Content is at the heart of B2B marketing, but your audience is getting harder to reach. Attention has become a scarce commodity because all day people are inundated with marketing messages from a combination of methods – email, Facebook, Twitter, radio, TV, etc. Since 47% of buyers view 3-5 pieces of content before engaging with a sales rep, we know the buyer’s journey is largely completed digitally.
So how do you stand out from the rest and capture the attention of your audience?
Check out these four tips:
- Relevant Content – the content you offer should be relevant and of importance to your audience. Your audience is looking for information that helps them solve their business problems. Awareness content items – such as blogs, tips and tricks, challenges in the market, case studies, guides, FAQs, etc. – typically perform well. And, to really know if your marketing is working, you need to understand how your prospects are engaging with your content. Clicks and form submissions don’t tell the full story. Behavioral activity – content binging – is a great indicator for which content items resonate with your audience and will help you maximize your engagement strategy.
- Accessible, OnDemand Content – can your audience effortlessly access the content they need when they want it? Providing content in a digital content hub where your audience can self-educate themselves allows them to choose the time and place in which they engage – leaving them to spend more time binging on your content. This in turn provides you with powerful engagement (binge) insights that help guide your marketing strategy, especially if you are considering paid channels.
- Soft gates and increasing the conversion – Are you struggling to increase conversion rates? Using “soft gates” allows prospects to preview an asset for several seconds before being asked to complete a form fill. This has been shown to increase conversion rates by 70%. Additionally, content engagement data allows marketers to gain visibility into whether or not leads were actually reading the soft-gated asset and could use this information to allocate future content syndication spend.
- Say Goodbye to Passive Content – There has been a 300% increase in content creation over the past several years. With so much content, how does your audience know which pieces are most valuable for them at each stage of the buying process? Never leave your audience’s next step to chance. Providing a content-driven journey – content in the order you wish it to be viewed – will help progress your audience faster and more accurately. Optimize your engagement strategy by developing a binge-worthy experience for your customers.
Sources
PathFactory, “Get More Juice from Your (Marketing) Squeeze: 3 Tactics for Optimizing Your Campaigns to Produce More Demand,” March 12, 2020
Oracle, “Writing and Winning in the Attention Economy,” February 3,2019, https://blogs.oracle.com/marketingcloud/writing-and-winning-in-the-attention-economy
HubSpot, “The Ultimate List of Marketing Statistics for 2018,” January 2019, https://www.hubspot.com/marketing-statistics