Are you in the digital marketing ecosystem? If asked abruptly,” What is your content strategy or your content marketing goals in particular? And how would you measure them when in the B2B world?” Turned upside down, are you? Agitated or frustrated enough seeing such grave queries at the very start.
A sense of anguish runs through your veins! Or you have understood that whichever business you venture into, becomes a failure, to be very specific?
Though in spite of your relentless and valiant efforts till now, what you are accoladed with is nothing? You have been part and parcel of this for quite some time now. Still, it seems just to have started!! The profits earned have been such meagre! Do they render you nothing, just sleepless nights?
On second thoughts, why would you ask such questions to yourself in the later stages of your business campaigns? Don’t you know you can tune in wisely at the start itself? You could inculcate the very digital marketing strategic aspects then and there!
Then why would it be a failure; on the contrary, it might leave an everlasting impact on your pockets. Why would you groan in agony, and topple down, just because you had time to think, but you invested foolishly?
After all, it’s your bread and butter, and no such fool would start without research! So you and the team of your content marketing experts have to understand the importance of research.
See, there are two different scenarios, in two different paragraphs! The former brings you tensions, and the latter seems to calm your nerves to the extent that you could give a second chance!
After all, it’s about the vision, the long term stabilized, and a short term ignited.
Yes, it’s the difference between your perceptions and your outlook towards the requirements you keep while running your business campaigns! It about the exposure to your marketing strategies in broader terms.
Why such comparisons at the start?
We had to make such comparisons, based on ground reality, to make you realize your approach and ability. It’s better to define your checkpoints while treading the journey of your content marketing lifecycle. Your content marketing strategies may bestow profits in abundance if pre-defined, and if you make use of the best possible combination of your resources.
But first of all, what does your Content Marketing Lifecycle go with?
Well, you are in the digital marketing era, and here the content marketing lifecycle defines your buyer persona, and perimeters for the buyer intent, thus making way toward the buyer’s journey. To nurture long term prospects to urge them to take action and drive in your content marketing funnel, you have to strengthen relations and everlasting impacts on your target audience. So you can grab the major market share, and bolster your content marketing campaign with solidarity.
“It’s like the puzzle where your content marketing strategy clamps in with the intent to the ideologies of your target market, and you make the dart complete!”
You are perplexed amidst a plethora of choices, over your not so defined decision making, when it comes to the aspects of your conversion funnel? Now the aspects here refer to the awareness, interest, consideration, intent, evaluation, conversion, and a graded content marketing strategy which lay the foundation of it.
About the prospects that you would be eyeing on, you would certainly fine-tune in with a purposeful decision making, which happens when you understand the benefits of the well-segmented content marketing strategy!
“Eating all in a go, snackable, is it or not? No, it isn’t, so taking huge chunks won’t help, let’s take in a step by step, making it easy to swallow.”
1)Increased brand visibility, nurtures rich connections with the audience, impacting brand affinity!
In the world of B2B content marketing, an in-depth study of the notable insights and the actionable aspects surpasses all the hurdles you could face. When it comes to building your brand awareness, strengthening connections with your audience, establishing trust and credibility over the products and services you deal in, the content format and its distribution, play a humongous role.
Whether the blog posts, the video posts, the webinars, the infographics, the ebook guides, the whitepapers, the case studies and tons of those, the content format you choose should suit the requirement of the audience and should be their best possible solution. From the ideation to the execution, the format to write upon becomes an integral part of your marketing strategy!
Even the distribution of content written over the various social media channels should be done wisely. It would add a treat to savour. When, where, which, are the three necessities of the content delivery management system, nurturing rich connections with your audiences.
When do you post your content, what time of the week it should be? Where would you post it? Is the audience addressing the content? Is it posted on the relevant channel, is there any possibility that they may interact, so much so that they might act?
Which channels are your competitors dealing with while posting theirs? In what way are they reacting with the audiences there? Could you bring something out of it? Are your promotional tones and voices different anyhow?
“And you got a bevvy of such questions floating when it comes to the distribution of your content over the various social media channels!”
To build your brand reputation, the trust and the credibility, to address your target audience so much so that you nurture your prospects relatively well, you have to create and distribute quality content. Quality brings you the results and gives your viewers the answers to their questions.
Communicating this way with your audiences builds lasting relationships ever, empowering brand recognition, for the wellbeing of the returns on your business campaigns!
This inflicts a love and a sense of attribution in the minds of the audiences, that caters to them taking action to draw themselves inside your sales conversion funnel. It makes them propel through for taking the subsequent actions that define their buyer journey.
Yes, not to forget that being a content marketing strategist, you have to ensure to build upon their engagement and be in continuous touch with them throughout their journey. This would be a healthy step forward for positive feedback and impact reviews.
2)Trust and loyalty nurtures prospects, lets you lead by example!
Whether the awareness, consideration or the conversion stage, following the ABC’s of the sales funnel, there are two factors, “the trust for your brand” and “its credibility” that attains the sustainability of your prospects towards your brand. Yes, they are there with a problem, and they are constantly looking for a solution, and whatever they choose should be trustworthy, and credible enough to get their answers straight away. This ensures a subtle reason for building long-lasting and ever impacting relationships of your brand with your audiences around.
It’s the awareness at the very first, followed by the understanding of your answers with their queries, following which is the belief they build in your solutions, and the actions they take are the cause of this long procedural journey. To cater to this ever impacting loyalty and trust-building, your brand voice should be the educational or the informational perspective of your solutions.
Yes, indeed the tone of your solutions should be conversational, educating your users, in a much more personalized manner, thereby indirectly pitching your product or services. This is where you have to bear the brunt of failures and bite the bullet if your content is not upto the mark.
Demonstrate your business insights as an industry expert; audiences believe in expert solutions! Also, to delve into the fact that this is the area in your digital marketing strategy where the thought leadership comes into action. Thorough competitor research, knowing your audience attributes, segmenting them on their behavioural characteristics, understanding your target market, etc. are the factors that make your content highly relevant and make it match with the intent of the audiences.
Optimized content suites the needs of the audiences and they believe that custom content provides effective solutions. Therefore in order to build trust, you have to understand the demographics, the geographics, the psychological, the social and the physical boundaries and limitations, followed by the traits your audience dwell in for a top-notch content creation framework.
3)Quality content boosts traffic and enhances lead generation!
As a part of your content strategy, creating a type of content that speaks with facts and figures, dwells in statistics, is of high quality, matches the intent of the reader and solves the problems, is liked by one and all. Content relevancy, along with comprehensive optimization, leads to your answers being found on the top of search results. Easy to read, and simplicity of the content makes it unique, it should be related to real-life instances, the tones of which should be highly active and personalized.
Highly organized and well-ordered content ranks on the search results! Ranking on the top of search results leads to getting read by most of the visitors with a query, getting the maximum number of clicks. This involvement of the maximum number of impression shares and clicks leads to getting a greater website visitor engagement, thereby propelling inbound lead generation in the near future.
With your articles ranking high on the SERP’s, your articles are read and shared at the maximum, because the first three results get the most number of clicks, shares and reshares. This welcomes the organic traffic in large numbers, and with an increase in the website visitor engagement, you are sure to nurture a maximum number of leads, for maximized profits with expansive sales and revenue at the end.
4)Content changes intentions to decision!
Stumbling within the ABCDEF’ s of the sales conversion funnel, your audience has to be directed towards streamlined decision making. The content creation framework, the content listing formats and its delivery mechanism play a vital role in changing intents to decisions.
Since we are a part of an era where content marketing circumferences the customer relationship lifecycle and the customer relationship management, an effective content marketing planningneeds to mould your customer sequentially, and that should be the last resort.
Whether the awareness, the consideration, or the conversion stage, the content has to manoeuvre the user and urge them to take action for the succeeding stages of the funnel. Now, content that is being pitched for every stage, ranging from the user’s activity on the pdf download to the email sign up to the newsletter subscription, or even when the users simply click the ad and directs to the landing page, the further actions that are called to, through the cta’s have to be decisive and compelling content should be backing it. To facilitate the sales funnel movement, the content being pitched in every stage of the funnel has to suit the reader’s quest at that very particular stage.
To be at the forefront with your marketing strategies, effective promotional strategies on social media channels has to be taken into consideration. The social media outlet is very vast yet extremely decisive. Therefore the content that is shared on any specific platform has to attend the behavioural traits of the reader and their reactions to such posts, on that particular platform.
This would create a sequential workflow down the funnel. Now here factors such as the track and monitor of the previous to analyze the room for improvements, the competitor research, deciding the best combination of the various resources available such as the tools, the applications, the time and money, etc., determine the smoothness of the funnel movement.
The buyer intent centric journey changes the intents to the decision, and with a significant sense of decision making, the promptness in taking actions to deep down the buying journey becomes interestingly easy. Not to forget the content strategy here is an integral part!
This leads to inbound lead generation, at the various stages, which then leads to expansive sales and delightful conversions, for justifiable returns on investments. The aftermath of your content marketing model should be such that the actions taken along with the ongoing events in the different stages of the funnel, should pay-off at the end, with the purchasing decisions in your favour.
5)Your goals are determined and your audiences targeted for a limited budget!
Your content marketing campaign if unstrategic may lead to unnecessary and incessant budget exhaustions, and you might limit your budgets to resources of less importance. Your budget allocated and spent respectively for your content marketing campaigns management and distribution on the various channels depends dramatically on your preparations. If you want to get the maximum with the minimum, plan and strategize.
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And a major portion of it is tirelessly spent on something irrelevant if you aren’t thorough with your comprehensive research mechanisms.
You have been exposed to such an era, where even a single competitor of yours might be a SMART marketer, that is where your competitor analysis would work. Secondly, the benefits of a stratified content marketing are that you have a graded working strategy, that includes SMART at their very first. The end goals of your content marketing campaigns can only be achieved when they follow certain criterion listed below:
1)Specific:
The goals you set as an objective for your content marketing campaigns should be highly specific. They should clearly figure out the motive behind and should be intent centric, with a user first and a user-friendly approach.
- who is involved in working for the goal achievement?
- what do you want to accomplish?
- where and how will that be achieved?
- what constraints and limitations are needed to be followed for your goal accomplishment?
These are certain questions that define how specific your content marketing campaign’s working traits could be, and what would be the basis of the working of your campaign.
2)Measurable:
Your goals should be measurable! You should be able to analyze the progress report through constant track and measure of the steps taken towards your goal accomplishment. This would provide you with an answer, on how your content will be playing a part in it. How much time, how many resources, etc. would be consumed for your goal accomplishments. This becomes the key to refined and goal-focused content marketing campaigns.
3)Attainable:
Your goals should be achievable, the resources, the efforts, the time and the money you are applying should not seep down the drain. In order not to let your efforts go in vain, make sure the goals you define for your campaigns are attainable! The goals should be audience-centric, on the one hand, they shouldn’t be below par, and on the other, they shouldn’t be even par excellence(rather becoming unattainable), this shows that your goals should align according to the needs and requirements of the user.
4)Relevant :
A refined and goal-oriented content marketing campaign is one in which the goals chosen are relevant. The goal should align with the resources available and the should meet ends. The goals set should have the short term profit-earning schemes and should also thrive in the long term consistency scenario. In short, the goals should fit the immediate and long term plans.
5)Time-bound:
The goals set for your content marketing campaigns should be time-bound for positive reviews and impacting feedback. Time boundations and constraints should also be there whether daily, monthly or yearly. Your goals should establish commitment and call for a sense of urgency, in desperate needs.
This ensures the budget that you have allocated to remain intact with the accomplishments of your content marketing goals. This acts as a gateway for a smooth transmission through the conversion funnel, wherein the resources that you have within, always have a fear of getting exhausted. The resource management activeness and the proactive decision making for a stabilized content marketing campaign management, never let you get short of their availability, and you earn yourself a thriving and fruitful campaign.
6)Analysis and monitoring of your content marketing campaign, gathering data that never lies!
To Conclude…
“Now since we are nearly at the end of this blog, let’s leave you with the last bunch of golden words to be remembered, during your campaign creation, its management and the optimization.”
Tracking and monitoring the performance of your campaigns on a regular basis, gives you an idea of where you stand out amongst your competitors. The data you gather based on the performance of your campaigns gives you an upper hand and knowledge for future plannings. Tracking and monitoring are a decisive and a conclusive part of your content strategy when it comes to the rephrasing and the repurposing of it.
Thus for the right content strategy formation and formulation, analysis is a must! As it also determines the best possible combinations of the tools and the applications that would let you smoothly sail in the arena of consumer lifecycle-based marketing. Where your campaigns lag, what could the changes be like, how could the changes be made, what are the best methodologies to do those changes, and many more such determinants, give you a clear idea, for where your campaign would land up.
The post What are The Benefits of a Well-Defined Content Strategy And Its Marketing? appeared first on CedCommerce Blog.
