Steve Clarkson shares his top five tips for creating engaging and effective content in the world of B2B marketing.
How do you create effective, engaging content marketing in B2B industries? How can B2B markerters change how they approach content marketing to get more from their investment?
In this edition of Friday Five, Steve Clarkson takes you through his five key steps to creating compelling content for B2B marketing. Steve will tackle the key challenges that B2B content marketers face, and how you can overcome them - from setting objectives and getting buy-in from the board, to coming up with creative content ideas that your audiences will love.
This is B2B content marketing in five easy steps.
Video Transcript
Hi, I'm Steve, and welcome to this edition of Friday Five.
Today we're going to be giving you five sure-fire tips to help with your B2B content marketing.
Set clear objectives.
Without clear objectives and aims, you're not going to be able to measure the success of your content strategy. You're not even going to be able to envision what that success even looks like. So set objectives and think about what you want your content to do.
Is it there to increase brand awareness? Is it there to boost sales leads? Or is it there to drive traffic towards your website?
Once you've established these objectives that will determine the type of content you're going to create.
It could be engaging content, which is perfect for PR & outreach. It could be advertising content, which will help boost those sales messages that you want to deliver to consumers. It could be functional content, which is heavily keyword focused, and could potentially boost your search rankings and drive traffic to your website. Or it could be informational content, which is based on long-tail search queries and lets you in on the type of conversations being had in that space, allowing you to feed into those and establish yourself as an expert within that space.
And at the heart of this complete content approach is strong research and insights and they will determine your content strategy for B2B.
Sell-in your strategy early.
Another advantage of having objectives laid down early on is that it makes your strategy so much easier to sell-in to your stakeholders. But to get their buy-in, you're going to need to make them a part of that process.
So seek their feedback and get them to input as much as they want into that strategy.
It might be challenging, especially at a global organisation where it's a challenge to get people on the same conference call, let along in the same room.
But ultimately, with clear communication and robust timelines, you can make it happen.
Know your audience.
Content starts with people. Always.
If you can ever hope to engage them in a piece of content, you need to establish exactly who they are.
It helps to create a persona of your audience, so you know exactly who you're targeting. Factor in their age demographics, potentially their gender, and how they like to digest content in and out of work.
It also helps to bear in mind the three key stages of the customer journey; awareness, consideration and decision.
So just think about how that looks in your world and how you can use that to filter content across those three stages.
The GlobalWebIndex is also a great resource to get the insights you need to build a proper profile of who your audience is.
Make your content interesting.
There are two million online articles published every day, so you want yours to stand out. Don't be vanilla. Experiment with different content formats, video, design and imagery.
Ultimately, you're not selling a product. You're selling a lifestyle and feeling associated with that product to capture your audiences' hearts and minds.
Having said that, avoid gimmicks. Make sure that everything you do is carefully conidered and tailored to your audience, and very useful and engaging for them.
Be realistic.
It's all very well being inspired by what the big brands are doing, but their audience is completely different to yours. So you might be able to draw some inspiration, but really you want to be honing in on what your audience wants and keeping your focus very firmly on that.
That's all from me, but don't forget to subscribe to our channel for more Friday Five episodes.
Thank-you for watching.
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