While content marketing has been around for some time, it has not only changed significantly in recent years, it’s the laser focus of marketers everywhere — especially B2B marketers. The “Great Content Marketing Quest” has become what “Let’s All Run Out And Do Social Media—It’s Free!” was to 2009 and the “Quest for ROI” was to 2012. The problem is that the landscape has changed in the last four or five years and there’s an abundance of content out there clamoring for attention. There’s also an abundance of really bad corporate content out there. You know what I mean – it’s basically a corporate brochure or sales pitch “cleverly” disguised (by marketers who don’t know any better) as a corporate blog post and “distributed” by way of blasting it out on a Twitter or Facebook account with limited to no friends/followers. And now, marketers are trying to figure out why no one is reading all the corporate blog content they rushed to create and trying to figure out what to do next.
Content marketing is effective. When done properly, it works. But in order to execute and deploy a content strategy, you’ve got to also understand how SEO and social factor into the equation. And most of all, you’ve got to understand lead generation and how to effectively use content for lead gen.
Today, lead gen is the new rallying call. The C-Suite and the sales team have quit talking about ROI in general and given marketers but one edict: bring me the leads.
If you’re a marketer focused on any kind of content marketing,I’m likely not telling you anything you don’t already know. But here’s some data to back that up.
According to a study published by the Content Marketing Institute and Marketing Profs, 93 percent of B2B marketers have clearly embraced content marketing, but only 42% consider their efforts effective. Although this is up a whooping 36% from last year, it leaves a ton of room for improvement.
The first step in maximizing your content marketing efforts is to determine your top goals and what you’re trying to achieve. As a starting point, we’ve developed a list of the top five goals of content marketing for B2B marketers – things that should be part of all content marketing initiatives. Want to know more …. Here’s the full post and the top five goals (and how to get there) in my recent LinkedIn blog post.
And by the way, if we’re not yet connected on LinkedIn but you’re reading this blog, let’s fix that. STAT.
Top 5 Goals of Content Marketing for B2B Marketers is a post from: V3 Kansas City Integrated Marketing and Social Media Agency
