Major parts of marketing are digital today, but according to recent studies, only 30% of the companies have taken the time to create a process for managing campaigns and accompanying sales content.
We know that growing online can sometimes become overwhelming, but surprisingly, in most cases, this is not because of a lack of budget but because of a lack of strategy.
There are still lots of situations when content continues to be developed and gets implemented without formal structures. That’s basically why more than 60% of the published B2B articles do not drive engagement, even if 80% of the B2B buyers expect ongoing communication from brands they follow.
Buyer Personas are nothing but fictional representations of the target groups you have in mind when promoting your business. They represent your ideal customers and can be created while researching and interviewing your business audience.
The more detailed their description, the easier it becomes to personalize your communication and offer potential customers what they look for precisely when they need it. Besides demographics, you might want to know:
By combining all these details, you’ll be able to create accurate, valuable, and useful profiles for the further steps of your marketing strategy.
One of the most relevant aspects is to understand how your Buyer Personas search online. Working out lists of keywords people use when googling for things, identifying the intention behind them, and grouping the expressions based on the level of knowledge and interest represented in the queries is both an art as it is a science.
You don’t only wish to know how things generally work but also how customers modify their search process to gather more and more information on a particular subject while also comparing different alternative solutions until they reach the point of deciding what to buy and where to buy it from.
Once you grouped the search terms and identified your customers' informational needs, you can start creating their journey along the following stages - Awareness, Education, Consideration, and Decision.
The map works best when focused on each buyer persona because it will also allow you to clearly see which type of content your customers resonates and interacts with.
Creating a plan means implementing a set of SMART lead acquisition tactics to acquire new customers and retain existing ones. It includes SEO, paid search, paid media, content marketing, social media, PR, emailing, and mobile marketing .
When elaborating the content marketing strategy and your content planning, using a content calendar template you may find suitable for your project, it helps working out a checklist for each piece of content that should include information about:
You might also need to include information on how things will be displayed and promoted.
Remember that it might take a month or more to rank for new topics when you start planning your content creation. Therefore, you should publish your content ideas ahead of the search trend. At least a complementary paid search campaign should accompany the SEO one with corresponding landing pages.
You can also use Social Media to create Brand Awareness and invite more people to visit your site.
After careful development of the content strategy, focus on coordinating the channels in the mix. The key is to see how each of them can contribute to the overall success of your project. Ideally, you should place your content on your website or your blog. You can then create summary points for social media to be posted afterward as teasers for attracting people to visit your website.
Articles can also be designed as lead captures mechanisms inviting people to come back for more in-depth information offered as whitepapers or detailed research reports.
No strategy is completed without clear objectives for it and defined ways to measure your success. For instance, even if with PPC, Google Analytics allows you to track many metrics, KPIs like the number of leads you can generate during your campaign or the cost per acquisition in Paid Search compared to other tactics that are more relevant. When it comes to content, you might probably want to know:
All these enable you to identify what works and what’s not so that you can review and improve the entire process based on data and results.
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