Most marketing advisers will tell you that you're doing well with B2B marketing if you get 10 percent of your contacts to respond positively. That may be a reasonable and achievable goal but, you know what, it's not good enough.
You're not in business to meet expectations or hit the numbers that everybody else can hit. You should aim to out-do your competitors in every aspect of business, including B2B content marketing. But how do you do that?
When it comes to your clients' success, don't guess--know! Here are some simple B2B content marketing tips to share with them, that will take their marketing efforts to the next level:
1. Create Interesting Content
This may sound like a given but, more often than not, marketers are so focused on what they want to say that they forget to make it interesting. There are so many companies out there sending out newsletters, mass emails and posting blogs that recipients have learned to tune most of them out. In order to stand out from the crowd, your content must be interesting and entertaining from the opening to the call to action.
2. Use Different Methods and Mediums
Even if your content is interesting, you won't be as successful as you should be if you use the same tactics for every marketing effort. It is imperative that you learn how to effectively use every marketing tool at your disposal because this will keep your current readers engaged and it will help you build your audience with people who prefer certain mediums over others.
Here is a list of some industry-proven practices that you need to be using:
- Articles
- Blogs
- eBooks
- Targeted Emails
- FAQs
- Infographics
- Podcasts
- Reference Guides
- Video Demos
- Webinars
- White Papers
Make sure to take the time to understand the methods for each before you implement them into your overall strategy. For example, a good headline for a blog post needs to include keyword optimization while a subject line for a mass email should be aimed at intriguing the recipient.
3. Make Your Content Easy to Find
Actually, let me qualify this by adding that it needs to be easy to find by the right people at the right times. For example, if you are an online retail store, you need your content to be available and relevant during your industry's buying season(s). You need to start by determining the trends leading up to each buying season and then developing content that will help you take advantage of those trends.
Once you decide on content that will be engaging and effective, you need to use the best strategies for getting your content out to the people who need to see it:
- Social Media Marketing
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
- Pay-per-Click Advertising (PPC)
- Pay-per-Play Advertising (PPP)
If you take the time to learn how to develop your content and vary the mediums you employ, you should also ensure that you are using these marketing tools as well as possible. Social media marketing is great for engaging customers but they may become immune to your efforts if you post too much material. Similarly, PPC advertising is great for finding quality traffic but there are times when you can get more from an investment in SEM strategies.
4. Make it Personalized
Of course, all of these tactics are versions of mass marketing but there are ways to make them come across as customized or personalized. This means the titles of blogs and emails, banners for PPC efforts and everything else you do needs to make the potential customer feel as though they are seeing your content because it actually applies to them, not simply because they are on the internet.
Sometimes this means scaling back efforts and targeting smaller groups individually. You can do things like choose more specific keywords for your blogs so they less people find you when they do a search but these people may be more likely to be buyers. Or it could be something like writing one blog for mass consumption and then linking to that piece with several shorter, more specific pieces. That way you draw in several smaller groups and then send them on to the information you need them to see.
It's crucial that you maintain an intimate connection with each group of customers you are attempting to reach. It's easy to forget that as you try to grow your audience so don't let your message become too broad.
The important thing to remember is that you should not be happy with ten percent returns on your content marketing efforts. Why not try for much more? If you put in the time and actually care about the feedback you receive, you can certainly do much better.
