Content marketing has become the keystone to modern marketing strategies, especially for brands with a strong digital presence. It’s not as easy as finding some white space and filling it with SEO content and a few video clips you hope will go viral. If your content isn’t giving you the return you expected on your investment, here’s where you may have taken a wrong turn and how a talented content team can change your course.
Making It All About You
The biggest issue novice B2B content creators and do-it-yourselfers have is confusing content for advertising. Ads are wonderful for building brand recognition, but they aren’t something your potential customers seek out to educate themselves or inform their business decisions – and that’s where content marketing excels.
Instead of using your content to blast advertising, think of it as a way to help your customers and prospects make important decisions and stay current with industry news. They’ll look to you as an authoritative information source and seek you out when it’s time to buy. You don’t need the hard sell to get them to listen; you just need engaging, creative, relevant content.
Not Enough Content
Audiences are voracious beasts, and they have an almost insatiable appetite for novelty. A weekly or bi-weekly blog, a corporate website, SEO – those are just the beginnings of an overall content strategy, not the destination. Human readers aren’t the only ones who crave newness, either; Google values sites that feature regular content updates and ongoing growth more highly than static pages. Your audience will treat you as a destination site instead of a stop-over when you offer them plenty of content.
By giving more to your audience, you can also ask for more from them. Give them new white papers to download, new case studies to pore over and new blog posts to retweet, and they’ll be more likely to share information and referrals with you.
Too Much (Low-Quality) Content
At the other end of the spectrum are companies that pump out endless SEO articles and blog posts that do little more than fill white space. If you can’t get your message across effectively, repeating it more frequently and at higher volumes won’t help. Bad content is worse than no content because it actively diminishes your authority with both search engines and your audience. Typos, egregious grammar mistakes and tissue-thin subject matter are sure signs of a company that’s misspent its content marketing budget.
Great content is less expensive than you think, especially when you work with a company that specializes in B2B content creation. Don’t choose a cut-rate content provider for something that defines your company’s brand; saving a few dollars on your weekly blog post isn’t worth losing even one potential customer.
Undifferentiated Content
Modern marketplaces are becoming increasingly fractured, and that means an increasing need for better segmentation of your audience. Instead of addressing your whole audience with one piece of content, you want to deliver customized content to each segment. This boutique approach works especially well with B2B companies that serve a wide range of clients in different industries.
All your audience segments want to believe they’re your highest priority, and content tailored to them makes it happen. One newslettter may not be enough to satisfy your whole audience, so your B2B content creation team might write two or three each week. A manufacturer who specializes in HVAC equipment and serves a national audience, for example, might send AC-related newsletters to clients in the south while focusing on ventilation and air quality in regions where air conditioners are a relative rarity.
