In the comprehensive 11th Annual Content Marketing Survey recently conducted by Content Marketing Institute (CMI) and MarketingProfs, only 31% of respondents said that their organization had been "very successful with content marketing."
Why is successful content as rare as it is?
Business trends have changed enormously in the last year. So has the customer journey. The environment for successful communication has deteriorated, and the importance of successful content marketing has skyrocketed.
The pandemic has simply changed everything.
So let us get to the point! What are successful marketers doing? Download the full study... or simply check out our three key take-aways (below.)
3 Key Take-Aways
- Top Performers are Making Sure Their Content is Reaching the Right Audience!
When attempting to optimize your marketing campaigns, measurement is your best ally. It is crucial to use key performance indicators (KPI) because they will afford you absolute clarity in seeing the effectiveness of your current campaign.
When you can measure and analyze your level of success, you’ll be able to adjust your spending to increase visibility or modify/replace content that isn’t connecting with your audience. - Write Blog Articles and Follow an Editorial Calendar.
Blogging and following a publishing schedule is an excellent way to build brand awareness and increase organic traffic. Writing articles that provide relevant and valuable content to your target audience is a perfect way to create more possibilities for customers to interact and for you to develop and nourish strong relationships.
The editorial calendar gives you many advantages. First, a well-received piece of content becomes an asset that will help drive new business. You’ll be creating content regularly, which will allow you to send your well-received content to new potential prospects. Remember, companies who reach out to you are looking for a solution, and sending potential customers valuable information will help establish you as an industry leader. - The Organization's Content Marketing is Sophisticated and Mature
Intelligent content creation will take some time to develop. To create a piece of sophisticated content, it’s necessary to have an in-depth understanding of your target audience. For example, you should know your potential customers’ pain points, the things that motivate them, their interests, and buying behaviors.
Creating an accurate buying persona and leveraging that persona helps guide your team regarding appropriate messaging framework and content categories that would be most helpful for your customer.
We stress the importance of understanding buying behavior. For many companies, there are windows of time in which contacting them would simply be an effort in building awareness. Building awareness is an excellent practice, and a previously produced email or free E-Book costs nothing to send out. However, we believe your plan is to make stronger connections that lead to business relationships. In that case, you’ll want to have an understanding of the appropriate time to send information for awareness and the appropriate send information combined with a sales strategy.
If you’re looking to deploy successful content marketing initiatives, BayCreative can help. We’re experts at creating virtual and digital content for B2B and have done so for clients like Salesforce, Cisco, ServiceNow, DocuSign, Palo Alto Networks, Twitter, Airship, Google, and more!
Look at all the things that evolved in 2020 that you want to keep, change, or stop doing. Then ask yourself how you might want to change content marketing to prepare for whatever comes next. If BayCreative can help, please let us know.
Stay healthy!
-- Scott, Arne and Team BayCreative
