Content Marketing 102: Bring on Enhanced Content!

Running B2B Marketing today, is synonymous with being a content developer. Whether it is developing product content, telling the brand story, or discussing the product experience; you are educating the market. Specifically, you are educating your target audience. Of course, it educates the market provided you enhance the shopping experience by:

• making it easier for the buyer,
• speaking to people,
• interfacing with the search engines to increase web traffic, and
• promoting your value proposition above the competitive din.

But, when you have been at it for a while, you may either cover the basics ad nauseum, or may miss what is important to your customers. An easy mistake, in an effort to become a thought leader, is to run too far ahead of the customer. Think of material that focuses on esoteric topics. While fascinating to an expert, it may lose the majority of your target market. Your market plan for content must focus on continually offering valuable, insightful material to your target readers. In this way, you are not merely relying on product and service differentiation as a competitive factor. Now you are using your marketing as a means of creating distinction within your market. This is your opportunity to use value articulation practices to distinguish your brand from the rest.

Stepping beyond the 101 level, here are several ideas on enhanced content. Let's call this advanced material - content marketing 102.

Utility Marketing

As a principle, always keep your target audience in mind for the material you generate in your content marketing 102 approach (beyond the basics). Since the buyer is central to your purpose, make sure both your fundamental, and sophisticated collateral are useful to that readership. They must always find the material valuable to their job, personal knowledge about the industry, or a career eye opener. Do this to give your content impact. Simply put, you don't improve conversion rates, nor raise your credibility in a topic by providing mediocre material. Worse yet, is content that your reader regrets reading! For a real world example of this read the Forbes article, Storytelling with a Core. Remember that every article is about build trust and credibility - otherwise you are eroding it!

If your content does not provide the reader with high utility, then the messaging within your material simply will NOT matter. The usefulness of your collateral will make it rich content. Rich content as high utility material - gets used, is appreciated, and helps influence the buying journey.

Benchmarks & Market Indices

Exceptional B2B content gives the reader substantive information, a tactically applicable strategy, new techniques, comparative statistics, or a new concept they can use in their profession. Benchmarks or market indices are good examples of substantive content. It isn't about being rich media in format, it is about providing deep value to the reader and prospect. At the end of the day, the first brand that offers the customer value they can use and apply, is likely to the be one from which they purchase their solution.

Make sure you material includes research on industry trends, utilization rates, comparison charts of capabilities, practices, and so on. Don't be shy about sharing statistics that your audience will find interesting or directly useful. Develop material that is fascinating to your target audience. It helps them understand how they are doing compared to the rest of the industry of peers.

Benchmarks and market indices are difficult to create, and less common in the content marketing landscape. As such, if you are able to include this in your 'enhanced content marketing' strategy, you will gain significant traction both as a demand generation engine, and as a brand exposure mechanism.

Two good examples of market indices are the images shown (one above, one below). DynamicAction as an example, aggregates client data to provide a quarterly Market Index. See image above. Another example is CloudPay's PEI - Payroll Efficiency Index (PEI - see below). Their market index on corporate payroll is an exceptional early indicator of the direction of the economy overall. In all cases, such market indices and industry benchmarks provide comparisons and statistics. Both of which the media loves to quote. Plus, your SEO experts will love the backlinks to your website that help build authority.

For more about benchmarks, market indices, read Advanced Content: Benchmark, Research, or Market Index?

Self Assessments

Develop several criteria with which to assess a client's current state. In effect, create a self-assessment scorecard for users. This provides your company with useful information about the state of the prospect's business, and their level of need for your solutions. In return, the prospect gets a report assessing their current state, with recommendations.

As an example the ContractPodAi scorecard assesses a prospect's current contract management status within their organization. A consulting report is emailed to the inquirer, after they complete a short questionnaire. An SDR (sales development representative), then follows up with the prospect to both discuss the results, recommend options, and if interested engage them in a discovery call or solution demonstration.

Self assessment tests like these are an excellent way to create demand, get a deeper understanding of the prospect, and even provides a built in lead-scoring mechanism.

Checklists

Another engaging piece popular with prospects is the checklist. This can be in many forms. It can be a very simple self-assessment checklist, or a guiding checklist. For a self-assessment, the checklist just asks the user to consider their current state, and whether they have several key areas handled. The fewer boxes checked, the greater the need for your offering. To deepen the connection, make the checklist a precursor to your scorecard. Inform the prospect that: 'for a deeper analysis, tryout our full self-assessment scorecard, with consulting report provided FREE for your evaluation'.

One such checklist one of my previous teams developed provided a valuable means of completing a balanced assessment of vendors - for the client. At it's core, this checklist was highly valuable to the target audience. It both told them about themselves, as their current state of being. It raised their awareness of the importance of the issue. Finally, it also provided a path forward. Naturally this value articulation pointed toward our solution, but it helped the prospect by highlighting what was of particular importance to them (even though they may not have previously realized it).

Annecdotally, we included this checklist as an appendix to a fundamentals (101) whitepaper on the subject of contract management. At more than one tradeshow (pre COVID era), prospects were enthusiastic about the checklist, and often took the whitepaper because they found the checklist to be quite helpful.

VideoCasting

Too many companies are concerned about not providing their competition with information. But, despite the competitive education threat, bump up your search results by offering instructive information on your product pages, and include videos that provide insights, too.

Creating high quality videos is not easy. You do have to plan things out. You will need some equipment. Although, with every laptop equipped with video cameras, and the world now accustomed to video Zoom and Microsoft Teams meetings - this should not be a significant barrier.

There are various videos you can create to both be subtly promotional of your brand, yet not come across as salesy. Video options include:

Discussion about the industry with your SME's (subject matter experts),

• Tutorials on business practices,
• Tutorials on using product features,
• Product demonstrations (demos),
• Discussion with partners, customers, and third party experts,
• Webinar recordings, and
• Panel discussions (multiple guests).

Although video does take a little longer to plan, edits, and 'professional-ize' it is another solid step toward engaging your target market, and building your brand credibility.

PodCasts

Starting up your own podcast in your own field, or working with established podcasters, are two options. If you consider starting your own podcast, realize that it is a long-term commitment, and also requires a fair bit of planning. Yes, in this case too, you will need some equipment to provide that professional polish. Don't expect to see immediate result from this project. It will feel more like a labor of love, and may take 1-3 years before you truly start to reap the rewards. Mostly these will come from the great industry exposure - rather than directly traceable leads and closed deals.

Podcasts provide another venue for prospects to find your material, discover your value, and get deeper exposure to your brand. Like other advanced content options suggested above, a podcast has to provide a high level of value to the listener. It isn't all about your product or a sales pitch. Imagine that you were in your car listening to the radio as you drive. Surely, you would change the channel to another radio station if you came across one that was continually self-promoting, mostly laden with commercials and very little content. This is the same story for your podcasts.

Done well, a podcast can elevate your brand in the mind of the listener. It broadcasts that your brand has subject matter expertise in your field. That grows both awareness of your offering and credibility in your capabilities.

Options here are:

• Discuss the market, and pain points experienced by prospects,
• Review your latest whitepaper, benchmark study, or research,
• Interview customers, your own SME's, and industry experts, or
• Drive a panel discussion and debate about a topic hot in your industry.

Enhanced Content for Distinction

Exceptional B2B content gives the reader substantive information; be it a tactically applicable strategy, framework, technique, or new concept they can use in their profession.

Content marketing 102 - is the next step to enhance your content marketing impact. Your first steps, are to create the consistent SEO savvy blog posts, a focus on useful content creation, ebooks, white papers, reports, guides, product data sheets (spec sheets), and so on. A content marketing strategy must go far beyond product detail pages where product descriptions and featured product listings rule. These are the fundamentals of product marketing, and are merely the starting points. Your first key lesson is, above all else, make it useful to your target audience. Create a distinction for your brand by providing value throughout the buyer's journey, better than what your competitors offer.

B2B marketing success isn't just about differentiating your product. It's about marketing that builds your Brand Distinction.

Once you have the fundamentals guides down, the next steps that will differentiate your brand are the creative, enhanced content pieces. Add a self-assessment scorecard, create a benchmark research study, and use your aggregated customer data to create a market index. This 'next step' content isn't just about enhanced product features. Your enhanced content is about providing value to your customers, beyond what your competitors are doing today. This is a finer point of not just differentiating your product, but using your content marketing to create brand distinction!

For more on demand generation read, B2B Marketing Challenge: Generating New Leads.