Crafting emails to prospects, leads, and customers is a natural extension of the content marketer’s skill set. And by applying their expertise to email, content marketers become an integral part of communication at every point of the buyer’s journey. This makes you an indispensable, sought-after asset.
A second, and perhaps more crucial, reason content marketers should draft outbound emails is to ensure consistency in messaging and style -- particularly when emails are promoting major content assets.
Content is tailored to the buyer persona needed to reach. That content asset was written, edited, designed, and basically agonized over by the content marketing team. So when it’s time to promote it through outbound channels, don’t just pass it along to the demand gen team. The result is a more consistent approach between the content and promotion strategy. After all, the content marketer knows the material being sent out, and how to speak to the target buyer you’re hoping will open that email.
► FREE: AgileContent™ delivers more quality content to your market! Get your FREE 14 Day Trial NOW!:http://goo.gl/rzeg79. No credit card required!
► Receive a FREE daily summary of The Marketing Technology Alert directly to your inbox. To subscribe, please go to http://ineomarketing.com/About_The_MAR_Sub.html (your privacy is protected).
Marteq's insight:
Makes perfect sense, especially the notion that you need a consistent, buyer persona focused message.
Businesses of all sizes are now shifting gears to include Content Marketing as one of the main pillars of their marketing strategy. But as they race to create more content (73% of B2B marketers said they are producing more content now compared to one year ago) their biggest challenge is producing ENGAGING content.
One way to resolve this challenge is to understand that the content developed needs to be relevant, valuable, and relatable across all of the identified stages of the buyer’s journey. These are:
So how can marketers provide targeted content at each stage of the buyer’s journey? Here’s an example, in the discovery stage, the personalization can include qualitative information such as presenting only case studies matching the buyer’s industry and company size. In the consideration stage, deliver content such as infographics or flash demos that only align to the solutions or products that match the buyer’s pain points. Blogs, online communities and video testimonials addressing the specific needs of your target audience are examples of how to provoke validation and the decision making process can be facilitated through a sales presentation of competitive strengths and advantages.
___________________________________ ► FREE: AgileContent™ delivers more quality content to your market! Get your FREE 14 Day Trial NOW!: http://goo.gl/rzeg79. No credit card required!
► Receive a FREE daily summary of The Marketing Technology Alert directly to your inbox. To subscribe, please go to http://ineomarketing.com/About_The_MAR_Sub.html ; (your privacy is protected).
Marteq's insight:
The percentage of B2B buyers who are prepared before engaging with sales continues to increase, and after engagement, the flow of content needs to continue based on the funnel...BY PERSONA! Don't ignore shaping your content to your buyer persona by stage.
Metrics & ROI - What metrics can marketers track to make sure their content strategy is headed in the right direction?
___________________________________
► Receive a FREE daily summary of The Marketing Technology Alert directly to your inbox. To subscribe, please go to http://ineomarketing.com/About_The_MAR_Sub.html (your privacy is protected).
Marteq's insight:
Click through for details, but I think this graphic communicates the essence of the post: shape your metrics accordingly.
Aaron Kahlow shares his cliff notes, down and dirty version of a content marketing blueprint, with everything important for content marketing in 2014.
Basic/ Digest...
Get to Know Your Audience
Reevaluate who you are targeting, what they are doing and their personal and professional motivations, likes/dislikes and areas of interest.
Tie in Buying Cycle
Next, tie in their role in the buying cycle. Do they search for solutions/products like yours, or does one of their folks hand them the short list of offerings?
Audit Your Content Assets
What do you have by way of blog posts, webcasts, power points, videos, testimonials, ebooks, whitepapers, etc.? Determine which are really evergreen and which could be tweaked to be more relevant today.
SWOT
Next, start mapping content types back to your personas and do a quick Gap Analysis on the areas of interest and stages of the buying cycle that are missing and what are most important.
Plan Your Content
Finally, create the calendar and ownership of when and who will create this content. Much can be outsourced, curated or partnered with, so it does not all need to come from within the organization.
Social Sharing & Distribution
After this is all done (and yes, it's a bit more complex than above), it's time to distribute the content. Social media is a great place to start, so begin by thinking about what content is best for what channel.
Ads & Retargeting
After you get your social integration strategy in place, start thinking about re-targeted ads on Google Display and YouTube.
Measurement & Attribution
Don't forget the tracking! Attribution and attribution modeling for social media and all other channels is critical.
___________________________________
► Receive a FREE daily summary of The Marketing Technology Alert directly to your inbox. To subscribe, please go to http://ineomarketing.com/About_The_MAR_Sub.html (your privacy is protected).
Marteq's insight:
The B2B Content Marketing needs to include two important factors (missing from above):
A year-end study has revealed that content marketing was on the rise in 2013. What's surprising is that large companies are clearly lagging behind.
Intermediate/ Condensed...
While 93 percent of businesses said they used some type of content marketing (up from 91 percent in 2012), only 42 percent said they felt as though they were successful in their efforts.
B2B marketers who had a documented strategy in place were far more likely to consider themselves effective (66 percent vs. 11 percent), however less than half (44 percent) had such a strategy.
Surprisingly, the big boys were the biggest offenders. Only forty-one percent of B2B companies with more than 1000 employees had a documented content strategy, compared with 48 percent of companies between 10 and 99 employees.
___________________________________
► Receive a FREE daily summary of The Marketing Technology Alert directly to your inbox. To subscribe, please go to http://ineomarketing.com/About_The_MAR_Sub.html (your privacy is protected).
Marteq's insight:
I'd like to believe that content flows in an organized fashion from larger companies, and although the studies may show something different, the history of content creation favors the former. I suppose the truth lies in how "documented content strategy" is defined.
December brings many traditions: enjoying the holidays, wrapping up projects from the year that’s ending, and gearing up for the year ahead.
Intermediate/ Digest...
Setting up your editorial calendar isn’t difficult. A basic Excel sheet or Microsoft Word Table will do the trick. At a minimum, it should contain the following information:
Date
Writer or content producer responsible for drafting the piece
Working title
Your target keywords
Content format (e.g. blog post, white paper, etc.)
Call to action
Status
More fleshed out content calendars can include any or all of the following:
For individual pieces, they might include approval chains, alternate titles, and target publications
Overall campaign goals, mapped to each individual piece
Details on your audience profiles, mapped to each individual piece. Who are you speaking to with this article? What aspect of their experience do you want to dial up, specifically?
What publications are you targeting with your overall campaign, what’s their demographics and contact details?
What are your key performance indicators overall for the campaign? How is each individual piece performing against those metrics?
What are the biggest successes of the campaign?
What roadblocks or issues have you run into as part of the content campaign you’re managing?
Your editorial calendar can become much more than just a list of dates and targets. It can serve as a centralized workbook where you manage your entire content flow. It can also serve as a strategic hub that makes it easy to evaluate your progress at any specific moment in time.
___________________________________
► Receive a FREE daily summary of The Marketing Technology Alert directly to your inbox. To subscribe, please go to http://ineomarketing.com/About_The_MAR_Sub.html (your privacy is protected).
Marteq's insight:
What's interesting about this article is that it harkens back to the basic outline, where you start with the components then slowly build each section out until you have an article. Same process.
What's interesting about this article is that it harkens back to the basic outline, where you start with the components then slowly build each section out until you have an article. Same process.
"An overview of the concept behind Content Grouping, and the methods by which you can group content."
__________________________________
► Receive a FREE daily summary of The Marketing Technology Alert directly to your inbox. To subscribe, please go to http://ineomarketing.com/About_The_MAR_Sub.html (your privacy is protected).
Marteq's insight:
LONG overdue! And will definitely make your life a bit easier!!
Online lead generation, lead scoring, and tracking are all listed as top priorities when businesses choose marketing automation platforms, according to the BtoB research. That’s no surprise given that the key to personalization is segmenting audiences into personas. By building personas based on behavior, title, industry, and other attributes, marketers can personalize customer experiences far more accurately, creating relevant content for each audience.
Clearly, marketers are stumbling on two different obstacles when it comes to personalization: the need for more personalized content and the need to have that content respond to users across new and developing channels, from social to email to mobile. Even with automation solutions on hand, marketers can feel like they’re being asked to produce more collateral than ever before while moonlighting as data scientists and programmers.
Yet there’s no doubt that personalization will grow increasingly important for building customer loyalty and acquiring new business. The democratization of big data and analytics tools will yield big gains to those who invest in them. To ensure customer loyalty, companies will continue to work toward a segment-of-one, trying to attain personalization on an individual level.
Technology–the cause of these new challenges and opportunities–will also be the solution. At first glance, all of these issues seem to be disparate, with different sources that demand different strategies. However, when big data and machine learning come into play, standard content marketing practices can be applied to new technology, and everything changes.
__________________________________
► Receive a FREE daily summary of The Marketing Technology Alert directly to your inbox. To subscribe, please go to http://ineomarketing.com/About_The_MAR_Sub.html (your privacy is protected).
Marteq's insight:
Short on answers, but going in the right direction.
However, been there. I cannot tell you how incredibly difficult it is to customize content to the individual. The notion seems simple enough, but the execution is incredibly intensive. One day...
We’ve come up with a few tips you can pass along to your sales counterparts.
-- > Know who your target buyer is, really – Even if you think you know who your target audience is, take a moment to think about key job titles, what pains you can solve, what does your prospect’s everyday life look like?
-- > Know where they are looking for information – Are you taking advantage of those new social channels? Many buyers today are asking their peers for advice on products and services. If you aren’t listening and engage in their online conversations, you are missing an opportunity to learn where they are in the buying cycle and help educate them.
-- > Develop the content that will attract their attention – Work with your marketing department to come up with educational and engaging content that will help you deliver an effecting messaging without ever telling them they need your product or service.
-- > Start thinking in real time – Once you’ve established your online presence you can start pointing people to your blog or website content and be a part of the conversations as they happen.
__________________________________
► NEW: iNeoMarketing makes content marketing easy with the new Q8 Content. Q8 fills your content pipeline daily with relevant articles that your audience wants to read. Learn more and sign up for the beta program: http://www.Q8content.com.
► Receive a FREE daily summary of The Marketing Technology Alert directly to your inbox. To subscribe, please go to http://ineomarketing.com/About_The_MAR_Sub.html (your privacy is protected).
Marteq's insight:
Tread carefully. Last thing you want is to get into a knowledge contest with your sales colleagues: rhetoric will sometimes win.
► NEW: iNeoMarketing makes content marketing easy with the new Q8 Content. Q8 fills your content pipeline daily with relevant articles that your audience wants to read. Learn more and sign up for the beta program: http://www.Q8content.com.
► Receive a FREE daily summary of The Marketing Technology Alert directly to your inbox. To subscribe, please go to http://ineomarketing.com/About_The_MAR_Sub.html (your privacy is protected).
Customer Behavior - Almost three quarters (72%) of buyers planning to purchase a B2B product begin their research with a Google search, according to a recent report by Pardot.
Excerpt...
Content Preferences
-- > 76% of B2B buyers surveyed prefer different content at each stage of their research process.
-- > 89% agree that the cost of the item they are purchasing affects the amount of research they do.
-- > 98% say their search terms usually become more refined as their research deepens on a purchase.
-- > 70% of buyers say written B2B content such as whitepapers and case studies should be under five pages.
-- > 2% prefer content longer than five pages, and 28% think the content should be as long as it takes to inform.
__________________________________
► NEW: iNeoMarketing makes content marketing easy with the new Q8 Content. Q8 fills your content pipeline daily with relevant articles that your audience wants to read. Learn more and sign up for the beta program: http://www.Q8content.com.
► Receive a FREE daily summary of The Marketing Technology Alert directly to your inbox. To subscribe, please go to http://ineomarketing.com/About_The_MAR_Sub.html (your privacy is protected).
Marteq's insight:
From the annual State of Demand Generation Report from Pardot, which I've previously scooped. This was worthwhile to pull out as it supports lead nurturing with content matched to different personas, stages, etc.
Content - Whether you are new to content marketing or you are looking to re-evaluate your current resources, keeping these four steps in mind will help you assemble your dream team.
Condensed...
Whether you are new to content marketing or you are looking to re-evaluate your current resources, keeping the following four steps in mind will help you assemble your dream team.
1. Start by hiring a managing editor
2. Find full-time (or freelance) content creators and distributors
3. Identify industry influencers
4. Don't forget about your coworkers
__________________________________
► NEW: iNeoMarketing makes content marketing easy with the new Q8 Content. Q8 fills your content pipeline daily with relevant articles that your audience wants to read. Learn more and sign up for the beta program: http://www.Q8content.com.
► Receive a FREE daily summary of The Marketing Technology Alert directly to your inbox. To subscribe, please go to http://ineomarketing.com/About_The_MAR_Sub.html (your privacy is protected).
Marteq's insight:
It all depends on how you define content as well as they type of content you're planning to produce. Use webinars as an example: is a Managing Editor the right person to captain that ship? What about infographics? Layout your plan, and hire accordingly. See my recommended org chart.
On Tuesday, Twitter announced the release of custom timelines. Now, you can create a timeline that includes select tweets about a topic, event, or breaking news so people can follow along. You can choose a name for your custom timeline, and it will live on its own public Twitter page.
In reality, we’ve barely scratched the surface. As we move into 2014, companies will find ways to organize all of their content (social, blogs, photos, videos, etc.) into easily digestible, topically relevant content streams that can live anywhere.
All this is in line with the future of content marketing. People are tired of wading through content they don’t care about. What they want is meaningful content. And what brands and publishers need is a way to organize and target it effectively.
__________________________________
► NEW: iNeoMarketing makes content marketing easy with the new Q8 Content. Q8 fills your content pipeline daily with relevant articles that your audience wants to read. Learn more and sign up for the beta program: http://www.Q8content.com.
► Receive a FREE daily summary of The Marketing Technology Alert directly to your inbox. To subscribe, please go to http://ineomarketing.com/About_The_MAR_Sub.html (your privacy is protected).
Marteq's insight:
I scooped the Timeline announcement last week, and this article offers a few more details, e.g., beta only. However, the additional point regarding organization of content is incredibly important, and there's going to be companies coming out with an underlying library system that delivers the right content and the right time, just in time.
B2B enterprises are failing to provide adequate support to their front-line sales forces, finds the CMO Council [download page] in an audit of 230 senior senior marketing executives conducted in Q3. One of the biggest deficiencies pertains to real-time delivery of sales intelligence and breaking news, with fewer than 1 in 10 definitively agreeing that their current customer information system acquires and delivers real-time account-related news, social insights and customer-related developments to the sales organization.
__________________________________
► NEW: iNeoMarketing makes content marketing easy with the new Q8 Content. Q8 fills your content pipeline daily with relevant articles that your audience wants to read. Learn more and sign up for the beta program: http://www.Q8content.com.
► Receive a FREE daily summary of The Marketing Technology Alert directly to your inbox. To subscribe, please go to http://ineomarketing.com/About_The_MAR_Sub.html (your privacy is protected).
Marteq's insight:
GADZOOKS, this is friggin' horrible! If we can't deliver the right content at the right time to Sales, then we're failing! Where's that functionality?
The Alchemy of Content: A Formula for Overcoming Four Major Content Pain Points”: offers a step-by-step process for overcoming four common content pain points:
Content Development and Distribution: How to organize resources to establish an effective and efficient process.
Content Creation: How to effectively “feed the content beast” with content that resonates.
Content Cadence: How to get the publication cycle right.
Content ROI: How to make sure content is working hard enough for the investment made. Defining your value story requires a methodical approach.
Clearly identify KPIs aligned with business mission.
Identify the metrics that will work as a unit to tell a value story.
Identify the sources of those metrics and pull into a dashboard using connectors.
Create an algorithm that weights each metric in relation to their importance to the “story.”
Analyze performing and non-performing metrics for each KPI on a periodic basis and use to calibrate approach.
Marteq's insight:
This truly is a step-by-step process, and very timely.
If you are considering formalizing your content process, or you need to do a pre-2014 audit, you need to review this .pdf. It's a quick read at 50 pages, and is a roadmap that you can use to compare/contrast/improve.
Content - How do you know which pieces of content are working well for your business? The following infographic by Brandpoint walks marketers through the process of measuring their content marketing and ...
Based on my experience working with the HubSpot team and the Boston Content community, here’s what you might expect as your content team scales:
1. You will remember that content is for resonance, not just reach
Unfortunately we get caught up in things like headlines, SEO practices, social sharing, and email — all are wonderful distribution mechanisms, but content is about resonance, not just reach. Something great has to happen after the click, so if your content mission is to “get eyeballs,” you are overlooking the fact that you’re targeting real people who have thoughts, emotions, nuances, and biases.
2. You’ll develop niche playbooks to be able to move more quickly and create content with purpose
While a small, emerging content team might only need to have a single content publishing “playbook,” or approach to content creation, our team has found itself with a dire need to create multiple playbooks, each addressing a different strategic goal, in order to scale elegantly.
3. You’ll start to specialize and hire complementary team members
With scale often comes specialization, as well as the need to work smarter against specific goals, not just really hard against every goal (though the hard work never goes away). Some personalities or areas of specialty that will likely start to emerge.
Marteq's insight:
Some pointers should you find yourself needing to increase the size of your content team. However, I'm in conflict with this notion. The marketer's budget is not unlimited, so given the growth of marketing technologies, why would you scale up the content team when you may very well want to outsource and free up resources for more marketing tech tasks.
Here are five tips for marketing leaders trying to rebalance their content generation efforts to ensure that key sales and marketing initiatives are fueled with the right kind of content:
Product marketing must redefine its role as content creator.
Marketing planning functions must build campaigns as content blueprints.
Communications groups must be transparent in their approach to creating and delivering content.
Sales needs a seat at the content planning table.
Set realistic expectations for global vs. local content.
Marteq's insight:
Missing: incorporating a marketing technologist into the planning process!
The Create, Edit, and Manage stage included all of the modern web content management systems (WCMS) and blogging solutions, along with file-sharing technologies such as Dropbox, Box, etc.
The Aggregate, Curate, and Optimize stage included classic content optimization, testing, and personalization tools such as Adobe Test & Target, Optimost, and Monetate.
The Promote, Converse, and Listen stage included social channels, as well as enterprise listening tools such as Radian6 and Attensity.
The Measure, Analyze, and Learn stage included many web analytics tools such as Google Analytics, Webtrends, and Adobe SiteCatalyst.
We then took the newer technology solutions, mapped them into the overlap areas, and grouped them as follows:
Content collaboration tools — where Create, Edit, and Manage overlaps with Aggregate, Curate, and Optimize. These tools facilitate content editorial work flow, empower the enterprise to manage teams (either external or internal), and enable collaboration on content for content marketing purposes.
Curation and conversation tools — where Aggregate, Curate, and Optimize overlaps with Promote, Converse, and Listen. These tools help to promote, publish, and aggregate content in meaningful ways; in many cases, they also help manage the content optimization process by using social signals, and can even facilitate some level of unified content conversation.
Social content analytics tools — where Promote, Converse, and Listen meets Measure, Analyze, and Learn. These tools help to maintain relevance in conversation, while also providing insight into what we should be talking about — from specific niche social channel analytics, to semantic processing of social media conversations.
Engagement automation tools — where Measure, Analyze, and Learn comes back around to overlap with Create, Edit, and Manage. Beyond classic marketing automation, many of these tools not only have the ability to manage some form of content, but they can do so from the point of view of helping the marketer “optimize” content for engagement and conversion purposes.
Marteq's insight:
We're starting see more and more theoretical models that reflect the marketing technology marketplace: from the LUMAscape to last week's Stack to this. Getting a grip on the framework is important inasmuch as it allows you to benchmark yourself against what is available in the marketplace, and how to best use these tools.
What if you could generate a CMS comparison that actually gave you the information you needed to eliminate the choices?
Digest...
The CMS Matrix: It's an incredibly nifty CMS comparison tool - but it's not just any tool. It has tons of information on each CMS, and my favorite thing about it is the conversation it stirs between marketing, IT, and the executives.
Receive a daily summary of The Marketing Automation Alert directly to your inbox. Subscribe here(your privacy is protected).
If you like this scoop, PLEASE share by using the links below.
iNeoMarketing merges marketing automation with content marketing for a powerful lead management solution, configured and managed by our knowledgeable, experienced staff. Contact us.
To help prioritize your content requests, consider developing a content request form that you share across all departments that might be asking you for content. Often requestors only have a vague idea of what their needs are when they ask for content to be created. The request form helps them drill down to their most essential needs — which will help you identify possible ways to incorporate them into your existing content plan, or to minimize the revision process so that you can free up time in your schedule to produce additional content. Moreover, the improved communication facilitated by the form helps you produce content that is more targeted, more appropriate, and better able to deliver the kind of results its requestor expects. Marketers also would be wise to use the form themselves, to help flesh out and prioritize their own ideas for content creation.
Marteq's insight:
A great tool...but we wonder if this builds more walls vs. bridges. We know requests flow into marketing from a variety of people for a variety of items, and organization is important. We just don't know if policing this process (or lack of process) should be done via a form (even an online form that extends a custom object from SFDC).
Receive a daily summary of The Marketing Automation Alert directly to your inbox. Subscribe here(your privacy is protected).
If you like this scoop, PLEASE share by using the links below.
iNeoMarketing merges marketing automation with content marketing for a powerful lead management solution, configured and managed by our knowledgeable, experienced staff. Contact us.
To get content containing either thought or leadership enter:
To get content containing both thought and leadership enter:
To get content containing the expression thought leadership enter:
You can enter several keywords and you can refine them whenever you want. Our suggestion engine uses more signals but entering a few keywords here will rapidly give you great content to curate.
Your new post is loading...
![Is Marketing In the Middle of Content Chaos? [Infographic] | Kapost Content Marketeer | #TheMarketingAutomationAlert | The MarTech Digest | Scoop.it](https://img.scoop.it/oZyBSroC6qTMJq8LPWsIx_L6dadsvGA8m9WNoVsbzkY=)
![How Do You Measure Content Marketing? [Infographic] - Profs | #TheMarketingAutomationAlert | The MarTech Digest | Scoop.it](https://img.scoop.it/gYSgTaJHmrhaA2HqieFd_PL6dadsvGA8m9WNoVsbzkY=)
![The Content Life Cycle [INFOGRAPHIC] | DigitalC4 | The MarTech Digest | Scoop.it](https://img.scoop.it/To-27Z8wRvlvmZerGWBpQvL6dadsvGA8m9WNoVsbzkY=)
![9 Questions to Help You Prioritize Content Creation [Template] - CMI | The MarTech Digest | Scoop.it](https://img.scoop.it/r_pj_zJqB8IYZwirml7Dn_L6dadsvGA8m9WNoVsbzkY=)
Makes perfect sense, especially the notion that you need a consistent, buyer persona focused message.