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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.
You already know thorough, careful, and strategic planning is critical to growing a successful business. This goes for all aspects—from finances to operations to, of course, marketing! And in order to make sure all of your marketing trains are running smoothly as possible, are on time, and are actually getting to their destination, it’s best to use a marketing calendar as a living document that keeps track of all your activity and tactics.
Below we’ll dive into exactly what a marketing calendar is, why you should have one, and how you can create your own.
Successful marketing requires a great deal of planning ahead and many moving parts; without a way for your whole team to keep track of all of those moving parts, it can get to be a little overwhelming. That’s why a cohesive, syncable marketing calendar is a must-have tool for a growing business. It allows you to track goals with ease and keep a pulse on the marketing activities that will help you achieve them.
Salesforce found that 86 percent of workplace failures stem from a lack of collaboration; a marketing calendar works wonders as the single source of truth to keep everyone on the same page.
Content marketing is the strategy of creating quality content for use across various digital marketing channels. The difference between content marketing and traditional marketing lies in the value offered to the reader. Traditional marketing focuses on everything the brand wants the world to know. In contrast, content marketing focuses more on the reader’s wants and needs by answering their questions, showing them how to solve a problem, and generally providing information of value and relevance at no cost to them.
Marketing calendars come in several different forms. The right type will depend on what you’d like to use it for. A few examples of tactic-specific calendars include:
The point of a marketing calendar is to plan and schedule content in a way that makes things easier for you—so the best way to create one will depend on your company’s needs. You may also find you need to adjust the setup of your calendar as you figure out what works best and how many people will be in and out of it. However, there are some key aspects to keep in mind as you build your marketing calendar.
To get started, we suggest breaking a sheet down into the following columns:
While these are the basic pieces of information that should be included in your marketing calendar, it’s also helpful to include who on your team is in charge of which pieces of content and how you will measure the success. This will keep everyone on track and allow everyone to understand the objective at hand.
In many cases, multiple calendars for different channels and types of content will be necessary. Additionally, it’s important to make sure your calendar is shareable, syncable, and easy to use! Half of a marketing calendar’s importance is keeping your whole team on the same page, so being able to easily make adjustments and edits that the whole team can see in real-time is vital.
At the end of the day, your marketing calendar should allow everyone to easily see exactly what needs to be done and by when.
As you can see, a marketing calendar is an essential tool. However, building one from scratch can take a lot of work, and we know you don’t have that kind of extra time.
That’s why we’ve created an easy-to-use marketing calendar template to help you get started. It has everything you need to start planning and scheduling the content that will land you right in the eyes of your target audience. Download it today to start customizing it for your unique business’s needs.
Marketing Manager Ann Ehinger serves as the link between clients and creative to drive projects that deliver results. With over a decade of experience working in the nonprofit, technology, and agency space, Ann is adept at managing a project from idea to completion while navigating all the ups and downs that pop up in between.
&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.
Today’s buyers want, need, and expect content from your brand. According to Forbes, the average person spends about seven hours a day consuming content. Hubspot reported that 79% of online shoppers spend at least 50% of their shopping time researching products, and the Content Marketing Institute found that 61% of online consumers in the U.S. decided to purchase after reading recommendations on a blog.
Content marketing is essential if you want to develop your brand presence, grow audience engagement, and ultimately drive sales. Offering current and prospective buyers high-quality, engaging, and consistent content establishes your brand’s expertise, authority, and trust, three criteria that are pivotal to generating website traffic.
Most importantly, content marketing connects to and supports all facets of your digital marketing strategy — email, website, PPC (pay-per click), social media, etc. When content marketing serves as the unifying element to your overall digital strategy, the various aspects of your campaigns integrate more effectively so you can guide buyers through every step of the funnel to a sale.
There are many more reasons content marketing is vital for both B2C and B2B brands. Keep reading to learn more about the importance of content marketing.
One central element in the importance of content marketing is that it unifies your entire digital marketing strategy by nurturing buyers through the sales funnel, guiding them from one stage to the next toward a purchase. Here’s how:
Content marketing is the strategy of creating quality content for use across various digital marketing channels. The difference between content marketing and traditional marketing lies in the value offered to the reader. Traditional marketing focuses on everything the brand wants the world to know. In contrast, content marketing focuses more on the reader’s wants and needs by answering their questions, showing them how to solve a problem, and generally providing information of value and relevance at no cost to them.
The sales funnel defines different stages of the buying process so marketers can identify where buyers are in the funnel and create a plan to guide them toward a purchase. The funnel is divided into the top, middle, and bottom:
Once you’ve identified your ideal customer’s typical journey through the sales funnel, you can begin creating content designed to guide them from one stage to the next. Once you have content in place, measuring things like website conversions helps you chart progress to understand what content is working well and where there are opportunities to optimize.
You can learn about the demographics of your audience through data. Over time, this data compounds so you can understand your ideal customer’s journey through your campaigns more and more clearly. These insights help you identify what kind of content has been most valuable to your audience and where there are opportunities for optimization.
For example, you may track engagement rates on social media posts, which eBooks people download, which videos people watch, and which blogs posts people read and share. This information is essential to understand what resonates with your audience most so you can develop more accurate buyer personas and target your campaigns to them more effectively.
According to Harvard Business Review, it is between 5 and 25 times more expensive to acquire a new customer than retain and satisfy an existing customer. In addition, it’s 16 times more expensive to bring a new customer up to the same level as a current loyal customer, says Small Business Trends.
These statistics demonstrate the importance of content marketing to both new buyers and past purchasers. Targeting existing customers with your content marketing strategy will help you encourage repeat sales while simultaneously increasing brand loyalty. BIA Kelsey discovered that 60% of Small and Midsize Businesses (SMBs) say half their revenue is coming from repeat customers, so you can see how critical this tactic is for growing businesses.
If you aren’t sure where to start with retention-focused content, here are a few ideas:
Audiences viewing your content are more likely to follow your calls-to-action (CTAs) to generate new leads and purchase from you in the future. Including clear and direct CTAs within valuable and relevant content capitalizes on the positive impression the content has generated and can nudge your reader further down the sales funnel. The better the content, the more likely they’ll make a purchase.
Consistent, quality content is pivotal to improving your search engine rankings so your business can build up its online visibility, trust, and authority. Good content helps search engines understand the purpose of your business so you can bring more organic traffic to your website.
Creating a high volume of content doesn’t necessarily result in more traffic, but it allows you to rank for more keywords and encourages visitors to spend more time on your site, which helps your ranking. Quality is more important than quantity overall. Google’s algorithm, for example, highly favors good quality content and ranks poor quality content lower. Plus, high-quality content is attractive for other websites that will share it with their audience, creating backlinks that increase your search engine ranking.
Quality content is a great way to improve your engagement on social media by showcasing your brand’s personality and values. Sharing information that your audience is interested in through your unique perspective can be powerfully memorable and establishes a warm relationship with your brand before a purchase is even made.
With social media quickly becoming as big of a content source as search engines, you have the opportunity to establish yourself as an industry leader. Content that explains solutions to common problems is often considered especially shareable, and shareable content on social media has the potential to amplify your audience significantly.
As your audience sees more and more quality content coming from your brand, they will see you as more and more trustworthy. Giving them relevant and valuable information without asking for anything in return speaks volumes about your brand’s values and esteem for your customers.
Helping consumers make more educated purchasing decisions demonstrates your expertise in your industry. As your brand authority builds, search engines will be more likely to send quality organic traffic your way.
Content marketing has maintained its position as the most cost-effective marketing strategy available. According to the DemandMetric, content marketing generates more than 3 times as many leads as traditional advertising methods, and costs 62% less. Companies that regularly update their blogs generate 55% more website visitors and receive 97% more inbound links with 434% more indexed pages (IMPACT). This makes content marketing especially important for businesses with small marketing budgets looking to grow — small businesses with blogs get 126% more lead growth than those without.
The key component to a strong ROI is to use the data available to create a clear description of your ideal customer and what content will interest them.
More than anything else, content marketing by B2B brands should be valuable and full of information that helps your audience solve a problem. In addition, it is vital that your content positions your brand as a leader and trusted expert for them to turn to. Content marketing is so important for B2B organizations for the same reasons as above, plus:
Content marketing connects all facets of your digital marketing strategy, offering many benefits that ultimately increase sales. It is a highly cost-effective strategy, but it does take time to reap the greatest results. Quality online content can provide value to your brand for many years to come, and creating it takes time and effort, so it’s best to begin developing (or enhancing) your content marketing strategy today.
You don’t have to create a massive, intricate strategy — start small with what’s manageable. Social Media Examiner found that 75% of marketers experienced increased traffic by investing as little as six hours a week into their social media content.
Want &Marketing to help you take advantage of all the importance of content marketing? Contact us today!
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.
Kim graduated from Indiana University in 2013 with a Bachelor or Arts in Creative Writing and a minor in Audio/Video Production. She currently resides in New Orleans, Louisiana and spends her time second lining and volunteering with animal rescues.
&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.
For most companies, LinkedIn is the most important social channel for their overall awareness and lead generation efforts. Yet so many organizations (we’re even guilty sometimes) just blindly post without knowing when they can best reach their audience. “When is the best day to post on LinkedIn to ensure my audience sees and engages with my awesome content?” is an age-old question and has layers to it.
But the good news is, we now have access to data that can help us answer that question. So, when is the best time to post on LinkedIn?
Well, the TLDR version of the answer is – it varies based on your audience. However, we at &Marketing don’t particularly love that answer. We also like to dig a little bit deeper and have some fun by leaning into data and building fun dashboards. So when we were posed this question, we decided to create something new that could give us an answer and potentially add to our Business Intelligence services. Here’s what we did and learned.
While you might generate some leads and back into your business goals with this approach, you’ll likely just be wasting time and money when you could be working smarter, not harder.
However, with all of the tools and data out there, it can be overwhelming or down right impossible to even know where to begin and how to leverage all of these glorious resources. Therefore, we’re going to help you find the elusive needle in the hay sack and show you three tools &Marketing leverages to save time, stop guessing, and still generate big results for our clients (and ourselves).
We gathered three years of LinkedIn data from a combination of sources.
Taking all of this data, we built several dashboards via Microsoft Power B.I. to help us mine through the 500+ LinkedIn posts and the thousands of website sessions from LinkedIn. These dashboards helped us easily uncover insights that could apply to our business questions.
Pro Tip: Do NOT use Bitly links with your LinkedIn posts. It makes it harder to match up the data with your Analytics.
After sifting through 500+ posts and all of our LinkedIn analytics data, here is what we uncovered:
We’d be silly to look at all of this data and just say, “we’re doing great!” We now have actionable insights that will help us optimize our organic LinkedIn strategy. What can we do based on the above is:
1. Our audience is most engaged with our LinkedIn content and engagement with our site.
2. Have the best conversion rates on our site.
As we mentioned in the beginning, everyone’s audience and social presence is different, so this data may be vastly different than what you uncover. The important takeaway is that all of this data is FREE and available to you via LinkedIn and your Google Analytics. When thinking about and crafting your organic social strategy, don’t neglect these valuable insights. Lean on them to make your LinkedIn presence felt by the most people. Don’t waste your valuable time just posting randomly without actually figuring out what works.
Want &Marketing to perform a free analysis of your LinkedIn? 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. Follow Paul on LinkedIn.
&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.
Most businesses are starting to learn the basics of SEO (search engine optimization) and why it matters, though developing a content marketing strategy optimized for SEO turns out to be a much more difficult task. Not only do businesses need to do quality research, content must be clear and engaging for their target audience.
By having a combined SEO and content marketing strategy, your business can maximize the time it takes to begin receiving quality traffic through organic search while driving valuable conversions on your site—meaning the right people are visiting and taking action.
A content marketing strategy is an organized plan to drive organic traffic and convert quality visitors into leads through publishing and distributing frequent and highly engaging content. The most effective content marketing strategies pair SEO research and tactics with content that addresses your audience’s needs, builds trust, helps them solve a problem, and encourages them to take action toward resolving their challenges.
A content marketing strategy is a roadmap that combines SEO research, marketing planning, and creation and distribution of content. Here are the most important steps in creating a content marketing strategy:
Content marketing starts with researching SEO keywords that you will target through quality content creation. Think about your business and what services you offer and utilize tools, like SEMRush or Ubersuggest, that help you understand the search market.
In most cases, you will want to target keywords that generate several monthly searches and have low competition. In other words, lots of people are searching Google for those terms and phrases and not a lot of other businesses are targeting them, too. These terms also need to harmonize with:
It can be a fun challenge to hunt down the right terms, and our data team loves spending time finding the right ones for our clients! Once you have identified your keyword targets, prioritize and plan with a content calendar.
Without a content calendar, your content marketing strategy will be inconsistent and difficult to maintain. Content calendars can be simple, but most importantly, the calendar must establish content topics and keywords, due dates, and goals for the content. As a baseline, &Marketing recommends posting one new blog per month, though if time allows, two blogs per month is the most optimal.
Struggling with planning? Check out our sample content calendar inside our marketing planning workbook to help you get started.
Once you have planned your content, activate your writing superpowers. Ensure that your target keyword appears in the title, first header, and first paragraph of your content, while making sure that your target audience will be engaged with your words. This may be the trickiest part of a good content marketing plan, as you are writing for both robots (Google) and humans.
In addition to good grammar, keep engaging storytelling top-of-mind while you write. Channel that favorite high school English teacher of yours and make sure your article has a clear introduction, body, and conclusion. Finally, be clear about what you want your reader to do when they finish reading. Should they move on to another piece of content? Download a helpful guide? Call you? Buy a product? Tell them what to do next, or they’ll do nothing at all (aka leave your website).
Don’t forget to post your content on all social media and share through email!
SEO and content marketing plans, although they require time and planning, have the potential to drive high quality organic leads for your business. Hold yourself accountable by creating a content calendar that sets your keyword targets and establishes due dates for your content creation. If you have questions or need help with any part of the process, reach out to us! We can guide you through keyword research, help provide topics for your calendar, or even execute the entire plan for you.
If you’re curious about some of the keywords and how they might perform, try our content marketing ROI calculator to truly understand the Return on Investment content marketing can provide your business.
Marketing Manager Dexter Burgess takes the lead on implementing new tactics and promoting change through data-driven strategies. Dex works hard at client relations through consistent communication and positive feedback, never settling until the customer is understood and happy.
&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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