For many Marketing Managers, understanding how to target prospects is a major challenge. Your prospects are inundated by thousands of marketing messages, you need to find a unique way to communicate.You've always known the value that content has towards online marketing. However, with the number of marketing channels there are online, creating content for each one of them is overwhelming!
Experienced marketers know that providing information that enlightens and educates their prospects gets better results than just sending sales collateral (in B2C, tugging on emotions produces the best results). Strong brand relationships are created by providing good, authoritative, even leadership-type content.
You know that your clients need information that will help them do their jobs better, but how do you reach them? Do you create an online email newsletter which may go directly to the spam filter? Or do you create a print newsletter or a glossy magazine mailer, knowing it may wind up in the garbage with all the junk mail your prospects receive? What’s a marketer to do?
Experienced marketers know that providing information that enlightens and educates their prospects gets better results than just sending sales collateral (in B2C, tugging on emotions produces the best results). Strong brand relationships are created by providing good, authoritative, even leadership-type content.
You know that your clients need information that will help them do their jobs better, but how do you reach them? Do you create an online email newsletter which may go directly to the spam filter? Or do you create a print newsletter or a glossy magazine mailer, knowing it may wind up in the garbage with all the junk mail your prospects receive? What’s a marketer to do?
If you’re a marketer, you’re not interested in spending resources on wasted efforts. You may split your budget between direct sales and channel marketing, but, by using targeted content, your message is easily heard over the general noise of ordinary marketing attempts.
However, just don't jump into creating a white paper/custom magazine right away! You need to outline a few key areas that will help you maximize your chances of success, such as:
- Audience: Who are your prospects?
- Content quality: What do your prospects look for to fill their information needs?
- Competition: What are your competitors doing?
- Measurement: How will you measure the success of your content strategy?
- Cost: What are the costs of producing and delivering the content? What's your ROI on a dollar basis?
- Time: How much time will it take to produce the various content?
Audience: Obviously, you know your audience and its information habits. You really need to know your potential customers down to a T. Where do they hang out online? What are their information requirements? What causes them stress in their jobs? To whom do they go for advice?
By understanding the day-to-day life of your audience, you are in the best position to provide them with information that will grab their attention. The best way to do that is to create reader/audience personas. A character-based description of potential prospects, their needs, their thoughts and challenges.
Example: Peter, a busy IT Manager in a health company, needs to upgrade his servers to handle a new software application that new employees can access remotely. As he’s putting out fires on a daily basis, he doesn’t have the time to spend doing research during the day, and definitely does not have time to talk on the phone with sales people. But because of the priority of this project, he may take time after work to do some vendor research online, and call up a few resellers for RFPs. He will definitely visit some forums to see what his peers are saying and to see if he can get some information there. He’ll read a few industry blogs. And if he can find them, he’ll download some white papers.
Content Quality: You should expect to spend a lot of time on content. Remember, content does not mean direct sales! Content means providing valuable information that helps solve clients’ problems, even if it means giving it away for free. Remember also that content helps build your credibility. Of course, you can say that putting sales materials about your company, the awards you’ve won, the clients you’ve served, is good, but it doesn’t help your clients understand how you can solve their problems.
Credible content is what builds brands, not sales materials. If your content is very helpful and specifically solves your B2B clients’ issues, they will be more receptive to working with you. What would be better: having a client download a white paper from your site and view an online video about your product, or mailing out a package that provides a print whitepaper, a software demo CD, and an interactive DVD on how your product will help solve their problems after they’ve had a conversation with your salesperson?
Competition: What is your competition doing? Remember that your prospects receive hundreds of marketing messages and phone calls on a daily basis. Are you doing the same thing and getting lost among them? Or do you stand out from the pack by targeting your prospects in other ways? Do some research; find out what your competition is doing and if it’s working. If you find that hundreds of your competitors are doing the same thing, don’t bother repeating their mistakes. Take what works and discard what doesn’t.
Measurement: Can you measure your efforts accurately? Any marketing tactic you choose should create measurable results. Is the campaign working, or is it a flop? How easy is it for you to collect the data? Are you spending too much time trying to analyze the data? Are the results self-evident?
Cost: Cost is one of the most important considerations in campaign planning. Will the tactic you choose provide you with the best return on investment for the lowest cost? But then you have to balance cost with….
Time: How long does it take to prepare the campaign and how long will it take to see results? Is this campaign one instance or more of a branding situation where multiple exposures are required before clients respond?
Failing in a content marketing campaign is an expensive proposition!
Take these factors into account before running a campaign, and maximize your chances of success.
