Remember mass marketing? If you do, you’re probably familiar with rotary dial phones, and maybe you even owned a Walkman. Mass marketing – which for a long time ruled the sales process – is vanishing into history, along with floppy disks and fax machines. Now, thanks to the internet, content marketing is king, and it completely changed the way companies sell their products and solutions.
Today, prospects actively search online for information on the products they’re interested in. And if you want your prospect to choose your solution, you have to have the right content available, in the right channels and formats. If your content doesn’t offer all the information prospects are seeking, or doesn’t sufficiently underscore your expertise or credibility, you’re going to lose out – on sales and business reputation.
First, you need a digital marketing content strategy. If you don’t have a clear strategy, you’ll end up with content, but it won’t necessarily be the content you need to drive sales, or even contain the information your prospects are seeking. A good B2B content marketing plan ensures that you’re sending a clear message to a well-defined target group, using the right tone and positioning, and includes all the information that your prospects are interested in.
To get started and create a content plan for your organization, consider these steps:
Your content strategy needs to align with a lot of other elements - your company’s vision and objectives, your overall communications plan, and your marketing strategy.
Who are your customers? By creating personas for your key customer ‘types,’ you can better understand the types of content they need.
Chart out the steps that your customers go through in buying from your organization, through the stages of awareness, consideration and decision.
Map out the content and channels that you need to support your buyers at every step of the way.
Once you have a master list of content and channels, create a content calendar to keep production on track.
In-house or partner with an agency? Choose the option that will best support the goals and deadlines you’ve outlined in your content plan.
The advantage of online content marketing is that everything can be measured. Number of visitors, social shares, search engine traffic, conversion ratios – every single interaction provides you with feedback on how well your content is performing.