3 Keys to a Highly-Effective Content Marketing Strategy

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Covid-19 has significantly changed business-to-business marketing plans. As Forrester noted recently, “It’s more than a combination of discrete trends such as rising bounce rates, declining open rates, or increasing churn; it’s that buyers now expect a fundamentally different relationship with your company.” Consequently, creating compelling, relevant and consistent content is a highly effective way to attract and retain your audience’s attention, gain their trust, and, ultimately, to convert them to customers.

In a world full of false advertising and eroding trust, content marketing should be at the heart of any digital marketing strategy. It’s the foundation of all digital marketing channels, including SEO, public relations, social media and traffic generation. According to Hubspot, 70% of marketers are actively investing in content marketing in 2020.

Rather than trying to directly sell  your products or services, you are offering useful, relevant content to your prospects and customers to help them overcome their challenges. So then, the focus is on content – be it in the form of infographics, YouTube videos, whitepapers, webpages or information in other formats.

Effective content marketing sends a message to potential customers that you are passionate about what you do and that you want to share your expertise with them — for free. To achieve this goal, it’s important to focus on three prongs: business goals, personas, and your sales funnel.

Three Essential Factors to Build Your Content Marketing Strategy

In order for your content marketing efforts to be successful, you need to create a strategy based on these three factors.

1. Business Goals

Step One in beginning an effective content marketing strategy is to be certain it lines up with your business goals. Understanding what business goal you want to achieve or support gives you the needed clarity to set the appropriate marketing objectives. Are you aiming to strengthen customer loyalty and reduce churn? Maybe the goal is to attract new prospects or overcome objections. Once you have defined your marketing goals, you can develop your content marketing campaign. 

2. Personas

Developing buyer personas is a necessary part of your strategy, but you have to take it a step further. Find the individuals within your audience that have the influence and enthusiasm that will help grow your company. If your audience is split into several types of buyers, refine your buyer personas to focus on those most likely to convert.

Start by identifying some of your most loyal customers. From there, find the primary decision-makers who championed the decision to purchase from or hire you. There are probably sales or service team members in your company who have close relationships with these people. Find those employees, and use sales data to create a persona – data points like goals/motivations, challenges, background, demographics, common objections, biggest fears and hobbies.

3. Your sales funnel

Vendor research happens online, and what will move the buyer down the pipeline is valuable content being published on your web, email, search and social channels. In order to drive success with B2B content marketing, you need to understand how the content you create fits into the different stages of your sales funnel.

Be aware that your funnel may vary from the norm depending on elements such as your sector, solution, business model, pricing structure and target market. In fact, experts report that “today’s B2B buyer might be anywhere from two-thirds to 90% of the way through their journey before they reach out to a vendor.” Confer with the sales team about the particulars of your sales funnel, then use that intelligence to create a marketing strategy that addresses leads at the top, middle and bottom of that funnel.

By: Cara Sloman

Source: https://www.entrepreneur.com/

Critics by: Jess Smith

Your content marketing strategy can also be referred to as a content marketing plan. It’s a businesses strategic approach to creating, managing and distributing all content assets, including reporting and documenting success metrics.

A content strategy typically involves a content calendar that will help you execute your content plan, broken down into deliverables on a yearly or quarterly basis.

Before you sit down to craft your strategy, consider the why carefully: Why are you focusing on creating content in the first place? This will help establish the goals surrounding each piece (for example: are you writing first and foremost for SEO purposes, or perhaps putting on a webinar to promote a product?).

B2B marketers who have a well thought out content strategy will be more successful than those that do not. A strategic approach to content production includes several important steps — from understanding your audience to being clear what point of the funnel a particular piece of content is serving to the promotion timeline.

1. Start with a content audit

If you’ve already been creating content for some time without a clear content marketing strategy, it’s a good idea to conduct a content audit. If you’re doing this in-house, work with your content team and marketing plan to create a detailed list of content assets, and remember to include all assets such as email marketing, social media posts, and many more. Take a look at your current engagement statistics and use these as a benchmark once you’ve put your new content marketing strategy in place.

2. Establish goals and objectives

Your content marketing strategy should not be thought of as stagnant. It’s important to evolve alongside the wider business objectives, to ensure you continue to support overall growth. But you need baseline content marketing goals to benchmark against so you can track your progress. As you continue to measure the impact of your content, you can be more effective and proactive when planning communications and campaigns.

It’s also a good idea to have productivity KPIs to keep your content production high. For example, the number of blog posts and webinars that you’ll need to complete on a monthly or quarterly basis.

3. Buyer personas

Buyer personas and consumer data can enrich your understanding of your core customers and stakeholders, but you must start with a clear picture of who your customers are, how those people interact with your organization at each stage of their journey, as well as what motivates them to deepen their relationships with your brand.

A social listening tool can help by monitoring conversations that your target audience is having and how your brand can help as well as understanding where your customers are having that conversation. This data will help you outline what type of content pieces to create and where to publish them.

4. Map your customer journey

With your personas in place, it’s important that you understand what the decision-making process is like for each of them, putting yourself in the shoes of your prospects and customers. The type of content that you’ll need to create for someone in the awareness phase is very different than the content a prospect about to make a final decision will need. Think about their questions, concerns, and information gaps that you can address on your website, via your blog, in video content, and other places.

Work with your content team and internal stakeholders to create a customer journey map – outlining the journey that customers take as they learn about your company, buy your products, and telling others about them. Knowing this information, you can be far more strategic with how you communicate with them. Be sure to share the map with other teams as well – this helps ensure that sales, marketing, and customer success teams are on the same page—and keeps everyone’s focus on the customer.

5. Publish, manage, monitor

Publishing and promoting content can seem like a big job when you’ve got several channels to publish on at the same time. Tools like Meltwater’s Social Media Publishing platform allow you to take control of your content scheduling and publishing with a social media management tool that’s built for marketing and PR professionals.

Once your content has been published, your job is not done. Now comes the most important part – make sure it gets seen by the most relevant eyes, so you can increase conversions, and measuring the metrics to see how you’re pacing against your goals. Within the same Meltwater tool, it provides your social analytics and PR coverage monitoring in one place.

6. Repurpose

Lastly, don’t fall into the trap that many companies do of viewing their content as “one and done”. Your content doesn’t need to have a short shelf life after you’ve completed the initial publishing and promotion. In fact, it can (and should) live many lives! Keep your article updated, and find ways to reuse the content, such as creating a video version, or atomizing small chunks into short-form content like TikToks or Instagram Reels. You should always be thinking about other ways you can promote content, multiple times, after publishing...Read more