2nd in a series of three
Continuing from our last blog, here we’re going to highlight some tips for getting the most from your content marketing.
- Understand who you're targeting: Know your potential customer's goals, challenges, pain points, common objections to products and services, as well as personal and demographic information. This can sometimes be a long process but as you learn more about your leads over time, you can increasingly personalise your messages to their specific needs;
- Create interesting and informative content specifically designed for your customers: Through doing this, you can establish your company as an industry thought leader whilst also helping to inform your prospect customers;
- Publishing the right content in the right place at the right time: This can be done by a simple analysis with the help of publishing and analytics tools such as Google Analytics, Facebook insights and Hootsuite.
- Blogging is the single best way to attract new visitors to your website: B2B companies with blogs generate 67% more leads per month than companies without blogs. To get found by the right prospective customers, you must create educational content that resonates with them and answers their questions. Once you’ve written the blog it’s extremely important to promote it so it’s not falling on deaf ears. This is something our next blog can help you out with;
- Social media marketing on social networking sites such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and Google+: Companies with 51 to 100 followers on Twitter generate 106% more traffic than those with 25 or fewer. 74% of companies said Facebook was important to their lead generation strategy in 2013. Social media allows you to use your company’s culture and personality and puts a human face to your brand;
- Optimising your SEO: Your customers begin their buying process online, usually by using a search engine to find something they have questions about or need a solution to. You need to make sure you appear prominently when they search. To do this, you need to carefully and analytically pick keywords, optimise your pages, create content, and build links around the terms your ideal buyers are searching for. SEO delivered 14% of marketers’ total lead sources and 13% of all customers in 2013;
- Make sure your website is helpful, easy to use and sales ready: Also keep in mind that companies with 30 or more conversion pages generate 7 times more leads than those with fewer than 10.
One thing not to forget is that PR and content marketing have a lot in common and should complement and supplement one another. This will make your life a lot easier. Things like creating interesting content that can be used on several platforms and getting coverage in independent press will be a huge boost to your SEO. That’s why there is incremental value in having an integrated PR and content marketing campaign. It also makes measuring the success of the campaign a lot easier as there can often be a lot of overlap and blurred areas between the two, such as site traffic, social following, SEO ranking and lead conversion rates.
Content marketing is an easy and successful way to generate leads and sales. It creates a better relationship with your customers and builds a strong image and awareness of your company. It's here for the long-haul so embrace it and use it to its fullest potential.
The final blog in our content marketing series will provide some really useful information on how to promote your blog.
References
http://www.newbreedmarketing.com/blog/b2b-inbound-marketing-machine#.U0J5W1dJZI1
http://socialmediab2b.com/2012/03/b2b-social-media-leads-infographic/
http://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/2013-inbound-marketing-stats-charts
