What is Marketing Strategy?

Content marketing has become an essential business requirement in the new normal of business. Having an effective content management plan is vital to achieving your desired business results, but not every business has its own content goals defined. However, finding clarity and defining content goals has been the demon haunting most businesses' marketing. If content has become the axel upon which the wheels of marketing success revolve, how can these marketing demons be conquered?

The Content And Marketing Synergy In Business

As Robert Rose said, "When taking a content-first approach, our job as marketers is not to create more content; it's to create the minimum amount of content with the maximum amount of results."

Marketing is the heartbeat of every business, as it drives sales and leads to generating revenue. Content marketing is at the core of what marketing does for the growth of a business, as it attracts, engages, and leads to the conversion of prospects into customers.

Businesses can build trust and credibility with their target audience through thought leadership, ultimately leading to sales by providing valuable and relevant information. Content marketing should be a strategic part of any marketing plan, as it can help achieve numerous objectives, such as lead generation, increased website traffic, and improved search engine rankings.

What Is Content Strategy?

When executed effectively, content marketing can be a powerful tool for driving business growth. Achieving that requires an effective content strategy. But what is a content strategy?

A content strategy is a plan for using content to achieve business goals. 

Content has the sole objective of attracting your audience, engaging them and retaining them by creating and sharing valuable content. It involves understanding your target audience, detailing the purpose of your content, and determining how to create and distribute it. It's an approach that establishes you as a business expert. It gives your brand more visibility and helps keep your business top-of-mind when it's time to buy.

Good content can help you create and maintain a consistent message across all channels, ensuring that your content is geared toward achieving a defined purpose. 

There are different types of content, each with its own strengths and weaknesses. A good content strategy takes all of this into account and plans how to maximise each type of content to its fullest potential. For example, a blog post can be valuable for building and establishing thought leadership, but it may not be the best if your audience is on video platforms like YouTube and TikTok.

Content Marketing Challenges

Some of the challenges businesses face with their marketing stem mostly from their content. More often than they realize, many companies get caught in the web of going about their content plan and strategy without a plan of attack. Some of the challenges surrounding this include:

1. Creating Interesting And Useful Content

In content marketing, you need to constantly develop new content ideas that will appeal to your audience, keeping them engaged.

2. Getting Your Content Seen

Creating content is one thing; making sure it is seen is another kettle of fish. It doesn't matter if you create the best content in the world. It counts for nothing if nobody sees it. It is important to make sure that your content is distributed through the proper channels to reach your target audience. While this may sound easy, it can be a challenge, as you need first to identify the right channels for your audience.

3. Making Your Content Stand Out 

It can be challenging to make your content stand out from the rest, especially when you think of all the content being created and distributed over the internet and social media. It's important to make sure your content grabs attention and is informative. That way, people can read it and share it with others.

4. Measuring Your Success

It can be an arduous task to measure the success of your content marketing efforts, as there are a handful of factors involved. You must keep track of your progress and analyze your results to determine what is working and what needs to improve.

Conquering Your Marketing Demons

The first step to solving any problem is identifying the challenges that contribute to the problem. With the challenges already identified above, solving them will become a lot easier. Conquering your marketing demons requires a content strategy in your arsenal. To build this out, you can start with the following first steps:

1. Define your goals. What do you want to achieve with your content?

2. Understand your target audience. Who are you trying to reach with your content?

3. Research your competition. What type of content are they using, and how can you do it better?

4. Plan for different types of content. What type of content will help you achieve your goals?

5. Create a content calendar. When will you create and publish your content?

6. Promote your content. How will you get your content in front of your audience?

7. Measure your success. What metric will you use to track whether or not your content is successful?

When you have the right content strategy in place, conquering your marketing demons is possible. Creating interesting and useful content that is seen by the right audience—and making it stand out—will increase your chances of success, getting you ever closer to your marketing goals.

Yearly or even longer-term marketing plans have lost their value amidst the constant waves of change we are experiencing today. As a B2B leader, whether you’re in a marketing, sales, or business development position, you need to build an agile strategic plan and leverage technologies and tools to lead a more productive sales and marketing team—all without the certainty that you will be able to execute this plan. You can count, however, on the fact that you will need to modify any plans and adapt your tactics to respond to increased market complexity and shifting customer behaviors.

B2B marketing is required to position your brand for success. As discussed in my previous article, the role of the marketer has also become that of the “chief change officer,” responsible for normalizing and easing the absorption of change within the organization.

Many business-to-business purchases are made before a consumer even contacts a vendor. A study from IDC revealed that social media is used by 84% of C-level executives and 75% of B2B purchasers to support their purchasing decisions, According to data from SiriusDecisions, 67% of the purchasing process is completed digitally. While these figures may lead B2B business leaders to make the assumption that customers do not want or require early contact with them, they’d be mistaken. Your buyers could be eager to communicate with sellers. According to the RAIN Group’s Top Performance in Sales Prospecting research, 82% of buyers are open to meeting with sellers during the purchasing process if they reach out.

It is natural, then, to ask: How can I be present early in the buying process to nurture the right conversations and opportunities before I even hear from my customers? Here are a few trends to consider:

• Testing and trying will become the new norm. Proof of concept will determine which tactics and activities marketers should invest in.

• Customer stories and authentic experiences will be capitalized on and leveraged over company-edited case studies.

• In the ever-increasing privacy regulation environment, customers will become more careful with their own data, which will make customer data even more valuable. As a B2B marketer, you may want to leverage ungated content, while peer-to-peer social media will make tracing the buyer journey more complex.

• You may want to consider new characteristics for understanding buyer behavior and for segmenting customers; these new characteristics may include resilience in the face of change and promoter potential.

Now, let’s dive deeper into these emerging strategies and trends for B2B marketing.

Marketing Proof Of Concept

Plans for the year 2020 immediately lost their value in the first week of the pandemic. Going forward, marketing strategies had to be agile, and a yearly plan had to be considered more like a checklist of different channels and OKRs than something that was set in stone.

Across marketing and sales teams, incremental projects must be tested, optimized, and then repeated after proof of concept has been established. After first considering proof of concept, marketing investments can be scaled up or down based on return.

B2B Customer Storytelling

B2B businesses must compete in the realm of buyer trust and authority. Storytelling will become a key component for businesses to educate and attract their audiences and communities. Purpose-powered communities will flock around business topics that are relevant to them.

If you want to tap into storytelling as a business leader or marketer, forget about marketing or sales in the way they are thought of today. You will need to enable and create platforms for your customers’ self-expression in order to generate more awareness. Community enablers and leaders will slowly replace thought leadership and influencer marketing. Storytelling and value realization through sharing real and authentic customer experiences will become the main language of awareness building and sales.

Digital Stages For Your Customer’s Voice

Your B2B brand is what customers make of it. The way to become a community enabler is to provide digital stages for your customer’s voice and self-expression. Taking a customer that is an evangelist for your business and empowering their voice across different digital environments will become the new growth hack.

Ungated Inbound Experiences 

I predict that sales channels will be mainly inbound in the B2B space as millennials take over key B2B buyer and management roles. Be aware of privacy regulations and time distractions, as these new B2B decision-makers will be reluctant to provide their personal data to avoid being tracked, marketed to or spammed. They will use and search for ungated content from even proxy data services to avoid being targeted and their behaviors traced.

P2P Social Media Channels

Peer-to-peer social media channels will make it more difficult for marketers in a cookie-less world to access marketing data and determine how the lead or buyer journey was influenced at different stages.

Paid Channels

Paid channels will be employed less during the first stages of lead engagement since, in B2B, they are becoming increasingly expensive and often do not justify the cost considering increasingly lower ROI at the first conversion stages. Paid channels will be employed more on retargeting and remarketing to current clients and prospects to stay top of mind and maintain awareness or thought leadership status with your audience.

Resilient Customer Segments

Segment customers by adding new dimensions, such as customer resilience or high promoter potential in the onboarding stages.

Untapped Opportunities In B2B Marketing

Niche opportunities will arise in the B2B space. Gifts and giveaways, for example, will be replaced by customer-focused and customer-driven experiences centered around well-being and mental health. The rise of polywork and BYOB (be your own boss) will increase micro-entrepreneurship opportunities with the potential to partner with your B2B customers.

A Brighter Future For The B2B Buyer

Stepping into the customer’s shoes is an evergreen marketing best practice. Empathizing with your buyer persona will lead you to discover their true needs and even more opportunities. As new social trends impact B2B, be mindful of the changes to optimize your marketing outcomes.

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Technology companies have a special place in the world of marketing. Users expect high-quality innovation news and easy-to-understand technical articles from them. And 78% of customers visit websites of IT companies for educational content that helps to solve issues in the IT environment. And all this work must somehow lead to sales. Without a well-built content strategy, technology companies risk being left behind the competition. Let’s consider the cases of four corporations that have become leaders in their niche thanks to thoughtful content marketing.

SAP: Content performance measurement is of key importance

For over 50 years, the German corporation SAP, a leader in the development of enterprise application software, has been constantly improving its content marketing strategy.

Jung Suh, Vice President of Digital Marketing, noted that the company is constantly creating and improving content. The manager emphasized that with the right tools, this is not difficult to do. Marketers detect which content is not true, identify gaps, and find new opportunities. They also must measure the content performance to understand whether the resources are spent correctly.

The marketing department focuses on a continuous cycle strategy that includes three elements: demand orientation, content optimization, and measurement of results.

In 2011, Michael Brenner, a marketer, conducted a large-scale optimization of SAP’s marketing strategy according to this principle. Previously, the company posted only product information on its website so as to communicate with the audience. SAP CEO Bill McDermott asked the marketing department to refocus on customers. The manager came up with the idea of ​​publishing inspiring stories about how SAP products helped customers reach business heights.

The company launched Digitalist, its first content marketing site with intensive research and storytelling. By the end of the year, the new strategy had produced an astonishing result. About 1,000 new clients brought in $750,000 in revenue. The digital magazine created by Michael Brenner contained customer stories and kept attracting clients and maintaining sales. 

IBM: Marketers need to create content so that people feel like we know who they are

The American technology company IBM is rightfully considered the leader in content marketing for IT companies. The company maintains about 45 independent blogs for different audiences (target industries, businesses, developers) and publishes texts on various platforms. IBM has over 1.1 million Facebook followers, about 670,000 Twitter followers, and nearly 300,000 followers on its main YouTube channel. The company generates information, scientific, and advertising content:

IBM Blogs publishes stories, news, and articles about breakthrough technologies that improve business and change the world.

On IBM Watson, writers share stories about how businesses are using AI technology in financial services, healthcare, advertising, IT operations, and more.

In Case Studies, the company publishes stories of customers who gained success with IBM software solutions.

YouTube accounts – IBM Technology, IBM Research, IBM Data, AI, and others – include ads and informational videos about research, innovation, and projects of the company.

Social media like Facebook are used by corporations to publish information about big data, smart storage, mobile analytics, and other technical topics. IBM puts a lot of emphasis on infographics, videos, and photos.

Influencers

A core part of an IT company’s content marketing program is a group of influencers. It includes business partners, IT analysts, independent bloggers, and writers with a unique view of a particular field. Indeed, influencers create content for the target audience and share information and their opinions about cloud computing, data security, or other technologies that correspond to the IBM portfolio of products and services. The company even launched the Watson Advertising Social Targeting with Influential program to find influencers who support the brand’s values.

At the OPA Content All-Stars conference, Ann Gould Rubin, Global Brand Marketing Executive at IBM, explained how the corporation builds its content marketing strategy: “We know IBM is a very complex and technical company. Yet, although what we sell is complicated, we try to talk about it in a very simple way.”

Cisco: Content marketing philosophy is about helping, not selling

In 2008, the international network company Cisco made a discovery, stepping aside from the traditional content marketing. It released a new product (a router) and covered this news on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. The event was the best of the five grand launches of the company: thanks to this project, Cisco managed to cut costs by six times. Since that time, marketers have been actively using social networks to promote and launch products. Cisco’s Facebook audience has more than 1.7 million subscribers, over 730 thousand followers read the company’s tweets, and 299,000 people are interested in its YouTube channel.

But the most momentous decision was the refocusing of its marketing strategy on content when Cisco hired 200 content marketers in 2015. So, the company has invested a lot of money in the development of its website and refocused on the clients’ interests.

Neil Patel, former Technical Product Marketing Manager at Cisco, noted that content marketing alone won’t deliver organic traffic. When used strategically, it will provide the organic traffic one needs. Employees abandoned the principle of “first create content, then ask questions.” They began to combine creative content with marketing technologies so that users could receive personalized, valuable information.

Engagement

Another example of the uniqueness of Cisco content marketing is the Super Smart cybersecurity superhero comic. Even though the company does not work with the most exciting industries and creates software solutions for the Internet, it has found a way to talk about its product temptingly. In an eight-page story, a superhero travels the world to stop Doctor Analog from ruining the nation’s digital programming. So, marketers replaced a boring blog article with something unique and interesting.

Certainly, this approach brings good results. The company’s revenue continues to grow: according to Statista, it reached $49.8 billion in 2021. Moreover, marketing costs are decreasing: in 2011, the company allocated $9.8 billion on it; in 2021, the spending amounted to $9.25 billion.

Andersen: The most important thing is exciting content that you won’t tear yourself away from

Although the European software development company Andersen has not yet become a technology giant, it is adopting the positive experience of industry leaders.

The team is actively developing the company’s blog, which explains the meaning of technologies relevant to business, publishes analytics, and the company’s expertise. Engineers share their experience and views on the development of software for logistics, healthcare, banking, and other industries. The company’s website has a catchy design because Andersen designers create unique images for the blog and vacancies.

IT experts maintain scientific blogs for Finextra and Forbes, which increases the credibility of the company in the eyes of customers. Andersen is actively developing Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn, where it publishes news, event announcements, and the company’s achievements. In 2017, the IT provider launched the Andersen People YouTube channel. It publishes interviews with scientists, science popularizers, and tech experts. The channel attracts people interested in science and technology. It covers topics such as Mars colonization, human evolution, DNA secrets, the darknet, and other global issues.

Conclusion

As you can see from the experience of technology leaders, content is the best sales tool. Julie Fleischer, a global marketing leader, notes that content marketing delivers a fourfold return on investment compared to traditional marketing spending. But not everyone manages to achieve such profitability. For content to work, it is necessary to generate ideas, experiment, and calculate the results of global changes.