The B2B segment has always been doing content marketing. Case studies, white papers, emailers—yes, they have been content marketers even before the term became fashionable.
One of the reasons why we get drawn to B2B customers is because they get content marketing.
Let’s explore how content marketing works for our customers.Stabilize, analyze, innovate: We create the e-newsletter for a multinational data center infrastructure management solutions company. Our objective is to increase click throughs, in an effort to build the company’s branding in the new domain.
The content of the newsletter is mostly neutral. We curate text and video content from the best of data center information sources on the Web. We include interviews of CIOs/CTOs which captures their insights about the industry. It’s been nine months since we started the project. It is now a stable product, well liked by the client’s management and marketing team.
Email analytics show that the best performing sections are the CXO interviews, and the video content we curate. So the client suggested to us that we should try a video interview of CXOs this time. And we did just that. It has come out well, and we are now awaiting the clickthrough rates.
And that’s how it works in B2B. You start new things, get consistent with it, and then try to bring in innovations. As always, keep a sharp eye on the metrics.
Build and grow a community, by being consistent: The brief from the client was clear. Get a webinar series going on topics related to online businesses, and grow a community of attendees in India. We started in January 2014. We identified speakers from across India and hosted a webinar every fortnight. We continue to do that. We promote the webinars on social channels, and upload the videos of concluded webinars. We have now segmented the database so that we send only the relevant webinars to each subscriber.
The target given to us was to double the subscriber base by December 2014, and get it to a place where we could invite international speakers. By August 2014, we had tripled the subscriber base, and we have 5 months still left to go! And it’s all organic; hence a relevant audience. We have already had international speakers, and we started a US facing webinar last month.
Repurpose content: Create once, repurpose many times, so goes the content marketing adage. But how? Here’s what we did recently. We got one of the directors at a client company to lead a webinar, which is available as a video. Then we created a blog out of it with lots of graphics. The graphics are being used on social media channels to promote the content. And it’s the lead story in the company’s monthly newsletter that goes out to their customers. It’s the same content, but it’s been repurposed and re-created in many ways.
While the push with this effort was for branding, the client has received enquiries too.
Here are some other great ways to repurpose content: http://blog.hubspot.com/insiders/repurpose-content
B2B content marketing is not easy, but it doesn’t have to be tough either. Curate a lot. Get access to the right people who can talk about things relevant to the target audience. Create and repurpose content. And of course, measure.
What’s your experience with B2B marketing content? Do share what has worked for you.
