The Guide to Content Marketing Success

Is your content getting the attention it deserves?

What you’ll learn from this guide:

Why it’s absolutely essential that your marketing strategy includes content

How to make the best use of the content that you’re currently producing

Why a large portion of your marketing budget should be allocated to content

Quality content educates and engages prospects. It can help to greatly reduce the friction of converting them to customers.

The right content presented at the right time helps your prospects and customers embrace your company more deeply.

By proactively answering questions, even before the prospect knows what to ask, your business is seen as the expert– with you as the thought leader.

Quality content also helps you attract prospects by increasing your position in search engines. Google and other search engines reward sites with quality content and diminish websites that only offer light or click-bait content.

Content that speaks to the pain points prospects have, and demonstrates a deep understanding of options and solutions, can only be developed with purposeful effort.  It does demand investment, but that investment has a return because you are developing marketing assets that can be leveraged and reused.

75% of B2B buyers report that content has a significant impact on their buying decisions and the selection of winning vendors. (Source: Demand Gen 2017 B2B Buyers Survey)
Your firm can increase conversion, revenue, and retention by concentrating on content.

Without content your marketing efforts sputter, stall, and eventually fail. However, content marketing has been described as complicated and hard to execute successfully. That does not have to be the case.

Technology consulting companies have a natural source of content, but it’s often ignored or under-appreciated. Your expertise and project successes are a virtual goldmine of insights, unique perspectives, and sought-after knowledge that your audience will not only appreciate but find incredibly valuable.

Content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing and generates about 3 times as many leads. (Source: Demand Metric)

content is the fuel FOR your

marketing engine

Sections

01 – Quality Content Leads to Success
02 – The Types of Content You Need
03 – Maximizing Your Content Value
04 – The Intersection of Content and CX
05 – Why Content Planning is Vital
06 – Content Contributes to Sales Success
01 Good content leads to success

Why content can determine your success

Content is one of the most versatile assets of your marketing system.  It’s a unique representation of your firm and how your unique experiences and skills benefit the customers you serve. Think of it as an asset that can be repurposed into multiple formats.

content is

a strategic asset
But the real value of content comes from its impact on customers. According to Google, B2B buyers and influencers do 12 searches prior to visiting a specific brand’s website. That should give you an idea of just how much content they see.

Volume quality– not quantity– should be the goal of your brand. In 2017, 97% of B2B buyers that responded to a Demand Gen survey indicated that the most popular type of content was focused content that lays out a formula for success.  When your prospects and customers consume your content it should be engaging, informative, and valuable to them.

 
Content is the Fuel of Your Marketing System

How Content Helps You Educate Your Audience

How Content Illustrates Your Firm’s Difference

3 Reasons Why Content is the Key to Winning the SEO Game (coming soon)

How to Determine if You Have the Right Content (coming soon)

02 The types of content you need

Let’s talk about what your firm needs.

There are numerous types of content that your firm could use to connect with an ideal customer. The key to success, then, is knowing what the exact type of content that your ideal customer wants to consume is.

Valens Point emphasizes strategy in order to identify the message that your content needs to send, the audience it’s written for, and the channels that will get it in front of said audience. Without a strategy in place, you’re likely to waste valuable time and energy producing content without a purpose.

Strategically planned and written white paper and case study content can be reused as a video, an infographic, a SlideShare presentation, and numerous social media posts.

  • white papers 82% 82%
  • webinars 78% 78%
  • case studies 73% 73%
  • ebooks 67% 67%
  • infographics 66% 66%
  • blog posts 66% 66%
Buyers look mostly to white papers (82% of a recent Demand Gen survey) for data and analysis, followed by webinars (78%), and case studies (73%) to make purchasing decisions. Close behind are eBooks (67%), infographics (66%), and blog posts (66%).

And since they also report viewing three to five pieces of content before engaging with your sales team, you should be thinking strategically about what content to produce.

Audiences are interested

in a variety of content

Do you use the right mix of content types?

Download our Content Type Worksheet and compare the number you are using against what successful B2B content marketers indicate is their number.
03 Maximizing your content

How can you get the most out of your firm’s content?

Content is only useful if your target audience sees it.  Therefore, your distribution plan should include the channels through which your target market and ideal customers consume content. That includes your blog, social media accounts, and email.  Without distribution, your ideal customer may never see your content.

Content is a

Strategic Asset
McKinsey research shows that, on average, a B2B customer will regularly use six different interaction channels throughout the buying decision journey.  Having multiple content types for your firm’s strategic content will allow you to utilize multiple channels, including your website, SEO, email, social media, and in-person interactions.

Systemizing the use of your content will ensure that it has the best chance of being found and consumed by your target audience.

Content Marketing Self-Assessment

Take our 10 question Content Marketing Self Assessment to determine if you need changes to your content marketing approach.
04 The intersection of content & CX

Let’s talk about how they’re connected.

Customer experience (CX) is a vital component of increased engagement and sales success.  A well-designed customer experience increases your conversion rates and helps to retain customers. It includes providing the right content, at the right point in the customers’ buying process. Dimension Data says that 84% of organizations working to improve their customer experience report an increase in revenue.  Meaning that a concentration of customer experience and content has a decided return on investment.
If increased revenue wasn’t enough to prompt you to action on CX, consider this: companies that have effective omni-channel engagement (meaning the same experience and content regardless of channel) keep 89% of their customers, compared to just 33% of those with poor omni-channel experience. (Source: Aberdeen Group)

Customer Experience

Increases Revenue
A Winning Combination: Content and CX

4 Content and CX Improvements Your Audience Will Appreciate 

The Best Content Perspective: What you Prospect Needs. (Coming Soon)

05 Why content planning is vital

Want to increase conversions?

Establishing a content strategy.

Customer experience and great content demands precise writing, strong strategy, and a deep understanding of the pain points your prospects face on a day-to-day basis.  That requires a concentrated effort. But, the concentration pays off according to CMI: B2B marketers with a documented strategy are more likely to consider themselves effective.

Quality Content and CX

Increase Conversions
(Coming Soon)

The Key to Content Planning Success: CX

The 5 Things You Need to Create a Content Marketing Plan

Establishing the Content Marketing Budget (coming soon)

 

Content Planning Resource Checklist

Download our free Content Planning Resource Checklist to determine if you have what you need to begin your content planning process.
06 Content Contributes to Sales Success

Your Sales Team Will Love Quality Content.

When you begin to integrate content marketing and your sales teams you’ll discover how valuable content truly is.

Handing off leads to the sales team will become better organized and productive.

The sales team will have an understanding of the customer’s journey, what’s they have used to educate themselves, and can refer to content the customer has consumed to validate the quality of leads and readiness to take next steps.

The sales team will also have an arsenal of conversion-oriented content like case studies and value recognition tools.

Integrating Content and Sales

will accelerate you success
How sales teams can use content (coming soon)

3 ways to encourage your sales team to use content (coming soon)

How Sales teams can contribute to the blog (without writing anything) (coming soon)

 

 

Valens Point Content Offers:

The Topic Expert Content Program
The Topic Expert Content Program works with your business to identify a detailed and comprehensive topic that when fully described in articles, video, visual content, and implemented in the way Google loves, will get you more traffic, higher search engine ranking, and topic authority. You provide your prospects with the information they need to know about your industry and making a purchase decision.

Need More Info?

Want More?

Our blog contains more content marketing articles.

Content eBook

Use our free content eBook to turn your content into your greatest marketing asset.

About Valens Point

We help early-stage tech companies accelerate growth by building brand credibility, establishing repeatable lead generation, and supporting sales and partner teams. The result — effective marketing up and running in a fraction of the time it would take to recruit, hire, and train an internal marketing team.