According to a recent Content Preferences Survey Report, 51 percent of B2B buyers rely on content to research their buying decisions. They prefer interactive content that educates rather than sells, and case studies or success stories from others who are facing similar challenges.
When done right, content marketing can be a powerful sales and marketing tool. It creates opportunities for your prospects and customers to willingly engage with your brand… while establishing you as a thought leader and a trusted resource.
Following are four tips for designing a successful content marketing strategy for building products brands.
Set a clearly-defined, measurable business goal.
When you think about all of the content that a brand can generate, it can be overwhelming – blog posts, case studies, ebooks, podcasts, webinars and social media stories are just a few of the ways brands commonly deliver content.
To be effective, each piece of content you develop needs to have a pre-defined, measurable business goal. What’s more, that content must be targeted to the appropriate audience and have a clear purpose.
Most important, to be effective with a content market strategy, a brand must understand how its content can best serve its target audience. Is it addressing prospects’ and customers’ pain points? Is it answering their questions? Don’t just deliver content for the sake of getting more content into the channel. Instead, ensure that your content is highly relevant and that it will resonate and engage.
Walk in your buyers’ shoes.
Content needs to capture a prospect’s attention at all stages of the buyer’s journey. While it should be used initially to get new visitors to your website – to learn more about your brand and solutions – content marketing should also help to drive prospects who are uncertain to eventual purchase.
For example, potential customers may like the look and features of your building products offering, but not clearly understand what makes the products different from those of your competitors. By educating the prospect on your solution’s unique differentiators in a compelling and informative way – through an engaging infographic or video, perhaps – you can instill confidence in the buying decision.
It’s also important to develop content that promotes customer retention and engenders long-term brand loyalty. According to Demand Metric, 80 percent of customers surveyed appreciated “learning about a company through custom content.” Providing customers with helpful information – or content about topics they are interested in – makes them feel valued and helps to gain their trust.
Track your performance.
Make sure you’re investing your time and effort exactly where it’s going to make the most impact. There’s no doubt that offering quality content is important. However, it won’t contribute to business – and growth – if your prospects don’t evolve into customers.
By closely monitoring and reporting on analytics for content marketing initiatives, your brand can assess what’s working well, along with what isn’t performing and where improvements can be made.
In addition, paying attention to analytics will help you refine and enhance your content delivery strategy going forward. For example, let’s say you notice that the readers of your weekly e-newsletter are clicking on articles related to sales and marketing alignment. In this case, you might well choose to deliver more content on that topic to those audience members.
Leverage existing content.
If you’ve taken the time and effort to develop quality content, you certainly don’t want that valuable content to go to waste. Many topics are “evergreen.” Rather than reinventing the wheel, why not rework existing articles or blog posts to extend their life.
Refreshing content that has performed well in the past not only creates efficiencies, but it also helps you reinforce your brand’s key messages.
For example, if you created a white paper that performed very well, it might make sense to develop a blog post on a similar topic – to reach an audience that prefers to read shorter content rather than diving into the depths.
Content that delivers
When approached smartly, content marketing is a valuable asset that will provide ongoing returns on your marketing investment.
Read our latest white paper – “Turn Content Into Customers” to explore how leading building products brands have used content to convert prospects into customers and how you can take your content marketing strategy to the next level.
