Sales behaviors are changing, and leads spend more time online educating themselves before reaching out to your sales team. A solid content marketing strategy ensures your prospective customers have high quality resources to learn about your company and your offerings on their own.
The purpose of content marketing is therefore to develop educational, entertaining or informative content that does not explicitly promote your brand. Instead, it aims to spark interest in your products or services by establishing your company as an expert and authoritative resource that can be leveraged to generate leads. Most content written by a B2B copywriter falls into two buckets, ungated or gated.
Ungated Content
Ungated Content is content that exists across your marketing channels and is
readily available for your to audience to access.
Blog Posts
Raise brand awareness, improve SEO and establish industry expertise.
- Create attention-grabbing headlines with focus keyword/phrase.
- Write blogs for your readers AND search engines providing rich and valuable information without fluff or jargon.
- Share your blogs on social media or newsletter after publishing to amplify the reach of your blogs.
Videos
Highlight your company’s products, services or mission.
- Keep the length of your marketing videos short - no longer than two minutes for best engagement.
- Promote your videos across all marketing channels (social, emails and website).
- Use longer videos such as webinars and product demos as part of your lead generation efforts.
Infographics and Visual Graphics
Present data points and statistics with visual narrative.
- Focus your infographic on one key message that you want to convey.
- Include your brand’s logo at the bottom of your infographic.
- Add a conclusion, takeaway or call to action.
Case Studies
Demonstrate value added for customers, target leads at the “topof-funnel” stage.
- Use data points to demonstrate the results and ROI of your solution.
- Promote case studies in targeted emails and online advertising campaigns.
- Consider segmenting your case studies on your site by the various verticals or buyer personas your business serves.
Gated Content
This type of content is typically more expensive to produce and can only be accessed when a user submits information via an online form.
Industry Research and Benchmark Reports
Position your company as an industry thought leader and build credibility.
- Promote your reports across all of your marketing channels and utilize paid campaigns to amplify the reach of your content.
- Consider partnering with another organization in your industry to produce an industry report.
White Papers, Guides and eBooks
Generate “top-of-funnel” demands with topics relevant to your audience.
- Re-purpose other types of content such as blog posts or videos to help create new eBooks and white papers.
- Use buyer personas to determine the content direction of your eBook, guide or white paper.
- Focus on strategy-level content for executives and tactical-level content for managers.
Product Demos and Webinars
Educate audience about products and services.
- Create a short, two-minute product overview video that provides the key benefits and addresses your customers’ pain points.
- Offer live demos that are personalized to your target audience.
- Leverage webinars for thought leadership and lead generation campaigns.