5 Key Factors to Win Content Marketing

The role of content marketing in B2B marketing cannot be overlooked. A recent study shows that a whopping 88 percent of all organizations have content marketing at the center of their marketing strategies.

If you haven’t been using content marketing to promote your brand, then you have certainly been missing out. These five factors will help give you an insight into the content marketing concept and how to use it to the advantage of your brand.

Objective Clarity

Knowing your objective and being able to project it in your content has an immense impact on the success of your marketing campaigns. Many businesses seem to ignore this, and that’s what may have led to the notion that content marketing is a fraud. Albeit it’s hard to know all your objectives from the start, you should have a starting point.

Ask yourself the following questions before kicking your campaign off.

• Why am I investing in content marketing?
• How will my business benefit from this campaign and what should be my targets?
• Are the benefits measurable?
• How long will it take before my business starts reaping the benefits?

Jot the answers down in a document and keep reviewing it as you are bound to come across more benefits and objectives over time. Every two months, check if your activities conform to your objectives and identify what needs to be changed.

Knowledge of your audience

This point is complementary to the first one as you cannot create objectives without a clear understanding of who you’re targeting. Most content marketing campaigns fail because their content is either too narrow or too broad for their target audience.

If your content ignores essential details and focuses on irrelevant issues, you are losing the most interested fraction of your recipients, and that is how you fail with your strategy. To avoid this, create buyer personas and target content that addresses problems that these personas face.

Buyer personas are made-up profiles of the individuals you are targeting. You can base them on actual examples of previous and current customers or people you reckon to answer the description of potential buyers of your product or service.

Use factors such as gender, age, language, income bracket, social values, interests, and general preferences to come up with the imaginary profiles. Accurate buyer personas will help you identify the questions your customers need to be answered about your product and help you create more relevant content.

Storytelling ability

Storytelling is an important part of B2B content marketing. It gets you an emotionally-attached customer base, which has been shown to be the hardest to lose. It is an underused gem that can separate your content from the millions of others that your potential customers are being spammed with.

By engaging storytelling, you are ensuring the content sticks to the readers’ minds and that you achieve a personal-level connection with them.

Aggressiveness

Content promotion is perhaps the most misused terminology in online marketing. A great deal of marketers believe that creating awareness of their content is as simple as posting links on Facebook and Twitter, pulling off a few SEO strategies, and leaving spam contents under blogs.

You should see beyond this if you are serious about content marketing and promotion. There is the “right way” of promoting content in the contemporary world, and that’s by avoiding direct promotions and working to build relationships instead.

Here are a few content promotion tips that you should employ:

• Guest blogging. Identify other blogs that target the same audience as you and write guest posts for them. Include links to your content where necessary.
• Email list content. Nothing gives you access to sure readers like a good email list. These are people you can easily convert into your brand’s biggest word-of-mouth marketers.
• Social media. With social media, it is not just about filling content links in your posts and other people’s comment sections. Direct marketing has been misused way too much it doesn’t carry any weight with it anymore. Contextual link sharing is the only way social media can be meaningful to your content marketing campaign.

Presence of a call to action

A call to action is what makes your content marketing material and design work. Without one, yours is just an informative piece that readers will use as a guide to seeking services elsewhere. If your content is excellent and is comprehensible, rest assured you will attract a few clicks into your website.

Whether it is to direct readers to where they can purchase the product or where they can sign up for the service, a call to action is the only way your content is going to pay.

Remember, not many potential customers are willing to put effort into finding the product you are advertising, so it is up to you to make the call to action as straightforward as possible. If it is a link, ensure it directs the readers into the specific webpage that sells the product.

Conclusion

While numerous content types and formats can be used to reach potential customers, it is essential to focus on quality and resourcefulness. There is much more to content marketing that can be crammed into one post, and miscellany is indeed not one of the reasons your rivals are ahead of you.

Pick the form that you think suits your audience best and focus on the factors mentioned in the article. Create content on a regular basis and watch your brand take a new upward momentum.