In just a few years B2B content marketing in the UK has gone from being a hot trend to now being relied on by 95 per cent of marketers for their top three marketing goals: brand awareness, customer acquisition and engagement. So, the key question for B2B marketers isn’t whether you are using content marketing but rather, is it effective in engaging and converting your desired audience? Some 44 percent of UK content marketers report being challenged to produce the kind of content that engages according to the study ‘Content marketing in the United Kingdom’. And with B2B marketers already allocating 31per cent of their budgets to content, it’s crucial that it is delivering return on investment.
Follow these seven steps to create content that drives engagement and conversions:
1. Identify your audience
Start by identifying your intended audience, their objectives and goals. Data from media and competitive tools, as well as surveys, provide great insights. B2B audiences want content that concentrates on why they might be interested in your brand, product or service. They want to know how you will help them solve a specific business problem. A B2B company that is collecting massive amounts of big data will want to know how an analytic software product will help them analyse their big data and give them keen insights into their own customers thereby improving their bottom line. B2B audiences are interested in content that help educate businesses on industry changes, need for innovation, search for knowledge and competitive research.
2. Find out what’s on your audience’s mind
Answers to what is on your prospects’ minds can be found relatively easily by researching social media and search data. Pay particular attention to what questions your prospects are asking; on what channels questions are asked and the key topics or phrases that are discussed most often. Equally important is to conduct a competitive review of your competitors’ content for additional ideas for content development and ways for you to increase market penetration. Site analytics and research tools are crucial in revealing audiences’ traits, online behaviors, intent clusters and interests.
3. Conduct a broad media review and audit
Analyse website content including blog posts, press releases, whitepapers, infographics, how to guides, news, events, videos, webinars, webcasts, and podcasts. This review will give you an idea of what content can be leveraged and what might be missing and what needs to be created. It is crucial to audit your competitors in order to identify industry baseline and gaps, which in turn will provide you with great opportunities to differentiate.
4. Define your story
With your completed audit and understanding of your targeted audience, you can now select the best opportunity and the format for your story. Make sure that your story centers on the product or service’s key differentiators.
5. Determine optimal content formats
Look at the storyline, touchpoints and your budget – and then determine what types of content assets are right. Consider creating an adaptive content plan to ensure you are maximising your content creation investment. That way you create content once, repurpose it many times, save money, production time and most importantly ensure that your message is consistent and recognisable across all touchpoints. Remember to include calls-to-action to drive conversions.
6. Create a distribution plan
After answering the previous questions, you now know where to distribute your content. You will likely use multiple channels to reach the intended audience. If your audit concluded that your audience is heavy Facebook users, make sure to focus there. If you already have a large email list, add that to your mix. If your audience is big on YouTube, include Trueview Ads in addition to YouTube posts. Add to your distribution plans a dedicated landing page, syndicated placement in online publications, and make sure to mention it on your homepage.
7. Measure success
The most important question of course is whether your content leads to conversions. To determine the success of your content marketing campaign, you need to measure reach, visibility and impact. The ultimate measure is the number of new customers directly attributed to the campaign, including direct conversions from any of your engagement points as well as attribution sales. The latter is the measure of how a point of engagement advanced purchase intent but the conversion took place at a different time and on a different platform.
With reliable tracking and collection of integrated data across all campaign media touchpoints, you can determine the value of the actual interaction at a given point, as well as content marketing’s value in the media mix. In fact, deep diving into content marketing performance data offers great learning opportunities that can enhance future marketing campaigns and potentially even the product or service you are selling. Many of the immediate learnings can be applied to optimise the performance of your content assets and further increase campaign performance.
