Content Marketing
Enchant Your AudienceContent marketing is absolutely central to your marketing mix. Your content is what draws visitors to you and encourages them to engage with your brand.
Content needs to be highly relevant to your audience. It provides value and supports marketing activities such as SEO, social media outreach and marketing automation.
Content Marketing Research
Before you create valuable content, you need to deeply understand your market. If you haven’t already built a marketing strategy that provides you with this insight, your research needs to start with the following:
- Who are your audience? How are they split into groups and how do content preferences differ between groups?
- What are the hot topics in your market? How do these vary across audience groupings?
- Which stages of the buying cycle are you targeting, what do they want to know at each stage?
- What content do competitors produce, what is working well for them? How will your content cut-through and elevate your brand?
- Which content formats are most popular with your audience? Which is most appropriate for each stage and message of your content?
- What actions do you want to see taken after someone consumes your content?
- Do you learn anything when people consume your content? Can your audience hand-raise in different ways to indicate specific interest, or sales readiness, through their choice of content engagement?
We can help you with market research, competitor research and buyer profiling to develop insight into these areas.
From content to customers…
Mapping Content Marketing to the Buying Cycle
Once this research has been completed, you need to conduct a gap analysis of any existing content. From here, you can attribute the most appropriate content to each stage in the buying cycle (see diagram below).
From this gap analysis you are likely to find certain audience groups do not have content at each stage.
In addition to specific content, we need to determine appropriate messaging to convey at each stage – linking back to brand and solution/service/product differentiators.
The Magic Begins…
Creating Engaging Marketing Content
For content to be truly engaging, it needs to resonate with your audience – taking their challenges, aspirations and needs into account. This requires research. Good content is supported by stats, facts and references.
In some cases, you may have subject matter experts in-house who can be interviewed and used to generate insightful and engaging content. In most cases, there is a need to pull together threads from influencers and authorities on a topic to create something greater than the sum of its parts.
External experts, customers and even your customers’ customers can provide valuable insight and information. In turn, this can be used to create compelling content. Using external references in your content improves credibility. Furthermore, this also provides another avenue to promote the completed content.
With longer sales cycles in B2B marketing, it is important to pitch each item of content with an appropriate emphasis on product/solution/service. There’s nothing worse than a thinly veiled excuse for a product brochure, purporting to be a thought-leadership piece.
Good content marketing allows individuals to access product-centric content when they are at the appropriate stage. We can help you achieve the right balance here and always provide links to help your audience find more when they are ready.
Content should have a long enough lifetime to result in a significant ROI. Consequently, we suggest shattering larger content items (e.g. white papers) into smaller chunks (e.g. infographics, videos and blog posts). This approach enables you to push the same information out in multiple formats, over a longer timeframe. Maximum value can thus be extracted from all research and information gathering efforts.
Content Distribution for Maximum Impact
Once you have a range of valuable content, we can help you distribute this to reach your intended audience. Content distribution can include working with influencers to amplify the reach, social media to inform and grow your follower base, content placement, advertising and listing amongst other approaches.
Whilst active distribution can yield great results, the majority of value is likely to come through inbound traffic. For this reason, content marketing needs to be closely tied in with SEO and marketing automation to maximise the results from each item.
Get In Touch
Glastonbury, Somerset, UK
+44 747 666 2948
marc@glastonbury-marketing.co.uk