3 Techniques to Promote Effective Content Marketing

In a recent article published on Marketing Land titled “3 techniques to keep your content from being ignored”, author Mary Wallace suggests three techniques that marketers should use when writing content to promote their products or services. Based on my experience in working with both B2B and B2C clients, I’d like to add my comments on the importance of these techniques and add additional suggestions on how to promote effective online content marketing as well.

Put your content in context: Deliver the right content, to the right people, at the right time

Any content marketing plan needs to be done in the context of writing content that is specifically addressed to your targeted audience. It needs to be well written,  engaging and provide value that speaks to the right people at the right time. The challenge I often see in working with clients is that they don’t spend the time and effort needed to thoroughly talk with and understand the issues and needs of their clients.

In today’s digital world marketers must have well defined set of personas (one primary one and two or more secondary ones) that thoroughly describes the people that buy and use their products or services. In order to do this effectively marketers need to take the time to interview various customers and ask questions to learn about how well their products or services meet their needs and ways for how things can be improved. Sometimes it may be worth using a third party to do this since they can view things more objectively and provide unbiased feedback that customers may not want to provide directly.

Well defined Personas provide insight into the pain, background, joys and needs of customers. Some of the key components of personas include not only who they are, but where they hang out, where they look for information, what type of content they are interested in. Content also needs to addresses the buyer (persona) at a specific stage in the buying cycle. A single piece of content shouldn’t just address options for solving a problemand the costs associated with those options.

Get your content where your customers are

In today’s digital work buyers can look for information everywhere… and can be anywhere. Many start by searching online and begin looking at options, while others go directly to a vendors website, click through from a search results or attend a conference.

It’s useful to do a competitive analysis and have a thorough understanding of the landscape your business operates in and how you measure up to your competitors.  The competitive analysis will provide information about what your primary competitors are doing online including both paid ads, search engine optimization and use of social media.  After carefully reviewing this information a digital marketing plan and strategy can be implemented specific to your business. 

Using both inbound and outbound techniques has advantages, however all these need to be measured and tracked to determine how effective they perform. Participating in trade shows can also be an effective technique. While the article mentions that 67% of B2B content marketers consider event marketing to be their most effective strategy, this needs to be supported by an effective online strategy since most prospects will review your site look at feedback from online customer reviews.   

Deliver effective content your prospects crave

A digital trail of information can be tracked on website visits, form submits, email engagements and online searches. Web analytics can provide insights into which site pages visitors view, how long they view them and sequence they are viewed.This is valuable data that can be used to gather insights into the buying cycle and persona of visitors and engaged prospects. From this you can review how effective you are in delivering the right content.  

Developing a matrix of online content arranged by personas and their buying cycles is a good practice. Using this matrix, gather insights and look for trends into the visitors who traverse your website and engage with specific content. Then take the next step to segment them according to who they are and what they’re interested in.

These segments can then be used to send ultra-personal emails that have the right content and are perfectly in context to the recipient. Since these are in tune with the recipient, your content is not ignored.

Create effective online content marketing that speaks to your buyer’s persona, the stage of the buying cycle they are in and their needs is important. Getting that content in front of those specific buyers when they have intent to research and buy ensures your content will not be ignored.

The original article in Marketing Land can be found from the link below:

https://marketingland.com/3-techniques-stop-content-ignored-174369