For various reasons, B2B marketers have been among the slowest sets to adopt effective content marketing strategies. Before blindly submitting their contact info to a website, customers want to learn more about the company with which they may do business. While customers want more, and turn to online white papers and demos to conduct pre-purchase research, most B2B marketers still neglect basic content marketing principles in favor of a focus on traditional methods such as print advertising and telemarketing.
What business marketers must understand is that if they can create valuable content, they can cost-effectively gain significant competitive advantage and market share over their laggard competitors. Marketers need to determine what constitutes great content, and how such content can be procured for an affordable price.
Content Writing
First, try creating content of your own. Take some time to write a few creative articles related to your particular industry or field, and see how it goes. Perhaps the most important thing to remember is that most blog readers don’t want to read promotional puff pieces about your company. Instead of trying to lay a hard close on your readers, write content that they will genuinely find interesting, educational, or provocative.
If you’ve given content writing a shot, and determined that you are not a direct descendant of Ernest Hemingway, don’t give up. There are still options. A popular trick employed by marketers is to pore over content they have written in the past, and see if there is a tie-in to their current vocation. Review your old college essays or dissertations, and see if there is an opportunity to update it to become relevant. Maybe you wrote an economics paper about opportunity cost and a paper about saving the whales. Try something like combining the two to outline how the current public policy could be better directed towards environmental concerns.
Crowdsourcing
Regardless of how your personal writing mission is going, it can be valuable to invite employees from all departments into the content writing game. Not only can this save money, but asking your staff for help will be empowering, educational, and will help you gain respect by showing it.
Content Sharing
Finally, make your content shareable. A sound content marketing strategy will identify content as the best way to get a brand’s message across and build a loyal base of followers.
While some people will go to great lengths to post an interesting link on Facebook, some will quickly give up if they don’t immediately find share buttons. See to it that your sharing links are highly visible so that they don’t go unnoticed.
The major search engine ranking algorithms readily incorporate data gathered from social media networks into their computations. Savvy marketers will encourage their readers to share their blog posts, videos, and articles, thus boosting their search rankings.
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