While content marketing has had significant trend growth across 2014, it’s still an area that baffles over half of UK Marketers…
And while B2B Marketers everywhere generally still see ‘measuring content’ as one of their biggest challenges, more and more of us are coming up with well-documented strategies to smash those business goals …
Creating content that is relevant, adds value and is SMART, is the sure-fire way to B2B lead generation success. Take a look at this 6 quick but seriously effective steps to make your content marketing super smart, and you’ll be the content queen (or king) bee in no time…
Specific
Use data to define your buyer persona
Buyer personas are a powerful way to deliver content that is as relevant and valuable as possible – to the right buyers. The more factual and in-depth your buyer personas are, the more targeted and relevant you can make your content marketing.
Forget brainstorming and dig deep into your customer database, email lists and website data to understand who is interacting with what. Remember to go beyond the demographics and glean some psychographic insight too…
Identify your buyer persona’s personal challenges
When 60% of buyers are inspired to seek out a product after reading content about it, being relevant and adding value is essential if you want to create content that converts. The more relevant you can make your content to your buyers and the challenges they face, the higher the chance they’ll want to find out about your product too.
Measurable
Make content that is measurable against your business goals
The top 3 content marketing goals for UK businesses are engagement, lead nurturing and lead generation. With a growing focus on metric-based objectives, you need to create clear and measureable content marketing goals up front if you want to create content that delivers the results that matter to your business.
Optimising your activity based on solid metrics will help you identify success and bring you closer to hitting those all-important goals. Download the Ultimate Content Planner to quickly and easily measure your content marketing performance and analyse your success (thank goodness, we’ve done the hard bit for you!).
Attainable
Be in the right place, at the right time
Being timely can make or break your content marketing strategy, so it’s essential your content is in the right place at the right time. Now’s a good time to review those buyer persona’s again to define where and when your prospects are hanging out, but on a bigger scale.
Take a look at recent industry research from the likes of the Content Marketing Institute, the IDM B2B Barometer and the Base One Buyersphere report to give you a wider idea of where your personas spend their time and how they like to consume content.
Relevant
Choose the right content marketing medium
B2B Marketers rated in-person events, webinars, videos, blogs and case studies as the most effective B2B marketing medium in 2014. Not every medium will be suitable for your business…but it will be suitable for your prospective buyer.
To expand your reach and accelerate your content engagement, experiment with new media and channels on a regular basis and don’t be afraid to mix and match if it fits with your personas. Most importantly, keep it measurable.
Time-bound
Timing is everything…or not.
58% of B2B Marketers agree that being relevant is the No. 1 thing that makes content marketing so effective. While your business goals for content marketing may shift and change over time, the need to be relevant will not.
Make sure you keep up to date with the latest current events that are relevant to your industry by creating an interactive macro moments calendar using One Note or Google Docs. Plot any relevant events that pop up across industry or wider news, but remember to stay relevant to your audience…nobody likes a bad news hijack…
No matter what your business goals are for 2015, your content marketing strategy is a powerful discipline to master. Follow these 5 steps to getting SMART and you’ll be well on your way to creating top-notch content that converts.
Make your content marketing super SMART with the Ultimate Content planner 2.0 – Download your free template here.
This blog was originally posted on the Lead Forensics website. Read the original article here.
