Chapter 6
Targeting Content for Your B2B Audience
IN THIS CHAPTER
Building a resource library of content
Writing for the right audience
Creative a narrative for your brand’s story
Tracking success metrics
The content marketing revolution transformed the B2B marketing world. The birth of marketing automation platforms launched in the mid-2000s also launched the digital content marketing industry. Content marketing is all about telling the story of your company’s product or service in an unbiased way and demonstrating thought leadership. Establishing a thought leadership position is accomplished through creating meaningful content that leaves an impression on your targeted accounts.
Marketing automation systems need content to fuel demand generation. Without content, there’s nothing to link to from your calls to action (CTAs) on landing pages. Demonstrating thought leadership would be impossible. Your company needs content to demonstrate its knowledge of industry subject matter. Content has become the lifeblood of a successful marketing program.
You have to get the content engine revved up and keep it full throughout your marketing campaigns. A comprehensive strategy is paired with content for each stage of the buyer journey. Content should be engaging, entertaining, and based on the stage of the relationship. All throughout the buyer journey, you’ll use marketing technology to help deliver content at the right stage, at the right time, and to the right contacts.
In this chapter, you see how to drive a response from your various types of content, giving you a framework to start your own content marketing program. Also outlined are the best practices for measuring the success of your content marketing programs.
Creating a Content Library
According to the Content Marketing Institute, 80 percent of business decision makers want their company information in a series of articles, not in advertisements. The buyer journey is a comprehensive lifecycle, from the time a prospect first connects with your company. Your potential buyers want to read and digest information at their own pace instead of being spoon-fed by a salesperson. By having a library full of content, your prospects can select the content they want to read or the videos they want to watch. This content informs them about the value of your company’s product or service without a sales pitch.
Host your company’s content library on your website, labeled “Resources,” “Resource Library,” or “Knowledge Center.”
A content library will have gated content protected by a form. This way, you capture a contact’s information before they download content. Content is used to draw inbound activity to your website to discover new contacts and nurture existing contacts. Lots of different content is needed, as it will serve a different purpose in the buyer journey.
When brainstorming ideas for content, think of people outside of your company you need to interview. To remove any bias from your content, interview at least three thought leaders outside your industry, then send them quotes to review before including them in your content.
Your content library should showcase your company’s expertise and thought leadership position in the industry. All the different pieces of content should inform your prospect, educate them on best practices, and guide them through the buyer journey. These tools work in all stages of marketing:
- Whitepapers: This long-form content is created in .pdf and should be served up early in the buyer journey. A whitepaper is a great way to demonstrate thought leadership in your area of subject matter expertise. Across all industries, producing and distributing whitepapers to your prospects is considered a best practice for moving prospects through the sales process. Whitepapers can be as short as six pages to make the information easy to read.
-
Ebooks: An ebook is an even longer version of a whitepaper. Ebooks are used to incorporate even more quotes and content from other thought leaders and industry insights. These should also be served up early in the buyer journey.
The difference between a whitepaper and an ebook is both the length and design. An ebook is a longer work, averaging at least 20 pages or more. Whitepapers usually are around ten pages, and they got their name because of all the white space included in the design to make the text easier to digest. An ebook should incorporate more color and graphic design elements. Figure 6-1 shows a sample of an ebook. Include a table of contents in your ebooks and whitepapers over ten pages. This helps the reader to find the content they want to read. Figure 6-2 shows a sample table of contents from an ebook. -
Infographics: When you only have eight seconds to capture the attention of your prospect, an infographic helps keep you top of mind. These graphics should also be served up early in the buyer journey to help increase the awareness of your product or service. Figure 6-3 shows a sample infographic.
With ebooks, infographics, and whitepapers, the goal is education of the problem your company solves, not about your company. Don’t include detailed information about your product or service in this early-stage content. Save it for later in the buyer journey. - Case studies: Letting your customers share their success stories in case studies is good for you (prospects will hear about authentic results from real clients) and good for your clients (their stories promote awareness of their businesses, too). This content should be presented by the sales team after the qualification process, when you’re trying to progress the account into an opportunity or Closed/Won deal. Two ways to develop case studies into content include
- Document: Designed in a .pdf covering the problem your customer was experiencing and how your company provided a solution.
- Video: Short recorded interviews with your customers, where prospects can hear from customers in their own words about why they do business with your company.
-
Webinars: In the early stage of the buyer journey, webinars are a great tool to drive awareness and engagement in your target, qualified accounts. The goal of producing webinars is to create more interest with the contacts in your account and move them further through the sales process. With your prospect webinars, you need a panel of presenters. When you have three presenters, these roles are the ones you should have:
- One thought leader or industry influencer from outside your team
- A customer “champion” who can be an advocate for your product or service and can speak eloquently to your audience
- One of your executive team members or a leader in your company
Edit your recorded webinars into shorter segments, such as a 15-minute video. Short video recordings are easy to digest, and can be replayed at your contact’s convenience. Figure 6-4 shows a sample webinar.
FIGURE 6-1: Example of an ebook.
FIGURE 6-2: Example of a table of contents.
FIGURE 6-3: Example of an infographic.
FIGURE 6-4: Example of a webinar replay.
Have a quarterly plan for your webinars. Hosting at least one webinar per month is a great way to create velocity for the sales team. They should create a promotion plan to share this new content.
Because you’re going through the effort to create a content library, you need to have a plan to share this content with your target audience. When you spend this time, money, and effort to create content, it needs to be shared with the contacts in your accounts.
You need to create content that doesn't live in your “Resources” section, as other content and communications are needed to serve other purposes to drive awareness.
This content can be strategically used in campaigns to target accounts that are in the early stage of the buyer journey. Here are other types of content you need to develop:
-
Blog posts: Your company’s blog is a key component of your marketing website. Your prospects and influencers will check out your blog for the latest topics your company is writing about.
New content should be published to your blog at least once a week. Make it current and topical. -
Press releases: This is how your company will distribute major news. These news announcements can include a strategic round of funding, a new customer acquisition, merger, partnership, or hosting an event.
The benefit of distributing a press release on a web-based platform, such as PR Newswire (
www.prnewswire.com), MarketWired (www.marketwired.com), or PRWeb (http://service.prweb.com/home), is that it’s an official press release, which you can then link to from other sources. -
Social media: The content you publish to social media platforms, (such as Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook) should be fresh and timely. Social media content should be created specifically for the channel you’re publishing it on.
Every time you post a link to Twitter, use a platform like Bit.ly (https://bitly.com) or Snip.ly (https://snip.ly) to track how many times the link is clicked. When you’re sharing the same piece of content on multiple social media channels, such as sharing the same case study on both Twitter and LinkedIn, create different tracking links to attribute it to different channels. Many marketing automation systems can also generate tracked links or integrate with tools that track social media engagement. - Direct mail: Content for direct mailing includes physical objects. You need to have stationary printed with your company’s logo for your team members to write notes to accounts thanking them for their time. Consider printing postcards to include with “swag” or other items you will physically mail to prospects
Create an editorial calendar for the new content you’ll publish to your library, blog, press releases, sending direct mail, and other content. This calendar will help your marketing team manage when and what you’re publishing across various channels.
Having an editorial calendar also provides transparency across your sales team so everyone knows about new content and upcoming campaigns. Send an email or communicate during your weekly sales meeting to your sales leaders about when new content will be available and how they can use it.
Storytelling and its importance
As discussed in Book 3, Chapter 4, the whole point of developing and sharing content is to tell a story. The importance of storytelling for modern B2B marketers can’t be overstated. Your prospects don’t want to watch a commercial or hear a product pitch. Buyers today want to be informed and educated, so they can arrive at a decision independently. The content your company produces should help tell a story to your buyers, so they can be guided down a path that leads to becoming customers.
The content in your library should be used in campaigns throughout the buyer journey. Throughout the sales process, there’s an underlying story. This is called the narrative. The narrative tells a story problem you’re trying to solve and builds to a conclusion at the end, which is how your company answers the solution. When you think about storytelling, the story should be consistent. No matter who you tell the story, it shouldn’t change. However, you might tell the story from a different point of view, depending on the type of contact you want to reach. For example, the angle from which a story is told to an IT manager is very different from a CMO.
Adapting the narrative to fit the buyer journey means everyone will discover a slightly different version of the same story. A story always has three components: a beginning, a middle, and an end. The same is true for the buyer journey. You need to tell a story to the contacts in the account using your content. Here’s how to think of your content as a story:
- Beginning: The start of the buyer journey with your company. It’s about awareness for the early-stage prospects. At this stage, the prospect is becoming educated about the problem and potential solutions. The relevant content at the early stage includes blog posts, ebooks, infographics, and whitepapers.
- Middle: The account has been qualified and the sales team is trying to create an opportunity. At this stage, the contacts in your account are becoming educated about why they should buy from your company. The relevant content at the middle stage includes case studies, video testimonials, webinars, and engaging on social media. (Sales account executives should personally connect with accounts on LinkedIn.)
- End: The sales team is trying to close the opportunity and win a new customer. At this stage, the contacts in your account need to see how your company will continue to support them after the deal is done. The relevant content in the final stages of the buyer journey includes “how to” content (such as checklists and implementation guides) showing them how they can easily adopt your company’s product or service. If there’s competition here, a competitive analysis or brief document outlining the return on investment (ROI) can be provided.
When you have a lousy product, no good story can sell it. You must have a good product or service, or no amount of marketing will help your company in the long term.
To win the deal, you need a solid product offering, but it’s so much more than that. The account will choose to do business with your company because of the relationship built with the sales representative and the content that was produced and shared throughout the buyer journey. The storytelling process helps your sales team to tell the right story and sell the dream to close the deal. It’s part of the psychology of sales.
Now, the content that supports the overall narrative can be different depending on the particular problem they’re trying to solve. The story needs to tailor to that angle and may require a change in focus on which portion of the story based on the stage in the buyer journey.
Every quarter, your sales team should get together to determine what type of content marketing needs to produce for sales enablement. They should also meet with customer success to discover which content will be needed for customer accounts to support adoption and provide training.
Taking a BtoB lens to your content
Imagine you walk into a store. The shopkeeper knows your size, the colors you like, your fashion sense, and your price range — all the information about the types of clothes you like. They select items to present clothing options that they know you’ll be likely to purchase. B2B marketers need to think more like the storekeeper who treats all clients like they’re VIPs with tailor-made clothing; you’re tailoring your message to contacts in an account. These contacts should match your personas (the type of people who are the best fit for your product or service). Keeping the accounts and contacts in mind when developing your content will make sure it resonates.
To think about your content from a BtoB perspective:
- Know your audience. Remember that your audience is extremely important as you’re taking a targeted account approach.
- Deliver content meaningfully. Don’t just blast an email to thousands of people every time you publish a new infographic or whitepaper. Your content was designed with your audience in mind.
Producing content by industry vertical
Your content should be specific to the industries and segments of the market identified in your buyer persona. When you start planning your first marketing strategy, you’ll work with your sales team to identify a persona that includes both company size (based on the number of employees and the amount of revenue) and the type of industry.
Verticals refer to the market. A vertical market is the type of industry. Examples of vertical markets include financial services, commercial real estate, fashion merchandising, retail stores, and gaming.
You must create an persona for the types of accounts you want to target before producing content.
Writing content without basing it on an industry is like speaking a foreign language to someone who isn’t fluent.
Publish a case study for each industry vertical you’re targeting. When you’re targeting that industry, you must provide proof of how your solution works for their peers.
Figure 6-5 shows a sample case study tailored to target accounts in a specified industry.
FIGURE 6-5: Example of a case study for one industry.
Basing content on personas
For your content, consider the stage of the buyer journey and who is in the account. Your marketing team needs to both educate one person or contact, and also all the contacts within the account who have a stake in the purchase decision. The content should be as specific as possible for each individual decision maker, ensuring they’re engaged in the process.
You must consider who your audience is for each individual piece of content, and how they will obtain this content. Every piece of content should be created and tailored with your personas in mind. The personas are based on job role, responsibility, and seniority in an organization.
This is why it’s essential to have your personas created before you start developing content. You can read more about building your personas in Book 2, Chapter 2.
When you’re developing persona-based content, write the content targeted toward the persona’s role and business needs. Think about how your solution focuses on supporting the needs of the individual role.
The story you’re telling with all your content must align to a narrative. What is the problem, and how is your company the solution?
The personas for your contacts in your target accounts will range across all levels of the organization. The way a C-level executive wants to consume content is different from a marketing manager, because they're different people who are focused on specific business needs. Your content should provide answers for all the personas in your ICP. Each person wants to hear why your solution will work for him or her, in addition to the company as a whole. Here are considerations for creating content based on seniority:
- Individual contributor: This person is tasked with finding the right solution for his or her own role. They’re the most engaged during the buying process, even when they aren’t the ultimate decision makers. For content, this individual contributor needs to see “how to” guides. The questions your content should answer for this persona include
- What can your product do to deliver features, functionality, and ease of use?
- Which integrations does your platform support?
-
How easily can you pull reports or show metrics?
Metrics are essential. The individual contributor must show why your product is useful.
-
Manager or Director: The department manager needs to know your company actually can do what the individual contributor says you can. In most sales situations, your sales account executive will begin by talking to an individual contributor who will be the end user. Content will need to be created for this person’s manager. A manager wants to see these types of content:
- Positive product reviews on the Internet
- Case studies, customer use cases, and video testimonials
The manager is verifying that your company is solid, and that going with your company is the right thing to do.
- Executive: The sponsor of the project who is a stakeholder for the success. He or she is the ultimate decision maker who is conscious of the budget and investment required to use your company’s product or service. The types of content this person wants to see includes
- Financial proof: A brief or spreadsheet showing an estimated ROI
- Competitive analysis: How your company is better than other vendors in the marketplace
- References: Connecting with your customers to confirm you truly have a solution
- Reporting examples or screenshots of sample dashboards
- Influencers within the company: Outside of your end user and his boss, you need to remember that there are influencers in the account who may not directly use your product or service. These influencers can include people in other departments; for example, when you’re selling to marketers, an influencer could be the VP of Sales. While this VP role isn’t part of the marketing team, because of the leadership position they influence the whole purchasing process. The influencer wants to look at complementary solutions, talk to their peers who have heard of your company, and show their colleagues on the executive team that they did a background check on your business.
- Beneficiaries: When the VP of another department is an influencer, then the beneficiaries in his or her department are asking “what’s in it for me?” For example, marketing looks at technology solutions, and salespeople benefit from them, but marketing decides which tools to purchase. Content should be created for the individuals who will benefit from your solution, even when they don’t have a say in the purchase decision. They need to know whether the solution is working, and how they will benefit.
Across the entire account, the end users want to see more tactical examples of how your solution works, whereas the higher you go up the organization more strategic.
The higher you go up the food chain, the more your personas care about how your solution fits into the account’s vision and strategic objectives. The executive team in your target account wants to know how doing business with your company will help them reach larger business goals.
Think about how your content aligns with providing answers to all of your personas. Your personas should align with each of the contacts in the account. The story should guide your contacts in the account by what they want to know about your product or solution.
The goal is to get content to the right persona. You need to make sure everyone in the account, all the contacts who can impact the purchase decision, know what your company offers and the benefit it can provide. Here is one example using the different personas in an IT department:
- Chief Information Officer (CIO): The technology leader for an IT department wants to know how your solution works from an integration standpoint. He or she wants to see how it collaborates with the other tools and software that exist in the organization’s technology stack. The question to answer here is “Does this new technology play well with what I already have?”
-
Chief Financial Officer (CFO): He or she wants to know the return on investment after making this purchase from your company.
VisualizeROI (
www.visualize-roi.com) is one tool that helps you create an ROI calculator plugging in different variables to demonstrate how using your company’s product or service will save time, money, or both. Gartner’s Magic Quadrant is another proof of investment. You can leverage the renowned analyst team at Gartner to show your product isn’t just smoke and mirrors, but verified by industry analysts. - IT Director: The department head who will have firsthand knowledge of how his or her direct reports are using your product or service. When something isn’t working for one of the director’s team members, your customer success manager will hear about it.
- IT Manager or Specialist: The end user of your technology. He or she is the persona who ultimately can turn into a “power user” or “champion” for advocate marketing. You need to empower this person from Day 1, the time they first connect with your company or download a piece of content.
Humanizing Content
The entire marketing industry is evolving. Instead of business-to-business (B2B) or business-to-consumer (B2C) marketing, it’s often referred to as human-to-human (H2H). Humans want to buy from each other, and establish relationships. It’s those relationships and personal connections that build trust. Trust makes humans feel more confident in the purchase decision.
Demonstrating thought leadership
Thought leadership is one of the strongest influences in B2B marketing. A thought leader is someone in your industry perceived to be a subject matter expert. Thought leadership is presented through your content. Demonstrating thought leadership in your content is very different than traditional marketing or advertising. Instead of saying “Here’s why you should buy my product!,” it’s “Here’s a problem; in your position, here is how we helped other people in your industry solve it.”
Being a thought leader means sharing the limelight with other industry leaders, giving them the stage. People look to thought leaders when they’re bringing the industry’s best.
You can use these channels and activities to demonstrate your thought leadership position:
- Content: In your ebooks, whitepapers, case studies, and blog posts. Focus on one topic that aligns with your product. If you were writing content about five ways to use content marketing to support sales, you could highlight methods for working with your account executives. You could also link to quotes from other thought leaders.
- Videos: In all your video content, from high-level product overviews to detailed demos and customer testimonials, the language used in these videos reinforces your thought leadership.
- Press releases: In your communications to the media, cite industry sources that support your go-to market claims.
- Social media: Regularly post content about your subject matter on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. If you were a thought leader about IT solutions, you might post content about the latest technology, then find and follow other thought leaders on social media who talk about the same topic to engage them in a discussion.
- Webinars and in-person events: When you’re putting together an event, decide on a central theme and topic. Then find other thought leaders to join your event as a panelist, presenter, or sponsor. Having multiple thought leaders participate in your digital and in-person events reinforces your position as a leading influencer in your industry.
Addressing wants, needs, and pain points
Your content should present a solution but not in a sales-y way. The content and messaging your company creates needs to address the wants, needs, and pain points of your personas. Your personas have different motivations, and your content needs to speak to these driving forces. When a contact first lands on your website or reads and email, they don’t have a vested interest in your company. They may not even know they have a problem, which your company can provide a solution for. What your contacts know is their own personal motivations.
Set up a meeting with your sales team to examine your personas and discuss their wants, needs, and pain points.
Because your sales team is on the front line, interacting with prospects and opportunities, they’re the best source to provide insight into what’s motivating the contacts in your target accounts. Here are the questions to ask:
- What does this persona want? Think about it from the context of their role. When the contact is an individual contributor, like a marketing coordinator or an IT specialist, they want their manager or director to recognize the work they’re doing. When you’re targeting a manager or director, they want to streamline processes and operational efficiency to achieve more results without spending more money.
- What does this persona need? This motivation most likely will be tied to a strategic business objective or a company goal. When your persona is someone in the sales department, he or she needs to hit a revenue goal each month or quarter. Consider how your content speaks to helping with this need.
- Which pain or stress does this persona have? When your persona is a marketing director, you know that the pain they’re feeling can stem from needing to contribute to revenue growth. When you’re targeting an IT director, their pain can come from too many systems that aren't integrated. When it’s a CFO at an early-stage technology company, his or her pain may come from not having enough financial resources to grow the organization.
Before writing your content, make an outline that asks these questions. List your persona, these three questions, and how your content will address each point to help demonstrate your company’s solution.
Personalizing your message
There’s so much you can do differently in your content to make it personal. The ultimate goal is to communicate on an individual level with all the contacts who can influence the purchase decision. While this may seem impossible to do on a massive scale, your content depends on personas, so you can address the motivations of the contacts in your target accounts.
Developing a brand identity
The content you create will reinforce an identity for your company. You want your content to demonstrate thought leadership and answer any questions your prospects may have, as this reinforces your position as an expert. This also helps create a brand identity. But building a brand identity is a process. You can’t become a thought leader overnight, but you need your prospects and other influencers to recognize your brand.
When you think about a brand, the first things that come to mind are probably design elements: the brand’s name, logo, color, and text. While these design elements are essential, when it comes to developing a brand identity with your content, you must think about the words you select. Your brand identity is developed through the content you publish, the events you attend, the advertising campaigns you run that link to content, and every interaction you have with your accounts.
Your brand is what other people say about your company. Any negative interaction or detracting comment from a prospect can damage your brand.
There needs to be a plan for your brand’s identity. Consider the key adjectives, phrases, and descriptions your prospects would use to describe your company. Ask your customers questions about how they perceive your brand in surveys. This will provide insight into the type of content and activities to build and develop your brand. (See Book 1, Chapter 3 for more about branding.)
Reaching Through Technology
Technology, such as marketing automation platforms and CRM systems, has allowed more precise BtoB marketing to be possible. The majority of your content is distributed using digital channels. As you’re thinking about the type of content you’ll develop for your BtoB campaigns, consider how the content will be delivered to the contacts in your target accounts. The pieces of content you’re producing, such as webinars and whitepapers, will be hosted in a central hub (your marketing automation platform) for all the gated content requiring a form to download.
Host your original content files on your marketing automation platform. It’s synced with your CRM. It’s your marketing automation platform that monitors who from your CRM is engaging with the content.
Employing a content strategy
According to the Content Marketing Institute, less than 44 percent of B2B marketers meet daily or weekly (in person or virtually) to discuss the progress of their content marketing program. To succeed with targeted marketing, you need a strategy for distributing your content. Having a strategy will help you effectively use technology to ensure that your content is reaching the right contacts in your account. Think about your strategy with this formula:
Strategy = Content + Context + Channel
- Content: The marketing piece you’re sending. It’s a blog post, whitepaper, case study, handwritten note, infographic, video, or whatever medium that you’ve selected for your message and creative graphics.
- Context: The time and situation when you send content. The context depends on the stage of the buyer journey. Your content will change according to who you’re talking to, where they are in the purchase decision, and the context around the account.
- Channel: All the ways you can distribute content and connect with your accounts. The channels include digital methods (such as email, social media, downloading content from forms, and advertisements) and more traditional channels (such as direct mail and phone calls).
You will use a strategy to surround an account with your content, at different times, and across various channels. Surrounding all the right contacts in an account with your message creates a halo effect. To engage all the influencers in the purchase decision, you run different campaigns across multiple channels. Here are a few technology platforms that help with employing your content strategy:
- Uberflip (
www.uberflip.com): Uberflip’s software helps marketers create, manage, and optimize content at every stage of the buyer journey. The platform lets you aggregate all your content for specific buyer personas, topics, events, and prospects. There are features that help you automate curation and publishing to serve up the right content experience to your contacts. - SnapApp (
www.snapapp.com): SnapApp’s interactive content marketing platform helps you create, publish, manage, and measure audience experiences. SnapApp gives you the flexibility to create on-brand custom content experiences. Features can give you complete brand control and speed your time-to-market. - Triblio (
http://triblio.com): Triblio’s platform helps marketers personalize messaging and CTAs to specific accounts and personas. With Triblio web campaigns, each visitor can view customized websites, overlay cards, microsites, or content hubs that match their interests.
If you’re asking for budget approval to invest in technology to develop marketing content, make sure your executive stakeholders recognize that publishing more content will not automatically generate more revenue. It helps with nurturing contacts throughout the buyer journey.
What does equal more revenue? How can you scale and do more personalization with the same content?
The call to action (CTA) must be different. Don’t serve up a demo advertisement when they’re in the negotiation stage. When you’re doing personalization, it doesn’t have to be based on one technology. Within each of these strategies, you will use different tools to help create velocity and drive awareness, interest, and engagement with the contacts in your target accounts. Throughout the process, your job is to make sure you’re distributing content to the right people in the account.
Content needs to be packaged and delivered to contacts in accounts based on stage. Keep your strategy simple. You can’t control how people will find you.
When you think about the status of an account, you’re thinking about the context. Many interesting things can happen when you think about context.
Because you have accounts that are all in different parts of the purchase decision, there is a different context, or event(s) that impact the status, for each account. Your contacts in the account can have different context, especially when it’s a larger company.
There is always a context around the account. In a perfect world, your contacts in the account would say, “We want to do business with you!” But that’s just a dream. A specific event will trigger the progression to the next stage of the buyer journey.
The context is important for communicating with your business prospect. Your marketing communications, content, and activities shouldn't just be general, or “blanket,” messaging. It should be highly personalized, based on the context. Here are types of situations to consider for the context.
- Qualification: The content you send to a new account who matches your persona for the right company size and industry.
- Big news: When one of your targeted accounts publishes a fundraising announcement or other press release with a major announcement.
- Events: In-person (such as conferences and tradeshows) or online events (such as webinars and virtual summits). Depending on the timing, there will be different contexts, such as an attender who came to the event, pre-event registered, or post-event (they registered, but they didn’t attend or you didn’t have the opportunity to meet them).
- Event sponsor: They may be sponsoring an event that’s in your ecosystem (the industry or vertical with accounts you’re targeting). You sponsor the event for the chance to get in front of your targeted contacts.
- Job change: Alert from LinkedIn that a contact in your account has been promoted.
- Article: You saw one of your accounts in an interview or profile.
Setting up a Google Alert (www.google.com/alerts) can alert you of any news or media pertaining to your target account. When the company publishes a press release or is featured in a publication, it appears in your Google Alert. Whenever there’s news, the salesperson who owns the account should reach out.
Delivering content on the right channel
A combination of content and activities will be needed to create velocity for accounts. By publishing content across various channels, and running multiple campaigns, you can create energy and awareness for your targeted contacts. But it’s important to know whether these are the right channels to use for connecting with your contacts.
Your content is only as good as the people who read it. Find new ways to repurpose your content or to redistribute it on new channels.
Cross-promoting your content
You invest a ton of work in creating valuable content. One way to expand the reach of getting your content in front of the right people is to have a cross-promotion strategy.
Think about it this way: If you’re hosting a fancy party, you’ll invite a group of people with a formal invitation, but then you will follow up with them individually. When you see Bob at work, you’ll ask him whether he’s coming to your party, and he’ll reply with “Oh, right, I need to RSVP.”
A cross-promotion strategy works the same way. When you’re trying to engage a new contact in an account, and you invited them to attend an event and they didn’t respond, you follow up with an email. Or, when you just published a blog post, you can’t just hope people will read it. Hope isn’t a strategy. Your content can reach a wider audience by cross promoting across multiple channels. Here are ways you can cross promote your content.
- Social media: You can use social media to share your latest content, such as a new whitepaper or blog. When you’ve just published new content, you should post a link to this content on social media channels, such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, for your followers to see and read. Also, the “feeds” from Twitter can be integrated into your company’s blog through plugins for WordPress.
- Blog posts: When you publish a new case study, whitepaper, or ebook, write a blog post with an excerpt of this content. Include a CTA on your blog post to download the longer piece of content.
- Ask customers to share: When you've interviewed a customer for a case study or video testimonial, and you’ve just published it to your website, send the link to the customer you interviewed. Ask him or her to share it on social media, or internally with their company.
- Ask thought leaders to share: When you interview a thought leader or industry analyst for your latest whitepaper, ebook, or blog post, send them a link to the content and ask them to share it on social media. If they have a blog, ask whether you can publish an excerpt on their blog as well and cross promote that link.
- Webinar replays: After a webinar, turn the recording into a video, and publish the webinar’s slides on a landing page to download, or on a public-facing site, such as SlideShare (
www.slideshare.net). Send an email to your webinar registrants and attendees to download the slides and replay the recording. Also, post links to these assets on social media. - Infographic: Copy the images from your infographics into Microsoft PowerPoint to create a slide deck. These slides can be used for a webinar, a presentation for a sales account executive, or uploaded to SlideShare for people to download. You can also link to the original infographic. so your contacts can see it in different versions.
- Monthly newsletter: Every month, send an email newsletter, featuring multiple pieces of content. Include a recent blog post, your newest piece of long-form content, or a link to replay a webinar. This is a great way to aggregate all of your latest content and email it to contacts in your targeted accounts.
Measuring your content’s effectiveness
The formula for a successful content strategy is Context + Content + Channel. To determine whether your content is effective, you must measure the results. You must measure the success of your content and activities across the different stages of the buyer journey. Based on the content, here are questions to ask to determine whether your content was effective:
- Did the whitepaper, ebook, or case study you sent to a prospect advance the account to the next stage (getting the account on a demo or creating an opportunity)?
- If you sent a direct mail campaign, did they receive your mailing and acknowledge it (replying to your follow up call or email)?
- If you launched an advertising campaign, did you reach contacts in your targeted accounts? If so, how many impressions did you get? How many clicks did you receive from your contacts?
For more information about measuring your content’s effectiveness, see Book 9.
Who you’re talking to matters. The whole point of cross-promoting your content is to reach your targeted audience.
Think about how your core content can be delivered in different ways for consumption. You’ll discover which platforms are most effective for distributing content, based on the number of downloads (tracked in your CRM) and the number of clicks.