Why do so many companies under-utilize the Internet? Unlike your business, it’s open 24/7 so it can provide site visitors with an interest in your business, products and services with quality answers and a taste of what it will be like to work with you.
Sure, I understand the concept of ‘we want customers to talk with us, and our site is designed to drive the customer to call.’ But it isn’t about what you want – it’s about the customer.
Putting up a site isn’t acceptable anymore (if it ever was) and if your site is strictly brochureware chances are pretty strong that you’re missing valuable opportunities to provide your site visitor with a unique, valuable experience.
Take a look at these three factoid, courtesy of the good folks at Content Marketing Institute:
- Content marketing is widely adopted: 9 out of 10 B2B marketers are using content to grow their businesses.
- Marketers believe content marketing is 18 times more effective in actually determining ROI than traditional advertising.
- 41% of B2B marketers consider themselves to be effective at content marketing. (Source: Content Marketing Institute)
Content marketing is being used, it drives ROI but there’s room for improvement.
So, what are you doing to improve your content marketing? Here are a few tips based on best practices of highly successful sales and marketing organizations:
- Who are we trying to attract? Get down the the segment level because each segment will have different needs and wants that you need to address with your content.
- What needs and wants do they have during each stage of their buying process? Buyers at the early stages of the buying process are looking for solutions to problems (education) but later in the process they want specific information about your solutions (product demo, trial) – so make sure you develop content for the stage in the process.
- What expertise do we have that can provide a unique, valuable solution to those needs and wants during each stage of the buying process? Look internally and externally – customers, suppliers, industry experts – in order to present the content in a variety of compelling ways. Variety can help keep the reader engaged in different content – hearing the same person over and over again can weaken the impact of your message.
- What channels and formats does our audience prefer to receive information? Written or spoken word? Video? Blogs or white papers? Do you host on your site (yes) and ignore social networking sites (no)? To ask this question a different way – how do you need to create and distribute content in order to maximize your reach?
- How can we produce quality content for these channels? You might not have the resources internally so line up the expertise as needed so you can produce the quality and manage the costs in order to maximize the ROI.
- How can we make this fun AND valuable to the customer? This is probably the most overlooked element – but try to build some fun into the content. Create a fun quiz that pulls the reader into the content. Create an engaging infographic.
- Create an editorial and production calendar, build a process, assign owners and be consistent. Content marketing can be a lot of work and it can get pushed to the side all too easily so create an editorial calendar that includes [ex] kick-off date, first review, comments due, final review, publish as well as owners for each stage. Then publish content on a consistent basis because consistency builds your audience. (Check out these sources for some great ideas – content marketing plan, editorial calendar)
- Test, measure, analyze, modify, repeat. Again, content marketing is about ROI so you need to establish a process for testing content, measuring performance, analyzing performance and modifying your plan in order to test some more. Never rest on your laurels.
