Well everybody seems to be talking about B2B Content Marketing these days. Companies are hustling up young tech savvy executives and se...
Well everybody seems to be talking about B2B Content Marketing these days. Companies are hustling up young tech savvy executives and sending them to social media and content marketing workshops. While there is an acute shortage of expert B2B Marketers out there, outsourcing is the next best practice that many companies seem to be adopting these days. We all know "If Content is King then Content Marketing is Kingdom" So then what does it take to get your Content marketing to work? To answer that question in short Quality content creation, Publishing & distribution and finally Lead capturing.
Your content marketing strategy needs to get all these three engines working simultaneously. I can bet most SME's have failed miserably as they have failed to identify how to go about achieving these goals. Building your own inhouse Content marketing engines can take years before they can all fire up together, While outsourcing you need to identify a B2B marketer or an agency with proven track record in your area of business. However if you are a medium to large enterprise and would like to build your own inhouse Content marketing strategy checkout these 5 basic steps below
Think like a Publisher
Your inhouse team should look at Content marketing differently. Bill Gates famous "Content is King" essay, in which he quite presciently argued that content would be the “killer app” of the Internet. He foresaw, back in 1996, that “those who succeed will propel the Internet forward as a marketplace of ideas, experiences, and products—a marketplace of content.” Content is what informs, entertains and inspires us. So, if you’re merely looking to do some content marketing, you will most likely fail. You need to think like a publisher that entails not only new activity, but new skills and a new perspective.
Clearly state your Mission
Marketers are trained to think in terms of objectives. They have a specific goal in mind, such as building awareness, driving sales or increasing loyalty. They devise strategies in order to achieve those ends and design metrics in order to measure success. Once those goals are met, they move on to new objectives and a new strategy. Publishers on the other hand begin with an editorial mission. The mission doesn’t change at the end of the quarter or when certain objectives are attained. Your Content should be all about helping and not selling. [Click Here]
Get your audience to become your fans
Most marketers still think in terms of the sales funnel. You create awareness for your brand and that will create interest which will hopefully lead to a sale. We need to focus less on grabbing attention and more on holding attention. Headlines should not be catchy slogans, but promise clear benefits.
Most of all, you need to think in terms of delivering an experience that will make people want to come back and share your content with their friends. [Click Here]
Content should deliver quality and value
The best way to create a superior experience is to stop thinking about promoting and start thinking in terms of delivering a meaningful value exchange. Every brand has something to offer the world and if you present what you have to offer in a compelling way, your audience won’t mind that you’re promoting your brand at the same time. So, if you’re a technology company, an article about the Superbowl might earn you lots of views, shares and likes, but will ultimately be a waste of time. Metrics are meaningless if they don’t serve the mission. [Click Here]
Put Content skills ahead of strategy
You will often come across brand planners who have evolved as Content strategy experts. Unfortunately many of them lack publishing experience. And that’s why content marketing so often fails. We need content skills, not content strategy. We need to build positive, meaningful experiences, not clever taglines. That means putting the mission before metrics and delivering value instead of sleek sales pitches. So, if you expect to make your efforts successful, learn the trade and take brand publishing seriously.
At VALVE SOLUTIONS we take your B2B Content Marketing seriously. We help your content create that magic with a fine balance between Content writing, Publishing, Promotion, Lead Capturing across our well established digital assets, blog, social networks, third party community and established relationships. This way you can focus on the more core issues at your business and leave the Content marketing to our inhouse Engineers. [Click Here]
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