Content marketing is the new face of B2B Marketing. Plain and simple. If you are a B2B marketer, you have to think about your content strategy and get it right, it's really that important.
Why?
Get it right and your firm will dramatically increase your quality of leads and your conversion rates will soar and that means you will make more money...worth reading on?
In the course of building your content marketing strategy you will build a powerful, meaningful relationship with your target audience, built on mutual respect and understanding.
So what is content marketing? It means building valuable content that you give willingly to your contacts, leads, qualified prospects and customers that expand their understanding of the issues they face, assist them to clarify what's wrong and help them understand how best to fix the problems and at a time and in a format that suits them best.
In short it's about stimulating the minds of your target market to such a point and in such a way that they take action. Without creating action, marketing is a pointless exercise.
But here's the rub. It means you have to stop shouting at your audience and do something useful; put your own agenda to one side; stop talking about yourself and the wonders of version 2.7.3 of you latest software or wonderful widget.
Is this revolutionary thinking? Hardly, these have been essential truths for many years, but the environment is rapidly changing and the stakes are getting A LOT higher.
The web has fundamentally changed the way we research topics we are interested in and how we solve problems and gaps in our knowledge. Your target audience is engaging with you directly much later in the sales cycle. You must seek to influence their understanding via content marketing.
successful Content marketing requires a selling organisation to:
How does your organisation stack up against this list of 10 "must haves?"
So what are the key steps to create a successful content marketing strategy?
Content marketing is the manifestation of the marketing revolution that is sweeping the B2B world, inbound marketing. It is in direct contrast to traditional interruption based marketing and builds a true and meaningful dialog with prospects. Many firms build content themselves as they employ many experts and thought leaders in their midst, however the key challenge for most firms is how to string the content story together and deliver it in a way that consistently supports and nurtures the relationship with the prospect. For that many firms, small, medium and large are turning to inbound and content marketing agencies for help.
If you're interested in learning more download our free eBook on Content Marketing below.