BATTLE FOR CUSTOMER ACQUISITION THROUGH EFFECTIVE CONTENT MARKETING STRATEGY “CONTENT IS A KING”4/27/2016 Content marketing is one of the most important elements of your marketing process. It’s about creating, promoting and distributing content consistently, with the goal of encouraging your target audience to take action. Despite its importance, many small business owners are making terrible blunders that are hindering their marketing efforts and stifling their businesses. It is obvious to know that the relationship between buyers and sellers is undergoing a major transformation. Social media and e-commerce have given buyers tremendous new power to research products, prices, reputations, and opinions—often before they even talk to the seller. Therefore, to compete in this buyer-empowered market, business-to-business companies have been forced to rethink how they market and sell their products and services. Yet companies have been slow to adapt to the changing landscape, and they are losing out in the battle for new customers.
Too many organizations still market the old way, randomly bombarding customers and prospects with generic brochure-ware, product pitches, and banner ads. Increasingly this strategy is falling short. Marketing materials are routinely ignored, and companies continue to miss critical customer-growth and return-on-marketing targets. Marketers must move beyond traditional pay-per-click ad models or face tougher executive scrutiny of their digital marketing programs. If you’re a business, the takeaway is that sharing without analytics is essentially useless, that engagement is not as valuable as insight, and that seeing things in context is more important than being popular. -- Brian Solis, Altimeter According to research, 65% of all people are visual learners, 30% aural and 5% kinaesthetic. A study by ROI Research also shows that 44% of online users are more likely to engage with brands that provide visual imagery and dynamic content (like video). One key theme that emerged from this year’s B2B research is that effective content marketers do several things differently:
Here are some key takeaways: ■ Only 30% of B2B marketers say their organizations are effective at content marketing, down from 38% last year. Effectiveness levels are greater among respondents with documentation, clarity around success, good communication, and experience. ■ 44% of B2B marketers say their organization is clear on what content marketing success or effectiveness looks like; 55% are unclear or unsure. ■ 44% of B2B marketers meet daily or weekly—either in person or virtually—to discuss the progress of their content marketing program; however, the more effective the organization is at content marketing, the more often they meet (61% of the most effective meet daily or weekly). ■ Fewer B2B marketers have a documented content marketing strategy compared with last year (32% vs. 35%), even though the research consistently shows that those who document their strategy are more effective in nearly all areas of content marketing. ■ Respondents’ content marketing maturity levels were roughly equally apportioned: approximately one-third were in the early stages; one-third, in the adolescent stage; and one-third, in the sophisticated/mature stage. In general, marketers become more effective as they gain experience, the findings show. ■ B2B marketers allocate 28% of their total marketing budget, on average, to content marketing—the same percentage as last year. The most effective allocate 42%, and the most sophisticated/mature allocate 46%. ■ Lead generation (85%) and sales (84%) will be the most important goals for B2B content marketers over the next 12 months. ■ Over the last six years, B2B marketers have consistently cited website traffic as their most often used metric. This year, however, we also asked them to rate metrics by importance. The most important metrics are sales lead quality (87%), sales (84%), and higher conversion rates (82%). ■ B2B marketers, as in years past, continue to be heavily focused on creating engaging content (72%), citing it as the top priority for their internal content creators over the next year. The number one goal of every marketing program should be to generate leads that drive revenue. Traditionally this job has been more of an art than a science, with marketers relying mainly on experience and intuition to capture the attention of prospects and turn them into sales. Now that content is king, companies are shifting their focus to creating subject matter that will grab the buyer’s attention and serving it up in compelling formats at just the right time. Even though social media platforms have brought a wealthy of possibilities and opportunities for companies, products become more and more similar, thus there is a need for identity, image and uniqueness; but how does a company manage to stand out and differentiate itself in 2016? In the recent years a new trend has emerged; content marketing (CM), which focuses on content related information delivered to the consumers in order to provide them with something valuable. This marketing strategy is not focused on selling like traditional/old marketing, but merely to create brand loyalty and thus hopefully enhance purchases in the long-term. Our society is starting to shift from focusing on material value to gratifying information value; thus there is a need for great content. The consumers of today are increasingly more interested in the brand and the brand values that follows, which appeal to them, fascinates and even repulse them, rather than the actual product itself. Gradually, it is all about what the brand can do for the individual, personally. In 2016 companies need to win the consumers’ minds, but more importantly they need to win their hearts. They need to create trust and credibility and it can be questioned whether companies now need to focus on image marketing before product marketing, which I will elaborate the topic in my next article / blog.
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