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These days, you can find any information you could want online. Thanks to Google, instant gratification has become a daily feature in our lives. What has become more rare, however, is human connection.
That’s why connecting with consumers more deeply as human beings has become more effective. It’s not enough anymore to simply share the logical reasons why your brand has something special to offer. To cut through the noise of today’s oversaturated markets, you also need to weave emotion and empathy into a narrative that captures and holds their attention.
Why a narrative?
Storytelling is always at the core of what we do for our clients, and we’re passionate about helping organizations realize the power of its impact. Below, you’ll learn more about the neurological impact of storytelling on the human brain, the basics of brand storytelling structure, and how positioning your customer as the hero positions you to win more business.
Recent scientific studies show that storytelling has a measurable impact on the brain, particularly the synthesis of oxytocin. Oxytocin is a hormone released by the pituitary gland, sometimes referred to as the “love hormone,” as it can be released by things like touch, music, and exercise, which produce feelings of well-being.
“Oxytocin is produced when we are trusted or shown a kindness, and it motivates cooperation with others,” says Paul J. Zak, founding director of the Center for Neuroeconomics Studies and a professor of economics, psychology, and management at Claremont Graduate University. “We found that character-driven stories do consistently cause oxytocin synthesis. Further, the amount released by the brain predicted how much people were willing to help others.”
Zak’s team has also gotten insight into what makes stories effective at spurring oxytocin production, finding that a story must first grab and hold the audience’s attention by creating tension. When the characters experience tension, the audience’s ability to empathize and get transported into the story increases. If you’ve ever felt like working out or taking a karate class after watching an action flick, this is why. This may be because our attention to the story at hand sharpens as more tension arises. Our senses heighten as we get swept more and more into the story, imagining ourselves in the hero’s place.
If you can present your consumers with a story that places them in the center of the narrative as the hero triumphing over daunting obstacles to achieve their goals, you can capture their attention and empathy. You’ll have the opportunity to show them (not tell them) how you can help them defeat their villains and change their lives for the better.
Another reason storytelling is so effective is that it helps our brains organize information in a way that’s easy to understand. Stories put everything in order to prevent the audience from getting confused and tuning us out.
Because effective storytelling has been studied and practiced for thousands of years, it can be distilled down into a definable and repeatable structure. This structure is highly effective at helping brands simplify their message and use their opportunity to communicate with the audience to its fullest potential.
In Building A StoryBrand, Donald Miller identifies seven essential parts to storytelling:
“A character who wants something encounters a problem before they can get it. At the peak of their despair, a guide steps into their lives, gives them a plan, and calls them to action. That action helps them avoid failure and ends in a success.”
Miller says that customers are most interested in how your brand will help them to survive and thrive. Once you understand their needs, desires, problems, fears, and goals, you can place them in the center of this storytelling structure as the hero conquering their foes with you by their side as a trusted expert and guide. Just remember — they are the hero, not your brand!
People want to see themselves as the heroes of their own stories, and helping them do that is a vital way to cut through the noise and differentiate your brand. By focusing on their goals rather than your own, you position your brand as a wise guide that can help them overcome their challenges and thrive.
Once you’ve identified your ideal customer/main character, you need to define the problems they need your help solving. Focus on internal problems, the kind that keep your audience up at night — the primary villain, the dragon they need to slay. In what concrete ways do these problems present themselves in daily life? How does it nag at them mentally throughout the day?
As their empathetic and authoritative guide, you should be able to articulate how your brand can help them vanquish their villain. That means you’ll need to present yourself as wise, showing your expertise through case studies and testimonials to demonstrate how you’ve helped others. You’ll also need to show empathy and that you thoroughly understand their challenges.
Now that they’ve got a trusted guide on their side, they need a plan of attack. That’s where calls to action come into play. Don’t be coy — tell your audience exactly what they should do to fight their villain and come out on top. Articulate how this action will help them to achieve success and avoid failure, transforming them from the striving hero to the ultimate champion.
Do you want to unleash your brand’s inner Yoda, guiding customers toward their Luke Skywalker moment? Learn more about storytelling in our free guide to narrative marketing, where you’ll find a full breakdown of each step from StoryBrand.
Content Specialist Kim Steinmetz helps brands and thought leaders discover and develop their unique voice and tone while establishing authority on a topic through compelling messaging and copywriting. An accomplished writer and marketer with over a decade of experience, Kim is well-versed in both B2C and B2B content.
&Marketing provides the robust outsourced marketing department growing companies need without the high overhead costs of big agencies or full-time employees. Our variable model empowers businesses to reach their growth goals through access to the guidance and expertise of senior level strategists and a flexible execution team.
Are you facing challenges of your own in generating leads and meeting your business’ growth goals?
We’d love to learn more about your challenges and how a coordinated marketing approach might help take your organization to the next level.
Your content marketing strategy is vital to your organization’s overall success, so getting buy-in from stakeholders outside the marketing department is crucial to keep everyone aligned toward business goals. When everyone puts their heads together to provide input into the new plan, fresh perspectives and ideas are uncovered to make the strategy work better for each department.
We’ve spent years discovering the most effective approaches to get buy-in from stakeholders, so we combined our knowledge to create this guide. Keep reading to discover our 3-step process to winning your entire organization over to your brilliant new content marketing strategy.
There are many reasons why getting buy-in from stakeholders for your content marketing strategy is a step that should always be remembered. It may take hard work and patience, but it’s worth it — when everyone is aligned on a strategy:
Marketing is constantly evolving, so you must be strategic about getting buy-in when you propose changes to your strategy. Leadership especially wants to be reassured that any changes are highly likely to deliver results, so you’ll need to come prepared with plenty of data — but that’s not all:
Map out how various departments interact with or may be impacted by your strategy. Examples may include outside sales, customer service, IT, and others. Start thinking about their responsibilities, needs, and possible objections. What will you need from them, and how can you ease the burden on them to provide that?
Depending on your organization’s size, it might be worthwhile to have a different session with each department. This can help you avoid bogging anyone down with extra information irrelevant to them, tailor your presentation more closely to your audience, and provide them with individual attention.
When it comes to getting leadership buy-in, ensure you understand what metrics leaders are most interested in improving and can demonstrate how your plan will help move the needle toward the company’s goals.
Make sure everyone knows the purpose of each meeting beforehand, so stakeholders know what to expect. Don’t wait until the end of the session to finally get to the ask — tell stakeholders what you want from them at the beginning, then provide a clear explanation of why they should agree.
Set a baseline by explaining how things are currently done and where there’s room for improvement. This is an excellent opportunity to incorporate data showing where your current strategy could improve.
Pro tip: don’t just rattle off facts. Storytelling is an incredibly powerful tool — don’t just use it in your content marketing strategy. Use it to create an engaging and impactful presentation that pulls your stakeholders in just as you would a customer.
Once you’ve captured your audience’s attention and imagination, appeal to their logical side by providing data to give your proposal more legitimacy. Make sure it’s easy to understand and leads to a clear conclusion. Share examples of other organizations that have seen success with similar strategies. Most stakeholders don’t want to be the first to try a new tactic, but if they can see that others have succeeded, they’ll feel more comfortable giving it a try.
Clearly describe the benefits of your plan. A strong content marketing strategy makes customers feel more comfortable interacting with you because they’ve come to you. It also often costs significantly less than outbound marketing strategies while netting higher quality leads and improving visibility online. Make sure your audience also clearly understands any benefits specific to their department or goals, and make a clear and concise ask for exactly what you want them to do next to support your plan.
Sometimes there are factors beyond your control influencing stakeholder decisions. For example, if you’ve just joined the company, your peers and leadership might not have had enough time to get to know and trust your expertise. While it can be frustrating, it is understandable, and there are ways to help stakeholders warm up to your ideas even if they haven’t yet warmed up to you. For example, consulting with an outside expert, someone likely to be trusted and respected, can be valuable in helping to reinforce your claims.
If your plan requires marketing skills you don’t currently have and you aren’t ready to make a significant investment in headcount, you can outsource key roles. It’s common to do this for tactical roles like website design or content creation, but you can also hire part-time executive-level content marketing help in the form of a Fractional Content Marketing Officer, or fCMO. An fCMO can lead your team in both strategy and execution of your content marketing strategy without the high overhead of adding another full-time member to your C-suite.
Content marketing is ultimately a long-term strategy, but stakeholders are often interested in hearing about short-term results whenever possible. At the outset of your plan, establish your baseline to measure against. Short-term goals to track include social media interactions (likes, shares, mentions, followers), backlinks, and leads and conversions. Search engine traffic will take longer to rise, but with a baseline, you’ll be able to see any quick bumps if they do happen.
Whether you need help creating an impactful story for stakeholders or customers, we’ve got a roadmap for you. To help you successfully lead your hero down the path to their own happily ever after, &Marketing has broken down Donald Miller’s StoryBrand roadmap into easily digestible bites. Download our free guide to narrative marketing for a simple breakdown of each step.
Content Specialist Kim Steinmetz helps brands and thought leaders discover and develop their unique voice and tone while establishing authority on a topic through compelling messaging and copywriting. An accomplished writer and marketer with over a decade of experience, Kim is well-versed in both B2C and B2B content.
&Marketing provides the robust outsourced marketing department growing companies need without the high overhead costs of big agencies or full-time employees. Our variable model empowers businesses to reach their growth goals through access to the guidance and expertise of senior level strategists and a flexible execution team.
Are you facing challenges of your own in generating leads and meeting your business’ growth goals?
We’d love to learn more about your challenges and how a coordinated marketing approach might help take your organization to the next level.
This post was originally published at https://www.demandrevenue.com/cmos-what-kind-of-conductor-are-you-jazz-classical-or-both/.
Hopefully, as a CMO, you like an eclectic mix. Today’s CMOs need to be holistic conductors, balancing creativity with precision. You need a good balance of both to be really successful in today’s complex market. Let’s listen:
Being innovative and building strong connections with customers and prospects is like jazz. Remember Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis or Benny Goodman? Jazz requires expressing your creativity, using your gut, developing audacious breakthrough ideas, and taking risks to connect with target audiences in a really memorable way. They won’t remember numbers as much as how you made them feel. You won’t get big ideas from spreadsheets, either. Creativity requires you to:
Precision requires process, logic and consistent orchestration like the mathematically consistent phrasing in classical music. Remember Vivaldi, Bach or Handel? Over the last several years, digital and social media have enhanced the measurability of marketing’s impacts and value to the enterprise. Effective data analytics and process management are critical to lead efficiency and continuous improvement in today’s marketing organizations. To enable precision, you must:
So start making some beautiful jazz as well as classical music. Blending strong creativity with precision makes you a better marketer. It’s impossible to quantify creativity except in the rear-view mirror. And you can’t run an efficient marketing operation without the precision that data analytics and technology afford. Balancing both makes marketing far more interesting, effective and fun.
Alan Gonsenhauser, Founder and Principal of Demand Revenue, is an experienced CMO and general manager, and more recently as a CMO Executive Advisor and Analyst at Forrester and SiriusDecisions. He now offers Interim / Fractional Marketing Leadership, CMO Executive Advisory and Coaching, and Keynote Presentations, bolstered with comprehensive Strategic Marketing Services.
&Marketing provides the robust outsourced marketing department growing companies need without the high overhead costs of big agencies or full-time employees. Our variable model empowers businesses to reach their growth goals through access to the guidance and expertise of senior level strategists and a flexible execution team.
Are you facing challenges of your own in generating leads and meeting your business’ growth goals?
We’d love to learn more about your challenges and how a coordinated marketing approach might help take your organization to the next level.
The targeting, planning, and tracking of content marketing campaigns continue to get more sophisticated as new capabilities and tools are tailored to the task. However, CMI recently reported that 44% of marketers still find some aspects of improving content measurement challenging, though it remains a top priority.
Measuring their return on investment, or content marketing ROI, is increasingly essential because customers engage with content at every stage of their journey. Forrester found that a customer engages with 11.4 pieces of content before purchasing. Furthermore, the customer journey is rarely linear, especially in the B2B sales funnel. Instead, potential customers may dip in and out of the funnel several times, sampling different pieces of your content before converting.
Measuring content marketing ROI is not an exact science, but tried-and-true best practices are emerging. Read on to learn more about content marketing ROI, measuring it, and which metrics are truly vital.
Simply put, content marketing ROI is a percentage showing how much you earned from content marketing compared to what you spent producing and distributing it. It is one of the most critical measures of the success of a content marketing program because it is directly tied to revenue.
However, content marketing ROI has been challenging for marketers to quantify because, as mentioned above, the customer journey is often anything but straightforward. Content marketing is, after all, a long-term strategy, which makes attribution more difficult to determine. Plus, content alone won’t necessarily generate ROI – it is most valuable when created to bring value to additional channels like email, ads, etc.
Marketers have developed a formula to determine the content marketing ROI percentage. Still, many more metrics are not tied directly to revenue but help provide a holistic view of the success of your content marketing campaigns. First, we’ll explain the formula.
Add up how much you’ve spent producing content. This could include images, video, audio, the content creator’s salary, work done by other departments, etc.
To that number, add what it costs you to distribute the content. This could include tools/software used for creation and distribution or paid promotions. If you are using those tools for multiple purposes, use a percentage of that cost – for example, are you using email solely to distribute content? Perhaps not, so focus on only the portion of the cost attributed to content. This sum represents the total cost of producing all of your content, or your investment.
Add up all of the sales or leads (you must establish a lead value) that resulted directly from a piece of content. This is your return.
To that number, add what it costs you to distribute the content. This could include tools/software used for creation and distribution or paid promotions. If you are using those tools for multiple purposes, use a percentage of that cost – for example, are you using email solely to distribute content? Perhaps not, so focus on only the portion of the cost attributed to content. This sum represents the total cost of producing all of your content, or your investment.
The first thing you should know is that it is counterproductive to try to track all possible metrics. Instead, you should hone in on specific metrics depending on what you want to accomplish with your content. When you begin a new content marketing project or campaign, focus on metrics that support your key goals and provide you with information you can use to optimize the project or campaign. Don’t wait until the piece is released to decide which metrics are important. Plan ahead and limit yourself to the most meaningful and actionable information.
Here are some key metrics to consider linked to some common goals:
There are many ways to measure lead quality, which are likely to vary from business to business. For example, if you have Google Analytics set up on your website, you can see whether visitors spend time on important pages. Set up a goal for those pages and view the results at Conversions > Goals > Funnel Visualization. Another way to evaluate lead quality is by looking at traffic, bounce rates, and conversions together. For example, high traffic with high bounce rates and low conversions can indicate low lead quality.
In B2C, if you want to know how many leads turned into sales and the value of those sales, you’ll need eCommerce enabled in Google Analytics. At Behavior > Site Content > All Pages, you’ll find a Page View column that can show which pages are driving the most revenue. However, this only works for straightforward, one-session conversions, which aren’t that common for most websites. You can learn more by visiting Conversions > Multi-Channel Funnels > Assisted Conversions, which measures conversions that each channel assisted with, and sorting by landing page. For B2B, focus on form submissions.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) increases website traffic by helping your website rank higher in search engine results, where potential customers are more likely to click. Measuring the success of your SEO often involves looking at whether you rank well for your target keywords (this is vital), have high-authority inbound links, and are popping up in relevant answer boxes. You can check this by using a private/incognito window to search for key terms and seeing how well you rank. Tools like Moz’s Link Explorer that can give you specific measurements around domain and page authority, and show you your inbound links. Compare your SEO success with your social engagement to see how well your content uses keywords and whether it is finding the right audience.
The more exposure you get and the more you establish your brand’s authority both online and offline, the more people will want to share and link to your content. The Moz tool offers good insight into authority by domain and page, but you should also be sure to track offline metrics like instances of media coverage and participation in industry events. While authority is valuable, it can be challenging to track, so you may want to get creative with the types of metrics you measure here. For example, don’t forget to pay attention to what people have to say about your brand on social media.
You can also see what terms your blogs get impressions and clicks for in Search Console or Analytics. Additionally, there are tools (like Search Analytics for Sheets) that will continuously and automatically export out all queries your pages get impressions for so you can monitor average position and help determine which terms to target for new content.
Without traffic, you can’t generate revenue on your site, so web traffic is an important metric to combine with others for a well-rounded view. You can use Google Analytics to see how much traffic a content piece is driving by visiting Behavior > Site Content > Landing Pages. This view shows you which pages visitors first land on, sorted by highest-traffic pages first. Next, look at where your traffic is coming from (referral traffic) by clicking on a specific page and clicking Secondary Dimension > Acquisition > Source/Medium.
Once people arrive at your website, you’ll want to understand how much time they spend on which pages. Low bounce rates are a good sign that your content is well-received, but there are also other important onsite engagement metrics. In Google Analytics, go to Audience > Overview to see pages per session, bounce rate, and average session duration. To see how fast visitors are bouncing off a specific piece of content, go to Behavior > Site Content > All Pages and find its URL.
Social media shares are important to track because social proof and peer recommendations have become so critical in the purchase process. You can see how much traffic you get from specific platforms at Acquisition > Social > Network Referrals, and the Social > Overview page can show you how much revenue that traffic has earned you.
Using &Marketing’s Content Marketing ROI Calculator is your first step toward creating a thoughtful content strategy that aligns with your business goals. This calculator will help you determine which keywords and topics will generate the most organic traffic and conversions on your website (depending on where your content ranks for those keywords on Google). It also calculates how much it would cost to get those same results via paid advertising. This comparison will help you determine whether it’d be more cost-effective to invest in paid advertising or organic content, or a combination of the two!
Looking for more guidance around understanding and optimizing your content marketing ROI? Contact us today!
Marketing Director Paul Ferguson helps clients develop fully integrated marketing solutions that make impressions and drive results. Whether it be design-oriented campaigns or digital market execution, Paul skillfully creates strategies to effectively reach client’s desired audiences.
Content Specialist Kim Steinmetz helps brands and thought leaders discover and develop their unique voice and tone while establishing authority on a topic through compelling messaging and copywriting. An accomplished writer and marketer with over a decade of experience, Kim is well-versed in both B2C and B2B content.
&Marketing provides the robust outsourced marketing department growing companies need without the high overhead costs of big agencies or full-time employees. Our variable model empowers businesses to reach their growth goals through access to the guidance and expertise of senior level strategists and a flexible execution team.
Are you facing challenges of your own in generating leads and meeting your business’ growth goals?
We’d love to learn more about your challenges and how a coordinated marketing approach might help take your organization to the next level.
From building brand awareness, ensuring consistent messaging, to bringing in leads—your marketing department breathes life into your company from top to bottom through your customer’s eyes. Marketing does some seriously heavy lifting to help grow a business, but which lift is the most important one? When some of the work marketing does happens behind the scenes, what do business owners see as the strongest value-add?
We conducted a recent LinkedIn poll to answer a common question: “What’s the most important contribution a marketing department can provide to a company?”
The answers ran a wide gamut, but a few clear winners came up on top in the court of public opinion. Read on for an in-depth look into the role of marketing within a company. The most popular answers are broken down below, with the highest result last.
A little less than one-fifth (16%) of respondents to our survey said the most crucial role of marketing is to deliver a “customer-centric culture.” But what does it look like in practice?
Your marketing team is responsible for all of your messaging, including the construction of your target customer personas. These are archetypes of people who represent your “ideal” client base: from demographics to hobbies and typical online behavior, your buyer persona represents who you are directing your marketing efforts toward overall. This helps you build all of your efforts with this customer’s needs and wants in mind.
Good branding strategies never lose sight of this all-important individual. Customers feel included and invited to interact with your brand (and hopefully into your marketing and sales funnel to close the deal) when they are being directly spoken to and empathized with in your messaging. When interacting with brand materials, your clients “should also have increased awareness of and engagement with a firm’s brand, products …. all of which show that the brand is integrated into their priorities in a positive and productive way,” says Barbara Kaplan, CEO of BSK Strategies.
You may offer the best product or service in your industry, but your best customers could be passing you by for a competitor if they aren’t familiar with your brand. According to our survey, 29% of participants believe the most important role of a marketing department is to ensure that “customers know the brand(s).”
Robert Curtiss, a National Account Manager with Business Group Resources, provides a poignant example of the power of brand recognition, “Can I have a kleenex? I spilled coke on the Formica because I was distracted by the Zamboni crashing into the jet-ski. That Zamboni driver should get a seeing-eye dog!”
As humorous as it is outlandish, Curtiss’s example holds water: Brand recognition is king in the court of public notice. Being the first brand that springs to mind for your category is a powerful way to “live rent-free” in your customers’ minds.
Through consistent application of brand guidelines, thought leadership work, and positive product and service placement, your marketing team is responsible for growing customer awareness.
At the end of the day, your marketing team is there to provide a positive return on investment for the money you give them. This was the most popular choice, with nearly half (46%) of our respondents choosing it over other options. It seems the most obvious answer in business terms: your marketing team exists to convert the money you give them into more money for your business.
But is it that simple? “Positive ROI is a lagging indicator of a customer centric culture, customers knowing the brand, and everything else a marketing department does,” stipulates Mark H. Johnson, Talent Optimization Manager with PI Midlantic. “It’s all about financial results.” According to quite a few other commenters, Johnson hit the nail on the head with this analysis.
While delivering favorable ROI is a final result of a successful marketing team, their primary objectives, such as building a brand image, spreading awareness, and creating customer journeys, will all ultimately serve the purpose of creating a positive ROI. It follows that while this should be the main goal of your marketing strategy (and any other department in your business, in most cases), it can be achieved through a range of other avenues.
Not insignificantly. 9% of our respondents reported that the most important role of a marketing team is something else entirely. They may be onto something: from crafting client relationships to reflecting business values, reaching out to press, representing new releases, and more—chances are, your marketing team is busy creating more opportunities for your business growth than you realize.
Darren Sudman, Founder of Unless, an outsourced corporate social responsiblity consultancy, made a case for his answer. “Reflect the culture, purpose and value proposition. If those are aligned and well received, everything else takes care of itself,” says Sudman.
It’s a tried and true method to follow. The great Simon Sinek famously wrapped up his vision for marketing in rather succinct terms: “People don’t buy what you do; they buy why you do it and what you do simply proves what you believe.”
If people are always going to buy your “why” before your “what,” perhaps the answer to the question “why is marketing important” lies within being able to connect and communicate your company’s why and your customer’s why.
Not sure if you’re communicating to the right customer, or don’t have a clear idea of the story you’re telling them? Download our Narrative Marketing Outline to help get that process started.
What do you think is the most important role for a marketing department? If you’d like to discuss this topic further or get help identifying the role your marketing department plays and how we can help fill those gaps, contact our team!
As the Managing Director of &Marketing (and-marketing.com), Rajat “Raj” Kapur strives to provide small, medium, and mid-market businesses unparalleled marketing strategy and execution services. His team of professionals can either augment an existing team, or outsource the marketing function for a client.
&Marketing provides the robust outsourced marketing department growing companies need without the high overhead costs of big agencies or full-time employees. Our variable model empowers businesses to reach their growth goals through access to the guidance and expertise of senior level strategists and a flexible execution team.
Are you facing challenges of your own in generating leads and meeting your business’ growth goals?
We’d love to learn more about your challenges and how a coordinated marketing approach might help take your organization to the next level.
Content marketing is proving to be just as crucial for B2B organizations: Statista shows that 30% of marketers consider content to have the highest ROI of any channel, and DemandMetric has found that 91% of B2B marketers use content to build brand awareness, loyalty, and drive leads.
The pandemic has also driven significant growth in B2B content marketing investment. If you’re interested in implementing a B2B content marketing strategy but not sure where to start, keep reading to learn:
Content marketing for B2B involves producing and sharing content to help you achieve several different types of goals:
There are many differences in the content marketing used for B2B and B2C. The audiences, for example, are very different: B2C audiences tend to be very broad while B2B audiences are much more specific, targeting key decision-makers. Distribution often looks different, too. While social media is usually pivotal for B2C companies, other distribution channels are usually more successful for B2B content marketing — 70% of B2B customers will consume content directly from your website compared to 53% looking for it on social media networks.
Here are a few B2B content marketing strategies that are working particular well for our clients:
The most important thing to remember about your audience is that it consists of individuals. A tool like Google Analytics can help you get a little more granular, so you understand your audience a bit better using demographics like age, location, gender, and special interest data. Putting this information together may allow you to draw logical conclusions about your audience that can help you tailor content to their questions and interests.
Choosing the right keywords is pivotal for driving traffic through organic SEO and identifying topics your audience is interested in. An excellent way to figure out what your target audience is searching for while at work is to evaluate a competitor’s website to see which keywords they rank well for using an SEO tool like SEMrush. Look for keywords and phrases with high cost-per-click (CPC) numbers, This means those words have high purchase intent and are incredibly competitive in the paid search market.
There may be fewer users searching for these terms compared to those with lower CPC, but that’s okay — the higher CPC indicates a more qualified lead, which can make those smaller audiences worth targeting. If you can create strong organic content that targets those topics, you can avoid having to pay to be seen for those keywords.
There are other ways to generate fresh ideas for content beyond just keyword research. Pay attention to the online communities where your audience spends time. Look for common questions people ask, as this is often an indicator that they couldn’t find the answer via search. Comment sections on industry blogs can be another great source to understand what information your audience is looking for but can’t find. Look for opportunities to create content that offers a new perspective on a trending topic.
Pandemic-related closures have precipitated a major rise in virtual events like webinars and online courses. According to CMI, in the last 12 months, online events have produced the best results of all content marketing formats for B2B organizations. However, that doesn’t mean that in-person events are a thing of the past — businesses should expect to invest in both and should consider creating a calendar of virtual events if they aren’t doing so already.
If you have the resources to do it, industry studies get a lot of traffic and shares and are excellent for establishing brand authority and expertise. Even just one high-quality industry study will help you generate backlinks (where other websites link to yours and vice versa) that increase your site’s domain authority.
Speaking of backlinks, obtaining these is one of the most challenging goals to achieve in content marketing — 94% of content published never gets any. Competition is part of what makes backlinks so difficult to get, so it’s important to create useful, compelling, and unique content to cut through the noise. You don’t have to break the mold with something astonishingly different. Instead, focus on creating high-value content worth reading and sharing. A good strategy is to develop comprehensive guides in addition to shorter content pieces — cover absolutely everything from the very basics of the topic all the way to key terms, real-world examples, and specific techniques.
Did you know that 53% of tech-focused B2B buyers rated video as the most useful type of content? Many B2B businesses are missing out on the opportunity video presents. If you aren’t sure where to start, try repurposing older successful content into a video format to see how your audience responds.
Content competition is intense, so you should promote your B2B content in addition to relying on organic search. LinkedIn is a great place for businesses to promote B2B content, but your business may also find success on Facebook, Twitter, and others. The more you share your content, the more you will attract followers who will share your content to their networks, gaining you more followers, and so on.
If you’re wondering whether a particular topic is attractive to your audience, try testing a short, bite-sized version on a social media network with strong organic reach (like LinkedIn or Twitter.) If the content garners strong engagement, you might consider creating an expanded version to share in other channels.
An email newsletter is another great way to promote your content — 31% of B2B businesses use them to nurture leads and build relationships with target customers. Getting your business in front of several people every week keeps you top of mind and gives them a reason to engage with your brand when they need what you offer.
Did you know that 70% of marketers are actively investing in content marketing? While this statistic confirms content’s reigning title of king on the internet, companies often make the mistake of generating blogs, eBooks, and social media posts blindly. This results in content marketing that lacks a real strategy, a concrete plan, or a way to track tangible return on investment. Download our ebook to learn how you can create content that converts and actually grows your customer base.
Content Specialist Kim Steinmetz helps brands and thought leaders discover and develop their unique voice and tone while establishing authority on a topic through compelling messaging and copywriting. An accomplished writer and marketer with over a decade of experience, Kim is well-versed in both B2C and B2B content. Her portfolio includes written print and digital ads, national television & radio spots, press releases, blogs, email newsletters, eBooks, and more for a variety of industries including IT, pharmaceutical, healthcare, manufacturing, and consumer packaged goods.
&Marketing provides the robust outsourced marketing department growing companies need without the high overhead costs of big agencies or full-time employees. Our variable model empowers businesses to reach their growth goals through access to the guidance and expertise of senior level strategists and a flexible execution team.
Are you facing challenges of your own in generating leads and meeting your business’ growth goals?
We’d love to learn more about your challenges and how a coordinated marketing approach might help take your organization to the next level.
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