Using B2B Content Marketing to Engage Customers and Prospects
In recent years, inbound content marketing has grown in importance as a strategic, results-producing B2B marketing tool, due to accelerated demand for relevant and valuable content during the purchasing cycle.
According to the B2B Content Marketing: 2010 Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends study by Junta42 and MarketingProfs, 90 percent of B2B marketers are already using some form of content marketing. The study also found that 51 percent of B2B companies planned to increase their content marketing budgets. If your company is still on the sidelines, there are many ways to get going with web content marketing.
In its Content Marketing Playbook, the Content Marketing Institute lists 42 of the top content marketing tactics in use today. While the Playbook cites blogging as the top content marketing tactic, there are dozens of other content marketing vehicles and formats that your company can use.
Here are three ways that you can get started:
- Enewsletters: Distributed weekly, monthly or quarterly, you can use an enewsletter to communicate regularly with current customers and prospects. You can choose to include complete articles or 3-5 short teaser items that link to existing content on your website.
- Customer Case Studies: A case study combines the narrative structure of a story with first-person testimonials. Because it tells the story of an actual customer’s experience, a case study can effectively create credibility and trust with prospects.
- Online Videos: Popular websites like YouTube and Vimeo have made it easier than ever to share your company’s videos online. These tools also provide options that allow you to embed videos in your website – and for others to share your videos to help them go viral.
Still not sure what will work for you? You can learn more about the types of content marketing vehicles that B2B companies can use in the Content Marketing Playbook from our friends at the Content Marketing Institute.