When Content Marketing lost its Edge, You Need Something Better
There are only so many ways to design an email. So many ways to optimize a landing page. So many tactics to exploit and improve conversion.
Books and blogs each day full of teaching, learn us how to create content. It seems everyone discovered the holy grail which is called content. And thy shall promote aggressively: a zillion of tips-n-trick to ‘aggressively promote’ and ‘amplify on social’ are available behind your mother of content search Google.
What’s the square root of epic content?
We are urged to create ever more epic and great content to break through the conversation clutter. Read more 
Killer Content along the Buyer’s Journey: A Practical Guide to Monetize Your Content
The Mafia at Cleveland’s Hotel Statler. Photo: http://markwadestone.wordpress.com
Content can be actively used to move buyers through the buyer’s journey. Organizations need to visualize this journey. Visualizing this journey allows them to better understand which content they have and which content they are missing. Visualizing the content along the buyer’s journey also allows you to actively move buyers to the next stage in their journey.
Not so long ago Eric Wittlake (@wittlake) wrote an article why you should stop mapping content formats to the buyer’s Journey. He explains how marketers tend to map formats to certain stages in the buying cycle.
This post will learn you how you can:
- use a practical method to create the right content along the buyer’s journey
- how you can actively drive buyer’ss through the buying cycle, with content
- how you can link content with marketing automation
- understand which data the method produces to show real marketing ROI
To understand the role of content in this, you first need to understand the difference between content formats and content itself. Read more
Thought leadership : How to become a thought leader in your industry?
Picture from http://paintedhorsemedia.com/services/thought-leadership/
I know, I know this has become somewhat of a buzzword in marketing lately. But isn’t it every marketers “wet dream” to produce that kind of material?
In this post I help you to start building that kind of material.
What is thought leadership and how do you develop it?
The first thing to do is: put away your company head and think like your buyers. Especially in Thought Leadership, the content you create will be a solution to those buyers’ problems. Do NOT mention your company or products at all!
Thought Leadership is content that is seen by our buyers as insightful and providing them with unique information that helps them to better solve their personal professional problems.
An example of an ICT company
As an example, some of the topics that would fit in the context of Thought Leadership for an ICT company:
- What you need to know to fully optimize the potential of your ICT infrastructure?
- What to think of when planning a network upgrade?
As you can see in this example, the ICT company is not in the business of running or implementing networks. But these topics certainly drive the kind of buyers to that Thought Leadership content.
As an effect, these buyers are more likely to consider the ICT company as their technology provider because the company shows that they understand the business issues of building and maintaining an ICT infrastructure.
How on earth will Twitter create useful opportunities for my B2B company?
Many B2B companies struggle with what to do with social media. They start creating a page on Facebook, Google+ or any other social media platform. And usually also a Twitter account.
But I’ve seen many B2B companies using it as an extension of their public relations, in which they just tweet about their press releases, new product launches, their promotions, etc…. Now that’s something you should not doing on Twitter.
Does my B2B company need Twitter?
If you are still asking yourself that question, you urgently need to dig into the topic of social media (you can start already today by reading this blog). Twitter, and social media in general, is being used heavily in B2B by journalists, analysts, but also your customers. They stay up to speed on trends, companies, and news, and educate themselves using social media.
