We cannot know exactly what the future of B2B content marketing will be, so in 2018 instead of making assumptions, we prefer to keep in mind these 10 useful insights for the B2B content marketing strategy in 2018.
1. When It Is Content Marketing, Please Follow The Basic Principles
In 2017, content marketing experts realized that sticking to basic information can yield substantial results. Aaron Orendorff, Shopify Plus Content Marketing explains how.
In content marketing, it is important:
- Identify valuable keywords that the target market is already using
- Certify explicitly written content that is optimized for search
- Increase the written content with rich data and images
- Provide visitors with relevant calls to action to include them in the funnel.
2. Load Your Content With The Contributions Of The Influencers
Orendorff goes on to say that instead of creating marketing activities alone or even as a marketing team, it is necessary to turn to external influencers or internal experts for original contributions. He says “make it as simple as possible, providing clear directions and asking only one question at a time.”
Garrett Ruiz, Head of Global Content Marketing at BlueJeans, used a similar approach to influence in his company. Speiga: “we went from a model of transmission in which the contents were focused on the education of our target audience, on our business, or on our products, on a model of involvement and defense. We looked for market themes to connect our brand to influencers who could help us tell these stories.”
“For example, we asked influencers to post their opinions on a digital transformation theme and we published a paper with their contributions. Once the document was promoted through social media, this has achieved 7 times more tracks and 1.6 times more involvement, compared to our average posts. The topic resonated with our audience and external collaborators were eager to share the piece with their audience,” says Ruiz.
3. FOLLOW YOUR COMPETITORS
Bianca Ghose, Wipro’s storyteller, says successful content marketers “haunted” their competitive landscape in 2017. “Know your competition, what they’re saying, doing and even planning!” Says Ghose. For example, his team uses tools like Buzzsumo, Sprinkler and Social Studio to keep track of ongoing conversations, campaigns and sharing of competitors’ voices.
4. Try Your Content Marketing Strategy
In addition to keeping competitors under control, Ghose recommends testing all the elements of your campaign, including …
- News
- Visual
- Channel strategies
- Ad units used
- Place the download form on your landing page.
Continue Reading: 15 free marketing tools for Instagram
5. Optimize Your Videos For The Different Channels Of Social Media
“This year we discovered that the same video can be shared on different platforms in different ways for very different results,” says Jonathan Seidman, senior specialist, content marketing at ATEN International.
“For example, it became clear that by directly uploading our videos to our Facebook page (which would automatically play them, compared to a static YouTube link that had to be clicked), it got a lot more views than just pasting a link.” on these results, the Seidman team has increased the sponsorship of video content, as well as increased the ratio between video and static content, from 1:3 compared to 1:20 last year.
On LinkedIn, Seidman points out that videos do not play automatically because it is a less noisy platform with much less content fighting for attention. In contrast, Seidman recommends sharing content such as case studies, which have proved more effective on LinkedIn.
6. Amplify Your Content Through A Payment Distribution
“The biggest learning for me in 2017 was that a strategy to promote organic content, especially on social media, had to go hand in hand with a paid distribution strategy. In our case, the new Facebook ads have proved to be a very effective way to link content to potential buying behavior, “says Seidman.
7. Do Not Create New Content When You Can Recycle It
“If an idea works , it changes the packaging, the messaging and the design, the mix of contents and the public, and put it back into circulation after a reasonable period of cooling”, advises Ghose.
As Wallace says, “Content must be cleaned up! The most performing content of the year, in terms of sessions, backlinks and code fragments, were the contents we had published the previous year, so we updated it accurately for the New Year, or we put new images, new quotes and even new content if required and republished as new. Google immediately ranked the topmost pieces, the influencers and the experts were ready to share (since the piece already had some share) and the partners were often ready to invade the pieces, since they had the degree of research and the workload was light for them.”
“Our readers are happier, indicative of our decrease in bounce rate and the increase in email responses. And it took a bit of diligence not to produce new networks, but to look back, understand what worked or not and then clean it up,” says Wallace.
8. Share Examples Of Real Cases And Study Cases
“Publishing anything with less than 1000 words without examples, screenshots or other people’s quotes does not work for us,” says Wallace. “Our readers do not want a list of important suggestions unless you show them: Who does it this way? How did they set it up? What are the exact metrics on how it works?”
Wallace explains: “I attribute it to the” Fake news “industry right now. People are becoming more cautious about the content they trust and if you cannot back up what you say with examples of people doing it right now, then why would anyone trust your advice on best practices? “
9. Do Not Sell Your Products Through Your Contents
Nicola Eliot, head of content at BBC StoryWork’s APAC, shares the negative aspects of selling through content. “In cases where we tried to experiment with the heavy content of a brand, it did not work as with content that kept the focus on what is interesting for the reader.”
10. Create Contents That Connect With Your Public Without Extreme Targeting
Marketing professionals agree that a valid approach for everyone does not work. Ruiz explains: “It may be tempting to try to cut corners when it comes to audience segmentation, but it’s better to focus on producing great content for an audience rather than trying to speak to more audience with un-personalized or (worse) irrelevant content.”
11. Share the content with the subscribers
Ghose, however, recommends that you do not overdo hyper-targeting content. He says “The urge to specify excessively and the micro-segment audience has ruined many (potentially large) campaigns. There is no perfect customer profile, no person that can be accurate enough. While custom audiences are absolutely critical, in making the marketing strategy very specific, content marketers have risked abandoning large groups of potential customers.”
Tags: Content Marketing, Content Marketing 2018
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