4 Tips for Great Content Marketing

1. First up is analytics, which should be attached to everything when possible.

As I mentioned, delivering useful content to potential leads is only the first step – the analytics on how they interacted with that content can be a marketer’s most powerful ammunition. Audience behavior can be transformed into data that is fed into CRM and marketing automation tools that then enable marketers to follow up with customers in a personalized manner. In fact, the combination of webinar and marketing analytics, for example, can significantly improve lead qualification and inform every facet of your marketing program – including content marketing, demand generation and social media.

 

2. Businesses should also deliver a consistent message to their audiences.

While content should be personalized and customized depending on the channel, it is important that the core message remain unchanged. Clear goals, a central narrative and a distinct voice as a campaign is launched provide the foundation for a successful ongoing effort.

3. Next, organizations should recycle what they’ve created.

Content is expensive to create; therefore, it is foolish to only use it once. Repurposing content can be the easiest way to increase its value and ROI. For example, a marketer can take a webcast video and redistribute it across various channels. It can be posted in its full form on the company’s YouTube channel, and snippets of the video can be tweeted, added to a website and included in an executive’s blog post. In this example, we have one piece of content, distributed across four distinct channels. This increases views of the video, broadening the brand’s reach and the content’s value (more on content recycling here).

4. Finally, timing is of the utmost importance.

This will determine exactly what type of content you serve up to your prospects and when. Marketers need to understand where the customer is in the buying cycle and deliver appropriate content accordingly. From the level of engagement and overall interaction with different pieces of content, businesses can accurately qualify leads. For example, if they have downloaded a white paper that gives a brief overview of a company, they are in the beginning of the buying cycle and should be nurtured. On the other hand, if a lead is attending various webinars and asking specific questions on functionality and pricing, it is safe to assume that it is a “hot” lead.