B2B Content Marketing Best Practices Report Author Highlights Measurement, Social & Buyer-Mapping Strategies
Econsultancy, a global independent community-based publisher, recently released the B2B Content Marketing Best Practices Report, which highlights the various content formats that marketers are employing to enhance engagement and education, but ultimately to drive revenue.
In a Q&A with Content4Demand, report author James Gurd, Owner of e-Commerce and digital marketing consultancy, Digital Juggler, and guest blogger on Econsultancy, highlighted the “3 Pillars of Content Marketing,” how to effectively leverage social media and map content offers to the buyer’s journey.
Content 4 Demand: Can you speak to the "3 pillars of content marketing?" and how they relate to the overall success of content marketing tactics?
James Gurd: I suggest the three pillars are:
1. Content formats - This relates to the different types of content available in the marketing armory, including written, spoken & visual content.
2. Content distribution - This relates to the marketing channels at your disposal for publishing and distributing your content to secure maximum exposure.
3. Content measurement - This relates to the evaluation toolkit at your disposal to help identify the impact that your content is having upon ecommerce KPIs such as traffic and conversion and to then fine tune performance to improve those KPIs.
All of them combine to help make content marketing successful (with success depending on the desired outcomes of the business). It’s all comes back to fundamental marketing principles; you need to get the right products (content format) to the right people in the right place (content distribution) at the right time.
Content measurement then enables marketers to understand what customers are doing with the content when they receive it and how this content affects web site traffic and visitor behavior. This is critical because you can’t fine tune and improve content marketing activity if you don’t understand what is working and what is not. That’s a simplified explanation but I go into more detail in the report.
C4D: The report highlights a common barrier to content marketing-- the lack of knowledge of how to measure the impact of content and how it contributes to the sales funnel? What are the key considerations for marketers to more effectively understand this?
Gurd: To combat lack of knowledge you have two main options. Firstly, you can look to more experienced marketers to learn from them and this can be done internally within your own business or externally via professional associations, seminars, courses etc. Secondly, you dedicate an amount of time every week to research online and learn more about content marketing.
With regard to measuring the impact of content you first need to understand what you can measure. That means having an appreciation of the basics of web analytics. If you don’t know anything about this, then I suggest buying “Web Analytics: An Hour A Day” by Avinash Kaushik – he’s one of the most widely respected analytics and optimization experts in the world and writes in an easy to grasp way. You can also follow his Occam’s Razor blog for regular insights.
Once you know how analytics tools work and how you can use them, then you need to dedicate time to getting used to the reporting suite and functionality. I’d advise starting with Google Analytics because it’s free and there is a lot of content written about it online by other users, so you’re already starting with a great, free knowledge base to quickly skill-up.
C4D: The report notes the role of social media in communication. How can marketers effectively subscribe to the community mindset to optimize the channel for messaging and brand awareness?
Gurd: Social media is just another communication tool, albeit with a distinct culture and etiquette that means the rules of engagement are slightly different.
To be successful with social media, you have to genuinely believe in becoming part of the community and contributing. You can’t just roll-up with the attitude that you want traffic, sales and content sharing, then push content at people, sit back and wait for results.
Intelligent social media campaigns involve building the community by listening and learning. There is no magic formula, no “do this” and they’ll love you forever. Start by defining what it is you hope to achieve from social media and what you have to offer that is relevant, then start talking to people and encouraging their feedback. Listening is as important as marketing. I would also caution against a focus on driving brand awareness – that can lead to push marketing instead of genuine communication. Brand awareness should be a byproduct with the focus on providing information that adds value to the people listening. Once you have built a trusting relationship with your audience, you then have a better platform from which to test direct selling messages – there are some retailers who have done this successfully. Honesty and transparency are key when looking to sell via social channels.
I think one of the most valuable elements of social media marketing is learning how to spot advocates. These are the people who are regular contributors to the community, who share your content and who are vocally positive about your company and/or brands. You can’t have a direct relationship with every community member, the resource demands are likely to be onerous, so advocates are the people to build proactive relationships with because they can help you influence the wider audience.
C4D: Targeting content to buyer stages has become an increasingly urgent part of the sales and marketing discussion, and as the report notes, is a complicated process. Can you describe how the buying cycle is broken down and how content should support each stage?
Gurd: Although this is too long a question to cover adequately in a blog, in short the B2B buying cycle can be segmented into six phases:
1. Needs identification
2. Requirements specification
3. Solution search & evaluation
4. Selection & due diligence
5. Purchase & implementation
6. Maintenance and support
To understand how content supports each stage, you need to define the needs of customers at each stage. Where are they in their buying process? What information will they need to make sensible commercial decisions? What information would influence them personally and professionally? Only when you have this clearly defined can you look at what content you can provide to address these questions. Each question represents a purchase barrier and content marketing is one of the tools you have to tackle the barriers.
There is no right answer because BtoB has such a wide variety of buying cycles depending on industry, company and product/solution. For example, the buying cycle for complex plant machinery will be far more detailed than that for replacement desktop PCs.
C4D: Can you speak to the different types of content and how organizations should best decide what suits their objectives?
Gurd: First you need to make sure that objectives and goals are clearly defined. Exactly what are you trying to achieve with your content marketing? Who are you trying to influence? What actions do you want them to take?
For example, consider a marketing team trying to increase the volume of new leads for their Sales Team. Their key audience is the Sales Director of target companies but this audience is notoriously hard to pinpoint as they are frequently away from the desk and have busy diaries. A mailshot might only get the attention of a small percentage of the audience.
However, the market data shows that business decision makers now see the mobile as their primary communication channel. So the first thing to consider is how to use the mobile channel to market to this audience. Then you can look at what content formats are most suitable for the mobile channel. Mobile devices are better suited to simple scroll and click functions, so this would suggest that video might be a good attention grabber.
This is a simplified explanation but it illustrates the mental process marketers need to go through in order to decide what content formats are suitable to their marketing campaigns. Whatever happens, this must be backed up with the web analytics because successful marketing is trial and error. Not everything will work as you want it too but if you have the data to back this up, you can quickly learn and adapt to survive.
James led a carefree existence until he discovered a nascent desire to embrace e-commerce in 1999 while working for the IBM Software Team in Portsmouth. He spent four years in business development at BCA learning how to integrate e-commerce with traditional DM. Two years as Head of Client Development followed at a UK e-commerce agency helping a range of leading retailers like The Conran Shop, Radley and New Look to evolve their online presence.
James has worked as a freelance e-commerce consultant since 2009 and has helped media organizations, high street retailers and Internet start-ups to manage their ITT process.