Wednesday, April 27, 2011

How do you Prioritize Content Marketing in B2B?

I recently read an article that outlined some important considerations for leveraging your company's content for marketing purposes. My favorite highlights from the article are quoted below.

It can be extremely difficult not only to produce a good quantity of unique and valuable content but also to match it up to the right stage in the buying cycle. This is even more difficult for companies that have a lot of solutions, like Perficient does, or who want to target that content by industry, geography or other data points.

We break our content down into several types:

  • Website Copy
  • Blog Articles: We have four active blogs with over 30 people blogging on behalf of the company right now.
  • Twitter & other social media content (Example: @Perficient)
  • Whitepapers
  • Webinars: both video replays and slide shows
  • Video Content: in the form of tutorials, demos, interviews, panels, speakers, events, and more.
  • Solution Sheets 
  • Case Studies
  • Podcasts / Audio Files
  • Email Newsletters
It has been an ongoing effort to tag all of this content to appropriate solution-based categories and or target market segments in order to promote and leverage them in the right way for lead generation purposes. More importantly, in our industry, insights and techniques can become outdated very quickly, so keeping on top of these assets and updating them frequently is very important. 

Some of my goals as a B2B marketer involve taking this list of assets and doing just what the article referenced emphasizes is so important:
  1. Make all unique content easily sharable - across social networks and via email.
  2. Evolve the content experience from A) providing insightful value to the reader - to B) demonstrating the wealth of thought leadership at my firm - to C) solving a business need. 
If you work in B2B, what types of content are you prioritizing in your marketing efforts? Are you trying anything different from my list above? 





Social media has expanded both the need and the reach of content.
One of the strengths of social media is to drive awareness of a company, product or service. Many B2B marketers set up Twitter accounts and Facebook Pages to promote product launches, trade show events and other company-centric ideas.
Content generated leads can be tracked in a company’s CRM system, along with the description of the content that drove the lead.
As buyers move into the consideration phase, they are looking for more than just product information. They are looking for solutions to business problems.
Customers are doing more online research before purchase than ever before, and are further in the buying cycle before they ever have a conversation with a salesperson. This makes it vitally important to have consumable content, easily available and shareable, to keep a company’s products relevant and appearing in search results.
According to a study by strategy consulting firm AMR International, the first and third priorities for B2B online marketers are lead generation (38%) and awareness (28%).
While the second priority in this survey was customer retention, an important online tactic, there is no mention of middle of the funnel marketing.
B2B marketers need to respond to the changing online environment and changing needs of prospects to make more information available on social platforms and in shareable formats
All social content needs to be created with two thoughts in mind. Does this show a prospect how their business need can be solved, and would they be willing to share this with other connections online?

1 comment:

  1. Learned a lot from reading the article. Thank you very much for posting it.
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    ReplyDelete

Thank you for commenting on my blog post! I really appreciate the conversation. -Erin

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