Category Content Marketing

AN 8-POINT WEBSITE CHECKLIST FOR EFFECTIVE B2B CONTENT MARKETING

By in Content Marketing, Marketing Tag , , ,

by Matt Bell for The Framework Your company’s website is one of its most important assets when it comes to effective content marketing. You own it. You control the content. You can direct visitors to the parts that are most relevant for them. And yet, many B2B companies still treat their website as little more than a digital catalog. Some practically reproduce the catalog format, with an index-like homepage and subpages dedicated to product lines and spec sheets. Is that what your audience wants to find? All of them, all the time? Those are rhetorical questions, of course. As I’ve…

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Content Marketing During a Downturn: Here’s What the Conventional Wisdom Gets Wrong

By in Content Marketing, Marketing, Uncategorized Tag , , ,

By Sharla Moody for Contently Recession. Downturn. Economic uncertainty. When these words start to appear, conventional wisdom tells businesses to cut their marketing budgets. It turns out that advice is dead wrong. As multiple researchers have found over decades of studies, stopping your marketing efforts during tough times is a mistake. Data shows that proactive marketing “pays off” during recessions—for brands across industries, including the likes of Toyota, Amazon, Coca-Cola, etc. As two marketing professors put it in a 2020 Harvard Business Review article: “Firms that maintain their marketing spend while reallocating it to suit the context … fare better than firms that cut their marketing…

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How To Write Like a Journalist (And Why It Matters in Marketing)

By in Content Marketing, Marketing Tag , , , ,

By Kyle Covino for Brafton.com The importance of good journalism can’t be overstated. Journalism is an art: It’s not just telling a story, it’s about helping the reader read it through to the end. Perhaps above all, it should produce positive results in society. To quote Andrew Vacss: “Journalism is what maintains democracy. It’s the force for progressive social change.” A free, democratic society is impossible without accurate and ethical journalism. But the qualities that make up this art can be extended to many other forms of writing — notably marketing — in a big way. How’s that? Read on to find…

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8 WAYS TO SELF-DESTRUCT YOUR B2B CONTENT MARKETING

By in Content Marketing, Marketing Tag , , , , , , ,

by Message Up A lot is written about how to succeed at content marketing. It’s a complicated thing to get right and there’s a how-to guide for every element. Marketing leaders and their supporting casts do their best to implement a practical subset of this advice, within inevitable resource constraints. Many of them do a really good job, getting a lot of things right. Until they don’t. Like the racing driver who is on a personal best lap, only to wreck at the penultimate corner, they make mistakes that undermine everything they’ve worked so hard to construct. In this week’s…

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5 PRIME SOURCES FOR B2B CONTENT

By in Content Marketing, Marketing

by Message Up You recognize that content marketing is mission critical for your B2B business, and you’re committed to making it happen. You’ve done your homework and prioritized a list of themes and topics on which your team is going to publish. All well and good, but how are you going to create the content itself? More precisely, where are you going to find the inspiration, ideas, and insights that will make it relevant and engaging? Here are five tips on where to look. But First, Back to Identifying B2B Content Topics Before we dive into the sources, let’s rewind…

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Employee-Driven Content: A 4-step Framework on How to Get Started

By in Content Marketing, Lead Generation, Marketing Tag , ,

by JASON BRADWELL for B2B Byte You’ve got to invest in more content. “Damn Jason, what is this - 2005? We’ve been creating content for years!” …to which my response would be… “Sure. But when did you last create good content?” If the recent phenomenon that is ChatGPT has taught us anything, it’s that we are on the precipice of a huge acceleration in the publication of mediocre marketing collateral. Particularly on blogs. Volume is no longer the aim of the game. Dialling in on doing less that says more must become the new normal. And a great way to do this is by investing in employee-driven content. Here’s a…

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The 6 Risks of AI Content

By in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, Content Marketing, Information Technology Tag , , , ,

by Ryan Law for Animalz There are already plenty of use cases for generative AI in marketing. Industry and article research. Getting to first draft faster. Creating content briefs. Brainstorming titles and headers, angles, and introductions. Programmatic SEO, at a scale and sophistication previously hard to imagine. Repurposing content from one format to another. Personalizing ABM campaigns. These use cases have risks associated with them. There is the risk of factual inaccuracy and hallucination. Risk of copyright infringement and legal challenges. Risk of Google penalization. Risk of mediocrity and pumping out a ton of content that doesn’t help the bottom line.…

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Unlearn what you’ve learned about content marketing.

By in Content Marketing, Marketing

by SEBASTIAN CUERVO AND RONNIE HIGGINS for 42 Slash If you want to succeed in the new era of content marketing, the first step is to accept a painful truth: the playbook everyone has been using for more than a decade is inadequate for addressing the needs of today.  Sure, some of the tried-and-true strategies and tactics that gave rise to content marketing’s dominance over the last few years will remain. SEO and email are far from dead, too. But the game has changed tremendously.  What’s changed:  The tyranny of platform algorithms:  We are at a different moment of the internet…

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How To Think In Funnels (And Achieve The Best Possible Outcomes)

By in Business Management, Content Marketing, Marketing, Sales Tag , , , ,

by Frontera Blog Thinking in funnels is a mental model that breaks down your goals into different stages. So you can improve the conversion at each stage to achieve the best possible outcomes. We’ll start with a marketing story from the 1890s to understand how it was born. And finish with how to think in funnels. Let’s go. In 1898, Elias Elmo Lewis created a formula that changed marketing forever. He had an advertising agency. And he wrote newspaper ads for his clients — which was the main channel to reach potential customers before radio and TV. Like any advertiser, Lewis wanted to sell…

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SaaS Content Marketing: Why You Should Focus on Bottom of the Funnel First to Drive Signups

By in Content Marketing, Marketing, SaaS Tag

By Benji Hyam for Grow & Convert If you talk to content marketers at SaaS companies (both in-house and other agencies), almost everyone will tell you that you need to focus on top of the funnel content first. Why? Because most marketers assume everyone starts at the top of the funnel and slowly makes their way down the funnel via nurturing and more content. The logic typically sounds like this: “Well first, the customer needs awareness: They need to know about the problem. Then, they need to consider different options: Look for solutions. Then they’ll convert: Sign up to try your solution.” Yes, in theory, every single customer for any product goes…

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