A key challenge for B2B marketers is enticing their target buyers with appetising, morish digital content. Generating truly memorable content every time, all the time, is tough.
Your content’s primary objective is to be shared. That includes your content consumers tweeting, sharing on LinkedIn, emailing or any other form of distribution. Simply, you want people to go ‘wow, need that,’ and 'I'm going to send this to the CEO, CFO and sales guys'.
So how can you beef up your content production?
The 6 Breeds of Digital Content
-
1) Created: Original pieces of content that you create from scratch. These are obviously the most resource intensive. But they’re invaluable. Created content can include: eBooks, infographics, articles, SlideShares and countless others.
Tip: spend your energy most wisely by building more of the content that your users are interested in. Study your site hits, your subscribers' conversations, and their interests. Patterns are key. -
2) Curated: Content that collects information from other sites and sources. In a collage-like manner, curated content can take the shape of round-up posts. An example would be choosing a topic like social selling and listing the best web resources on the topic for that week. Invariably, this kind of content is most attractive because of its currency. But, equally, it’s not evergreen.
Tip: curated content must always be accredited. -
3) Collaborative: This co-created content is 'sourced from established content creators, some of whom might already have some notoriety or a built-in audience in their area of expertise,' as defined in Ann Hadley and C.C. Chapman’s Content Rules. All contributors generate content around a central theme. An example is American Express’ OPEN Forum that publishes a treasure chest of information for SMB owners.
Tip: find your industry luminaries and reach out to them. Bet is, they'd love a serve of your limelight. -
4) Legacy: One of the easiest ways companies can quickly scale their inbound content marketing is to repurpose content they already have into different assets. For example, if you have an expert presentation, turn it into a YouTube clip, submit it to Digg and repurpose it for SlideShare. Take your best stuff and reapproapriate it across various mediums.
Tip: choose content that keeps giving – that’s timeless. -
5) UGC: User-generated content is produced by people who visit your site as apposed to professional writers, content creators, or marketers. Inviting your audience to create content for you is also called crowdsourcing. This content can include product reviews, ratings, forums, Q&As, etc.
Tips: always respond to your users, take complaints or negative feedback into a private space as quickly as possible, guide the converstations. -
6) Licenced content: This is content that, as you may expect, is licenced from content producers. In order to license content, you may need to chip in a few bucks or exchange attribution. The idea with licenced content is that you’re able to stock an online library of credible resources. This can reinforce your position in the industry, showing that you're in-the-know, without you doing all the writing work.
Tip: balance this with equally impressive content of your own creation.
A note on product messaging and content creation
Remember that, as a general rule, content marketing is not product-centric. Yes, exceptions exist: the product review, tech and specs pieces, industry trend commentary and so on.
But best practice for every piece of B2B marketing content, according to SEOmoz, is to follow the 80/20 rule. This means that 80% of the copy is non-product focused and 20% of the copy is product orientated (your moment to talk features and functions). Most importantly, product references should only be used where they make most sense, and on a limited basis. Anything that looks too spammy will do the exact opposite of nurturing leads and will burn any residual truct you have earned.
Take a look into the health of your B2B Marketing by doing our quick online healthcheck:
