ShareTwo of the marketing industry’s leading events took place this month and Coast Digital were there to meet fellow marketers and deliver presentations on content marketing. The ‘Funnel’ event focused on helping B2B strategists deliver results by aligning their marketing and sales to drive new business through the sales/marketing funnel. The B2B Marketing conference focused on the strategic integration of digital marketing channels and the challenges facing today’s marketer in regard to utilising the right channels and message in line with customer preference.
As part of these events Richard Brenkley, Coast Digital MD, led a session titled “Content Marketing to Your Sales Funnel.” (Richard was unfortunately unable to attend ‘Funnel’ so I stood in for him.)
I attended Richard’s session at the B2B Marketing Conference so here’s a run-down of his presentation. If you want to discuss it in more detail why not get in touch?
Richard feels passionately about content marketing and during the event presented the view that it is more than just a buzzword, but actually a methodology of approaching lead generation and customer engagement.
Integration & Defining Audience Needs
The session started by highlighting the importance of close integration between sales and marketing and how both have a vested interest throughout the lead generation process. Key questions such as ownership of data, handover of leads and identifying targets were discussed, whilst the changing emphasis from demographic data to psychographic data was also explored.
Content Centric Thinking
As a seasoned advocate of content marketing Richard actively promotes the belief that useful, valuable content is at the heart of every great marketing campaign and that a content centric approach is needed when appealing to your target audience. This content centric thinking permeates all aspects of campaign planning, identifying which content will appeal to your audience’s internal mindset, what assets you can use to form a marketing strategy and how the right message on your website can help to turn prospect into lead.
Mapping Content to the Buying Cycle
The session also proposed that the purpose of content marketing is to establish what your prospects are asking of you, to understand their mindset and to provide convincing answers through effective and valuable content. As such it is vital that content is mapped to the prospect journey in order to provide customers with the right message at the right time and in the right format.
The Practicalities of Content Marketing
After discussing the most successful types of content and Joe Pulizzi’s Fiver Pillars of Content Marketing the session then turned to the practicalities of enacting a campaign. In this section potential content formats, distribution channels and measurements were highlighted as well as tips on how to identify your target market, extract the greatest insight from your key people and how to use social media as a research tool.
And finally…
To recap the points presented during the session Richard explained his 5 key considerations for content marketing in the modern B2B setting, describing how they should be used to shape your future campaigns. These are:
- Customer pull has now replaced vendor push
- Today listening to your audience and not just talking is essential
- When targeting think needs and wants not just job title and geography
- Don’t just rent data, build, own and love it to reap the greatest rewards
- The only way to keep up with the rising quality bar is to stay fresh and innovative
The slides from Richard’s session can be seen here and of course if you would like to discuss aspects of content marketing or how it could positively affect your business, please get in touch today.