All content should serve your audience and move leads through the sales funnel, but not all content does. In order to improve your content, it’s time to stop making some common mistakes.
Do you recognize any of these problems in your own marketing? If so, it’s time to make a change.
The best content can only live up to its promise if it serves your targets’ needs — and is delivered to the right market segment at the right time. Even before you begin drafting your content, it’s critical to gather insights about the decision-makers in each of your market segments.
What does bad targeting look like? Sending an email campaign all about your small business offerings to potential buyers at international corporations, for example, or promoting a case study about a 500-person tech company’s success with your product to a small mom-and-pop retailer. Make sure your content is tailored to meet the needs of each of your unique audience segments, and you will start to see it make a real impact.
Unbelievably, 75% of marketers still believe that “content should frequently mention products,” even as the majority of consumers claim to “turn down content that sounds like a sales pitch.” Forty-three percent of participants in a recent survey from CMO Council reported that the aspect of B2B content they liked least was its tendency to be “blatantly promotional and self-serving.”
In contrast, the content that consumers valued most had three main features: “breadth and depth of information,” “ease of access, understanding and readability,” and “originality of thinking and ideas.” Marketers, the imperatives are clear. It’s time to create content that provides your leads with valuable information and demonstrates your expertise. It’s time to stop thinking of your content as a sales pitch for your product.
Content that can’t be found will never be able to convert your audience. Once your team has spent the time and effort to create top-notch content, it’s time to promote and support it. Use SEO best practices to optimize your content for organic search, and promote it across channels like social media and email with appealing visuals.
Content must not be overly promotional, but it does need to be branded and include a call-to-action (CTA). Your CTAs should point your audience in the right direction, moving targets from awareness to consideration, and eventually, conversion. For example, if a target has already downloaded and read an in-depth whitepaper, the CTA at the end of that piece should direct them to contact the sales team or at least read more content at the same level, not point them to blog posts with “top of the funnel” content.
Content is strongest when it’s deployed with a strategy and works in tandem with other aspects of your marketing efforts to build your brand’s reputation. Once you’ve determined your content niche, use it as a rubric as you continue to create content. This is how brands build thought leadership: by drilling down into one topic and building a reputation for expertise in a very specific area.
But thought leadership can do more than simply boost the reputation of your experts. It can strengthen your brand. When publishing educational content across platforms, make sure that your brand is clearly credited on each piece of content.
If you’ve identified any of these problems with your marketing and want to discuss how your efforts can be strengthened, contact us.
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