The B2B buying process is, in reality, not as linear as what might be suggested by the concept of a buyer simply “moving down the funnel.” From the lens of the funnel, the buyers start at the brand awareness stage (at the top of the funnel), then become mid-funnel leads, and eventually make a sale or purchase. While it’s not perfect, it remains a framework to help inform our editorial decisions.

The middle portion of the funnel is equally as important as its outer compadres in defining a brand’s longevity and the success of a content marketing strategy. Marketers who devalue this stage or fail to invest in its maturation may be missing out on opportunities to further enhance relationships with potential customers.

According to a 2024 study conducted by the Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs and sponsored by Brightspot, 63% of the content marketers surveyed said content helped them nurture subscribers, audiences, and leads — which takes place at the middle of the funnel — in the past year. At the same time, nearly half (48%) of the content marketers surveyed said they find it challenging to align content with the buyer’s journey.

These data points should alert us to the importance of the stage between content creation and conversion. While leads pour in with successful top-funnel campaigns, it takes effective mid-funnel content to move them toward a sale.

What is mid-funnel content?

Mid-funnel content bridges this gap between initial intrigue and the final purchase. It is the layer of the conversion funnel that holds everything together.

Generally, mid-funnel content is most important to B2B companies. That’s because B2B sales cycles are generally more complex, which means you need to spend more time building and nurturing relationships with prospects. The middle of the funnel for B2C companies, by contrast, is focused more on customer-relationship management.

How do you know if you’re producing the right mid-funnel content? Let’s first distinguish where mid-funnel prospects come from and what our goals are when they get there.

From the lens of the traditional funnel, mid-funnel folks are viewed as either leads that have trickled down from your compelling top-funnel content or remain in your system as potential repeat buyers — though we now know that realistically, buyers may enter the funnel at any stage, and they may move back and forth between stages.

Regardless of how somebody arrived at the middle of your funnel, the goal of content at this stage is to provide material that will help buyers evaluate your brand and develop an affinity for it over your competitors. The magic happens by deepening the connection made in the top of the funnel with content that is specific to different segments of your overall audience.

Goals of mid-funnel marketing

While the content approach will be different depending on where in the spectrum they fall, the principle remains the same. Mid-funnel content must:

1. Nurture leads, drawing them to an eventual purchase. (Hello, ROI!)
2. Educate current and potential customers on the factors that differentiate your brand.
3. Continually inspire an emotional connection with unique audience segments to establish brand loyalty and create brand advocates.

Mid-funnel content is persuasive, educational, and targeted. Aimed at people already in your CRM system, mid-funnel content delivers the right content to the right people at the right time, usually with the help of marketing automation technology. (More on that in a minute.) While top-of-funnel content should be optimized for broad reach among your target audience, mid-funnel content should be intentionally crafted to speak to the needs of those closer to buying your product.

Email segmentation to nurture mid-funnel leads

The easiest and most effective way to nurture your mid-funnel email strategy is through segmentation. Age, gender, and geography are all valuable segments, but behavior-driven groups carry the most potential to connect in a relevant and valuable way with individual users. Newsletter subscribers will follow a different path than those who entered your system through a YouTube how-to campaign and will thus expect different material. Similarly, podcast subscribers will respond differently to product and service offers than the avid long-form reader.

What is at the heart of these unique segmentation patterns? Determining who you are talking to, where they came from, and what they are seeking, and being able to deliver targeted material at the optimal time for the purpose of engagement. (Remember, there are people on the other end of those Gmail and Outlook accounts.)

Types of content to nurture mid-funnel leads

Middle-of-funnel content may take any (or more) of the following forms. It’s all about having the right context mix to meet buyers’ needs.

Detailed e-books

E-books can be a great way to nurture mid-funnel leads. They can also serve to deepen the relationship between you and your audience by providing rich information on a particular topic.

HubSpot is a pro at this strategy. Its persuasive, data-heavy (and free) e-books are embedded in blog posts and easily accessible via the company’s website. As a mid-funnel tool, the focus is not on acquiring leads but on assisting the buyer in his or her evaluation process.

Case studies

Case studies or customer stories are an easy way to show, not tell, prospects exactly what you do through the eyes of the buyer by leveraging direct quotations and data points. The impact? The company demonstrates the power of its products through a user’s lens. They can be so effective that the Content Marketing Institute/MarketingProfs study revealed that 78% of content marketers have used them in the past 12 months — an increase from 67% the previous year.

Case studies are incredibly useful for content marketers as they can be repurposed into many formats, like blog posts, social media material, newsletter highlights, testimonials, and more. The website of Coursera for Business — the B2B arm of the online learning company — features a robust library of success stories in both video and downloadable formats, and visitors can search for content assets based on topic and other parameters.

Webinars

A webinar can be an interactive and engaging way to say to your prospects, “Here’s what you should know about your industry and here’s why we are best suited to address it.” The best webinars are those that provide unique and timely subject matter and an interesting narrative that’s relevant to the issues facing your audience. By choosing the right presenters and guests, showing compelling (but not overwhelming) visual elements, and making time for audience questions, your webinar can be a great way to nurture mid-funnel leads.

White papers and research

A white paper typically looks like a longform fact sheet or an e-book on statistical steroids. Call me crazy, but Docusign has nailed this white paper on measuring the value of an e-signature, providing data, colorful graphics and images, and actionable how-to’s for its entrepreneurial audience, all while promoting its product and brand.

Integrated email campaigns

Email campaigns can (and should) be more strategic than a weekly newsletter blast — they’re the bread and butter of the mid-funnel process. Groove is exemplary with its mid-funnel email campaigns, as are Dropbox and Marketing Sherpa. In each case, notice onboarding emails that inspire a double opt-in, follow-ups with new perks when engagement is low, personal 1:1 recommendations based on email or site interaction, and — here’s the kicker — humanized, engaging language.

ROI calculators

Rather intuitively, ROI calculators allow prospects to plug in website and company information to determine the necessary investment to reach set goals.

The power of automation

Keep in mind that the list above is neither exhaustive nor precise. Exactly what your content looks like will depend on how different segments fit into your overall sales goals. The short answer to mid-funnel content creation is that there is no universal content template. Mid-funnel strategy is successful by the nature of its specificity, creativity and case-specific data.

How do content marketers organize and monetize this specificity? Enter automation.

Too often, once marketers acquire leads after investing in top-of-funnel content, they hit their general audience with unspecific or final-sell material. Without paying attention to audience behavior and tailoring a relevant message, the relationship between prospect and seller is cheapened.

Mid-funnel prospects are humans, and, naturally, they want a degree of familiarity once the relationship has been initiated. That means you have to engage in a thoughtful and direct manner that is specific to them.

That’s where automation comes in.

Superior marketers adapt their mid-funnel strategy to provide authentic content to distinct groups and individuals. Automation — particularly of email — simplifies this segmentation, personalizing information during this critical stage in relationship-building.

At the heart of these segmentation patterns is a greater understanding of the motivation behind the behavior (i.e., desires) of your customers. Conceptualizing these actions — and the people behind them — will allow you to map and deliver content to tilt purchase decisions in your favor and create brand loyalists.

Automation tools for mid-funnel marketing

When you first hear the term “automation,” you may immediately think it’s cold and robotic. The opposite is the case. Tools like drip campaigns, lists, tags, and rules in email software, and smart lists and snippets, make it easy to organize segments of your audience to speak to them in a targeted and engaging way. Tools may even allow marketers to sort by company attribute (title, department, location), behavior, or timeframe.

Meaningful data supports automation’s role in fueling the mid-funnel portion of your content strategy. Automated emails have an 83.4% higher open rate and a 341.1% higher click rate, according to an Omnisend study.

For further examples of what to do and not to do in the automated mid-funnel, just look in your inbox. You’ll quickly be able to differentiate the companies that have effectively automated you into their systems — and responded to your behavior — from those that have you on blast.

Lead scoring

If automated mid-funnel content bridges the gap between intrigue and sale, how do we measure the impact of this content’s success?

Like creation and distribution strategy, the metrics used for mid-funnel measurement depend on your goals. If the goal of a mid-funnel campaign is to offer an upgraded service or a certification, the newsletter subscriber who always opens your email but never clicks on a link will hold a different value than the subscriber who went to your blog from the email, read the entire article, and downloaded an e-book on the same topic that corresponds to your improved service.

While the leads may have originated from the same newsletter list, it makes sense to assign different values to these people based on their actions. This numerical assignment represents different proximities to a potential sale.

Oracle, Act-On, and Salesforce each have CRM mechanisms to help assign value to prospects based on their one-to-one and/or segmented engagement. Organized as a numerical system, the lead-scoring process lets you assign points to prospects depending on a number of variables (age, gender, demographic, behavior), resulting in an evolving number for each audience member.

The result is twofold. In addition to determining the proximity of a prospect to a final sale at a given point in time (when and how are they likely to make a purchase?), lead scoring allows you to track touch points to help you start to determine the ROI on specific pieces of content. The more you understand your segmented lists, personalized emails, and the behavior of these groups, the easier it is to pinpoint valuable metrics and determine attribution.

Checklist

While there are no golden rules in mid-funnel marketing, here’s a recap of what you need to know. (Use it as a checklist, print out for your fridge, and ponder it over a sandwich.)

Align mid-funnel goals with overall sales targets. Marketing and sales should always be simpatico: Marketing spoon-feeds ripe leads to sales, while sales returns the favor with valuable insight.

Take advantage of automation tools and email campaigns. Remember the power of segmentation, personalization, and behavior-driven lists. As long as segmentation is thoughtful and intentional, a diverse array of leads will remain valuable for long periods of time.

Track audience behavior. Take the time to understand how people in your mid-funnel engage with you and reach out to them in real-time. This involves marketing and sales collaboration. Use sophisticated, actionable metrics that make sense for your overall goals. You need to understand how well your audience knows what differentiates your brand and what drives them down the conversion funnel. And don’t underestimate content engagement metrics.

Be forward thinking. Integrate mid-funnel content with social. Both mid-funnel and social strategy tie into brand authority, trustworthiness, and recognition.

Now, go forth. Nurture those audience relationships. And remember that the middle of the funnel is the glue that holds the funnel together.

Ask the Content Strategist: FAQs about mid-funnel leads

How can I determine the right topics for my mid-funnel content?

To find topics that will drive ROI, you can start by analyzing your audience’s pain points, frequently asked questions, and the content they have engaged with most. You can also revisit the content topic pillars or themes that drive your content strategy.

What metrics should I focus on to evaluate the success of my mid-funnel content?

Buyer engagement can be measured by metrics such as email open and click-through rates; social media likes, shares and comments; and audience interaction levels with specific content types, like web or blog hyperlink clicks, repeat visitors, or time on page. Additionally, lead scoring and tracking how leads progress typically through the funnel will provide insights into content effectiveness.

How often should I send mid-funnel content to my leads?

Your mid-funnel content cadence should aim to strike a balance between maintaining engagement and avoiding overwhelming your audience. Generally, a bi-weekly or monthly cadence works well, but it’s important to monitor engagement rates and adjust your content calendar accordingly.

The post How to Nurture Mid-Funnel Leads with the Right B2B Content Mix appeared first on Contently.

Very quickly, high-quality, engaging content became an absolute necessity for most businesses. This awoke a sleeping giant: content marketing.

The Content Marketing Institute’s 2022 Annual B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends Report gives an interesting insight into the new post-pandemic landscape. Here are the major takeaways.

Don’t bother trying to return to ‘normality’

When businesses were suddenly forced to work a lot harder to reach their customers, many decided to fundamentally change the way they communicate. “The pandemic made us create a strategy,” said one respondent quoted in the report. “Getting attention got way harder, and we had to adapt.”

This meant changing the tone, as well as the context, of their content to fit with the evolving needs and values of customers, focusing more on helpfulness and kindness.

While some businesses have started abandoning this approach, that might be a mistake. Of the businesses that consider their content marketing to be successful, 87 percent are prioritizing the needs of their customers by being helpful over promotional.

Key takeaways

• The tone of your content is more important than ever
• Prioritize your audience’s needs over your sales message
• Focus on helpfulness and kindness

Embrace the technological shift

All industries had to change the way they used technology — and content marketing was no different. Marketers had to get used to new content creation, collaboration, and workflow tools, like a content marketing platform. While this may have required some adaptation, it allowed for increased inter-departmental collaboration and enabled businesses to create more effective content as a whole.

The report showed 83 percent of businesses that considered their marketing efforts to be successful use collaboration and workflow tools to improve how they work with distributed teams. In contrast, only 50 percent of those who considered their content marketing to be “unsuccessful” used the same tools. Collaboration has always been key, but now there is no excuse to ignore the technology capable of maximizing the way teams work together.

B2B businesses aren’t just using technology to collaborate, though. Around 58 percent of respondents said online events produced the best results over the last 12 months — with research reports and articles less than 3,000 words coming in a close second.

Key takeaways

• Look for new ways to reach your audience
• Don’t ignore more traditional formats
• Use tools and technology to improve efficiency and collaboration

LinkedIn reins supreme for B2B marketers

While social media is evolving quickly, it remains one of the most important ways to engage your audience and distribute content.

As always, social media played a large part in distributing content. While B2B marketers use a range of different platforms, however, they don’t always produce the same results. 77 percent of respondents said LinkedIn performed best in the last 12 months with Facebook lagging behind in second place at 37 percent.

This shows that more effort put into social media doesn’t always mean better results. Take time to identify your highest-performing channels then consider whether you’d be better off putting more effort and budget into them, rather than spreading your resources across multiple platforms.

Key takeaways

• Focus your attention on the platforms that get the best results—with some extra attention paid to LinkedIn
• Consider the different ways in which you can distribute interactive content types (such as webinars and virtual events)
• Look for ways to establish your brand and management as thought leaders (such as through presentations and talks at events)

Content marketing budgets are on the rise, buoyed by virtual events

Many businesses had to pivot quickly during the pandemic to reach their audience. In general, an increase in virtual events, customer-first content marketing, and a gentler tone-of-voice paid off. As one respondent said: “Work-from-home forced us to do more webinars instead of live events, which ended up increasing our actual audience 10x. And not a junk audience either, but a relevant audience that we weren’t reaching before.”

The change in attitude towards content marketing has been reflected in budgets, with 66 percent of respondents expecting their future marketing budget to increase from 2021 figures. Investment in in-person events are expected to return, but many marketers are planning to invest in hybrid events as well.

Key takeaways

• Virtual events aren’t going anywhere
• Examine how you can film and record in-person events to create a companion virtual experience
• Content marketing will remain a vital part of the marketing mix

The end of the pandemic is now in sight, and content marketing emerges on the other side as an industry changed for the better.

“We see the merging of content marketing and other marketing activity,” Robert Rose, CMI’s Chief Strategy Advisor, said. “It’s becoming a more blurred function in the business—and there will be more content-marketing-focused teams now assisting the
wider marketing department, and vice versa. So, we’re seeing more of
the integration of people, processes, and technology that are helping
businesses to approach their content in a more holistic way.”

The post 4 Key Takeaways From CMI’s 2022 B2B Content Marketing Research appeared first on Contently.

Today’s audiences come across so much mediocre content that looks and sounds the same. Lately, innovative marketing teams have been thinking beyond the standard blog post. They’re investing in new formats and new ideas that can push their businesses forward.

In our brand new report, we set out to highlight tactics that could help your brand thrive. We analyzed the entire B2B content marketing landscape, talked to experts, and broke down case studies from companies like Google, Microsoft, HubSpot, and more.

Here are the five biggest trends you need to know.

[If you prefer to view a PDF version of the report that’s easier to print, we’ve got you covered here.]

1. Interactive Tools Give Brands a Creative Edge—and Empower Buyers

On Google, there are 260 million search results for “b2b technology.” There are only 214 million for “b2b software.” Based on the numbers, you’d expect b2b technology to be the more popular term. But according to Google Trends, that’s not the case. For most of 2020, b2b software has had about twice as much interest.

Data like that is powerful evidence for B2B marketers who can optimize their sites to take advantage of a keyword inefficiency. Best of all, anyone can access that information, and more just like it. Want to test your site speed? Assess your marketing maturity? Identify untapped markets? You can investigate all of these questions yourself using the Digital Marketing Toolbox on Think With Google.

A few years ago, the search giant launched Think With Google, a content hub for marketers and business owners. “It’s intended to be a resource for everything from high-level insights to deck-ready stats to useful tools,” said Alli Mooney, the site’s former editor-in-chief, who now runs brand content at Waze.

Those types of tools are just as useful for Google’s marketing team as they are for its audience. Interactive tools are one of the most cost-efficient content investments you can make because of their evergreen appeal. And once the content is live, it won’t require much upkeep.

A few good examples of this include CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer and Canva’s Color Palette Generator. Both tools occupy top spots on search rankings, driving more long-term value than your average blog post. According to a study by Demand Gen Report, interactive content was more effective at educating buyers than static content by 23 percentage points.

It’s the difference between telling someone what to do and empowering them to find the answer on their own. Why give a man a fish when you can teach him to how to benefit from your B2B software, right?

“When you let your customers interact with your content, they make choices that are relevant to them, and you learn more about them each time they click,” said Jennifer Burak, who was VP of marketing for Rapt Media, an enterprise video platform, before becoming director of marketing at Techstars. “This helps you create better content and continue to optimize your existing content.”

Interactive content encompasses a variety of formats like videos, calculators, quizzes, and even games. Creating this kind of B2B content can sound complicated if you’ve never done it before, but there are simple ways to get off the ground: calculators and quizzes.

Calculators have become the go-to resource for a lot of companies because they let people consider costs without a hard sell. Salesforce, for example, has a free ROI calculator that promises to show “how revenue, gross margin, and cost control could improve.” To make it as easy as possible, Salesforce asks users to filter by industry, which automatically enters some data based on recent benchmarks.

You can see why a tool like this is beneficial. It makes the case for why you’ll benefit from buying Salesforce, without you ever having to talk to a salesperson.

BuzzFeed’s calling card—quizzes—also works for B2B companies. Only instead of asking people to choose from 13 pictures of Taylor Swift and telling them what kind of dog they are, B2B marketers can develop diagnostic quizzes that point users toward solutions for their biggest work challenges. At Contently, we added a Content Strategy Assessment at the bottom of our content strategy services page on our website to help potential customers evaluate which of our solutions fits their needs.

When done right, interactive tools don’t just drive leads. They qualify them too, providing key information that’ll help you personalize your follow-up and push prospects down the funnel more efficiently.

For marketers wondering how to build awareness and even drive leads, this is one easy way to get people interested in your company. Tools like Typeform, Calconic, and Qzzr offer free trials and have plans for about $30 per month.

We expect brands to test the waters with more tools in the near future. And if that goes well, then they can graduate to our next trend.

How to take advantage of this trend:

• Do some research in your field to see what tools already exist and where you can stand out.
• Start simple with a calculator or outcome quiz that your audience can use to discover something about themselves.
• Add value by guiding the user toward a solution like a relevant resource, case study, or product page.

2. Educational Courses Are Lead Gen Machines

Way back in 2011, some employees at HubSpot had an idea. They wanted to create an educational program on inbound marketing for HubSpot customers. So they wrote scripts for a few lessons, shot a few videos, and published them on a landing page. At the end of the course, they included an optional exam. If someone went through the course and passed the exam, they’d receive an official Inbound Certification.

“At the time, we knew it wasn’t the best course on SEO or content marketing or email marketing,” the company wrote in a recent e-book. “But what [the] Inbound Marketing [course] did do well was combine all of those strategies into a framework that really spoke to SMB marketers.”

Almost a decade later, that single project has evolved into HubSpot Academy, which offers over 350 free online courses. Per HubSpot, the Academy educates “tens of thousands of users every month.” In Q1 of 2020, new leads increased 115 percent year-over-year. Anyone can access the database to get certified in disciplines ranging from content marketing to business analytics to e-commerce. All you have to do is fill out a form.

HubSpot was clearly onto something. Virtual learning has boomed in recent years thanks to massive open online courses (MOOCs) like Coursera. Students can go through the material at their own pace, usually for free. Even esteemed colleges like Harvard and Yale have gotten in on the action, letting the public take certain online classes without needing to pay a cent of the $50,000 tuition.

In the professional world, this trend has huge appeal, especially for B2B companies. Workers can add to their skillset or learn something new if they want to switch careers. B2B marketers, meanwhile, can break down their complex products and services into lessons that are easy to understand. The courses also help nurture leads gradually (and improve customer retention). The built-in structure gives people a reason to come back multiple times to finish the lessons on your site.

Every course begins with a landing page. Think of it as a syllabus or outline, packaging the different components. This typically reveals how many lessons there are, who’s teaching them, and how long it’ll take to complete the whole course.

One reason these courses are so popular is because of chunking. The term comes from Harvard psychologist George A. Miller, who, in the 1950s, found that humans tend to memorize information best when something is split up between five and nine segments. If your boss asks you to learn Google Analytics, that sounds daunting. But if you go to Google Analytics Academy and see there’s a beginner course with smaller units for setting up basic campaigns and tracking conversions, suddenly the request seems more manageable.

For marketers, chunking supplies an added bonus: It gives users a clear reason to fill out a lead form. We’re all bombarded with pop-ups asking us to subscribe to newsletters and talk to a salesperson. But it makes sense to give up your email when you’re taking a course so that new lessons can be delivered to you on time.

Most successful courses incorporate video lessons, but you don’t need a huge budget (or an academy) to put together a successful video course. The key ingredient is knowing what your audience wants.

In 2014, three researchers from MIT, edX, and the University of Rochester studied 128,000 students learning through MOOCs. The goal was to find virtual learning trends and provide recommendations for instructional designers and video producers.

After evaluating over 6.9 million watching sessions, here’s what the researchers suggest:

B2B marketers, particularly in tech, already have the instincts to build a course like this, since they’re used to communicating with a digital audience.

“Presentation styles that have worked well for centuries in traditional in-person lectures do not necessarily make for effective online educational videos,” the researchers wrote. “To maximize student engagement, instructors must plan their lessons specifically for an online video format.”

How to take advantage of this trend:

• Review your existing content to find common themes or topics that could become courses.
• Use your content calendar to map out new course lessons well ahead of time if you’re starting from scratch.
• Keep video lessons short and highlight the instructor to give the course a personal connection.

3. Newsletters Have Become the Centerpiece of Content Distribution and Audience Building

There’s always another hot new marketing channel. Snapchat, TikTok, Instagram, Alexa have all been anointed the next big thing that marketers need to care about. But one of the greatest resources marketers have at their disposal has barely changed in 50 years: email.

As organic social media traffic tailed off last decade and mobile device usage made homepages less essential, email newsletters helped marketers direct readers back to their sites on a regular basis. In a way, the inbox is now the new homepage. And it’s no longer a channel that brands can ignore.

Platforms like Substack have made it ridiculously easy for anyone to start an email newsletter. The appetite is there for this kind of content. It’s gotten to the point where people from places like Digiday and Politico are leaving their full-time jobs to start subscription newsletters.

For marketers, it’s also a more personal alternative than social media. As journalist Casey Newton told The New York Times, “You don’t have to fight an algorithm to reach your audience.” That’s why brands and publishers alike have opted for more personality in their messages, even letting certain employees include their names in corporate emails. I have a last name, but you may know me as Jordan at Contently. I’ve also come across Taco at Trello, Sophia at Yesware, and even Charles the Dog at Lighthouse Creative.

This personality has a point. Per HubSpot, 78 percent of marketers noticed an increase in email engagement over the last year. And according to Content Marketing Institute’s 2020 B2B Benchmarking Report, marketers rated email newsletters as the best way to nurture leads, ahead of blog posts, in-person events, and case studies.

“We love email,” GE’s Chief Storyteller told us. “It may sound old-school, but email subscription is really a hardwired link to your audience. For us, email subscribers are an extremely valuable audience that we want.”

A big part of email’s value comes from having a reliable connection with your audience. You can link to B2B content on social channels, but you’ll have to pay for distribution for it to have a meaningful impact. (Organic reach on Facebook was clocked at just 5 percent in April 2020.)

It’s like building a house on somebody else’s land. As our head of marketing Joe Lazauskas wrote in his guide to compounding content ROI: “Spend $500 on ads today, and you’ll have to spend again tomorrow to see the same results. But spend $500 on a piece of great content today and it will drive continuous traffic and leads for free—by ranking well for search, engaging website visitors, and increasing newsletter engagement.”

At Contently, we developed a model to map out how our newsletter impacts the bottom line. Our blog, The Content Strategist, gets hundreds of thousands of unique visitors each month.

For the people who aren’t already subscribed to our newsletter, we put a pop-up on our site that lets them sign up if they’re interested. That pop-up converts at 2 percent. That means that every 100,000 new visitors will yield 2,000 new email subscribers.

Of those 2,000 new email subscribers, about 2 percent will request a demo of Contently over the next couple of quarters.Based on the average value conversion rates of an MQL, those 40 demo requests are worth $200,000 in weighted pipeline to our business.

Additionally, email provides more freedom to customize and experiment compared to other content distribution channels. Marketers have the ability to segment their subscriber lists. This tactic can be really useful if you’re trying to reach people in different industries, roles, locations, and more. Urbansitter, a tech company that connects parents and babysitters, increased conversions by 260 percent just by segmenting emails to its two different user groups.

Sending a newsletter isn’t exactly a new trend. But what’s noteworthy is that companies are beginning to treat email as one of the most important parts of the content lifecycle. It can be the ultimate factor that makes or breaks a B2B content program.

If you’re new to content marketing, look for ways to build your list and feed subscribers with insightful material. Even if the material doesn’t come from you all the time. Email partnerships, content swaps, and content curation can all get you in front of new people.

Morning Brew, which publishes four newsletters including Marketing Brew, has executed this strategy to perfection. The company expects to earn $20 million in ad revenue by the end of 2020, per Digiday. It has over 2 million subscribers across the newsletters and boasts an incredible 42 percent open rate.

Those numbers may seem untouchable right now, but keep in mind that Morning Brew had 160,000 subscribers two years ago. Email growth can happen fast, as long as you send the right message.

How to take advantage of this trend:

• Set up lead forms on your site so it’s easy for people to subscribe to your newsletter.
• Give employees the freedom to have personality and share their experiences.
• Segment your subscriber list over time so you can tailor content to different audience personas.

4. B2B Tech Leaders Are Reimagining the Product Story in New, Creative Ways

88 Acres: How Microsoft Quietly Built the City of the Future…

It reads like the title of an award-winning magazine feature. Should’ve been, really. In 2014, Microsoft pitched a bunch of journalists an idea about how a group of employees were analyzing sensory data to revolutionize the way the company used energy across its 500-acre campus.

All of them passed. So Microsoft’s communications team decided to cover it themselves. Jennifer Warnick, the lead writer of Microsoft Story Labs at the time, put the article together. Forty-eight hours after it went live, 800,000 people had read it. To this day, it’s arguably one of the best pieces of content marketing ever created.

“88 Acres” is the platonic ideal of a product story. A Microsoft employee wrote about other people at Microsoft using the company’s products, and it didn’t come across as self-promotional.

When companies write about themselves, we usually wind up with dry, hollow press releases. However, the typical press release machine has become somewhat outdated. Why put an update on the wire hoping a journalist covers it when you can tell your audience directly? Microsoft’s story shows what happens when a brand controls its own narrative.

Over the years, brands have gradually warmed up to the idea. SEMrush uses its own features to analyze its content on a regular basis. Then there’s Typeform, which walked us through a more unusual example earlier this year. When Paul Campillo, head of brand and communications, was working on a story about chatbots, he wanted to insert one so readers could ask it questions about the article. Only problem was, Typeform didn’t have a chatbot. So their dev team built one.

“The article was a huge success,” Campillo said. “Now it’s one of Typeform’s three offerings.”

Marketers have this tendency to sugarcoat everything. But we’ve heard from clients that they liked learning about our trials and errors. They could relate to our challenges and follow each step as we worked to overcome them. At Contently, we think of ourselves as our best case study.

That’s something anyone can do, regardless of whether or not they have a tale as rich as “88 Acres.” And since product stories appeal to both new leads and existing customers, the content can help with onboarding and retention. Think of them like Help Center assets that customers can use to solve problems on their own—only with more creativity than the usual instruction manual approach.

For software companies, these stories can be integrated throughout the product. We’ve started doing this ourselves with a new video series called “Contently In Action.”

When customers reach a certain part of our platform, a short tutorial pops up and explains how we use the feature to optimize results. It may not win an Emmy, but it serves actionable advice at the right time.

How to take advantage of this trend:

• Compare a press release and an article side by side while noting the differences in tone and creativity
• Sort through the most popular Help Center articles or tutorials to discover good product story ideas
• Write about your own experiences using your product like an investigate reporter, highlighting challenges and solutions

5. Branded Shows Are the Future of Multimedia Content

The average Netflix subscriber spends two hours per day on the streaming service. When marketers publish content, they’re usually hoping someone will spare two minutes to look at it.

That’s such a stark difference when you say it out loud. At the core, though, a Netflix executive and a B2B marketing executive are after the same thing. Both are building audiences and vying for user attention to increase revenue. So how can we get people as vested in our B2B content as they are in Stranger Things?

The first step is to think in terms of series rather than one-off pieces of content. The biggest mistake people make when setting up a content calendar is treating it as just a daily tracker. The calendar is more than just a to-do list. For your content strategy to work, you need a long-term lens

You never hear someone ask, “What’s your favorite episode of TV?” You say, “What’s your favorite show?” You want to know what series got them hooked, coming back for more.

“To hold attention, the only plan must be to provide your audience with a worthwhile experience,” Jay Acunzo, founder of Marketing Showrunners, wrote on The Content Strategist. “Shows are the world’s best vehicle for doing that. They help marketers create compounding returns on our content investment, since shows are binge-worthy when done right.”

A number of innovative companies are starting to take this track through podcasts, video series, and even feature-length documentaries. Acunzo keeps a running list of over 200 branded shows broken down by B2C, B2B, and non-profit. It might surprise you to see the B2B space represented so strongly with Adobe’s Wireframe podcast, Moz’s Whiteboard Friday, and Lessonly’s Do Better Work, to name a few.

With in-person events paused for the foreseeable future, shows could fill part of the void in the marketing line-up. Like educational courses, video series are good for driving and nurturing leads. They’ve proven to be effective—a study from Animoto found that four times as many customers would rather watch a video than read an article to learn about a product.

One new show that Acunzo recommended is Onboarding Joei, created by 360Learning. The docu-series, which debuted in April, follows Joei Chan as she gets acclimated as the tech company’s new director of content.

As writer Molly Donovan detailed on the Marketing Showrunners blog, the show drove immediate results. In the past, 360Learning had to spend €900 to acquire a marketing qualified lead. For Onboarding Joei, the MQL cost dropped to €25.

“I was able to show that I could bring in a lot of qualified subscribers,” Nicolas Merlaud, the show’s creator, told Donovan. “Moreover, I could prove the show’s ROI.

This approach could even translate to virtual events. (There’s a reason they call it event “programming.”) Standard marketing events tend to struggle with meandering panels, awkward lulls, and dry speakers. Pre-recorded presentations benefit from higher production value, and polished editing grants audiences a smoother experience.

Recently, we adjusted our lead generation efforts to include pre-recorded webinars. The slides and voiceover were edited and uploaded before the event time. After the presentation, we switched to a live Q&A with attendees to address their thoughts.

The move makes a ton of sense because we’re showing the best possible version of our work. At the end of the day, whether you work for Netflix, Google, or a company just starting to invest in B2B content, that’s what we should all be aiming for.

How to take advantage of this trend:

• Brainstorm series instead of ad-hoc stories when planning your content calendar
• Invest in video content, budget permitting, to give customers a binge-worthy experience
• Explore turning in-person events into a virtual series with a mixture of pre-recorded and live elements

The post State of B2B Tech Content Marketing: 5 Trends That’ll Get You Promoted appeared first on Contently.

For the sake of science, I will admit that I’m guilty of mindlessly scrolling through these clips into the wee hours of the night. At first glance, TikTok’s audience, which skews younger, may not seem like the ideal place for a B2B brand. But my tailored algorithm isn’t all cute cat clips and conspiracy theories. Educational content also works, taking the form of basic advice for topics like writing resumes and learning about the stock market.

Today, TikTok has over 1 billion monthly active users between the ages of 13 and 40. And based on personal experience, the platform’s algorithm has gotten very good at recommending related content on the “For You” page—including posts that come from brands. That’s part of the reason why the average time spent per user has doubled in the last six months.

Now comes the big question: Should B2B brands use TikTok? It depends. The platform isn’t saturated with advertising, but many B2C companies are already active. Based on what I’ve seen, TikTok may not be right for every B2B brand, but if they’re looking for some new and creative opportunities that just make sense, here’s how they can join the platform without ruining it.

1. Embrace emotional targeting

B2B brands don’t always tug at the heartstrings of the audience when they’re selling technical products and services. However, this perceived bias toward rational selling could be holding back marketers—especially those interested in TikTok.

Gyro UK, a B2B specialist agency, found that 62 percent “of business decision-makers rely on gut feelings when it comes to their final choice.” Regardless of the complexity of your product, you are still selling to people, and people have emotional needs.

In Contagious: Why Things Catch On, UPenn professor Jonah Berger came up with the acronym STEPPS (social currency, triggers, emotions, public, practical value, and stories), which outlines what marketers can do to make their content stick and increase the likelihood it gets shared.

With that in mind, consider taking a step back from self-serving, promotional content and letting your employees post some videos of their snoring pets–because what’s more amusing than that?

Jokes aside, TikTok allows brands that are selling a seemingly unexciting product to establish an emotional connection to their audience. Take Lysol’s “#HealthyHabits6Step” trend, for example. Thanks to a catchy custom song, users are provided a lighthearted, engaging way to bring awareness to a critical COVID-19 initiative. The average person may not feel particularly attached to a cleaning company, but the creation of this hashtag brings an interactive element to the rather humdrum topic of personal hygiene.

Even though Lysol is B2C, you could still adapt a similar model for a B2B company, adding a sprinkle of exhilaration to mundane activities—be it personal hygiene or work.

2. Teach us (quickly)

Educational courses are lead gen machines, just ask HubSpot, which offers a phenomenal set of online marketing courses. So what do HubSpot and TikTok have in common? They both utilize chunking. HubSpot’s short, segmented videos and TikTok’s one-minute post limit give creators the ability to publish educational information that viewers will retain better.

One of my favorite educational TikTokers is Hank Green, also known for his Crash Course YouTube videos that got some of us through school. Hank posts a plethora of short, personable videos answering questions you may have always wondered about but never found the answer to (click here if you were wondering what fire tastes like).

@hankgreen1Reply to @mafflack Ask me more moon questions. I love the moon. ##askhank ##tiktokpartner ##learnontiktok♬ original sound – Hank Green

Some people have built their entire brand on TikTok by emphasizing educational advice. Laine Blazevich hops on the latest dance trends to pass along internship advice to students. He’s the perfect balance of cringy, yet relatable—and the short video format takes away part of the information overload that makes the internship process stressful.

And as I promised above, you don’t need to jump on the latest trends in order to see success on TikTok. Ben Pryor keeps it simple while he teaches you the ins, outs, lefts, and rights of the stock market through graphics. His tone is conversational, making it easier for him to address the demands of his particular audience.

Larger finserv companies may feel out of place at first on a platform like TikTok, but people like Pryor are proof that there’s an audience for every industry. By focusing on personal finance advice or small business tips, finserv companies can cover basics and build trust in a relatable way.

3. Highlight company culture for recruiting

I’m guilty of using Brobdingnagian words to make myself seem smarter (see what I did there?). But when it comes to building a team and establishing trust, there’s no need to overcomplicate things. You want your audience to know your brand as clearly as possible.

At Contently, I think you know how much we value storytelling by now. One of the main reasons stories work so well in marketing is because of their relatability. It’s vital to take a step back from promotional advertising. See the value in creating content that doesn’t haggle your audience for their contact information, or else they may become skeptical of your intentions and how you value their business.

One of America’s most reputable daily newspapers, The Washington Post, has done a fantastic job of utilizing TikTok to emphasize their exceptional company culture. Their company mission is to portray news truthfully and unbiasedly and reach the public at large. On their main website, they do just that by presenting current events in a factual, clean and serious format. However, on TikTok, they bring a playful and relatable element to their brand with their employee Dave Jorgenson (also known fondly as Washington Post TikTok Guy).

@washingtonpostEveryone say bye to Madhulika, a legend ♬ original sound – We are a newspaper.

Jorgenson breaks down the current events that The Washington Post publishes with a humorous component so they are easy to understand. In a digital age where face-to-face connection is often minimal, these small efforts show that real people just like you and I are behind big brand names. This can do wonders when it comes to establishing company culture, especially if you are looking to recruit new employees.

4. Get to know TikTok and post frequently

In the “2021 TikTok Benchmarks & Strategy Guide for Brands,” Conviva discovered that the top 20 company accounts on TikTok averaged about 5x more posts per year than all other users, and those who posted 2000-2499 times over the year gained a whopping 6 million followers, on average.

So if you’re going to try TikTok, make sure to commit.

Granted, the biggest brand accounts tend to have a creative advantage since they can post sports highlights (ESPN) or movie clips (Netflix). But regardless of your industry, the key to TikTok growth is putting in the time. The audience will appreciate it if you learn what works on the platform instead of shoehorning in whatever you have on your YouTube page.

As you’re doing your research, here’s a final piece of advice: Don’t succumb to teen stereotypes. If something feels cringy or oversaturated, it’s okay to skip it. Users will thank you for not trying to co-opt the latest trend.

Nonetheless, I encourage you to embrace this strange, magical world. TikTok, like the universe, is chaotic. You may not be able to master it right away, but at least you can learn something—even if it means finding out you’re a hologram.

The post How B2B Brands Can Use TikTok Without Ruining It appeared first on Contently.

It’s nearly impossible to prove content marketing ROI if you don’t outline clear goals at the beginning of the year. Sure, you may be able to cherry-pick some numbers in December, throw them into a Powerpoint, and make a tenuous case to your boss. But you’ll be playing a dangerous game for two reasons:

1. The most impactful KPIs aren’t just magically measured by Google Analytics. You need to properly setup your marketing stack (GA, Pardot, Salesforce, SEMRush, Facebook Business Manager, etc.) to track the behaviors that matter most.

2. If you’re not creating and distributing content with a clear purpose, you’re basically banking on a happy accident to keep your job.

So where do you start? To prove ROI, your content goals should ladder up to the things your CEO cares about: new business (revenue generated by new clients), customer retention, and loyalty (getting your existing clients to keep spending more money with you).

This doesn’t mean your content should be full of product plugs. Far from it. It’s much more effective to build trust with your audience through helpful content than to inundate them with sales messages. They’ll be more likely to buy something from you in the long run.

But you do need to tie content to revenue. There are a couple of easy places to start.

If you’re B2B, most of your inbound business comes from demo requests or people looking to talk to sales. Track how many people first visit your site by reading or watching a piece of content before subsequently filling out a demo/sales request. Then see if those leads convert to deals at a higher rate.

If you’re B2C, track whether people who consume your content convert into customers at a higher rate, and if they spend more money. Walmart, for instance, found that people who read their content had 7% larger orders—a big overall KPI for the retailer.

Then, measure the key drivers that attract the right audience to your content. After all, you need to build an audience and inspire people to engage with your content if you want it to have an impact on revenue.

SEO: Measure gains in search traffic and ranking improvements for target keywords. (For instance, we really want to attract people searching for terms like “content strategy” and “content marketing platforms.”)

Newsletter sign-ups and Engagement: Since newsletters are the most consistent way to build an owned audience, growing that list is key. But also track your open rate, click rate, and overall percentage of engaged subscribers.

Social Engagement: How are followers engaging with content across channels? Look to metrics like video views, engagement rate, reach, social referral traffic, and comments.

Backlinks and earned media: The most effective SEO strategy today is to create content with such great original research and reporting that it earns backlinks and press. It’s super valuable to organically introduce your brand to new audiences.

The science here comes from setting achievable goals in each of these categories. The art comes in interpreting the data, figuring out which metrics are most impactful for your business, and teaching your team how to create and distribute content with these goals in mind.

This is far from an exhaustive list—I’m working on a content marketing ROI mega-post that goes into much greater detail. But we’re almost a month into the year. If you haven’t set goals already, you need to get started. Your content marketing program depends on it.

The post The Art and Science of Content Marketing ROI appeared first on Contently.

The discourse around tech—specifically B2B tech—often comes in the form of thought leadership content. What does the future have in store for us? And how can new technology help us solve big problems?

It’s vital that we ask these questions, but there’s a disconnect in the way B2B marketers are answering them.

According to 2020 joint study from LinkedIn and Edelman, 89 percent of B2B decision-makers believe thought leadership enhanced the perceptions of an organization, while nearly half (49 percent) claimed that thought leadership influenced their purchasing decisions. However, the results “show that 85% of decision-makers feel that current content under-delivers on quality.”

When I started freelancing for a billon-dollar B2B tech giant, I saw this problem firsthand. My role consisted of writing and editing, but after three months, I was asked to put together a training session to help the internal team, based on all the press releases, blog posts, case studies, and site copy they’d created.

Here are the three biggest mistakes that crept into the content along with advice I offered for how to fix them.

1. Focusing too much on consumer technology

Good writing should be engaging. But marketers shouldn’t prioritize entertainment value over relevance. When sifting through my client’s work, I noticed that some content creators were throwing in references to exciting consumer technologies like driverless cars when the topic of choice was, say, cloud computing.

These mentions were clearly added to make blog posts more appealing, but they didn’t really tie back to the point of the piece. By attempting to improve engagement this way, the writers actually got the opposite result. B2B decision-makers are usually knowledgeable in their fields, so incorporating unrelated topics will turn them off.

As a journalist, I receive dozens of thought leadership bylines every week via email, so I understand that it’s difficult to stand out, especially with technical subject matter. But your audience might walk away with a negative perception of your brand if you just shoehorn in trending topics.

What you should do instead:

Thought leadership content is meant to be strategic, so stay focused on the topic at hand. Unique advice can stand on its own. Plus, a niche audience will probably geek out over the specifics.

I’m glad marketers are pushing to be more creative, but analogies and cultural references work best in small doses. If you find a relevant example that can provide a new way of thinking about complex technology, go for it. But make sure the connection is clear.

2. Abandoning the hook

Some of the strongest blog posts I’ve reviewed began with a strong narrative like a news hook or an anecdote. Over time, though, the narrative thread disappeared as the piece went on. By the conclusion, the initial story was almost completely forgotten. This is a structural problem that plagues a lot of B2B content marketing.

If you don’t follow through with your story, the piece won’t flow as well—or leave as strong of an impression.

What you should do instead:

Endings are often the hardest part to write. You’re almost across the finish line, you’ve developed a clear thesis, and now you just want to get the article up on the site. I see this as a planning error. If you create an outline before you start writing, you can map out a conclusion that ties together everything that comes before it.

My client’s best pieces of content continued the narrative. In some cases, all they needed to add was a few words or a single sentence that alluded to the intro. To see this in action, check out this link to an article about content fluency on The Content Strategist.

3. Using jargon as a crutch

When trying to appeal to a senior audience, there’s always a temptation to use flowery language and longer sentences. Also, thought leadership content tends to be littered with jargon, especially in B2B tech. These articles articles read more like press releases than insightful opinions.

One phrase I encountered a lot with my client was “in this fast-paced digital world.” Frankly, this term doesn’t really mean anything, so I advised them to stop using it.

What you should do instead:

Iron out the unnecessary words from your content. Concise writing is more effective for the B2B audience. If decision-makers believe their time is valuable, then make sure every creative choice you make delivers something of value.

I try to address this before I start writing by asking a basic question: What do you want to achieve with this piece? That way, when you’re done working, you can refer to the answer as you’re proofing. You’ll almost always catch some fluff before it goes back to the editor, manager, or in this case, back to the client.

The post 3 Big B2B Content Marketing Mistakes—And What You Should Do Instead appeared first on Contently.

Since then, comments and questions have been the content metric I secretly value over likes and shares and views. Did I make people think about things differently? Did I spark enough curiosity to make someone want to learn more?

By that measure, our webinar on the science of storytelling a few weeks ago was a big success. By the time we got to the Q&A, there were nearly 100 questions in the chat. I answered as many as I could live, but I also wanted to give the best of the rest some love in a content mailbag. Let’s dive in.

Should we change anything about our storytelling because of the COVID-19 situation?

-Anthony

Over the past month, the phrase I’ve come to loathe the most is “business as usual.” Nothing about our current situation is usual. Our work and personal lives have changed in very real ways.

As marketers, our top priority right now should be helping our audience overcome the challenges they face. If we do that, we’ll build trust, nurture leads, and have a strong pipeline when the economic landscape shifts. To steal a line from Hootsuite, we need to “do good or make people feel good.”

For most brands, doing good means taking action in the fight against Coronavirus. For example, we’re raising funds for emergency grants for freelance creatives in need.

The easiest way to make people feel good is to create high-quality content that educates and entertains them. As a marketer, think of yourself as in public service. If you’re in finance, help people take advantage of every financial program available to them right now. If you’re in healthcare, follow GE’s lead and share important innovations that can help fight the disease. If you’re in marketing or technology, help people figure out how to work more effectively together.

However, don’t just create coronavirus content for the sake of it. In other words, don’t be this brand.

Bottom line: Everything that’s going on right now should prompt us to reevaluate the stories we tell and ensure that we’re prioritizing the ones that’ll help people the most.

What is your opinion on sending email content regarding the current situation?

-Ryan

Email remains the best way to reach your audience with stories and build a connection. When done well, it amplifies your traffic across all other organic channels. Coronavirus doesn’t make that any less true.

But we do have to be extra careful about the amount of emails we’re sending right now. This is what my inbox looked like for most of March:

Apparently, I have a lot of friends at Via. I also have a second family—the sweetgreen family, and they would like to take care of me during this unusual time. And Target considers me a “guest” because …. yeah, I guess I did get drunk and fall asleep in the camping section that one time in college.

We all get too many emails from brands, in part because it’s one of the toughest things for companies to manage. Product is sending a survey, the content team is sending a newsletter, customer marketing is sending a product update, and the sales team is reaching out with a special expansion proposal. And that’s when everything is normal. In times like this, our instinct is to do more, more, more. We try to drown our business anxiety in hyperactivity.

At Contently, we definitely sent a few too many emails to some folks after the crisis hit. Last month, we quickly spun up new virtual events to address challenges our audience were facing, like remote content collaboration and making the case for content marketing. These events had a ton of sign-ups, but in the course of promoting them, we ended up sending too many emails to people who were already signed up for our weekly newsletters. Once we realized this, we vetted our lists and reduced our email frequency.

In other words: Keep sending helpful content to your audience, but audit your email comms and ensure that people aren’t on overlapping campaigns. Even your most engaged contacts shouldn’t hear from you more than twice a week.

What if I am writing for tech savvy audience? Does it still make sense to write at a 4th grade level?

-Anna

You’ve talked about white papers at the beginning and the “level” at which they should be written—does that apply to brands across the board? We are in institutional asset management and continuously struggle with the “tone” and “level.” Senior management is pushing for academic level and the marketing team is pushing for something lower?

-Herbert

After my last webinar, I got a lot of questions about our research on content fluency. Should all brands really strive to write at an elementary or middle school level? Even B2B brands in niche industries?

The answer: Yes.

Complexity doesn’t equal authority. Whether you’re writing about institutional finance or pharmaceuticals or email marketing, you should make your writing clear and enjoyable to read. Doing so leads to a huge competitive advantage. If you’re the only one in your industry who does that well, people will turn to you first. You’ll earn their loyalty.

Now, your content may require some technical industry jargon. If that raises your reading level, that’s okay. But a lot of jargon can often be simplified into basic terms, so try to keep it to a minimum.

How relevant do you see content marketing being for B2B companies, and which kinds of content would you recommend?

-Herbert

In many ways, content marketing is more important for B2B companies than B2C companies. I wrote about why a couple years go:

People only want to read and watch content about their passions, and those things tend to fall into two camps:

A) Content that helps people enjoy their personal passions, like sports, gaming, wellness, fitness, cooking, travel, health, and, in my case, bouncy castles and large water slides.

B) Content that makes people better at their jobs, where they spend most of their days. These people desperately need to improve if they want to retire before they’re 85 years old and Boca Raton is somewhere under the Atlantic Ocean.

If you’re a B2C brand, you’re likely playing in the first camp. And the competition for attention there is fierce. If you want to stand out, you need to drop someone from space or tell truly unique stories—like Marriott or Dollar Shave Club—to stand out.

If you’re B2B, you still need to create content that stands out, but there’s much less competition. Condé Nast isn’t about to launch a magazine to help content marketers measure ROI. Meredith won’t start a new pub to help healthcare executives navigate the complex regulatory landscape. As a B2B brand, you likely have knowledge and expertise people crave.

This is a topic I’m weirdly passionate about. I even made a video about it!

Obviously every audience is different, but in general, what types of media and placements are most effective for storytelling, particularly for B2B on a small budget?

-Justin

There’s no universal rule here. You should reach your audience on the channels where they’re most engaged.

Our two biggest traffic sources are search and email. Search helps us reach thousands of new people who subscribe to our weekly newsletter. Then that weekly newsletter keeps them coming back. We’re a B2B startup with a pretty small budget, too, so we’re very deliberate about which keywords we target, focusing on terms like “content audit” that bring in readers likely to subscribe.

After that, LinkedIn is our biggest social channel. We have two new LinkedIn newsletters, The Storytelling Edge and The Content Report, that are growing by about 500 subscribers per week. We try to repurpose content as much as possible, so after a few days or a week, we repost our LinkedIn newsletter to our blog, reaching our audience in two places.

The biggest key is to tailor your content to the channel. On Twitter, threads work super well; often, we’ll summarize the contents of an entire article on Twitter, especially if it’s data-heavy, so our audience doesn’t have to click out of the feed.

We're aiming to raise $50,000 in emergency grants for the @freelancersu's Freelancers Relief Fund to help freelancers facing economic hardship during #COVID19. Here's why 1/https://t.co/PV6Rwsn7tb

— Contently (@contently) April 7, 2020

On Facebook, native video is king. Once you figure out where your audience spends their time, study that channel to figure out what works best. Short “NowThis” style social video and animated explainers work really well here, and they’re much less expensive to produce than live-action shoots.

How can I express the value of emotion in advertising to a leadership team that is highly focused on price-based messaging?

-Christine

Every brand needs to find the right balance of short-term sales activation with long-term brand building. The problem is that most organizations invest much more in the former than the latter.

Leading marketing researchers Les Binet and Peter Field have found that the ideal split of resources is 60/40 in favor of long-term brand building. (My ex-colleague, Guissepe Caltabiano, has a great breakdown on it here.)

While price-based offers will deliver an immediate short-term boost, those gains mostly disappear after six months. Brand building efforts, however, deliver compounding returns over time and a long-term uplift in sales. You can still use short-term sales activations to get over the finish line in any given quarter, but brand building is the key to long-term success.

Unfortunately, we’re drawn to short-term sales activations because:

1. They’re easy to measure. You send an offer, people click and buy, and you can measure the ROI.

2. The immediate results make our brains feel good.

But it’s not a great long-term strategy. Ask your leadership team: Do they only care about boosting sales for the next 3-6 months? Or do they want to build a brand that lasts?

What tips do you have about formatting copy? For instance, do bullets kill storytelling?

-Eric

Some thoughts here:

• Bullets are a great way to break down complex information and make it easier for our brains to absorb information. Bullets, lists, and images are a great way to keep people’s attention and cater to visual learners because it mixes up the monotony of long text blocks.
• However, don’t begin an article with bullets. That’s snoozetown. Start with a relatable story or anecdote that invites your audience in.
• Lastly, make formatting choices with intention. I tend to use shorter paragraphs to cater to mobile readers. I also almost always use H2s or bolded questions to break a piece up so it’s easier for people to digest. When in doubt, copy the formatting choices from others that you enjoy the most. And never make a bullet as long as this one. Honestly, it’s just getting out of hand.

Joe Lazauskas is Contently’s former head of marketing and co-author of The Storytelling Edge. Ask us your most pressing content strategy questions here.

The post Ask a Content Strategist: Answers to Your 7 Biggest Content Questions appeared first on Contently.

Over 700 people signed up, and we got a ton of questions. We tried to answer them all, but I spent a little too long breathlessly explaining how to work with compliance teams. So for this month’s Ask a Content Strategist column, I thought I’d dive into some of the best questions that went unanswered.

As a content team of one, I struggle holding onto the roles of creating the strategy, campaigns, assessment, graphics, etc. to avoid the chaos that always ensues. What should my primary focus be? And what are absolutely necessary technologies to invest in?

-Paul, Colorado

It’s never fun being a one-person team. No one realizes you’re responsible for 1,000 percent more than just creating content. And there’s usually that one guy who thinks he could do your job way better than you. (You may think you can write, Chad. But you can’t.)

When you’re a one-person content team, you’ll always be tempted to focus on just creating more. More content. More campaigns. When you’re overwhelmed, it’s much easier to just focus on the rote tasks in front of you.

But to be successful, you need to take a step back and focus on your content strategy. You’re one person. You can’t do everything. So it’s all about honing in on the few channels and tactics that are getting you the best results.

This is essentially the 80/20 rule. If you’re getting 80 percent of your leads through email and SEO campaigns, but spend the vast majority of your time trying to maintain an always-on social and blog cadence, you’re wasting time and effort.

Focus on the channels that work best for you, and then put all of your energy into creating a few pieces of high-quality content specially crafted for those channels.

As for the technologies you’ll need: It depends. A B2C startup focused on paid social video has a much different stack than a B2B company focused on email campaigns and partner webinars. But there are a few must-have buckets.

Analytics: The biggest key to growing your program is showing results. If you’re B2B, you need to show that your content drives leads. If you’re B2C, you need to show that people who engage with your content come back and buy something within a 90-day window.

Google Analytics is free, awesome, and can track both engagement metrics as well as basic conversion pathways. But to provide a full picture, you’ll need a good CRM as well. For most smaller companies, HubSpot is the easiest to plug in and get working.

Calendar and workflow: These tools are important for your own sanity and organization, but they also provide transparency to other teams you work with (sales, demand gen, accounts, etc.) so that they can know what content is coming. A lot of Fortune 2000 and fast-growth companies invest in a content marketing platform like Contently, but if your program isn’t ready for that yet, you can use a more general workflow/calendar tool like Asana.

Social media management: The free version of Buffer is awesome for smaller companies. For enterprise companies, Sprinklr and Spredfast are client favorites.

CMS: For owned content, you need a strong CMS that you won’t spend half your time troubleshooting. WordPress remains the easiest platform to design, maintain, and use. Plus, there are tons of great plug-ins to create different content formats (interactive, quizzes, parallax scroll, etc.) and templates that boost conversions and sharing.

What’s an example of a “big rock” asset in the consumer content world?

-Woo, San Diego

Usually we refer to “big rock content” in a B2B context—white papers or e-books that then get repurposed in a bunch of different ways: blog posts, infographics, videos, social posts, and interactive content that relies on the foundational research in the original asset.

But B2C companies create big rock content too—just look at Spotify’s “Year in Music” research, which it remixes as everything from personalized playlists to 100-foot-high billboard ads. There’s also Red Bull’s epic music and extreme sports documentaries, which the brand slices into “social cuts” specially designed for their audiences on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat.

One of our customers, Silversea, creates big rock “Collections” that serve as travel guides for specific destinations around the world. Each component within them—like these awesome Planet Earth-esque travel videos—serves as a divisible piece of content.

Just look at that freaking walrus!

What are the most effective ways to track ROI for each individual piece of content you produce?

-Sam, San Diego

Here’s the truth: I really do not recommend trying to quantify the hard ROI of every individual piece of content that you create, as opposed to your content program as a whole.

It will lead you down a terrifying rabbit hole in which you have to match up a ton of web analytics and CRM data, and you’ll spend 90 percent of your time making those calculations instead of, you know, actually making cool stuff.

That being said, here’s an in-depth guide on one way to measure the full ROI of individual content pieces. And here are some key metrics you can look to in order to identify top performers.

Conversions: Track which pieces of gated content generate the most leads. For instance, in 2015, I wrote a series of five content marketing playbooks for Contently. They were extremely popular, generating tens of thousands of leads.

Each playbook was classified as an individual campaign, which we then tracked as the lead source in Salesforce. If a deal closed as a result of a playbook, it got credit. As a result, we were able to attribute millions of dollars of revenue from that campaign. (I’m still waiting for my cut…) And guess what? We’re rolling out an updated series of playbooks in the coming months to try to recapture the magic.

SEO: Three things I love about SEMRush—it’s cheap, easy to use, and tells you the monetary value of your primary organic keywords. If a piece of content is ranking for a high value keyword and driving a ton of traffic, this is an easy way to show hard ROI for an individual piece.

Here are some other ROI guides that should help:

The content metrics that really matter.

How to show the ROI content has on your brand.

One last piece of advice: Find the friendliest marketing or business analyst in your company, bribe them with booze and cupcakes, and get them to set up an automated dashboard that pulls in your most important KPIs each month. (In all likelihood, they already use Looker, Domo, Tableau, or Google Data Studio.)

It’ll mean the difference between looking like this at the end of every month…

Versus looking like this instead…

Joe Lazauskas is Contently’s head of content strategy and co-author of The Storytelling Edge. Ask him your most pressing content strategy questions here, or email him at lazer@contently.com.

The post Ask a Content Strategist: What Should You Focus On When You’re a Team of One? appeared first on Contently.

“What are you talking about?” I’d say to every bartender or Lyft driver or artisanal ice cream entrepreneur who asked if I was going to the flugtag—this was Portland, after all.

Though I was still years from accepting a job in content marketing, I got a mini-education in the field each time someone brought up the stunt. It wasn’t as crazy as Stratos, everyone said, but Red Bull was helping to “Keep Portland Weird” with the marketing stunt. Though the scaffolding was obvious—it was impossible to talk about the air show without mentioning the brand by name—no one really seemed to care. If anything, they respected Red Bull’s candor.

At the time, I wondered how much money the brand was actually going to make on the stunt. Would it make any difference? (Most likely.) Was there a catch? (No.)

Now, most companies want to be like Red Bull. But we often hear from clients and prospects that their products and services don’t feel as conducive to big, viral stunt marketing like Red Bull. They see consumer-facing brands working in exciting areas like retail, beauty, and food, and many clients think, “Content works for companies like that.”

But Red Bull didn’t build its reputation just by being cool or extreme. The marketing efforts worked because the brand’s purpose aligned with what consumers wanted. That style of content marketing was also unheard of at the time.

There are a ton of companies out there waiting to benefit from content marketing, and most of them don’t sell exciting energy drinks. Here are four types of brands that can benefit the most.

A company starting a content project from scratch

Five years ago, a lot of companies were just creating content without a plan. Today, with so many helpful guides on tactics and strategy available, brands new to content marketing have more of a roadmap for success.

If you’re a marketer starting a new content initiative, you’re in a fantastic position to build a relationship with your target audience. As you’re developing a strategy, you’ll be able to see what your competitors have already done and where you can stand out.

Take California Closets, for example. The company could have aligned itself with bargain retailers in the industry, but by going all in on a new print magazine, Ideas of Order, it attracted an audience searching for high-end, luxury closet organization. It’s clear from the content that they’re not selling ugly plastic tubs for college students.

At Content Marketing World, the magazine won awards for Best New Print Publication and Project of the Year. As Stephanie Stahl pointed out on CMI’s blog, after only a month, Ideas of Order had already driven $42 in revenue for every dollar California Closets spent producing and distributing it.

A company with something to prove

Maybe your company sells a taboo product (Poo-Pourri). Or maybe your CEO has just stepped down after a series of unfortunate controversies (Uber). Maybe you’re trying to disrupt an industry and you need to convince customers to change their habits (Netflix). Look at those core challenges as a blessing. They give you the conflict you need to tell a good story.

Now, a brand doesn’t have to be in “damage control” mode to break into content marketing. But correcting a misconception in the market can be a nice place to inject some honesty or even humor. Your brand might benefit from a funny, informative video about what you do, or you could always write blog posts to set the record straight about something in the press.

One recent example of a brand side-stepping a silly product with humorous content is Steak-umm launching a rebirth on Twitter. “[Young people] might have an inkling of [our] name in their mind, but they’ve never actually seen it advertised in a modern context,” Steak-Umm’s social media manager Nathan Allebach recently told us, “So we have that innate advantage working on social, which lets us [try to be] goofy and kind of ‘out there’ with the brand.”

A company expanding somewhere new

Expansions can take many forms, but no matter what you’re rolling out, content can bolster the effect it has on the market. If you’re a European financial brand expanding into Asia, you’ll want transcreated content lining the runway when you arrive.

The last thing a marketer wants to hear from potential customers is, “Wow, I know your company, but I had no idea you guys did this too.” You’ll need well-crafted stories to prove that you understand your new market.

If you’re a Manhattanite, for example, you’re probably familiar with the men’s health company Hims. Their tongue-in-cheek, stylized subway ads were ubiquitous last summer. When Hims announced they were launching a brand of vitamins and medications for women, appropriately called Hers, it seemed like an obvious move.

The Hers product line was accompanied by a new branded blog called Savoir Vivre. The Hims blog, Savoir Faire, features content about sleep deprivation, menswear, acne, and cholesterol. The Hers blog, in contrast, is hyper-focused on women’s sexuality, which matches the brand’s primary product offering for women: prescription medication Addyi. You can see the adjustments strategists made mo the Hims/Hers copy before the women’s line launched. It’s clear the brand concluded that women were more accustomed to reading about sexual health, so they were able to skip the innuendo.

Still, the playful tone is obvious on the blogs. “it’s french,” both homepages read, “say it how it’s supposed to be said. it’ll make your mouth feel funny.”

A company solving a complex problem

Some companies just can’t cram their product marketing and brand messaging into 30-second ads. The rise of content marketing has benefitted these brands significantly, giving them enough space to answer complicated questions and address pain points that can’t be summed up with 8 words in a banner ad.

Whether you’re B2B or B2C, informative content doesn’t have to be dry. We tell clients and prospects in B2B industries that they’re still marketing to people. C-suite executives with purchasing power still need to be educated and entertained.

That’s the driving force behind everything we create on The Content Strategist. We don’t want to rely on overt promotion to sell our product. Instead, we want to answer questions about thought leadership, content strategy, and the ROI of video marketing. Without the freedom to talk through that complex story on our blog, I just don’t know how I’d explain it.

Content marketing, it turns out, is a discipline best used by marketers who have a lot to say.

The post The Types of Companies That Benefit Most from Content Marketing appeared first on Contently.

But that moment also had some side effects. Suddenly, every marketer wanted to “go viral,” although none of them wanted to spend more then $5,000 to do it. Marketers also came to believe that content marketing was way easier for the “exciting” B2C brands compared to the “boring” B2B companies.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

People only want to read and watch content about their passions, and those things tend to fall into two camps:

A) Content that helps people enjoy their personal passions, like sports, gaming, wellness, fitness, cooking, travel, health, and, in my case, bouncy castles and large water slides.

B) Content that makes people better at their jobs, where they spend most of their days. These people desperately need to improve if they want to retire before they’re 85 years old and Boca Raton is somewhere under the Atlantic Ocean.

If you’re a B2C brand, you’re likely playing in the first camp. And the competition for attention there is fierce. If you want to stand out, you need to drop someone from space or tell truly unique stories—like Marriott or Dollar Shave Club—to stand out.

If you’re B2B, you still need to create content that stands out, but there’s much less competition. Condé Nast isn’t about to launch a magazine to help content marketers measure ROI. Meredith won’t start a new pub to help healthcare executives navigate the complex regulatory landscape. As a B2B brand, you likely have knowledge and expertise people crave.

B2B content gets boring, however, when people make some common mistakes. To learn how to use your content marketing advantage, spare 60 seconds to watch the latest episode of Content Marketing Minute.

And if you missed the first four episodes, check them out below.

Episode 1: Setting Content Marketing Goals

Episode 2: Building Relationships With a High-Value Audience

Episode 3: Finding Your Brand Voice

Episode 4: Building a Killer Channel Strategy

The post Video: Why B2B Companies Have a Content Marketing Advantage appeared first on Contently.

It’s easy enough to recall legitimately funny marketing campaigns. NBA on ESPN nailed its RV series. “Shaq playing Scrabble” is still one of my favorite commercials ever. And I do find myself amused by OKCupid’s winking “DTF” ads on the subway. But breaking content down into its small parts and analyzing what laughter does for a brand’s voice is a much more complex affair.

Enter Dr. James Barry, a humorist, professor at Nova Southeastern University, and co-author of the research paper “A typological examination of effective humor for content marketing.” While teaching a course on social media humor, he realized he had inadvertently gathered a sizable sample of online branded content while looking for content to show his students. From there, he narrowed the focus to study brands as they attempt to be funny.

Barry told me that infusing content with humor has a lot of potential for B2C and B2B companies alike, provided that they avoid re-inventing the wheel. “Seriously, humor works very well in B2B spaces,” he said. “As long as the creator knows exactly what type of humor strategy they’re using. Why wouldn’t CEOs want to be entertained? They’re just like anyone else.”

Though content marketers tend to categorize brands by their target audience, the data Barry collected led to a new set of classifications. “The difference between an individual making a joke and a brand making a joke is that the individual’s only aim is to entertain,” he said. “A brand has to entertain and connect the joke to their brand image. They’re using laughter to leverage brand familiarity.”

According to Barry, brands fall into three categories when it comes to humor in content marketing: red, yellow, and white industries. He recently spoke to me about why B2B brands should be funny, how to start using humor if you’ve never done it before, and when companies can go too far.

So what makes a brand red, yellow, or white? How can I tell which brands belong where, and which have the easiest time using humor?

Red industry stories are highly emotional, and using humor can come off as offensive. These are the brands asking their audience to make high-stakes decisions on luxury items like a Lexus or a diamond necklace. Maybe their audience is researching a high-cost vacation over time or they’re imagining these products being present in intimate family moments. Content in this space usually reaches for an inspirational feel. These are the tear-jerker commercials, and people don’t appreciate feeling surprised by humor.

Yellow industry content is often boring without humor. The stakes involved with a purchase are much lower. If your brand offers snack foods or beer or candy, it’s almost mandatory that you use humor in some way. Everyone is doing it, and many are doing it well.

White industries is where B2B comes in. These brands have to try to tell technical, complicated stories about their products, and they’re usually selling us a version of something we need anyway. Insurance companies, non-luxury appliances, anything that’s just a tool in your daily life. The process of purchasing these products is still really involved and there are a lot of little steps, just like a red industry product, but no one wants to hear you go on and on about a white industry product at length. That’s where humor can really help.

So humor in B2B content marketing is actually a good idea?

Yes. If simplification and audience engagement is the goal of your content, you could do worse than trying to entertain. The key is using humor right off the bat, and white industry audiences especially love self-deprecating, insider humor. Something like, “Boy, isn’t it crazy what Facebook makes us do now?” or “Most of us don’t actually know how QR codes work, right?” is going to kill. People don’t just love funny content—they love the sensation of thinking, “Hey, I have that problem too!”

If you make a joke like that early on, maybe in the first piece of content your audience sees, you’ve made yourself into an authority. You know the industry so well that you can joke about it.

Does that mean humor works best as a top-funnel technique?

Our brains respond to anything novel. In order to make that psychological experience happen, yes, it’s best to use humor to grab an audience early on in your relationship with them. All your competitors are using the same language and data to market themselves, so you have the element of surprise.

What you don’t want to do is say, “Hold on, folks, mid-way through this clip you’re going to get a surprise!” People don’t want that suspense in comic content. It works best if it’s part of your initial move, and then if it’s integrated fully into your brand messaging from there on.

What if you can’t joke about what you’re selling?

There are still a few ways to use humor, especially if your audience isn’t expecting it, but the risk of offending or alienating your audience is higher here. I’ll use insurance as an example. Before Geico introduced the “So easy a caveman could do it” slogan, insurance companies tended to avoid humor completely. People couldn’t even imagine how to make something like that funny, so all the content was Allstate’s “Are you in good hands?” or State Farm’s “Like a good neighbor” shtick.

It went deeper too. No one thought insurance companies specializing in, say, care for cancer patients could use humor, but then out of nowhere came Aflac with the duck. It trickled down from there, and Progressive came on board by introducing Flo.

But those are ad campaigns, which is a different beast than content marketing, no?

Content marketing actually has unique advantages when it comes to branded humor. Back when a TV commercial was the only viable form of content, a brand could make a joke and it only had to land once or a handful of discrete times. In content marketing, serial is the standard.

In content marketing, serial is the standard.

The fact that we’re all constantly fielding messages online means that a brand can complicate a joke once they’ve got your attention, and they can reference it as part of their story. It’s not just about getting a single laugh anymore—you want your audience to feel like an insider because they already understand the bit you’re doing. They’ve been with you for a while.

Let’s say I run a brand that has never used humor in content marketing before. How do I start?

First, there are pros and cons to trying this out. Let’s start with the pros. Our world is filled with so much noise, and your brand has billions of potential followers on social media. We considered all the content that reaches viral metrics, and about two-thirds of that work gets there because it’s funny. The other third of content that goes viral is reaching for awe-inspiring, breath-taking, astonishing. The numbers show that using humor—or even just a light-hearted tone occasionally—is the only surefire way to stand out in a crowd.

The con, obviously, is a joke falling flat, but that’s not even the worst-case scenario. Everyone’s heard a bad joke. We just tend to forget them and move on. What you really don’t want to do is offend someone with a stab at humor. That’s the kind of thing that sticks around.

Is it worth the risk? How do you make sure your brand’s humor isn’t offensive?

By not trying to reinvent the wheel. At no point in creating funny content should you be trying to do something no brand has ever done before. There are 10 types of humor as I’ve defined them in my research, and the two most dangerous types for brands are:

1. Pointing out differences and stereotyping

2. Outrageous interruptions

The first type, whether it’s parodying social norms or roasting someone, is going to play worse in homogenous populations. Americans, to some degree, are used to having differences pointed out. But in cultures abroad that value uniformity of thought, that’s going to read as offensive.

The second type does very well online, but no one necessarily wants to see it coming from a brand they trust. Incongruity humor, extreme irony, an unexpected surprise, gross exaggerations that capture your attention … these are all very effective attention-grabbers, but they’re risky for brands. Crazy images like people suddenly screaming, throwing fits, maybe authority figures bursting out into dance, that stuff is only going to play well in the yellow industry, and even then, it’s not a guarantee.

So you’ll know right away if you make a mistake?

Yes, and it’s difficult to recover from offending someone. You can see companies recasting their video strategies for content that will live on YouTube, as opposed to TV ads. The comment section is extremely important, and the last thing you want is a video that has more downvotes than upvotes.

The user comment phenomenon is a positive, though, because people tend to discuss your content amongst themselves. To a degree, that’s brand reinforcement. If an audience member doesn’t necessarily get the joke you’re making, they can always just scroll down and learn the context from commenters, which can actually help you in the long-run. We’ve never had such immediate feedback from our audiences, so it will shape what we make next.

This interview has been lightly edited and condensed.

The post When to Use Humor in Content Marketing appeared first on Contently.

Jannelle, Halifax, Nova Scotia

In our weekly editorial meetings, we go around the room pitching stories. The vibe is fairly professional and even-keeled … until it comes to me. I might start out measured, but inevitably, I’ll launch into a PG-13 tirade about some content marketing topic. Editorial meetings are my safe space, and my creative process (unfortunately and unintentionally) involves channeling Gary Vaynerchuk.

Jordan, our editor-in-chief, will nod along with a smirk on his face and then say, “That’s actually a good idea.”

[Ed. note: This is true.]

Two weeks ago, my weekly rant was about content marketing design—specifically, the many Fortune 2000 brands with content hubs that look like they were designed by a half-blind fisherman in 1998… and haven’t been updated since.

Design is incredibly important in content marketing. If the design of a content site is terrible, people won’t give the words a chance—they’ll perceive it all as low quality.

According to a Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab study, 46.1 percent of people say that “design look” is the top criteria for perceiving the credibility of a brand. Design and UX impact read time, bounce rate, conversion rate, etc. Just imagine if Contently looked like it was a forum built in 2000. This isn’t surprising. According to a 2012 Forrester CSO study, 90 percent of information transmitted to the brain is visual, and the brain processes visuals 60,000x faster in the brain than text.

In other words, hubs that look like the image below don’t exactly scream “trustworthy” and “innovative.”

Finance brands tend to publish higher quality and more sophisticated content than other industries. But going from HBR or the Wall Street Journal to most finance brand blogs is like going from streaming Hulu to popping in a faded VCR tape you found under your dad’s couch.

Guess dad was really into Billy Banks workout videos in the ’80s

I’ve seen plenty of marketers baffled when readers don’t convert to customers. Sometimes it’s because the content isn’t very good. But more often, it’s because the site design makes it extremely difficult to convert in any way. People won’t sign up for your newsletter unless you prompt them to do so. They won’t check out products related to the topics you’re covering unless you make it easy.

One brand that does this extremely well is Marriott, with Marriott Traveler magazine. Traveler has over 40 editions around the globe, all run by Marc Graser, a former staffer at Variety and Entertainment Weekly, who refuses to publish any stories that feel like hotel ads. Instead, Traveler operates with the integrity of a high-quality travel magazine, publishing fun stories about little-known travel gems.

(Disclosure: Marriott is a Contently client. But read Traveler. It’s good.)

Even though Marriott Traveler doesn’t push product, it drives millions of dollars in direct revenue for the hotel giant. How? The site does a really good job of recommending related products and experiences to the story that you’re reading.

Take this article from Marriott about lesser-known, kind of weird things to do in Midtown Manhattan. It’s a smart addition to Traveler because it solves a common problem for tourists in New York City: Most of the hotels are in midtown, which gets boring after you’ve done the standard tourist activities. Everything seems like one giant M&M megastore—an artificial tourist trap designed to steal your money and give you diabetes. Most people figure that if you want to find anything classically “New York,” you need to head to the Village, Harlem, or the outer boroughs. This piece, however, details old-school New York attractions that fell under the radar, like a Houdini museum. Hell, I’ve lived in Manhattan for a decade and have never heard of that.

The article doesn’t plug Marriott at all, but it makes you think that maybe staying in midtown—where Marriott happens to have several hotels—isn’t so bad after all. And once you finish reading, Traveler makes it very easy to book a room or a Marriott Rewards experience with a module at the bottom of the page. Marriott essentially acts as the advertiser of its own high-quality editorial content.

And it works! Marriott Traveler would drive a fraction of the revenue for the company if the site didn’t make it so easy to book a hotel. Without that hard ROI, there’s little chance Marriott would have invested so heavily in Traveler, launching new editions around the globe every few months. Since the ad exists in a place where consumers are used to seeing advertising, it doesn’t corrupt the editorial experience. Everyone wins.

How do you create content that drives customer engagement while delivering ROI for the business?

-KL, London

This overlaps with what I wrote above about Marriott Traveler, but I’ll repeat it here with a twist of different analysis. Also, I may be a little conceited, but I’m not conceited enough to assume that you read everything that I wrote. (But if you do, thank you, I love you, and please scroll down to the next question.)

Marriott executes a strategy that I wrote about a couple of weeks ago on this blog. The best brand blogs follow the law of Poliakov’s Pyramid, which illustrates the narrow band of content that people actually want from brands—stories related to their interests and passions, and content that helps them do their job better.

In short, B2C brands should ask, “How can I help people live their lives better?”

B2B brands should ask, “How can I help people do their jobs better?”

Both groups should slap themselves with a fish if the primary answer to that question is just “our product!”

If adhere to Poliakov’s Pyramid—and if your answers are different than what’s already readily available on the web—you have a damn good chance to succeed. If you don’t, you’ll come across as the brand equivalent of the boring, self-absorbed jock villain in every ’80s teen movie.

Which tactics can be used to figure out the questions your target group is asking about a specific (read: technical) topic?

-Griselda, Stockholm

Let’s finish with a bulleted list, shall we? I promise there’s a kicker in here somewhere.

• Search data: It’s the holy grail of user questions. I love this simple overview by Moz on how to integrate search queries into your creative process.
• Internal search: What are people looking for on your site?
• Reddit/forum data: BuzzSumo recently integrated a lot of this really useful information.
• Persona interviews: Actually talking to the people you’re trying to reach might seem old school, but it’s super valuable.
• Surveys: We survey newsletter subscribers all the time to learn about their challenges and needs, which drives a lot of our story ideas.
• Help desk, accounts, sales, and other client-facing teams. These groups are a source of anecdotal data that can complement quantifiable research.
• Customer councils: Get your top prospects and clients in a room together and listen to what they’re struggling with. It’s a worthwhile way to get a bounty of valuable data. Facebook does this very well with its major agency and brand clients. In a few years, this will be mandatory when Mark Zuckerberg is named Dark Lord of the Connected Realm.

Joe Lazauskas is Contently’s head of content strategy and co-author of The Storytelling Edge. Ask him your most pressing content strategy questions here, or email him at lazer@contently.com.

The post Ask a Content Strategist: Why Are Brand Blogs So Ugly and Outdated? appeared first on Contently.

All that is to say that I was wary of Instagram stories initially, because I could not imagine a world in which I’d chose ephemeral posts over permanent ones. A year and a half later, I post stories on Instagram almost every day.

Some brands—usually B2C companies—create content that seems like a perfect fit for an ephemeral timeline. Birchbox, for example, posts teasers for new products, complete with user polls and animated gifs.

For B2B companies, adapting blog posts and long videos for Snapchat and Instagram stories isn’t as simple. Let’s face it, longform how-to articles aren’t exactly set up for five-second views. But don’t let the obstacles deter you. Ephemeral content can still work for B2B brands, and we may see more of it very soon.

According to Later’s The State of Instagram Marketing Report, 76 percent of B2B respondents that don’t use Instagram stories are interested in creating them this year. Ninety-six percent of brands who already use the format say they’ll be upping their ephemeral content production soon, suggesting they’re seeing positive results already.

GE, which operates as both a B2C and a B2B brand, is a great example of how a company that isn’t in fashion, travel, or food can take full advantage of ephemeral content. On Instagram, content has ranged from a walk through the six best things on GE’s showroom floor to behind-the-scenes shots of photoshoots of their products to exotic excursions. There’s also some wild employee adventures to document—like exploring a volcano. Not every B2B brand has that bandwidth, but they can still apply a few of the same principles.

So what do you do if your B2B brand, like most, isn’t descending into volcanoes regularly? Instagram stories can be a good place for quick educational content, like Deloitte Digital often posts. Deloitte’s clips of brand philosophy and AI facts can be read in the few seconds they appear on their story, and are just enough to pique an audience’s interest about their consulting expertise. Deloitte especially takes advantage of posting ephemeral content during events, which is a smart way to drum up engagement outside of a conference hall. Other companies, like NASA, are known to profile their employees via ephemeral content.

On Contently’s Instagram, I occasionally post educational content and quotes from TCS articles. For the most part, though, our Instagram presence exists to showcase the company culture. Every B2B company can use the same approach to help recruiting, regardless of what the brand sells. Think of it this way: Your social media manager can post stories similar to what an audience would find on their friends’ personal accounts. Company outings, parties, and lunchtime shenanigans make for (hopefully) interesting stories which give a humanizing look into your company’s culture.

Instagram stories might be a better fit for B2B brands than Snapchat—at least, until Snapchat finds a better way to house educational content. In the meantime, Instagram profiles allow audiences to get a better overview of your company by letting them scroll through your more permanent posts. But thanks to events like the Shorty Awards, which includes a Best Brands on Snapchat category (the winner of which is chosen by a combination of public votes and scores from the Real Time Academy), it’s worth keeping the platform on your radar and noting whether future updates can support your content distribution efforts.

Now that I’ve come around, I’m excited about the potential for more B2B ephemeral content. True, I wish more of it would include volcano jumping because we all need something to aspire to, but I like the idea that ephemeral content will make us feel more connected to brands, introducing us to the people who make their businesses come to life.

The post Now You See It, Now You Don’t: What B2B Brands Can Do With Ephemeral Content appeared first on Contently.

Ever since, I’ve developed an intense love for simple charts that demonstrate an important point. My new favorite is Poliakov’s Pyramid of Engagement, and I’m super excited to show it to our clients. Why? First, because I’m a huge dork, and second, because it demonstrates the most important part of content strategy. You need a strategy that aligns with one of the precious few things your target audience actually cares about.

If the guiding light of your content strategy is the message you want to dictate to consumers, you are going to fail. Sure, maybe some people will still click on a piece of content and subsequently buy some stuff. But you won’t build true loyalty and trust.

This chart was made way back in 2010 by Sell! Sell!, a creative shop in the UK that has the greatest agency blog I’ve ever read. I love the site because it communicates a simple message: content marketing should either help people enjoy their lives more or do their jobs better. If your content doesn’t do one of those things, it probably sucks.

Some marketers may feel disheartened, but it’s a liberating message once you embrace it.

If you work in B2B, this should makes your job easy. You just need to help your target buyer do their job better. What challenges do they face? What do they need to know to take their careers to the next level? Your job is to answer those questions honestly (which means you can’t just cram your product down their throats). Provide lessons and publish research that’ll teach them something new.

If you’re B2C, you need to focus on topics people love, which can span everything from travel and adventure to cooking and sleeping. (I’m into all of those things, depending on my mood.) If you have a viable consumer product, chances are that it relates to at least one area like that. The challenge then, is figuring out how to tell a story or offer a new piece of information that’s different than what everyone else does.

For this reason—despite popular belief—I think that B2B content marketing is easier than B2C, especially if you’re in an emerging industry or serving a specific group of people who don’t always get the attention they deserve. You have a much better chance of standing out if you’re trying to reach operations directors at large healthcare companies than if you’re trying to reach travelers or fitness buffs.

Work and personal interests don’t have to be mutually exclusive, either. Your industry may be one of your passions. (Case in point, I am writing this at 1:30 a.m. on a Friday night after sitting by the lake with some friends and debating the most promising revenue model for media companies.)

No matter what industry you’re in, though, your content strategy needs to be able to pass the Poliakov Pyramid test. Does your content truly help people live their lives better or do their jobs better? If the answer is no, you need to stop and reevaluate. Or else, your content focus groups just might feel a bit like Clockwork Orange.

The post Poliakov’s Pyramid of Engagement Will Make Your Content Strategy Better appeared first on Contently.

At first glance, the narrative makes sense. Mobile ad spending has surpassed $58 billion this year, accounting for 70 percent of all digital spend, per eMarketer. This “mobile-first” mindset gives consumers the ability to access information wherever they want to research and make purchases. So if you don’t invest in mobile, you risk getting left behind.

But it’s time for us to rethink this blanket advice. Mobile optimization and investment may be necessary for a lot of brands, but for B2B companies, its importance has been wildly overstated.

To debunk this misconception, let’s talk about the desktop computer. Sure, everyone owns a smartphone, but that doesn’t mean everyone uses it for business purposes. So while smartphones are great for scrolling through social media and looking up directions, desktops still play a huge role in research. Forrester found that only 20 percent of B2B web traffic originated from mobile devices, per the Internet Retailer Q2 2016 B2B Sell-Side Online Survey.

On Search Engine Journal, writer Clark Boyd dug deeper into this topic by looking at the Consumer Barometer, a survey tool. According to the research, more than twice as many people in the U.S. rely on computers over smartphones for product information.

Workplace email habits could have a big impact on the mobile divide. This summer, Adobe released survey data that shows a majority of professionals prefer to use desktops or laptops to check work email. For personal email, however, 59 percent of people primarily use smartphones, compared to just 35 percent of people who use desktops or laptops.

So if you work in B2B, think twice the next time you see a headline or an article touting the rise of mobile. Desktops and laptops aren’t going anywhere.

The post Why Your B2B Team Is Investing Too Much in Mobile appeared first on Contently.

Every year since 2010, the Content Marketing Institute has put out one of those studies on the state of content marketing. CMI’s analysis of B2B content marketing is a prime example of how to get earned media. Positive statistics demand coverage and dominate headlines. But I wanted to dig deeper to draw out more unorthodox insights from the report—and not all of them are good.

Here are 4 takeaways that examine the state of B2B content marketing and point out some areas where marketers need to improve.

Centralized content teams are the norm

Traditionally, content teams have been siloed from the rest of the marketing department. The idea of a centralized content operation, however, is something analysts like SiriusDecisions have been advocating for years. And according to CMI’s study, that centralization is currently taking place across the B2B space.

Overall, 92 percent of respondents have some form of a centralized team running content marketing. That data point is a big deal, suggesting that brands are making alignment and organizational efficiency priorities. (It’s worth noting, though, that the individual answers may be a bit flawed since a “centralized content marketing group that works with multiple brands/product lines throughout the organization” overlaps a lot with “small (or one-person) marketing/content marketing team [that] serves the entire organization.”)

This graph struck me as an interesting starting point for further research. I’d be curious to know what kind of content these teams create: Are they mostly producing content for a blog? Or are they also heavily involved in sales enablement, event content, customer success content, and so on? Perhaps that’s something for next year’s study.

More content needs to map to the buyer’s journey

We talk a lot about the importance of mapping content to the buyer’s journey, and we’re not alone. Particularly in B2B marketing, ensuring that you have content for the right audience at the right time is key to achieving content marketing success.

Yet, per CMI’s study, only 41 percent of B2B marketers claim to create content based on the buyer’s journey. That’s particularly surprising given that 72 percent of respondents are concerned with how content impacts customer experience. Since customer experience is largely based on a buyer’s journey through the sales funnel, mapping content to each step should be an important part of ensuring a great experience.

B2B marketers aren’t using tech to manage email

If your inbox looks anything like mine, it shouldn’t be surprising that email is the most used content distribution tactic in B2B. Ninety-three percent of B2B marketers use email to distribute content. (Social media is right behind at 92 percent.) And 74 percent of respondents named email as the most effective distribution format, 29 percent above the next closest method (blogs).

Despite this, only 70 percent of B2B marketers are using email tools to manage their distribution. That gap of 23 percentage points is concerning because B2B marketers shouldn’t be wasting time and resources by manually creating email lists and sending out messages without any insight into their performance.

An ROI reckoning is coming

Measuring ROI is one code that plenty of marketers still have trouble cracking. Sixty-five percent of B2B marketers either don’t measure it at all or are “unsure” if they measure the ROI of their content marketing. Incredibly, the most given reason for why is that there isn’t a “formal justification required.” Thirty-eight percent of respondents also admitted that measuring ROI is too difficult.

There’s no getting around that measuring the hard impact of your content requires intensive organizational capabilities and lots of hard work. But the marketers who aren’t even trying to figure out how to track ROI won’t stick around much longer.

At some point in every competent business, executives will question the marketing budget, and content marketers will have to justify their work. If those 38 percent of B2B marketers aren’t prepared, they risk losing everything they’ve built. And if that happens, don’t be surprised if this normally rosy study suddenly gets much bleaker.

The post The 4 Most Important Takeaways From CMI’s B2B Content Marketing Study appeared first on Contently.

“People tend to think about content marketing or branded content as longform advertising,” Seetharaman, the global managing director of marketing solutions, told me. “You really have to look from the outside in. What problem are you trying to help somebody solve and do you have a right to play? Do you have a real answer for that problem? If you can’t deliver on that promise, you have no right to play there for a brand.”

At the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity this summer, I sat down with Seetharaman to talk about the best B2B content brands, Snapchat vs. Instagram, and the vanity metrics to avoid. Check out the full interview below, which was created as part of our Accountable Innovation Series in partnership with Magnet Media, an industry-leading global strategic studio.

Transcript

Joe Lazauskas: Welcome to Accountable Innovation at Cannes. I’m Joe Lazauskas, Contently’s editor-in-chief, and I am here with Mina Seetharaman, the head of global marketing solutions for The Economist, which is one of the more impressive job titles I’ve gotten to say this week. Thank you so much for joining us here in the Index Exchange Suite.

Mina Seetharaman: There are definitely worse places to be than here with this view, I’ve got to tell you.

Joe: I know, and we haven’t even gotten any frosé yet, which is going to be our treat for getting through this interview.

Mina: Alright, I’m looking forward to it.

Joe: So we’ve got you in the hot seat, ask some questions about content marketing, about where you see the industry going. Are you ready?

Mina: Sure.

Joe: Alright. Who’s the best brand at creating content?

Mina: I work mostly with B2B brands. My two favorites are GE, not just because they were a client, but also because they’re willing to experiment on different platforms for lots of audiences and not afraid to just throw away things that don’t work and keep experimenting. And IBM because they have to traverse a lot of audiences at the C suite but also in the everyday population, and I think they do a good job of picking the right content for the right audience.

Joe: Two of my favorite too, GE Reports is incredible.

Mina: Yeah, that’s really good.

Joe: And still got to shout out my boy Tomas Kellner who runs that. Snapchat or Instagram?

Mina: I’m not terribly visual, I’m going to go with Snapchat, and I think it’s because a lot of publishers are doing interesting things on that platform. I think the key thing with any of the platforms is to figure out the best way to use your content and adapt it for that platform and really understanding it. And I think we’ve seen some great engagement with The Economist Discover.

Joe: What do you think is the key to creating branded content that actually maps back to delivering real business results and not just vanity metrics?

Mina: I think one of the big issues is that—and this is partly because we look at traditional metrics for a lot of things when we should maybe be thinking about the right way of measuring things—is people tend to think about content marketing or branded content as longform advertising. You really have to look from the outside in, so especially in the business space, what problem are you trying to help somebody solve and do you have a right to play? Do you have a real answer for that problem? If you can’t deliver on the promise that you’re making, you have no right to play there for a brand. I think that if you understand what your audience needs, promise them something that you can actually deliver on, and then really deliver it, I think you’ll see performance go up significantly.

Joe: And thinking about how you measure that impact, what are your three go-to marketing metrics?

Mina: So unfortunately, I think a lot of clients come to us wanting reach, and I always say that reach only matters if you’re reaching the right people and think of it as a really relative metric. If you have a very niche audience, you might not care about 100,000 views, and you might want the right 50 people to sign a one million dollar check. And then finally, am I helping to move the needle on some business metric. One of the trends that we’re seeing a lot at our panel this week, at Wake Up The Economist, is the idea that a CMO has to care about the business first and marketing second. And I think that we sometimes forget that in the marketing space. So remembering that we have to move the needle on the business is a key metric.

Joe: And now last question, hard-hitting one, we’ve got two days left here. What are the odds that we get a tweet from Trump about Cannes?

Mina: Unfortunately, I think they’re a lot higher than I would like, but I’m really hoping that that’s maybe around the 2 percent mark, but he’s surprised me before, so who knows what’ll happen.

The post The Best B2B Content, According to The Economist’s Top Content Marketer appeared first on Contently.

Clearly, the strategy field is thriving, and plenty of people who used to promote themselves as marketers, writers, editors, etc. now want to be become strategists. But since the title can encompass a lot of responsibilities, people often ask a basic question: What, exactly, do content strategists do?

At Contently, our strategy team helps prospects and clients build the blueprint for connecting content to their business goals. Since our strategic expertise is a crucial part of how we close deals, we asked Kristen Poli, Contently’s manager of strategy services, to break down her day of meetings, pitch decks, and data analysis.

8:45 a.m.

After waking up, getting ready, and drinking a requisite iced coffee, I arrive at the office a little before nine to prep for the marketing team’s weekly standup. Content strategists can collaborate with every part of the business, but our strategy team falls under the umbrella of the marketing department.

During the standup, I hear what everyone is working on for the week, which makes it easy to identify areas we can help each other out. Editors are working on upcoming webinars and copy for sales enablement assets. Sales development reps mention brands on their radar. This week, I’m focused on two key tasks: completing a set of strategy proposals and preparing to launch a new content strategy workshop. The workshop will give companies a chance to learn how to analyze the tone of their current content and determine if they should shift their brand voice to reach their target audience.

10:00 a.m.

Today gets off to a quick start. I take some time after our standup to answer high-priority emails, but I also have to review a competitive analysis deck I created for a B2B technology client. Competitive analysis is one of my favorite parts of my job because clients really grasp the importance of content strategy when they can pinpoint exactly where they have an advantage over their rivals. An added bonus: I end up learning a lot about different niche industries like 3D printing, digital health, genomic tech, and data mining.

11:15 a.m.

After my presentation, I work on a formal strategy proposal with a salesperson. The client in question already uses our technology, but it needs help creating a solid content strategy that can guide the company’s marketing team long term. I’ve already had multiple phone consultations with our point of contact about the direction of the strategy and feel confident that we can provide exactly what they need.

For this proposal, we’re offering a large package of competitive research, a fully formed strategic plan, and UX/UI recommendations for the company’s site. In addition to talking about the nuances of our offerings, I spend a lot of time describing our data-driven methodology. Getting this right is important because our method helps us stand out from the big creative agencies competing against us for business.

12:15 p.m.

Lunchtime. A few co-workers and I head to By Chloe, a delicious vegan place with shockingly short lines (a rare find in SoHo). We head back to the office to eat, talk about what we did on the weekend, and fulfill millennial stereotypes as we try to convince each other to watch our favorite docuseries.

1:00 p.m.

To kick off the afternoon, I set aside an hour to begin the research I need to create a content assessment. We use data at every stage of the strategic development process, so we have a very particular way of collecting information before making recommendations.

While it’s difficult to measure content success or understand a competitive landscape without access to proprietary analytics, publicly available search and social data can give us clues as to what’s working and what’s not in a particular niche. That means no day goes by without time spent manipulating massive Excel spreadsheets. As a result, my deskmates always know who to ask when they need help with pivot tables and macros. I usually start with SEO by investigating what keywords a client currently ranks for organically. Then I suggest alternative keywords they should prioritize in future content.

2:00 p.m.

I step out of the office for a walk with Alli Manning, the director of our talent network, and her lovable dog Grace, to talk about ways we could train freelancers on basic strategy principles. I consider it an important part of my job to educate the rest of the organization on content strategy best practices, but this is an especially ambitious goal since Contently works with thousands of freelancers.

One important topic I want to cover is the relationship between business goals, content objectives, and key performance indicators. For example, if a client wants to prioritize revenue generation, I’d advise the marketing team to focus on lead generation. They should hold themselves accountable to specific metrics like search traffic and return visitor rate. Clients know what their business goals are for creating content, but they don’t always know to carry them out in a documented plan.

2:45 p.m.

Next up is the strategy team’s weekly meeting. We use this time to decide who will work on upcoming content strategies, workshops, proposals, and related projects for clients and prospects. I discuss my goals for the new workshop launch and let the team know how they can help.

We also share any helpful updates—tools we want to demo, best practices we like, and any valuable research we find that may be useful for our clients or our research process. This week, we’re talking a lot about Newswhip, a social media monitoring tool that provides great data on content performance and distribution.

Near the end of the meeting, we dedicate some time to discussing external feedback about our work with clients and prospects. Our presentations include a lot of data visualizations, and I’ve started hearing requests for the raw data behind our charts. To give clients more information upfront, we decide to add additional reference data in the appendices of our presentations.

3:30 p.m.

I trade my sandals for heels and head uptown with a salesperson for a pitch meeting with a prospect. The goal is to answer introductory questions about our strategy services and provide some initial competitive analysis that intrigues the people in the room. (This approach get them thinking about the efficacy of their current strategy… if they have one in place.)

This prospect happens to be a large global enterprise struggling because of duplicated content across regions. Our salesperson explains how Contently’s technology can help streamline their content creation process and increase transparency within the organization. Though I’m confident I already identified the company’s challenges during my prep, I still ask a ton of questions about its target audience, distribution strategy, search strategy, and optimization process. This way, my team can make more prescriptive recommendations the next time we meet.

5:30 p.m.

Once the pitch meeting ends, I’m on my way back to my apartment. At home, I’ll answer some emails that I missed during the day, sign off, then get ready to do it all again tomorrow.

We’re building our content strategy team and looking for data-driven strategists with experience building breakthrough content strategies inside enterprise organizations. Check out our open roles here.

The post A Day in the Life of a Content Strategist appeared first on Contently.

According to a report from market research firm Demand Metric, events are second only to email when it comes to the most effective B2B marketing tactics.

Per the report, 85 percent of B2B marketers say events are either “critical” or “very important” for accelerating the sales pipeline and driving revenue. In total, events make up about a fifth of marketing spend at B2B companies, according to Forrester Research and Boston Consulting Group.

It makes sense that there is still plenty of confidence in event marketing. Talk to any salespeople and they’ll tell you about the significance of face-to-face sales opportunities. The B2B space cares just as much about relationships as it does hard numbers, and events are a critical way to foster them.

But that doesn’t mean B2B events aren’t affected by the digital revolution. A recent study from eMarketer shows that a new events technology stack makes all those conferences and salons more effective than ever.

Data and ROI

It’s not uncommon for event marketers to be siloed from the rest of the marketing department. The events team gathers opportunities from sales, slots them into a spreadsheet, and then salespeople try to influence prospects and close deals during the event.

That process leads to a lot of informality. The events team can take credit for any closed opportunity that attended a conference, while salespeople are just happy to have made commission. As a result, if business is going well, both sides may be content with the status quo instead of pushing to re-evaluate and improve.

Most marketers already use CRMs like Salesforce to track and attribute deal accelerations to events. But there’s plenty of room to build a data-driven process. As of this spring, 15 percent of decision-makers don’t integrate their event data into a CRM at all.

The event stack has the power to become much more sophisticated. Marketers are increasingly beginning to track as much as they can about the event, not just deals won and lost. For example, tracking lead quality of your function offers a much more nuanced view of how to improve future events.

Integrating events into marketing automation platforms like Marketo is also becoming more common. Most B2B marketers understand the importance of quick follow-ups, and marketing automation platforms can speed up post-event sales touches and make them more personalized.

Another important practice that’s often overlooked is monitoring the performance of landing pages on your site. Optimizing landing pages for conversions is key, but so is tracking conversion all the way from landing pages to lead generation.

This all goes to show that events, despite being in-person, and should be tightly integrated into the rest of the marketing technology stack.

Beacons and the IoT

As back-end software improves the business case for events, the Internet of Things and other advanced technology is also transforming how marketers track attendee experience inside the conference hall.

Take Content Marketing World. This year, according to Cathy McPhillips, VP of marketing at CMI, attendees will now scan into sessions using radio-frequency identification (RFID) badges. As a result, CMI can get accurate views of who attended what and see which sessions were most popular—a gold mine of data for salespeople and the events team.

Other companies use apps in a similar way to track attendee flow and gather information on attendees. Of course, not everyone will download the app; the data won’t be a complete picture of every attendee. But new technologies like wearable beacons should simplify tracking the attendee experience easier. South by Southwest already uses the tech to gather massive amounts of data on when and where people go during the event.

This system benefits attendees as well. The beacons can help them find a path to the next session, provide personalized recommendations, and even connect them with fellow attendees for networking.

If it all sounds a bit creepy, well, you’re not necessarily wrong. The question for marketers is whether they can balance improving the attendee experience with asking for more data. If they can nail that balance, they can make a longstanding cornerstone of B2B marketing more powerful than ever.

The post How Technology Is Revolutionizing B2B Events appeared first on Contently.

According to a recent study from DiscoverOrg, a sales intelligence platform, not many B2B salespeople are successfully walking this tightrope. The company, along with researcher Steve W. Martin, surveyed more than 230 decision-makers across industries and departments about their experience with B2B sales processes.

Judging by the results, one takeaway is clear: Buyers aren’t happy with B2B salespeople. Overall, only 35 percent of buyers have a “favorable view” of salespeople. And only 54 percent said that salespeople they met with could “clearly explain how their solution positively impacts” their business.

Interestingly, approval levels change dramatically depending on whom you ask. Departments that are more risk-averse—such as accounting, engineering, and IT—were much more likely to rate salespeople as “poor” than marketing departments.

The report wasn’t all bad news for salespeople, however. Let’s take a look at a few other takeaways marketers and salespeople should know.

Sell to the “dominant influencer”

When dealing with a large organization or a complicated deal process, salespeople can get caught up trying to please everyone they meet. But DiscoverOrg’s research shows that about 90 percent of the time, you really only need to convince one decision-maker. If you get that person on your side, closing the deal becomes much easier.

Savvy salespeople know this already, but it bears repeating since they’re still going to communicate with multiple people during any sales process. Hone in on finding and convincing the person controlling the decision, don’t turn off everyone else, and you’ll set yourself up for success.

Cost tops functionality (most of the time)

One of the reasons B2B companies constantly strive to be market leaders is to simplify the sales process. Once a brand dominates all of its competition, the “market leader” label implies legitimacy and success. For salespeople, throwing around that phrase is supposed to make it easier to sell.

In the study, however, market leadership is only part of the buyer’s equation. Of course, there’s also cost, which can matter more than you think. For instance, 62 percent of respondents said instead of paying top dollar, they would rather buy a product with “85 percent of the functionality at 80 percent of the cost” of a top brand.

These preferences can vary depending on the industry. Prestige companies that charge a lot tend to appeal to the fashion and finance verticals, while industries like healthcare and manufacturing are less enamored by the big names.

Buyers like different styles

There are different ways for salespeople to approach a prospect. Some like to get to know the buyer and tailor the sale to specific needs. Others like to be more assertive, pushing their vision of what they think the buyer needs. Some may even present themselves as advisors, ensuring that they’re committed to helping the customer in any way possible.

According to the research, there is no “right” way to approach a buyer. Forty percent prefer a salesperson who listens and matches to need, 30 percent prefer to be challenged and prescribed, and 30 percent like when salespeople operate as a long-term partner. If you’re a salesperson, that means it’s critical to find out which approach the buyer prefers as quickly as possible.

Your website is really important

No one buys a product without doing research, especially in the B2B space. The first place people go is often your website—and DiscoverOrg’s research shows that it’s an extremely influential part of the buying process.

Only 2 percent of buyers said that a company’s website doesn’t influence their vendor evaluation. If it wasn’t obvious before, B2B marketing teams should always make their websites a priority by doing things like refreshing copy, updating design, and checking for broken links.

Buyer’s remorse isn’t usually the salesperson’s fault

Buyer’s remorse can happen in every sales situation, but it can be particularly painful in B2B. Someone buys an expensive product, then something goes wrong. Perhaps they misunderstood the product, didn’t buy the right features, struggle using it, and so on.

Whatever the reason, 90 percent of respondents claimed their remorse had nothing to do with the salesperson. Instead, it’s often the buyer who made a mistake with research or implementation. Additionally, the product or customer teams can also be at fault for not helping buyers succeed with whatever they purchased.

The data should serve as an important reminder that a lot of the stakes in B2B sales go beyond the scope of the salesperson. For a customer to get value out of a product, a lot of things have to go right, many of which are out of the salesperson’s control. It’s hard to sell a product that doesn’t match up to its messaging, and it’s even harder to make sure that a customer actually puts in the time to use a product correctly.

So perhaps B2B buyers aren’t as displeased with salespeople as they are displeased with the complicated process of purchasing B2B products. Either way, there are a lot of things marketers and salespeople can do to make that 35 percent approval rating rise in the future. And once they do, maybe their jobs will finally get a little easier.

The post Study: B2B Buyers Aren’t Too Happy With Salespeople appeared first on Contently.

The reason for such emphatic coverage is simple: Great stories leave an emotional resin on readers, imprinting them in a way traditional marketing copy does not. But as our CMO likes to remind us, storytelling alone is not a strategy. Plenty of brands are interested in telling stories, but that doesn’t mean everyone is doing it effectively. According to a study by the marketing intelligence company Beckon, 5 percent of all branded content accounts for 90 percent of total engagement.

Since we’re in the midst of a heated battle for consumer attention, we decided to break down our internal data to see how different industries were performing in 2017 across three key metrics: average attention time, engagement rate, and finish rate.

The data revealed some interesting trends. For instance, B2B brands got high marks for average attention time, getting users to stay with their content for more than three minutes at a clip, but the average finish rate for their content was 13 percent. That discrepancy suggests there’s an opportunity for those companies to re-evaluate the length of their content. Readers are clearly hooked, but maybe the stories are too long for a given topic. Writers and editors have the ability to produce something valuable that stems beyond an intriguing headline or lede.

In the infographic below, check out how three industries—finance, B2B, and tech—compare when it comes to performance metrics. Welcome to the Content Performance Games. How do you match up?

The post Infographic: Which Industries Have the Best Content Marketing? appeared first on Contently.

Einstein. Sensai. Watson: Three important words for the future of martech and artificial intelligence. Salesforce’s Einstein launched late last year, Adobe’s Sensai two months later, and IBM and Salesforce announced a partnership to sell their AI together, earlier this month. As an IBM representative told TechCrunch, “Within a few years, every major decision—personal or business—will be made with the help of AI and cognitive technologies.”

However, not everyone is impressed. Henry Schuck, CEO of marketing and sales intelligence platform DiscoverOrg, thinks the AI arms race isn’t a new phenomenon. According to him, many martech companies are just rebranding technology that has been around for years. He isn’t the only one feeling skeptical. In a recent article on The Content Strategist that examined AI hype, Sameer Patel, CEO of the smart automation software company Kahuna, said: “There’s just a lot taking old technology [and] plastering AI on it.”

As artificial intelligence continues to grab headlines, I spoke to Schuck to get his take on evolving skill sets for marketers, where salespeople fit in an automated future, and why some marketers struggle with marketing technology.

I know you’ve expressed some skepticism about artificial intelligence. Do you think it’s going to be a big part of marketing’s future?

I’m certain AI will be a part of marketing’s future. But part of my perspective on this is the way companies use the word “AI.” It’s like a fancy word to describe something that marketers, particularly B2B marketers, have been doing for years now. It’s really just predictive lead scoring.

Marketers have been doing that for the last decade with website tracking and their own leads, all without using AI. It’s really over the last four or five years that there have been dozens of predictive lead scoring companies that have added machine learning to that process. They bring in a bunch of different data elements to help you look at your customer base and then identify which customers are your “A” customers, your “B” customers, your “C” customers, your “D” customers, all based on a complex statistical model that looks at the activities that your customers and non-customers have done. Then they identify what your ideal customer looks like.

So I think it’s interesting that there’s all this buzz around something that’s been around the B2B marketing world a long time.

Do you think in some cases it’s marketing technology companies rebranding something that has already existed, or do you think there actually has been a change in the technology itself?

No, I think they’re rebranding. My guess is, post-Salesforce announcement, the companies in the predictive lead scoring space began to rebrand themselves as companies who are in artificial intelligence.

That would not be too surprising. It seems that happens a lot, not just in marketing, but in technology in general.

Salesforce leads the way on a lot of that. DiscoverOrg was always a platform that was available on the web, but in 2010, when companies got really excited on the idea of the cloud, that’s just what we rebranded as: your data service provider in the cloud, everything in the cloud, all of your tools in the cloud. It was really because that’s when Salesforce was pressing on this cloud thing harder than they ever had before.

Do you think there is going to be a time in the future, say five years from now, when a proper AI technology can really change things?

First and foremost, I don’t think that AI ever fundamentally changes the need for a salesperson. In B2B sales, especially in the mid-market and enterprise side, there is a true skill to what a salesperson is able to do. A salesperson is able to comprehend the needs of a customer, make pattern recognition to what this customer needs compared to another customer, and so on. I don’t think that AI ever gets to a point in the near future when it replaces the art of what a salesperson does.

I don’t think that AI ever fundamentally changes the need for a salesperson.

I think what it will do, and what it’s already doing, is taking away some of the most mundane tasks that sales reps have to do. Calendar management is a place where you can see AI doing a great job.

In our business, we curate high quality information on companies and buyers that sell to companies. We have machine learning that’s built throughout the technology that we use. But one thing that we found is the last five yards, ten yards that you need, machine learning just doesn’t get you there. And sometimes those last yards make all the difference.

When you talk to some marketers and look at studies on how marketers are implementing tech, marketers are having problems with integrating everything and making sure it actually functions. Do you think that’s because marketers are not as technologically savvy as they should be, or is that more the fault of vendors not building products that are easy to use?

It’s two things. One, the industry has changed so quickly that the marketers who have those talents—who know how Marketo interacts with Salesforce, how to do campaign attributions, and how to look at different stages in the sales funnel—the number of people with real experience in that is very few. The entire universe of people who have done marketing attribution at scale is probably a couple hundred people in the United States.

Two, most of the technologies trying to help marketers are pretty new. Plus, the problems that marketers face are rapidly evolving, and the software’s trying to evolve alongside it. But it’s obviously a little bit behind.

With all AI, there are always humans behind these tools, and humans can make mistakes. Do you think there are potential problems where maybe the initial data input isn’t correct or there’s a wrench in the system that messes everything up?

With any AI, any predictive lead scoring, and really any of these analytics tools out there, they are only as good as the data that goes into them. So if you have a predictive lead scoring tool that defines a model and looks at your customer data, it’s entirely dependent on the quality of data that goes in. Once you have a bunch of the wrong contact types or incorrect industry labels, then the model is pretty useless.

With any AI, any predictive lead scoring, and really any of these analytics tools out there, they are only as good as the data that goes into them.

If you talk to any marketer about a predictive lead scoring tool, the biggest project is normalizing the data and filling holes. You spend a lot more time making the data normalized and filling gaps of the data with your own data than you do actually getting the data in and having it do the analysis.

It all comes down to how disciplined you are gathering your data, keeping your data cleansed, and making sure your data is in a format that can be easily translated into multiple systems.

So if you’re an average marketer and maybe you don’t work for the most tech savvy firm, how should you prepare for the increasing automation?

I think what you’re going to continue to see is people in marketing are going to be required to have a real technological skill set that maybe a decade ago they didn’t need to have. They could be creative and artistic and clever and probably get away with being a good marketer, but today’s marketer needs to be data-driven, technology-savvy, and able to pick up new concepts quickly.

If you look at the martech landscape, it’s almost tripled in size in the last three years. There are thousands of new marketing technologies that are coming online. Having a sense of what those things do and how they play in your environment really requires technological savvy.

We did a study where we looked at companies that grow fast and companies that don’t. For the companies that grow fast, one of the top characteristics that they looked for in salespeople that they hire is technological savvy. That contrasts against slow-growth companies that look for experience and discipline. I think it goes to the point that technologically savvy salespeople and marketers are the ones who are able to get the most out of today’s B2B sales marketing world.

This interview has been edited for clarity.

The post ‘Today’s Marketer Needs to Be Data-Driven’: DiscoverOrg CEO Henry Schuck on Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Martech appeared first on Contently.

“Oh, we’re B2B,” someone said. “We don’t think anyone’s looking for our content on Facebook. We only want to use LinkedIn.”

I hear this response meeting after meeting. I get the instinct to assume LinkedIn is the only worthwhile place to pay for content distribution if you’re a B2B company. LinkedIn has incredible ad targeting for B2B brands. When you’re selling a very specific product (say, enterprise content marketing software) to a very specific buyer, it’s incredibly useful to be able to target someone by job title, location, and company. On any other social network, it’s a crapshoot that people will accurately provide that information. On LinkedIn, it’s pretty much required. If I want to target the CMO of Pepsi with an e-book, LinkedIn is the first place I go.

But B2B marketers don’t eschew other social networks just because they love the targeting LinkedIn provides. They also believe users won’t be interested in work-related content on other social networks—particularly Facebook.

From all the data I’ve seen, the idea that people don’t care about B2B content on Facebook is a myth. Our strategy team runs content analysis for hundreds of niche B2B marketing topics each month, and consistently, we see that people love to share work-related content on Facebook. For topics ranging from demand generation marketing to logistics, Facebook accounts for the majority of shares for specialized B2B content.

This trend shouldn’t come as a surprise. Facebook accounts for over 40 percent of all traffic to publisher sites, eclipsing Google. Over 90 percent of all content sharing occurs on Facebook, compared to just 2.5 percent for LinkedIn. It’s the biggest media empire in the world, and people share and consume every kind of content through the Facebook feed—wedding pictures, political analysis, cat videos, and yes, even white papers and articles about the insurance industry.

While Facebook seems like a network that’s separate from our work lives, it’s really not. Think about the people you engage with most on Facebook. You probably see a ton of content from college classmates and coworkers—the people you’ve spent most of your life with since Facebook came on the scene. These also happen to be individuals who likely have similar professional interests. I don’t think twice about sharing a work-related piece about marketing or tech, because half of my “friends” work in marketing or tech.

If you’re still skeptical about using Facebook for content distribution when you already have LinkedIn, consider these two additional reasons: It’s cheap, and the targeting is really good.

The incredible amount of time that people spend on Facebook (50 minutes per day) means that Facebook has a supply of attention that no competitor can match. In most ad campaigns we’ve run for Contently, Facebook is consistently 10 times cheaper than LinkedIn ($0.20 – $1.00 per click on Facebook versus $2.00 – 10.00 on LinkedIn).

This isn’t to say that marketers should ditch LinkedIn. Far from it. As I’ve written before, one of the biggest problems in content marketing is brands don’t allocate enough of their budget to distribution. They create a ton of content, put it on a blog, and expect people to just show up. But they’d be better served creating fewer stories and investing extra money in paid distribution to ensure their target audience actually reads them. Unless you already have a mature audience and dominate the conversation in your industry, you probably want to allocate at least 25 percent of your budget to content distribution.

That means using LinkedIn and Facebook in conjunction. While LinkedIn only accounts for about 2.5 percent of social shares of all content, it still drives at least 25 percent or more of shares for content focused on B2B topics. Clearly, users look for more work-related content when they’re on LinkedIn. The targeting capabilities are especially helpful if you’re running an account-based marketing program. To oversimplify a bit, the strategy mix I usually recommend looks like this:

Top-of-funnel content: Facebook, since it’s a very efficient way to build an audience.

Gated lead-gen and bottom-funnel content: LinkedIn. When the payoff is bigger, the targeting and context make up for the price tag.

This year, B2B marketers need to experiment more aggressively with paid content distribution. But if they view LinkedIn as their only option, they’ll be doing themselves a disservice. Whether you love or hate Zuckerberg’s empire, it’s still one of the most powerful tools content marketers have.

The post B2B Paid Content Distribution: Facebook vs. LinkedIn appeared first on Contently.

Of course, CMI loves playing up that stat because the organization can help you build a strategy. But it is legitimately a problem for marketers—or anyone in business, really—to pursue an initiative without a documented strategy. Otherwise, you’re just shooting in the dark, not knowing if what you’re doing actually works.

CMI’s latest study, which was sponsored by the creative collaboration company Hightail, suggests that marketers are finally getting better at content strategy. Below, you’ll find out why, in addition to five other major takeaways from CMI’s reports on B2B and B2C marketing.

1. Marketers are getting better at documenting content strategy

Both B2B and B2C marketers got better at documenting their strategies this past year. In 2016’s study, 37 percent had a documented strategy, versus 40 percent this year. B2B marketers, meanwhile, improved from 32 percent last year to 37 percent this year.

In both cases, it’s still stupefying that the numbers aren’t higher. As CMI pointed out in last year’s study, more than 50 percent of the most effective marketers have documented strategies. 70 percent (for B2C) and 72 percent (for B2B) said strategy was a factor in improving their success in the past year. Creating one has no downsides yet plenty of benefits.

So what exactly are marketers including in their strategies? The number one element was “a plan to operate content marketing as an ongoing business process, not simply a campaign.”

Overall, marketers seem to find their strategies effective. Nobody said their strategies were “not at all effective,” while more than 80 percent said their strategies were either “moderately effective” or “very effective.”

That’s a testament to how useful strategies are to a content marketing program—now, the question is if the more than half of content marketers without a documented strategy will see the light.

2. Social is the most popular type of content

As mobile usage explodes and the mobile web stagnates, social media has become the best place to reach customers. Not surprisingly, companies are using more social media content than ever.

In general, marketers are planning on creating more content: Only 2 percent said they were expecting to produce less, and 73 (for B2C) and 70 percent (for B2B) said they were planning on creating more compared to last year.

3. But email is king

For B2C marketers, Facebook and email take the top spot when it comes to content distribution. 89 percent of marketers said they use the channels for their content, 26 percent above the closest channel, Twitter.

B2B marketers put email at the top for usage, at 93 percent, followed closely by LinkedIn, at 89 percent.

In terms of pure importance, however, email blasts its competitors out of the water. As the charts above show, no other channel comes close to email’s importance as a distribution channel. That makes sense since email is one of the few channels that provides a loyal, recurring audience that you own. Also, it doesn’t hurt that customer email addresses are key for a variety of martech tools, such as CRMs.

4. Content software is underused

Data collection and analysis are at the heart of digital marketing, which is why analytics tools are the go-to resources for most marketers. Implementing a content marketing program without any analytics software would be like taking a class without any feedback—it would be impossible to know if you’re successful.

However, analytics aside, it’s somewhat amazing how many content marketers don’t use critical tools such as email platforms, calendars, and CMSs. Perhaps they’re sending out email manually, or using a physical calendar tacked to the wall? CMSs are required to publish content, so the fact that only about half of marketers are using them is difficult to square.

No matter the explanation, it’s obvious that software is a big area of improvement for content marketers.

5. Promoted posts are booming

Across B2B and B2C, promoted posts saw big leaps in usage, particularly for B2C, which jumped from 52 percent last year to an incredible 89 percent this year.

Social promotion also took the top spot for effectiveness according to B2C marketers, while B2B marketers put it four percentage points behind search engine marketing (SEM). It’s safe to assume that much of these gains are a result of recent targeting improvements introduced by Facebook, LinkedIn, and their ilk.

6. Brand awareness and website traffic are still top goals

Even though some marketers are obsessed with finding one-to-one ROI, plenty of others still want brand awareness more than anything. Even B2B marketers, whose ultimate goal is always direct sales, named brand awareness a key content marketing goal.

So how are marketers tracking these goals? Website traffic, mainly: 73 percent of B2C marketers named it their top metric, versus 78 percent for B2B. Website traffic was also named the main metric for providing “truly measurable results of content marketing efforts” by both B2C and B2B marketers.

That’s somewhat surprising because website traffic can be unsophisticated and lean on the side of vanity. For B2B marketers, one would think lead generation would be tops (though “sales” and “sales lead quality” did take second and third).

Perhaps the biggest takeaway of all, however, is that a significant portion of marketers don’t measure ROI at all: 25 percent of B2C marketers and 28 percent of B2B marketers aren’t tracking ROI. It’s baffling that B2B marketers measure ROI less than B2C marketers, considering how much easier it is (and considering that lead generation was named the most-used metric).

It’s obvious from the report that—despite certain improvements—content marketers still have plenty of room to grow.

[Correction: An earlier version of this article used data from CMI’s report that was released last year. All figures have been updated to reflect data from this year’s report.]

The post The 6 Most Important Takeaways From CMI’s Annual Study appeared first on Contently.

According to a new infographic from WebpageFX, 80 percent of B2B social media leads come from LinkedIn. The visitor-to-lead conversion rate on LinkedIn is 2.74 percent, compared to 0.77 percent on Facebook and 0.69 percent on Twitter. In fact, over half of the people on LinkedIn don’t even use Twitter. Perhaps that’s because they’re primarily looking for industry insights and news, which they expect to find on a network dedicated to professionals.

However, LinkedIn’s 450 million users aren’t just looking for news—they’re also looking to buy. As the infographic shows, 74 percent of B2B buyers use the platform to research purchasing decisions, and 44 percent have found new vendors on LinkedIn.

Evidently, there are plenty of opportunities for B2B marketers to reach engaged audiences. But how do you make the most of those opportunities? To start, you might consider topics that do best on LinkedIn, including career management, workplace psychology, and talent management. It’s also best to post content on weekdays between 8 a.m. and 6 p.m., when most people are looking for resources to help them succeed in the workplace.

For more tips on LinkedIn marketing, check out the full infographic below.

The post Infographic: A Marketer’s Guide to Posting on LinkedIn appeared first on Contently.