The rules of content marketing are changing. I go by 6 rules that I’ll be blogging about over the next few weeks.
Rule #1: Changing Sales Cycles Need a Lot of Content
The Sales Cycle is Really Different from What it Used to Be
B2B has a longer buy cycle than it used to. Customers want to consume a lot of content before they ever want to talk to you. Sales is still vital of course — there is a lot of competition to close that deal — but this shift means that the content customers are looking for is critical in the marketing/sales cycle.
Good marketing content is content that sells you and your products. But what makes content good? There are so many types of marketing assets, plus different ways that prospects consume information, plus optimizing and promoting the assets for inbound and outbound marketing.
But too often these choices are left up to a roll of the marketing dice. “We need a white paper (who is your audience and how will you introduce it to channels?).” “We need to make a video (because everyone else is doing it).” “Let’s do a webinar (even though we have no clue how to promote it).” These can be great assets if you are making smart decisions and digital paperweights if you’re not. So how do you strategically decide which content you should create first? Where do the gaps exist? How can you promote your created assets so people can respond to them?
This is where content creation and consulting come into the picture: using consultants for high ROI when it comes to your content investment.
- Know who your customers are and the kind of content they want. Remember that your ideal customers are not the blue-sky early adopter types who just love your product. They’re good for PR and proof of concept but they will never be your customer base because they’re always on to the Next Big Thing. Your ideal customers may be SMB owners, IT organizations, records managers, compliance directors, C-suite executives, service providers or MSPs: these are the businesses that will make you a success if you can reach out and convince them. You will also need to know how they prefer to consume their content and at what stage of the sales cycle. For example, IT consumes information differently from the C-Suite and you are probably marketing to them both. Understand what they want to know when they are researching, their motivations, and what convinces them to take action.
- Specify your top 1-3 current marketing initiatives and their content gaps. Examples include brand awareness, positioning, lead generation, reference customers, or shortened sales cycles. Which initiative will have the best return on investment with content assets? If you only have technical white papers and are marketing to IT, great. If you only have technical white papers and you’re marketing to business decision makers, good luck.
- Create the content. If you have existing content then great, update it as needed and start it working for you. If you need to create new assets, prioritize content creation by need, cost, time to create, and expected ROI. Don’t automatically go with the cheapest or easiest option. If you can quickly create a podcast and get it out there while you create more in-depth assets, then fine. But do not spend a year recording throw-away podcasts when what your customers really want is a strong white paper.
- Develop a landing page specifically for the content’s link. Linking to a well-designed home page is all right for blog entries, but don’t promote a link to your home page from a major content asset. Send your content consumers to a landing page created specifically for the asset. For in-depth content such as white papers or research reports you may safely include an information form with minimal questions. Most readers expect this with downloads. If the content asset is short like an infographic, you probably will not want to capture information but you should include a strong call to action on its landing page.
- Promote the asset. Content works well for outbound marketing when you are actively pushing prospects to the asset. And content is particularly attractive with inbound marketing, the process of getting your customers to come to you because of the quantity and quality of your content. This is why it is vital to promote new content using search engine optimization and multiple media channels.
Stay tuned for Rules #2-5.