Resource
Believe it or not, it’s already time to plan strategy and budgets for 2016. But as your marketing team turns its attention to the new year, don’t ignore the last few months of 2015. They may have a meaningful impact on how you should approach your marketing strategy for the year ahead.
How will the following content marketing trends affect your plans for 2016?
1) The growth of live streaming video
Earlier this year, 76 percent of B2B marketers reported that they would use video in their content marketing in 2015. Meanwhile, consumer demand for video content is clear: video has comprised over half of all mobile data traffic since 2012. With video increasingly a part of both the B2B and healthcare marketing ecosystem, innovative marketers are continually looking for ways to set their video content apart.
One way to do so is to use tools for live streaming video to provide a real-time view into your operations and innovations. From the buzzworthy new options like Meerkat and Periscope to enterprise-level event-streaming services like Livestream, live-streaming is everywhere, and companies from NASCAR to Ralph Lauren are recognizing its worth. But what live video demands more than anything else is an event or occurrence that’s engaging and worthwhile enough to be streamed. So as you plan your video strategy for the rest of 2015 and into 2016, consider what you can offer a streaming audience. Whether it’s broadcasting a new product launch or an exclusive AMA (ask me anything) interview with an expert, you need to make engaging video an integral part of your digital approach today.
2) Interactive stories
Interactive stories are one of the most exciting new content developments as of late, and they’re not just useful for branded media. Great interactive content, whether branded or unbranded, makes use of graphics that viewers can manipulate, such as photographs that change as they are moused over or graphs that highlight particular data points or trends depending on where the viewer clicks. Interactive content frequently incorporates a variety of media, from text to audio to video, to tell one seamless story in multiple engaging formats.
As with all marketing content, interactive stories should be educational and offer value to the viewer. This style of content takes audience engagement to a next level, creating an immersive experience that no single content form could achieve alone.
3) Episodic content
From the serialized novels of the nineteenth century to the television cliffhangers of today, a good story keeps people coming back for more. On the nonfiction side, gripping investigative reporting can keep people invested in a story over the course of weeks or even months. So why not strive to produce marketing content that encourages that type of loyalty?
Brands have experimented with multi-part and episodic content for a while now, but we predict that in the rest of 2015, we’ll see more brands put more resources into producing this type of content. The key? Creating a human connection that will encourage your prospects to seek out the next installment. Consider: what stories can your brand tell that will engage your leads that deeply, and how can you break them down into engaging stories that keep leads coming back for more?
For more on interactive stories and episodic content, take a look at Content Standard’s “6 Content Marketing Trends to Help Plan Your 2016 Budget.”
As you look to the year ahead, consider how best to build your brand with our white paper, 10 simple truths about strong brands:
Download white paper
Resource
Marketers, welcome to the last quarter of 2015. It’s time to look back at the data from your 2015 campaigns, and it’s also time to ask yourself what needs to change to improve marketing ROI for the rest of this year and as you transition into 2016.
To help you, we’re trying something a little different in today’s blog. We’ve drawn up a list of twenty essential questions to ask yourself and your team as you prepare to develop next year’s marketing strategy.
Data
- What metrics are we focusing on, and what do they tell us?
- Are we drawing actionable insights from the data we collect?
- Are those insights driving positive results?
- What data points or metrics are we lacking?
Content
- Does our content truly address our prospects’ needs?
- Do we have content for leads at every stage of the buying cycle?
- Is our content driving our leads down the marketing funnel?
- How can we improve the conversion rate of our content?
Marketing/sales alignment
- How often do the marketing and sales departments meet in person?
- Are marketing and sales creating reports that provide each other with actionable insights?
- How qualified are the leads that marketing is providing to sales?
- Do marketing and sales have the same definitions for common phrases, like MQL, SQL and warm/cold lead?
Marketing ROI
- Do we have the tools and data to prove marketing’s worth to the company?
- Are we able to quantifiably prove our impact on the health of the business?
- Could we improve our impact through better allocation of resources?
- Do we have a clear idea of our short-term and long-term goals and a plan for how to achieve them?
The marketing team
- Do we have the team structure we need for success?
- Could our staff benefit from ongoing training opportunities?
- Should we be working with a partner firm or firms?
- How can collaboration among our staff be improved?
Take some time to sit down and answer these questions by yourself or with your team. Then, browse our past blogs for more ideas on how to address these and other marketing questions. We have a great lineup of posts in the coming weeks that will help you take a critical look back at 2015 so far and forward to the coming year.
Read our blog
Resource
Today, we’re marking the last day of the third quarter. Tomorrow isn’t just October first, it’s the beginning of Q4 2015, and if you’re like most marketers, you’ll be busy reflecting back on the year’s work to date and planning for 2016 during this last quarter of the year. Now is the perfect time to reevaluate and rework your content marketing strategy.
Today, we’re bringing you resources from around the web to help you do just that. Have you read something you’d like to recommend? Contact us, or reach out to us on Twitter @moveo.
Developing a Content Marketing Strategy (via Content Marketing Institute)
Are you one of the many marketers still operating without a content marketing strategy? This Content Marketing Institute post provides a solid overview of why your organization needs a content marketing strategy and how to go about putting it in place. A documented content marketing strategy will help your team effectively tackle content creation and acquire a higher budget for your efforts. Read this article for valuable tips on how to better communicate your strategy internally, and how often to update your approach.
8 Tips for More Effective Content Marketing Planning (via Tim Asimos)
In this new Business2Community post from marketer Tim Asimos, you’ll find tips for laying out your content marketing strategy for the next six months to a year. Asimos also includes advice on how to create an editorial calendar for your blog, repurpose content effectively and create a “parking lot” of unused ideas that might come in handy someday.
How to Make Your Content Work Harder (via Bob Murphy)
Not to brag, but some of the best recent content about content comes from within Movéo. In this post on Business2Community, our managing partner Bob Murphy discusses how to make your B2B content work harder by creating and documenting a content strategy and using data to measure the success of your content. He also delves into how to use different channels to deliver content strategically, explaining that marketers can and should use data to determine which channels are best for delivering different types of content.
Ad Blocking (via Seth Godin)
When you’re planning your content marketing strategy, take heed of these thoughts from Seth Godin. In his post, Godin remind marketers that “The best way to contact your users is by earning the privilege to contact them, over time.” The rise of ad blocking should be a wake-up call to marketers. Marketing materials need to serve the audience and provide real value. When planning your content marketing strategy, always ask yourself, “Does this content benefit my audience and address their needs?”
Learn more about content marketing best practices by reading Movéo’s white paper, The 5 new laws of content.
Download white paper
Resource
Before you can utilize content to compel your target to buy from you, you have to get it in front of them. In order to make sure you’re delivering content to those who need it most, at the right times and in the right manner, you need to develop a content delivery strategy that considers what content should go to different types of leads at each phase of their decision-making process.
Today, we’re taking a look at two methods of getting content in front of your audience when they’re primed to benefit from it most.
Optimize your content for search
Smart search engine optimization is one of the best way to reach the people who are actively seeking your solution or product. It can also be difficult, given the strong competition for popular search terms, to actually rank effectively for the keyword phrases your target market uses most.
There are several steps that your organization can take to implement an impactful SEO strategy, though it will take time to see results. First, perform thorough keyword research to better understand what terms your prospects use when seeking the type of content you can provide. Investigate how your organization currently ranks for various keywords, and decide which ones to prioritize.
To improve your SEO, you must make a holistic effort across your organization’s entire website to utilize target keywords and optimize each page for search rather than focusing solely on individual pages or pieces of content. Craft headlines, content and meta descriptions to improve your rank for desired keywords, and consider your keyword strategy when planning blogs, white papers and other content as well.
Place your content strategically on your website
All your content should be created with the intention of mapping it to a stage in the marketing funnel. For example, one of your e-books may be targeted at leads in the awareness stage and written in order to move them from the top of the funnel downward. High-value, lengthier white papers, which have much more in-depth information and should require a lead to share contact information in order to access them, belong lower in the funnel.
When placing content on your site, do so thoughtfully. Don’t put a bottom of the funnel content piece on the “about us” page, which users typically visit when they’re in the awareness stage of their decision-making process. Similarly, your deeper pages, like those that go into depth on features, functionality and pricing, are not good spots for top of the funnel content.
Impactful, well-delivered content is as important for B2B brands as B2C. In fact, at Movéo, we believe that B2B brands matter more than B2C brands. To learn more about why you need to invest in building your brand, read our white paper:
Download white paper
Resource
If you are a regular reader of our blog, you know how much we love actionable data and insights here at Movéo. So it should come as no surprise that we believe that measuring and acting on metrics is key to improving content targeting.
But which metrics should you watch? Here are three we use to measure how our content targeting is working.
CTA conversion rate
What share of your readers or viewers respond to your call-to-action (CTA)? Every piece of content should include a CTA, and it’s essential for your marketing team to calculate the conversion rate of each one. Not only does this help you to determine how much of an impact your content is making, it also lets you know how well you’re promoting it. Are you finding that leads are clicking on the CTA but exiting the landing page without downloading the content? It’s time to take another look at that landing page and determine what’s driving people away. Conversely, a high conversion rate can indicate that content is reaching and engaging its target audience.
To ensure that your content is well-targeted and converting as well as it possibly can, A/B test a few CTAs for each of your target audiences. The data you collect should give you insights into who the content is reaching and converting. The CTAs that work well for one audience may fail for another, and vice versa.
Social sharing
Social sharing is an excellent measure of how much people are getting from your content. If they value it enough to share it, you are doing something right (and reaching more people through your new brand advocates).
Measure and encourage social sharing by installing the ShareThis plugin and tracking analytics through it. Use your ShareThis data to determine what types of readers are most likely to share and then use this data to improve your content, learn more about your audience’s needs and interests and amplify your own voice.
Audience interaction
Are you tracking how people interact with your content? When someone downloads a piece of content, they don’t just stare at it blankly. They may click links or exit out of it halfway through, or they may spend two hours with it open in their web browser. Make sure you have a process in place for both quantitative and qualitative content engagement analysis.
For example, you should monitor not only links clicked and time spent with a piece of content, but also the social engagement that arises around that content. What are people saying about your piece? Are they asking questions? Sharing specific stats? Using it to build their own arguments? This can show you if your content is reaching the right people, and give you new insights into what engages them most.
In what other ways do you assess your content targeting? Now that so much of the B2B buying process is completed before a buyer speaks directly to a company representative, it’s more important than ever to get the right information to the right leads at the right time. For more information, read our white paper, Engaging B2B buyers before the buying process: 4 key steps.
Download white paper
Resource
All content should serve your audience and move leads through the sales funnel, but not all content does. In order to improve your content, it’s time to stop making some common mistakes.
Do you recognize any of these problems in your own marketing? If so, it’s time to make a change.
1. Producing poorly-targeted content
The best content can only live up to its promise if it serves your targets’ needs — and is delivered to the right market segment at the right time. Even before you begin drafting your content, it’s critical to gather insights about the decision-makers in each of your market segments.
What does bad targeting look like? Sending an email campaign all about your small business offerings to potential buyers at international corporations, for example, or promoting a case study about a 500-person tech company’s success with your product to a small mom-and-pop retailer. Make sure your content is tailored to meet the needs of each of your unique audience segments, and you will start to see it make a real impact.
2. Selling first and putting value second
Unbelievably, 75% of marketers still believe that “content should frequently mention products,” even as the majority of consumers claim to “turn down content that sounds like a sales pitch.” Forty-three percent of participants in a recent survey from CMO Council reported that the aspect of B2B content they liked least was its tendency to be “blatantly promotional and self-serving.”
In contrast, the content that consumers valued most had three main features: “breadth and depth of information,” “ease of access, understanding and readability,” and “originality of thinking and ideas.” Marketers, the imperatives are clear. It’s time to create content that provides your leads with valuable information and demonstrates your expertise. It’s time to stop thinking of your content as a sales pitch for your product.
3. Failing to support your content
Content that can’t be found will never be able to convert your audience. Once your team has spent the time and effort to create top-notch content, it’s time to promote and support it. Use SEO best practices to optimize your content for organic search, and promote it across channels like social media and email with appealing visuals.
4. Losing chances to usher leads further through the sales funnel
Content must not be overly promotional, but it does need to be branded and include a call-to-action (CTA). Your CTAs should point your audience in the right direction, moving targets from awareness to consideration, and eventually, conversion. For example, if a target has already downloaded and read an in-depth whitepaper, the CTA at the end of that piece should direct them to contact the sales team or at least read more content at the same level, not point them to blog posts with “top of the funnel” content.
5. Ignoring thought leadership opportunities
Content is strongest when it’s deployed with a strategy and works in tandem with other aspects of your marketing efforts to build your brand’s reputation. Once you’ve determined your content niche, use it as a rubric as you continue to create content. This is how brands build thought leadership: by drilling down into one topic and building a reputation for expertise in a very specific area.
But thought leadership can do more than simply boost the reputation of your experts. It can strengthen your brand. When publishing educational content across platforms, make sure that your brand is clearly credited on each piece of content.
If you’ve identified any of these problems with your marketing and want to discuss how your efforts can be strengthened, contact us.
Contact us
Resource
Marketing content doesn’t have to lead directly to sales every time someone consumes it to be valuable to your organization. But content does need to achieve two goals: it must serve your target market and it must move leads further through the sales funnel. We hate to say it, but if your content isn’t doing both of these things, it’s a waste of time.
It’s time to take a hard look at your content. If you’re not sure if it’s achieving these goals, read on for our take on how to make sure your content is optimized for success.
Is your content serving your market?
As a marketer, you need to be able to assess whether your content is adding value for your audience. This process begins with a smart analysis of content performance data. First, check to see how many people are downloading your piece of content, and compare that number with the number of visits you get to the landing page where the content is housed to get a sense of your content conversion rate. If plenty of people are encountering your gated content but very few are downloading it, it’s clear that your content is either not what your audience is looking for or that you are doing a poor job of conveying its value.
Similarly, tracking time spent on a page or how far the average audience member gets in a piece of video content can tell you about the value your audience finds in your content. If the time spent consuming your content is very short, or viewers are only consuming a small percentage of your content, you can safely assume your audience has determined that your content is not valuable to them.
If you find data about the time your audience spends engaged with your content to be valuable, make sure to monitor this metric for all types of content, not just video. Try replacing your downloadable PDF white papers and similar offerings with gated landing pages. This way, you can collect information on time spent engaging with your content via Google Analytics, which would not be possible if you simply offered a downloadable PDF.
And don’t forget: social sharing is one of the best indications of whether your audience values your content enough to tell others about it. So practice social listening to keep track.
Does your content move leads down the funnel?
In addition to serving your targets’ needs, each piece of marketing content should drive members of your audience to continue down the funnel to higher-level materials. That means that every piece of content should compel leads to explore more of your offerings, interact with email campaigns and download more gated content, leading them to learn more about your product or service and eventually become a customer.
This is where marketing automation software enters the picture. Content rarely drives a sale directly, but it is often an integral part of the journey that leads to that sale. So in order to turn your marketing qualified lead (MQL) into a sales qualified lead (SQL), you have to usher each person who interacts with your content through progressively in-depth forms of marketing content, from awareness-focused content to conversion-focused content, and on to the sales team.
By automating your marketing, you can ensure that your organization connects with leads at the times when they are most receptive to your messages: that is, right after they’ve interacted with relevant pieces of content. Marketing automation allows your company to better tailor messages for individual leads based on the content they favor. So why wouldn’t you take advantage of the opportunity?
With what seems like an endless stream of content available to your audience from both professional and amateur creators, have you ever wondered how to cut through the noise? Read our white paper, Amateur hour or the end of professionalism? for our thoughts.
Download white paper
Resource
Today’s post is from Brian Davies, managing partner of Movéo.
Brand owners continue to publish vast amounts of promotional content: product- or service-focused information that finds its way into brochures, PowerPoints, websites and other tools too numerous to list here. In fact, one of our clients just finished a major revamp of its entire literature library — print and digital — to coincide with a brand re-positioning.
Such material is an important part of what Movéo calls “Sales Activation” — marketing material that helps companies accelerate the purchase decision by providing appropriate (and hopefully differentiating) information to prospects nearing the end of the buying process. The folks reading promotional content typically have already decided what kind of solution is right for them: what they are now trying to do is determine whose solution is right for them.
So what value does promotional content have at the beginning of the sales process? Far less than it used to. As we all know, prospects have already done much of their research before they ever see a brochure. Because of this, it’s important to engage prospects early on with thought leadership: content that doesn’t promote your brand or solution, but shows your expertise in a subject matter. It is this kind of content that finds greater utility early on.
Thought leadership content demonstrates a deep understanding of a company’s prospects’ and customers’ pain points. It focuses on the challenges they may be having, and it may or may not guide them toward a particular solution. The more it does so, the greater the chance that it will lose its credibility in the eyes of readers who, at this point, are seeking only enlightenment around the issues.
Increasingly, our clients are producing thought leadership content that is primarily educational in nature — its goal is to help prospects be more effective at their jobs and to make better decisions. Of course, a brand can be rewarded for these altruistic efforts, not only with valuable contact information that can be used in downstream marketing efforts (which can be more overtly promotional), but also by earned trust. Those organizations whose primary concern is helping, not selling to, prospective buyers are those that rise above the noise. Jaded readers (and who isn’t jaded these days?), can see right through companies that thinly disguise promotional content as thought leadership.
At its most effective, thought leadership content makes readers curious about a problem. That curiosity leads to further exploration: a good thing for the brand wise enough to articulate the problem in the first place. Even thought leadership content can have a clear call-to-action. It can create urgency or attempt to shine a light down a certain path for additional information. Yes, it may be educational, but didn’t your teacher tell you what your homework was after class ended?
Marketers will continue to produce both thought leadership and promotional content in the foreseeable future, but it’s not a “versus” situation. They will each have their place in the purchase process, though promotional content will always be easier to produce. Why? To be successful, thought leadership needs to be useful, honest and empathetic. In essence, it should not feel like marketing at all. That can be a tall order, but it’s one worth tackling.
Thought leadership is just one element of a strong brand. What else helps to keep a brand strong? Read our white paper, 10 Simple Truths About Strong Brands, for our thoughts.
Download white paper
Resource
We all want to see our content succeed, but when content performs poorly, it can be a learning opportunity. Today, we’re taking a look at three of the most common reasons content fails, and breaking out our marketing toolkits to do some repair work.
Problem: vague content
Your content is vague, offering no unique insights or connection to your brand, and is not differentiated from the vast amounts of competing content in your field.
How to fix it:
Instead of relying on general advice or observations, add hard data to add value. As we discussed on Monday, an investment in proprietary research can pay off by convincing your audience of your dedication and industry expertise. But even without original research, your organization can incorporate properly-cited data from other sources into your own content in a way that adds credibility and interest.
This strategy has other benefits as well: it shows that you are well-educated in your industry and engaged with other thought leaders in your field. When using statistics or other research findings that are widely available, be sure to add your own insights and interpretations, perhaps by evaluating the trends you see across multiple pieces of research.
Problem: disconnected content
Your content feels overly academic, and isn’t clearly connected to the day-to-day work of your audience.
How to fix it:
Show why your audience should care by focusing on interviews, quotes from clients or contacts and real-world examples. That hard data we talked about a moment ago is critical to the success of your content, but must work with — not against — the human element.
At Movéo, we do this by sharing examples of brands succeeding in their marketing efforts in order to demonstrate how our insights connect to real campaigns. Sometimes we share examples of our own work, and other times we highlight impressive work from other marketers. When working to add real-world examples to your own content, consider what would speak to your target audience. Experiment with telling client stories, interviewing experts and other tactics that feel like a fit for your brand. What performs best with your audience?
Problem: content without a call-to-action (CTA)
Your content attracts readers and viewers, but it doesn’t drive conversions because there is no CTA to pull audience members further through the marketing funnel.
How to fix it:
Including CTAs is an obvious fix — but they need to be more than just a button at the end of a piece of content. They need to truly get at a reader’s pain points and questions. Craft CTAs that work by putting yourself in your target’s shoes and asking yourself what information you’d want to consume after finishing a specific piece of content. Then, A/B test to see if your assumptions are correct and optimize conversions.
When developing CTAs, it is key to compel your audience to continue navigating through your content without becoming overly promotional. That means using the body of your content to showcase your expertise and educate your audience, then including a CTA at the end that invites them to continue progressing down the buyer’s cycle, learning more about the solutions your company offers. Sometimes, a smooth transition from the first of those two elements to the second can make all the difference.
While these are some of the more common problems we see in poor performing content, we’ve only just scratched the surface. Are you finding other aspects of your content that need to be strengthened? Give us a call to talk more about how Movéo could help your organization improve its marketing efforts.
Contact us
Resource
Would you read a book that only told you things you already knew? If not, why would you offer your online audience dull content that merely repeats the same “insights” they’ve seen a thousand times before? If you’re looking to build your brand, and reach and retain new customers, you need to provide them with something they can’t find anywhere else. Here are three tips to do so:
1. Develop your brand’s thought leadership niche
Instead of creating content that covers a wide variety of topics and offers only surface-level insights, find a content niche that is broad enough to command significant search volume but narrow enough to be totally unique. Instead of telling your audience a little bit about everything in your industry, show that your team knows a great deal about one specific aspect of their interests and needs. For example, a medical device provider might develop a strong content strategy focused on helping surgical teams teach patients about the high-tech devices they receive.
You may also consider developing thought leadership from a few specific members of your team, each addressing their individual area of expertise. In this way, your company as a whole can still achieve coverage of a range of topics, while each writer can dig into their own specialty.
2. Invest in original research
High-quality original research can set your company apart like few other content offerings. When your organization conducts a robust survey on practices within the industry you serve, it reveals your commitment to fully understanding your clients’ needs, activities and pain points, and gives you interesting data to cite in your content, media pitches and other marketing efforts. Your proprietary research can bring real value to people in your target market, allowing you to generate extensive brand awareness and build a reputation for thought leadership.
If you are unsure of what types of questions your original research should explore, take a moment to put yourself in your audience members’ shoes. What questions do they need answered that no one has addressed? What kind of data would allow you to answer those questions? Over time, your brand can build a reputation for regularly releasing annual or bi-annual studies on the same topic. For an example of this, take a look at Nonprofit HR, a human resources firm that works exclusively with nonprofits. For the last 12 years, Nonprofit HR has conducted an annual Nonprofit Employment Practices Survey, which is regularly quoted in media outlets like The New York Times, CNN, Forbes and Fast Company. The survey also drives inbound leads on Nonprofit HR’s site, where it is available for download.
Depending on the complexity of your research, you may want to partner with an outside research firm to ensure the professional, statistically appropriate collection of data. While conducting proprietary research can be very costly, tools like Google Consumer Surveys can be a great fit for organizations that just want to test the effectiveness of conducting their own studies before diving in head first.
Once your findings are complete, look for ways to incorporate your original data into every type of content you create from white papers, to webinars, blog posts, infographics and videos. Use the strengths of each medium to showcase different aspects of your findings.
3. Tell stories through content
By now, most marketers have come to understand and embrace the power of storytelling. But your stories need more than just a beginning, middle and end. They need to show challenges overcome and illustrate character development. They need to elicit human emotion.
For inspiration, take a look back at our post about Caterpillar, the industrial equipment manufacturer. Despite being nearly a century old, this company is a leader in B2B storytelling. Caterpillar’s marketing content tells the stories of their customers, showing the successes of real people using Caterpillar products at their homes and on their farms. Does your brand have loyal customers with equally powerful stories to tell?
In the end, your marketing team needs to tie all of your content together to present a unified brand message that is refreshing and different from any other. For more insights into building a strong, long-lasting brand, read our white paper, 10 simple truths about strong brands.
Want to learn more about smart content marketing strategies? Read our whitepaper, The 5 new laws of content.
Download white paper
