“What’s the future of B2B content marketing in 2018?” I was asked recently.
“I’m no Nostradamus.” I replied. I don’t think anyone can tell you exactly what will happen next year.
So instead of making guesses for 2018, I asked the top B2B content marketers the following questions.
- What were your biggest content marketing learnings in 2017?
- What worked in terms of content marketing for your business in 2017?
- What didn’t work in terms of content marketing for your business in 2017?
Their learnings provide ten useful insights for your B2B content marketing strategy next year.
1. When it comes to content marketing, stick to the basics.
In 2017, content marketers realized that sticking to the basics can yield substantial results.
Aaron Orendorff, content marketer at Shopify Plus explains how.
In content marketing, the name of the game is still:
- identifying valuable organic keywords your target market is already using
- creating stand-out written content optimized for search
- augmenting that written content with rich data and visuals
- offering visitors relevant calls-to-action to get them into your funnel
This four-step process helped Orendorff produce B2B Ecommerce: How the Best in B2B Sales Succeed Online, which has been shared over 2,300 times on social.
2. Supercharge your content with contributions from influencers.
Orendorff goes on to say that instead of creating marketing assets alone or even as a marketing team, you should reach out to external influencers or internal experts for original contributions. He says “make it as easy as possible by providing clear directions and only asking one question at a time.” An example of this is Orendorff’s roundup piece: Growth hacking: Strategies and techniques from marketing’s 25 most influential leaders.”
Garrett Ruiz, head of global content marketing at BlueJeans leveraged a similar influencer outreach approach at his company. He explains: “we moved from a broadcast model in which content was focused on educating our target audience about our business or products, to an engagement and advocacy model. We looked for market themes to attach our brand to and social influencers that could help us tell those stories.”
“For example, we asked influencers to submit their thoughts on a digital transformation topic and published a paper with their contributions. When promoted the paper via organic social, it garnered 7x more impressions and 1.6x the engagement compared to our average posts. The topic resonated with our audience and the contributors were eager to share the piece with their own audience,” says Ruiz.
3. Stalk your competitors.
Bianca Ghose, chief storyteller at Wipro says that successful content marketers stalked their competitive landscape in 2017. “Know your competition, what they are saying, doing and even planning!” Ghose says. Her team, for example, uses tools like Buzzsumo, Sprinkler and Social Studio, among others to keep a tab on competitors’ ongoing conversations, campaigns and share of voice.
4. A/B test your content marketing strategy.
In addition to keeping close tabs on your competitors, Ghose recommends A/B testing every element of your campaign including:
- Headlines
- Visuals
- Channel strategy
- Ad units used
- Placement of the download form on your landing page
For a global B2B content marketing campaign earlier this year, Ghose said her team A/B tested almost every element of the campaign and optimized accordingly. Based on their testing, they learned headlines in social ads with open ended questions around a business challenge outperformed those with real insights or answers from the report, as well as creatives with real human visuals.”
Tracey Wallace, editor in chief at BigCommerce shares how her company conducts A/B tests. She explains, “we run A/B tests through Optimizely on micro-conversions on the site, starting with tests on our most popular blog pieces to understand what gets the most clicks, downloads and email capture. Nothing goes live 100% across the site until we have a winner on the those top-performing pages. We also tweak the funnel, adding in and testing thank you videos, number of email follow-ups, subject lines, copy, click-thru and so on. Nothing goes untested. Historically, we've measured performance via organic sessions data (and will continue to) but are now actively tying it into top-of-funnel lead generation, which means our funnels need to be perfect. And they are getting there.”
5. Optimize your videos for different social media channels.
“This year, we discovered the same video can be shared on different platforms in different ways for very different results, says Jonathan Seidman, senior specialist, content marketing at ATEN International.
“For example, it became clear that directly uploading our videos onto our Facebook page (which would make them play automatically, versus a static YouTube link that needed to be clicked), drove far more views than just pasting a link.” Based on these results, Seidman’s team increased their sponsorship of video content, as well as increased the ratio of video to static content, from 1:3 versus around 1:20 last year.
On LinkedIn, Seidman highlights that videos don't play automatically since it is a less noisy platform with far less content fighting for attention. Instead he advises bottom of the funnel content like case studies, which have proved more successful on LinkedIn.
6. Don’t settle for organic reach. Amplify your content through a paid distribution.
“The biggest learning for me in 2017 was that a organic content promotion strategy, especially on social, needed to go hand-in-hand with a paid distribution strategy. In our case, Facebook's new Lead Ads proved a very effective way to connect content to potential purchasing behavior,” says Seidman.
7. Don’t create new content when you can recycle.
“If an idea delivers, change the wrapper - the messaging and the design, the content mix and the audience cut - and throw it back into circulation again after a reasonable cool-off period,” advises Ghose.
She says this approach allowed her team to deliver a content marketing campaign at the start of 2017 that raked in $21 million in marketing qualified leads for the firm!
As Wallace says, “Content needs to be cleaned up! Our best performing content of the year, in terms of sessions, backlinks and snippets, was content we published the year prior, and then did our due diligence to accurately update it for the new year, i.e. get new images, new quotes and even new content if called for and republished it like new. Google immediately ranked the pieces higher, influencers and experts were quickly ready to share (given the piece already had quite a bit of social shares anyway) and partners were often ready to invest in the pieces given they had search rank and the workload was light for them.”
“Now, we republish a long-form piece of content at least once a month and are constantly updating our lead capture funnel to optimize for every new launch. Our design is getting better. Our organic traffic is up 300% YoY. Our readers are happier, as indicative of our decrease in bounce rates and increase in email responses. And all it took was a little due diligence to not produce net new, but to look back, understand what worked or didn't and then clean it up,”says Wallace.
8. Share real-life examples and case studies.
“Publishing anything under 1,000 words without examples, screenshots or quotes from other people just doesn't perform for us,” says Wallace. “Our readers don't want a list of top tips unless you are going to show them:
- Who does it that way?
- How they set it up?
- What are the exact metrics on how it works?
Wallace explains: “I attribute that to the "fake news" industry right now. People are getting more wary about what content they trust – and if you can't back up what you say with examples of people doing it right now, then why would anyone trust your best practice advice?”
9. Don’t hard sale your products through content.
Nicola Eliot, head of content at BBC StoryWork APAC, shares the downsides of hard-selling through content. “Where we have made any attempts to experiment with brand heavy content, it has not performed nearly as well as content supported by the brand and retained a focus on what is interesting to the reader.”
10. Create content that connects with your audience without extreme targeting.
Marketers were in agreement that a one-size-fits-all approach does not work. As Ruiz explains, “It can be tempting to cut corners when it comes to audience segmentation but it is better to focus on producing great content for one audience than trying to speak to multiple audiences with poorly tailored or (worst) irrelevant content.
Ghose, however, advises not to go overboard with hyper-targeting content. She says “The impulse to over-specify and micro-segment audiences has ruined many a (potentially great) campaign this year. Including some of mine! There’s no perfect customer profile, no persona that can be exact enough. While custom audiences are absolutely critical, in making the targeting strategy very specific, content marketers have risked abandoning large groups of potential customers.”
What was your biggest B2B content marketing learning in 2017? Share it in the comments section and you could just be featured in my next article.
