Marketers, what are your favorite types of content? Whether you’re into white papers or video, the form your content takes will have a dramatic impact on how your audience processes and acts on its information. Today, we want to talk about three types of content that can truly benefit your targets with actionable, educational insights.
Video is great way for B2B marketers to put human faces to their businesses. If done well, video can draw audiences in, encourage sharing and set a brand apart from its competitors.
Earlier this year, Progressive produced a series called Small Business, Big Dreams, which connected established entrepreneurs with those who were just starting out. In the first video, the brand introduced Nini and Bass, two entrepreneurs building a Boston empanada restaurant. They connected them with the team from 5411 Empanadas, an established business in Chicago. Progressive used this and other videos in the series to show the established company sharing advice with the startup, and in turn with all the viewers of the series. In addition to telling a compelling story about entrepreneurship, each video ends with a concrete tip, such as, on hiring, “Where would your ideal hire hang out? Try recruiting at conferences or relevant online groups in your area.” While the videos don’t aim to directly sell Progressive’s insurance products, they position the company as a champion of the small business, and build positive brand associations that will likely lead to future sales.
Webinars are the ideal platform for sharing technical knowledge, and many B2B businesses are taking advantage of webinar platforms to offer training and demos to their targets. One such company is Proformative, a professional development provider for corporate finance employees. In addition to offering corporate training packages and paid courses, Proformative offers a selection of free webinars, open to the public, where industry professionals teach valuable lessons about a variety of corporate finance topics.
These free webinar offerings give viewers a taste of Proformative’s larger suite of training tools for corporate clients while demonstrating the company’s expertise and willingness to educate its customers.
White papers are an excellent chance to explore a topic of importance to your audience in greater depth than you could in a blog post or through social media. They are also well-suited to evergreen content that will remain relevant in your industry for months or years to come.
At Movéo, we maintain a library of white papers that address questions from “how will the rise in raw content reshape digital marketing?” to “how can I enhance marketing predictability?” For example, in our white paper “Engaging B2B buyers before the buying process: 4 key steps,” B2B marketers can learn how to develop “Brand Empathy,” defined as “the perception that your company deeply understands and cares about a prospect’s business, its challenges/needs and the marketplace in which it operates.”
Do you have questions about the effectiveness of other types of content? We’d love to chat with you. Contact us today.
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