Marketing leaders acknowledge that organizations expect too much from content marketing and the consequent failures are hard to overcome both in terms of brand reputation and financially
CMOs say that a good content marketing strategy should include pan-organization initiatives that utilize both external and internal resources, strategy, goals, etc. Good content drives both outbound and inbound marketing measures. Marketing leaders say that all modes of marketing including eBooks, whitepapers, social media, and blog posts, paid ads, webinars, etc., are meant to drive the business and revenue of the organization.
CMOs point out that the marketing strategy must be well thought out, with measures in place for development, managing, optimization, and tracking the content. Marketing leaders must ensure that their teams are not committing common mistakes that could cost dearly. Some could be designing content being more about the organization rather than the clients, and not aligning with B2B buying schedule. The absence of a champion and management throughout the content lifecycle is another drawback.
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CMOs acknowledge that content marketing is poorly understood in B2B organizations and more insights are required to ensure better implementation of the strategy. For the B2B requirement, this marketing strategy can be used for lead nurturing and generation, support, customer experience, engagement and relationship management, etc. Marketers point out that the most efficient and popular formats of content are email newsletters, social media posts, and short articles/ blog items. Some other formats are videos, case studies, and in-person
Ensure the content is about the audience
Marketing leaders suggest that marketing teams should develop content that is about and relevant to the audience base. Organizations should be clear about the prospective clients that they are creating content for, content should be considered as an asset. It should engage and resonate with the clients.
One effective way to do this by encouraging organizations to create audience profiles based on every single feedback received. The feedback loop should be considered critical for every customer touchpoint in the organization including management, IT, customer experience, sales, and marketing.
Sound marketing strategy
CMOs point out that any type of marketing campaign is ineffective without an efficient and strong strategy backing it. They reiterate that organizations should have documented content strategy to have sophisticated and mature content.
CMOs say that major success indicators consist of a streamlined marketing team that represents the entire firm and uses metrics to calculate the content productivity and KPIs assignment to measure the ROI and initiatives.
Definite alignment with the B2B buying cycle
Marketing leaders suggest that marketing teams should design different content for each stage of the cycle. They believe that the same kind of strategy will not apply to all stages of the cycle. They suggest different types of content strategy be designed for building brand awareness, securing leads, nurturing leads, and converting the obtained leads.
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Organizations should analyze which strategies worked best in the previous years and build based on that, they must be aware that such a strategy will not be common for different organizations despite being in the same industry. Depending on one template is not
advised.
Manage the content throughout its lifecycle
CMOs suggest the utilization of technology to manage content across various stages of the lifecycle. Different types of applications and platforms are available in the current environment which facilitates content amplification, creation, tracking, and management. Marketing leaders prefer tools like email marketing software, CRM and CMS applications, web analytics dashboard and tools, and social media publishing tools.
Content champion is must
Marketing leaders point out that organizations must ensure to assign a champion like a content director or the CMO to be the champion. Doing so will guarantee that content development is consistent in the long run. Organizations with limited resources could outsource some of the responsibilities, but ideally, the champion should be an internal resource.
