As cliché as “content is king” may sound, it continues to hold water in 2017. How relevant is content for B2B technology marketers this year? According to online marketing guru Neil Patel, content marketing generates three times as many leads, yet costs 62% less compared to traditional marketing.
Okay, content matters; you already get that. One of the biggest challenges named in the B2B Content Marketing Report is a lack of time/bandwidth to create content. So, how will you scale your content marketing to consistently produce and publish articles that will give an edge over the competitors and increase qualified leads?
The following five methods are a good start.
1. Develop a Content Strategy
You can’t just start producing content without an overall strategy. You need a plan that examines the data available to you. What are some trends that are working well and not working so well in your industry? Your plan should seek to answer the following questions:
- What are your four to five key performance indicators (KPI) for measuring success?
- How often do you plan on releasing content — including blog posts, vlogs, social media posts, and email newsletters?
- What are the business pain points your technology solves? How will your content convey that you understand your customers?
- How will you publish and post your content consistently across all your channels?
2. Identify Subject Matter Experts
The subject matter experts in your organization understand technology trends and know what your customers care about. Assemble a team that can recommend topics (e.g. hybrid cloud, BYOD security, legacy infrastructures, ethical hacking, etc.) that your core demographic will find engaging, compelling, and read-worthy from start to finish. Use editorial managers who can help you compose your content and make sure it meets your key criteria.
3. Use Email Newsletters
No, SEO isn’t dead, and neither is email marketing. The latter is more viable than ever. In a survey by Marketing Sherpa, 70% of respondents listed email as their preferred source when communicating with a company.
A modern email newsletter has been identified as the best way to convey thought leadership and create value for your prospect or customer. A responsive newsletter template that is branded, easy to assemble with curated and original content, designed for mobile and has the flexibility to include social conversations will bring greater results from your content marketing efforts. Other considerations include:
- An option to have an automated newsletter based on your content criteria
- The use of social share buttons
- Easy interface for embedding content, such as videos, pictures, and social commentary
- Analytics for tracking campaigns, and integration with Google Analytics
- A way to incorporate campaigns in your newsletter to amplify your results.
4. Repurpose and Curate Relevant Content
Have you written a white paper or an e-book? Content can be leveraged in multiple ways and be broken down into a bite size series through blog posts and featured articles in newsletters. Did you gather statistics in your white paper? Create an infographic. If you host a podcast or a webinar, turn them into a blog post or a 2-minute explainer video.
Curating relevant content is another critical piece to your content strategy. Your audience not only wants your opinion (as awesome as it may be), but needs to see that others validate your approach. Curated content posted to your blog or social and included in your newsletter provides an invaluable source of information to your prospects and customers.
5. Outsource Content Creation
Your staff may be knowledgeable, but they are already overworked and most likely can’t find the time to write on top of their regular “day” job. An outside content agency who understands how to write about solving business problems with technology solutions will consistently deliver content in your voice to you on a regular basis.
Make sure that your content agency has worked to understand your organization, including;
- Your unique position in the market – why do your customers buy from you, who is your primary competition?
- Your audience – are they C-level executives, data analysts or programmers? What industries do they hail from? What does your audience read, follow and care about?
- Your voice – do you want to be serious about cybersecurity or lighthearted about data analytics? What keywords and phrases need to be optimized for SEO?
As you know, there is so much more to content marketing than simply writing a blog post. You need a complete, robust strategy that will amplify your reach, increase results and generate more organic traffic from your content through newsletters, social, SEO, landing pages, and campaigns as well as educate your qualified leads throughout the buyer’s journey.
The content team at ContentMX are experts on topics ranging from cybersecurity and IoT to data, analytics and the hybrid cloud. We work with you to create a content strategy that meets your goals and have editorial managers review your content to ensure it meets your voice before it is passed back to you. Our platform allows you to easily request original content, curate relevant content, create newsletters and landing pages and consistently create content across all platforms, including social media, email, and company blogs. Our mission is simple: to increase your ROI through thoughtful strategy and unparalleled execution with a complete end-to-end content marketing solution.