If you work as a CMO at a B2B tech company and struggle to generate good leads from your content, this blog post is for you. Many tech marketing departments fail with their content strategies. Maybe the content doesn’t get viewed, shared, or downloaded. Or perhaps it doesn’t generate good leads, or sales. Since creating content can cost a lot of money, it can be an expensive failure. In this blog post, we will give you 5 keys to making a successful content marketing strategy so you can start generating great MQLs and ROI. If you want to watch our webinar on the same topic,
check it out here.
To have success in content marketing, you need to write to the correct person in the right buying phase, regardless of the content format, (video, interactive content, E-books or blog posts). It's important to have both the right person in mind to know who you are speaking to, and the buying phase - that you want your content to target.
When it comes to content marketing you need to have a “buyer persona,” one or multiple depending on your business. A buyer persona is a semi-fictional characterization of your ideal buyer and some important things to consider when creating a buyer persona are:
Hopefully, your product, solution or service can be one of those, but what's also important especially when it comes to content marketing and inbound marketing, is that we also want to include the buyer’s journey. We want to add a dimension to the buyer persona and that can be done by segmenting the buyer’s journey into three phases:
You can use interviewing because it’s always great to talk, both to your existing clients, as well as talking to accounts that aren't a client of yours yet. Then you can get a more in-depth knowledge of their actual situation and the more you talk to a real version of the buyer persona, the more information you will get and therefore you can be more tailored in your messaging.
Of course, if you may not have the resources, bandwidth and time to conduct a lot of interviews. Here are some examples of what you can do alternatively:
There are different ways to target the content in the “buyer’s journey” and adapt the content messaging and the content itself to the different phases.
Type of content needed: Problem-centric content that addresses the prospect’s challenges and builds greater awareness of them.
Relevant content formats: Blog posts, LinkedIn posts, e-books, guides.
How to attract: Optimize searchable content like blog posts for SEO and invest in LinkedIn ads.
How to convert: Use CTAs in your awareness-stage content with links to your consideration-stage content. For instance, an awareness blog post linking to a landing page with a consideration guide.
Type of content needed: Solution-centric content with advice on how to solve the prospect’s problems.
Relevant content formats: E-books, guides, reports, configurators, blog posts, landing pages, tips sheets.
How to attract: Use landing pages that require some contact information to access premium content. Send a series of nurturing emails recommending additional consideration-stage content.
How to convert: Link to decision-stage content at the end of your consideration-stage content. For instance, you could link to the sign-up page for a webinar at the end of an e-book.
Type of content needed: Product-centric content to help the prospect see why they should choose your solution.
Relevant content formats: Webinars, case studies, FAQ articles, blog posts.
How to attract: Ask for additional contact information on landing pages, webinar sign-up forms and in nurturing emails. The goal is to gradually get all the contact information needed to be a sales-qualified lead.
How to convert:Use CTAs to book a demonstration, personal consultation or other meeting with sales.
Here’s some hands on advice on how to think about your content and different buyer personas. During the different phases of a buyer’s journey, we recommend dropping a content matrix, and you can do that for each product that you have and for each industry. The idea is to breakdown and map the content that you have because that can highlight what you need to create and what gaps you have in your matrix.
A particularly important aspect in the tech-industry that we're working in, is that the things we want to sell can be quite hard to understand. They can be very technically advanced and to highlight the benefits of your solution versus a competitor’s might mean that we need to go into some technical detail. It's important when you write copy to make sure that the person whose writing has the understanding and the ability of the technical aspects of your solution.
It’s all about making the most value out of your content, creating good content takes time and indirectly or directly it takes money to create good content.
Make sure to spend time on creating a great original piece of content, that can live over time Then you can create lots of content from that piece.
By making the content worth it, you need to repurpose and make the most out of it. For example: if you write an e-book and you have interviewed a couple of customers, or your technical experts, the information alone from those interviews can be used for other things and be used for a different purpose.
What happens after the production of your content? If you don’t promote your content, it won’t get any leads. Our favourite channel of promotion is LinkedIn, which is a great platform to reach IT decision makers. Our top tips on how to succeed on LinkedIn, or any other advertising platform, can be viewed below.
Below is a list of more channels to promote your content in.
It’s important to choose the channel that fits your purpose the best. Which one is best? Don’t go with the same old thing that you did for the last five years, be creative and willing to try out something new.
Marketing automation makes your content marketing efforts run like a well-oiled machine and enables you to speak to your audience with content that is relevant for them. This comes back to what we talked about earlier; making the most out of your content, because marketing automation is the engine in the background that ties all your marketing efforts together.
If you're serious about your content marketing and you’re working with content marketing, then Marketing automation should be a part of the work as well. Examples of marketing automation systems that we love are HubSpot and SharpSpring.
Content marketing and marketing automation goes hand in hand. Below are 3 examples:
Marketing automation is used to orchestrate multiple touch points to engage in continuous conversations with your buyers. Examples of how marketing automation and content marketing work together in different channels:
Marketing automation nurtures specific personas with targeted content that helps you turn prospects into customers. If you’ve been trying to manually catalogue all of your available content, marketing automation eliminates that task with several smart features:
Which content is actually working? Are you drawing in qualified leads? Are your content marketing efforts actually driving sales? Can you accurately measure ROI? Marketing automation allowing you to:
Marketing automation is the secret weapon making sure that all the hard work you put into each piece of content doesn’t go to waste!
Summary and key takeaways: