The evidence continues to build that content marketing is increasingly going mainstream in the B2B marketing world. According to the latest statistics, 89 percent of B2B marketers are using content marketing as part of their broader marketing campaigns. And fully 70 percent of B2B marketers plan to create even more content in 2017 than in 2016.
The downside, though, is that it’s been tough sledding in many cases to find the ROI. Only 22 percent of all B2B marketers say that their organizations have either been “very” or “extremely” effective in using content marketing. So here are four quick tips for giving your B2B content marketing a real rocket boost in 2017:
Tip #1: Put your content marketing strategy down on paper
This may sound obvious, but it also helps to explain why 80 percent of companies are not achieving the results they’d like to see with their B2B content marketing initiatives. They’re creating more content than ever before, but there’s no big picture of how it all fits together. By crafting a written strategy, it’s easier to get alignment and buy-in from everyone on the marketing team about what has to happen next. And as content marketing vendor Uberflip points out, it’s also possible to think in terms of creating and managing “content experiences” at every step of the buyer journey.
Tip #2: Diversify your content marketing strategy
It’s easy to think that content marketing only means blogs and long-form content. However, the way that people use the web is fundamentally changing, and that’s placing even more of an emphasis on visual content. That means you can diversify your content marketing to include video, podcasts, and interactive elements. Creating more video content is perhaps the easiest way to boost the ROI of your content marketing efforts.
Tip #3: Consider the trade-offs between quantity and quality
It’s easy to assume that more content is better — all the more so, given the proliferating number of channels, platforms and distribution networks. But it’s not always the case that quantity is better than quality. This is an especially important consideration with social media, where a B2B brand that creates too much content may be creating the type of content that doesn’t resonate with prospects and potential customers.
Tip #4: Accept the new rules of the social media game
Increasingly, Facebook is a pay-to-play social platform. In other words, only a small fraction of all the content your brand is producing may actually end up in the social news feeds of your customers. That’s because the Facebook algorithm must determine what to show – and what not to show – people. There’s just so much content being created on Facebook these days that it’s physically impossible to show everyone all the content. The only way to get around that is to pay to amplify your content, thereby ensuring that it will reach a desired level of distribution.
With these four tips, you can be more confident that your content marketing initiatives planned for 2017 will deliver the type of ROI you expect. The rules of the content marketing game continue to shift, and the emphasis is now on video content and paid social distribution. There’s reason to believe that these types of lessons will be fully absorbed by B2B marketers, who continue to report improved success rates for their content marketing initiatives on a year-over-year basis.
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Dane
Dane Cobain is a published author, freelance writer, book blogger, poet and (occasional) musician from High Wycombe, UK. Before going freelance, he worked as a social media marker, now specialising in writing about publishing, technology and marketing.