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Unleash the Power of Content to Engage Your Prospects (Webinar from MarketingProf’s #mpworld)


This webinar recap is part two of a three part series from the Social Media Marketing conference at MarketingProfs’ Digital Marketing World 2010.

In this presentation:

Content Marketing

Stephanie Tilton, Content Marketing Consultant, Ten Ton Marketing

Michelle Linn, Executive Editor, Content Marketing Institute

Some statistics

  • Buyers only find relevant content 42% of the time
  • The lack of relevant content as perceived by buyers is responsible for reducing the vendor’s change of closing a sale by 45%

Create the kind of online content that your buyers naturally gravitate to. - David Meerman Scott

Content marketing is the secret, and starts with a strategy:

Create a Content Strategy

  1. Listen
    1. Google Alerts
    2. Twitter
    3. Google blog search
    4. Where your customers spend their time
  2. Develop buyer personas
    1. Bring your prospects to life
    2. Create sample persona(s)
  3. Map content to the buying cycle
    1. Understand content preferences
    2. Map preferences to buying cycle
    3. Map content
  4. Think like a publisher
    1. Create an editorial calendar
    2. Keys for the editorial calendar
      1. Be consistent
        1. DO deliver content on a regular basis
        2. DON’T publish only when you have something new
      2. Commit to your content
        1. DO think about the content your audience prefers
        2. DON’T try a lot of things but don’t do anything well
      3. Map out content
        1. DO move people through the buying cycle
        2. DON’T string random pieces of content together
  5. Commit to remarkable content
    1. Craft valuable, relevant content
  6. Extract maximum value from every asset
    1. For example, use a single whitepaper and create: articles, webinars, checklist, podcast, blogposts, and best practices
    2. Repurposing your content
      1. Don’t…
        1. Simply put the same content in different channels
        2. Ask “what more can I create?”
        3. Consider content reuse as an afterthought
        4. Recycle the same content again and again
      2. Do…
        1. Customize content based on the channel (e.g. mobile)
        2. Ask “How can I give my readers a new way of understanding a key issue?”
        3. Include a plan to reuse content from the start
        4. Customize your content for a certain audience, vertical or place in the buying cycle
  7. Make your content easy to find, access, and share
  8. Measure

How BreakingPoint used content to increase new customer acquisition by 240%

Pam O’Neal, Vice President of Marketing, BreakingPoint Systems, Inc.

Do not interrupt what people are interested in; be what people are interested in. - Jeff Lanctot

1. Becoming Interesting

2. Monitoring, Engaging, Prioritizing

  • Mine for topics and opportunities (key influencers)
  • Capture the conversation
  • Analyze SEO keyword volume
  • Monitor analytics to ID popular topics
  • Identify and create content for buyer needs, issues
  • Prioritize content by effort
  • Identify opportunities

3. Speak to your buyers

  • Create blog, forum, community
  • Deliver role-based content
  • Optimize for search
  • Build community of interest
    • Pull with “conversation”
    • Pull with SEO, viral content
    • Push with SEM, email
  • Monitor popular content
  • Maintain with fresh valuable information

4. Seek to be found: SEO

Forget about your home page. Google is the new home page.

Content Distribution:

  • Twitter
  • RSS
  • Email
  • Wikipedia
  • Scribd
  • flickr
  • Facebook
  • YouTube
  • pitchengine
  • marketwire

Content Aggregation:

  • Digg
  • Google/Google Images
  • Bing
  • Reddit
  • FriendFeed
  • Squidoo
  • StumbleUpon
  • Delicious
  • LinkedIn

5. Spread the Word

6. Integrate with Drip Marketing

7. Optimize and Measure

How Kadient built a content library that maps the sales cycle

Amy Black, Director of Marketing, TimeTrade Systems, Inc.

Mapping Content to the Sales Cycle

  • Market Education
  • Lead Gen
  • Nurturing
  • Opportunity
  • Close

Remember:

  • What’s your key objective for the piece?
  • How else can you use it?

Content Library: Top of Funnel/Lead Gen

  • “How to – Impart practical knowledge
  • Provacative – Challenge and introduce a new way to think
  • Fresh format – eBook, conversation style, images, video

Content Library: Nurturing

  • Entertain with relevant, attention-grabbing humor (also great for viral program)
  • Harness customer voices
  • Highlight third party validation

Content Library: Lead to Opportunity

  • Connect prospects with internal expertise

Content Library: Sales – Opportunity to Close

  • Making the iron clad case
  • Showing how Kadient is different and better
  • Getting over the hurdles

Final Thoughts

  • Remember who you’re “talking” to
  • Keep your key objective front and center
  • Break through the clutter – stand out!
    • Entertainment
    • Provacative POVs
    • Video – short, sweet and interesting
  • Create content you can repurpose
  • Listen to your sales team
  • Pay attention to what is and isn’t working

Tags: , ,

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 4th, 2010 at 2:42 pm and is filed under Expert Advice, Social Media, Training, Conferences, Webinars. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.


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