Content Strategy and Content Marketing are some of the hottest topics in marketing today. With good reason – they are critical part of any solid marketing strategy, especially for considered purchases.
A few weeks ago I wrote a guest post on 10 steps to build a content marketing strategy, which was published in B2B Marketing Insider , Michael Brenner‘s site. The post was very popular and was posted again on the Business 2 Community and in SAP’s Business Innovation site.
I want to summarize some of the key takeaways of the article and add a few additional thoughts.
- Content Marketing is a response to changes in buying behavior: customers are doing much more reasearch before they buy and often making a decision before engaging with a company.
- In this age, marketing is more about being helpful and education than broadcasting and clever headlines.
- Content Marketing has been around for some time, especially in B2B – for example, white papers in technology marketing.
- The most important aspect of a content marketing strategy is to be have an interesting and useful point of view. This means content must be written by subject matter experts and that content needs to be valuable and unique.
- This is such a key point. As Ryo Chiba says “Great content marketing is neither spammy nor salezy. Solve a problem for your customers. Write posts that serve your audience”
- A good content writer needs to be an expert. If you are not one, before you start writing start learning. Have a point of view.
- Don’t lose sight of the fact that content’s main objective should be to influence buying decisions through customer education.
- A content marketing pyramid is very effective at making the most of your valuable content: start with a solid white paper, turn it into a webinar or slidecast, extract interesting sections into a few blog posts, then extract nuggets into tweets.
- You can track leading indicators to determine which parts of your content strategy are working. ROI measures for content generally fall under three categories:
- Consumption metrics: views and downloads (especially after someone downloads a white paper after reading a blog post, for example)
- Engagement metrics: shares, comments, votes, ratings and retweets
- Funnel metrics: clicks from your content to the buying process on your site
- Deal Influence: asking customers if they consumed any of their content and how much influence it had in earning their business
I encourage you to take a look at the original article and to share your thoughts below.