How to integrate content marketing into your business strategy.
Many companies often ask themselves the following question: how to integrate content marketing into their digital strategy? This is a very important point to consider for the success of your web marketing strategy.
Integrating Content Marketing into your overall strategy is a vast process to implement and we will try to summarize it in this article.
The importance of content marketing.
In recent years, content marketing has become a real discipline in its own right. According to a study by the Content Marketing Institute, 91% of B2B companies use content marketing as a lever in their marketing strategy.
Define the target of your content.
The second step is to profile the target audience for your content (the personas). To do this, you must answer these questions:
Increase brand awareness
Attract traffic to your website
Increase subscriptions
Direct readers to a Landing Page, etc.
By creating specific personas, you can easily adapt the content created to your target to achieve the objectives set.
Determine the type of content.
After defining your goals and target, it’s time to determine the type of content to bet on the most. Between video tutorials, blog posts, webinars, social media announcements… it’s up to you to choose the most relevant solution.
Create an implementation plan.
Once the type of content was determined, you had to establish a content execution plan (editorial plan).
Create a content promotion process.
At this level, you must put in the necessary means to promote the content created. Between advertising campaigns on different social networks, Google Ad Words, e-mail marketing or even influencer marketing, the choice must be made according to the objectives set and the budget allocated.
Measuring and refining your strategy.
It is important to set up performance indicators (KPIs) that help you assess your content marketing strategy. Besides, there are many tools to analyze the data collected and measure the impact of your strategy. This will help you make the right decisions to improve the effectiveness of your actions.
In order to remain competitive and attract new customers, companies must more than ever take care of their digital presence and understand the needs and expectations of their prospects.
According to a study by the Content Marketing Institute, 91% of B2B marketers were already using content marketing strategies in 2019. In addition, according to this same study, 72% of B2B marketing departments believe that one of their top priorities is to create attractive content to attract their prospects and customers.
Developing a good content strategy is, therefore, one of the pillars of companies’ digital strategy. According to Contently, content marketing will generate $ 300 billion in 2019 and the creation of communication content represents on average 34% of the budget allocated to companies’ digital strategy.
And for good reason, new technologies have a ubiquitous place in our daily lives. Computers and smartphones constantly connect us and are a real opportunity to generate demand, provided that we mature it upstream with stimulating and personalized content.
Developing a good content strategy allows companies to increase their visibility and support their expert status. A good correlation between the creation and sharing of communication content is inseparable if the company wants to achieve its objectives.
In terms of return on investment, content marketing costs around 62% less than traditional marketing and generates 3 times more leads. For each lead generated, it is 59% cheaper than paid research for large companies and 69% cheaper for SMEs.
Which communication content formats prioritized in BtoB.
In order to remain competitive and attract new customers, companies must more than ever take care of their digital presence and understand the needs and expectations of their prospects.
According to a study by the Content Marketing Institute, 91% of B2B marketers were already using content marketing strategies in 2018. In addition, according to this same study, 72% of B2B marketing departments believe that one of their top priorities is to create attractive content to attract their prospects and customers.
Developing a good content strategy is, therefore, one of the pillars of companies’ digital strategy. According to Contently, content marketing will generate $ 300 billion in 2019 and the creation of communication content represents on average 34% of the budget allocated to companies’ digital strategy.
And for good reason, new technologies have a ubiquitous place in our daily lives. Computers and smartphones constantly connect us and are a real opportunity to generate demand, provided that we mature it upstream with stimulating and personalized content.
Developing a good content strategy allows companies to increase their visibility and support their expert status. A good correlation between the creation and sharing of communication content is inseparable if the company wants to achieve its objectives.
In terms of return on investment, content marketing costs around 62% less than traditional marketing and generates 3 times more leads. For each lead generated, it is 59% cheaper than paid research for large companies and 69% cheaper for SMEs.
Which communication content formats prioritized in BtoB
There are many different types of communication content. Their use depends on your target and their needs. Regardless of the media or format, keep in mind that your prospects and customers are looking for more humanized and personalized relationships. In a survey of 1,100 digital professionals, 94% said personalization was “essential to current and future success. The priority of the content marketing strategy is therefore to create value and above all personalization.
In order to respond precisely to a potential client’s questions and/or needs, you can adopt an inbound content strategy. The more your target will have the feeling that a communication content responds in an ultra-specific way to their needs and that the company takes it into consideration as a person, the more they are likely to produce quality leads.
According to the day group, personalized lead management leads to a 20% increase in sales opportunities for prospects. In addition, personalized marketing converts to an average of 4x more than generic marketing.
Among the most popular formats for producing communication content, 83% of companies regularly use social media, 80% of them own a blog and 77% regularly produce newsletters.
Fun, it allows you to personalize relationships with the company. According to The drum study, 91% of consumers prefer this type of communication content to traditional content. Interactive content is the best way to get the reader into action and stand out from other companies.
If you want to offer interactive content to your customers, the most suitable formats for a content marketing strategy are quizzes, calculators, surveys, and surveys. Augmented reality and virtual reality are also developing more and more.
In the major content marketing trends, we also find visual content. According to a study by Alioze, it is 40 times more likely to be shared on social networks than text content. Infographics are a good example: they are 3 times more likely to be liked and shared than any other type of communication content on social networks. Visual content is essential to capture the attention of prospects.
Another good practice to support the expert status of the company is influencer marketing. Although it was largely used in BtoC in its infancy, it is now very popular in BtoB, because professionals also seek the advice of other professionals to support their decision.
The blog at the heart of your content marketing strategy.
Did you know that 70% of people learn about a business through blog posts rather than advertising?
Maintaining a blog has become essential to attract new prospects and is at the heart of companies’ digital strategy.
There are more than 1.60 billion websites worldwide and more than 2 million blogs are published daily on the Internet and around 92 million articles are published monthly.
According to TechClient, 77% of web users read blogs and 23% of the time spent on the net is spent on blogs and social networks.
Nowadays, blogging is a constantly growing practice, with more than 409 million people viewing more than 23.6 billion pages each month on WordPress alone.
If you don’t know this tool, WordPress is the first CMS in the world. It hosts sites like The New York Times, Forbes, and even the Facebook blog, and hosts around 20.6 million active websites worldwide.
In addition, as mentioned earlier, blogs have a format more suited to long content (at least 1500 words). A study tells us that a long article generates 9x more leads than a short article.
Blogging is an essential practice for any inbound marketing strategy. Inbound marketing aims to provide prospects with all the content they need to get an idea of the product or service that the company markets.
According to a drum study, 74% of the public trust content that comes from a business and aims to educate readers about a particular subject. In addition, 47% of consumers saw 3-5 different communication content before contacting a sales representative.
Thanks to inbound marketing, the salesperson can let the prospect mature until the latter reaches its maturation stage and the contact.
The more the content marketing strategy implemented meets the needs of customers, the more the company will gain credibility and expertise. It is also an excellent investment because it allows you to reach new prospects at a lower cost since the communication content created remains online without an expiration date. The articles will then refer to themselves little by little, provided you have the right promotion strategy associated with it.
According to Contently, companies that regularly maintain a blog have 434% more indexed pages than those that do not and 13 times more likely to generate ROI: blogging is undoubtedly an investment reliable over the long term.4
Video to boost your BtoB communication content.
As mentioned earlier, visual content is essential for engaging prospects. For this, video is a great way to reach a wider audience on all platforms, web pages or social networks the company uses.
In 2019, video generates 64% of internet traffic and will represent 80% of global traffic.
It leads to a 200 to 300% increase in the click-through rate of commercial emails and increases the commitment to buy leads by 64%. An email with a video receives an average of 96% additional click-through rate.
Across the world, 51% of marketers cite video as the type of communication content with the best return on investment.