to self-educate about your product and services
- Monitor content consumption and visitor behavior through Marketing Automation Software and Lead Scoring
- Score the website visitors that engage with your content – Sales can cherry pick hot leads out of the CRM
5 Ways to Use Content
- As an Opportunity: Highlight your Broader Mission
- Show how Does Your Product Live in the World?
- Share Stories – Not Self-Indulgent Stories, Stories that Walk in Customers’ Shoes
- Target Audiences – Speak to them, Feature Customer Questions and relate the answers to your product solutions
- Distribute content in many forms – case studies, blogs, webinars, white papers, videos, etc.
The top-two types of most valuable influencer content formats are Case studies (47%) and Webinars (39%) (DemanGen).
Become a Subject Matter Expert
Every company has a story. We help you tell yours.
- Use Experience and Credentials to Establish Knowledge Base & Expertise
- Celebrate Your Work & Demonstrate Accomplishments
- Share Experiences and Insight
- Leverage Industry Networking Contacts to Endorse & Comment
- Cite Accolades & Awards
- Use all these tactics to become recognized as an “Influencer”
Thought leadership has a greater impact of ideas on potential buyers than all other forms of content marketing – case studies, collateral, advertising, etc. (Forrester).
Content’s Influence
%
B2B Decision Makers
80% of business decision-makers favor getting brand information via an article series more than ads (Content Marketing Institute). 47% said such content had a direct impact on awarding business. (Edelman).
%
B2B Buyers
62% of B2B Buyers say they can make a purchase decision based solely on digital content (Blue Corona). 80% indicate that between 1 and 6 people are involved in the purchase process for a new solution or hiring a new vendor (Elevation B2B).
%
B2B Buyers
%
B2B Marketers
83% of B2B Marketers believe thought leadership content builds trust for their buyer (LinkedIn Business). 51% believe thought leadership builds trust in their organization (LinkedIn Business).
Techniques B2B marketers use to research their target audience for effective content marketing
Providing consumers with useful content to educate them on your products and services and show how your products and services effectively solve problems and challenges can increase purchases, improve brand awareness and boost sales.
Content marketing is all about using content to attract and retain visitors and eventually turn them into customers. Today, 41% of B2B marketers focus on content tied to the buying journey of a customer (Marketo). To be effective, you must personalize your messaging by proactively creating content that applies to each stage of the buyer’s journey.
“Eighty-five percent of consumers trust solutions that take the time to walk them through various paths toward decisions rather than just attempting to make that choice for them. This type of content shows consumers that you acknowledge and value their ability to evaluate and make decisions for themselves” (Marketo).
- Sales Team Feedback 74%
- Website Analytics 73%
- Keyword Research 55%
- Secondary Research 74%
- Primary Research 50%
- Social Media Listening 50%
- Database Analysis 45%
- Key Customers/Partners 42%
- Other Techniques 8%
