What is content marketing?
Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.
This is the general thinking that content marketing just creating content and distributing it aimlessly or all the platforms that’s available.
It’s not aimless. It’s targeted. That’s a HUGE part of it. You find the right location, the right demographic, and even the right time to post. Without that, you’re a lot less likely to succeed. Doing some competitive research about what the industry competitor is doing in terms of content marketing, might be a good starting point.
Using different types of content marketing allows you to cater to your audience’s various needs, preferences, and habits.
General marketing content and awareness building
- Blog posts – They help you build awareness, provide valuable information and improve search rankings
- Videos – B2B Industrial marketing companies can engage their users through dynamic storytelling, audio, and visuals.
- Social media content – This enables direct interaction and engagement with a wide audience.
- Influencer marketing content or KOL based – This is a great way to tap into the audience who are already your ICP.
- Infographics – This will help you bring style to your content by bringing graphs, charts, and statistics into learning.
Technical content
A well-structured content strategy needs to be planned to deliver technical content for your users effectively. Most B2B companies don’t realise that they have tons of content to speak about. Technical content helps you when the buyer is at the end of the buying cycle and wants to validate the technical information to affirm the decision of purchase.
- Ebooks – Typically, Ebooks are above 2000 words. Most B2B companies user E-books as gated content to collect information from potential users.
- Case studies – Case Studies are a great way to build authority with the industry niche. This will also allow the sales teams to to pitch proven success for the products in the same industry or application.
- White Papers – Whitepapers allow you to explore topics in-depth and new insights.
- How-to Videos – How-to videos will act as a great way to cater to post-sale training needs. This provides standardization and saves time during the longer sales cycles.
- Courses – They help you to build a strong follower base. If the content is great and your have the subject matter expertise, courses can be a great way to organic marekting. Eg: SEMRush Academy.
Pro Tip: Create a course with Individual branding, People develop trust and connect well with a single human rather than a company or an AI.
Content for paid and last gen campaigns
- Banner ads with Problem awareness, product awareness and brand awareness – Categorization of messaging helps in a great way to make paid campaigns successful.
- Testimonial video or an User generated content – This will help you bring authenticity and relatability to the content.
- Value based texts – The content in paid marketing works well if the content has value and solves customers value. Always focus on “Value”. In Industrial or B2B marketing it works wonders.
Dark social content – Personal engagement with a personal identity
- WhatsApp groups – This helps in local marketing to a highly relatable audience. Content should be highly personalized.
- Reddit forums and discord communities – Helps you take feedback from customers and engage realtime with the customers. There is no strategy as such, but be authentic and real. If you can give character to the brand and subtly promote the brand, on these forums it can do wonders for your brand. Engaging with relevant communities is also important.
- Personalized emails – Cold emailing is still important with B2B sales. Every sales representative should focus on providing value in exchange. This will help in better qualification rates.
Pro Tip: Check the LinkedIn page of “Chris Walker” of Refine Labs. He is a great advocate of Dark social selling and marketing
Content helpful for the field sales teams
When a salesperson is engaging with a customer he/she should have ready content. Below are the methods to do so:
- Facebook Group – It is the best way to reach a new audience within the relevant industry
- Broadcast WhatsApp messages – It will help to engage with prospective warm customers.
- Video tutorials / How-to videos – This is a great way to solve customer queries and problems
- Podcasts – Podcasts are a great way to show authority and knowledge about an industry subject. This also allows exploring new audience segment
No matter how great your content is, if they are not promoted in the required format then it becomes a difficult task to derive results. The next time you choose the format, choose based on research and not intuition.
My Suggestions
A post should be written for an onsite blog outlining the document and the problems that it solves.
Use content distribution networks such as Outbrain or Taboola to seed this blog post on relevant sites
Use social media sites and platforms such as Gorkana to find editors that can produce off-site links to the content
Use paid social ads to target relevant audiences and custom Audiences
Locate resource sections on relevant sites and recommend your whitepaper to the webmaster
Use aggregate sites such as Slideshare to submit Content
