Essential Tips for Social Media & Content Marketing
Content marketing is essential for B2B businesses providing both qualitative and quantitative returns. And while 6 in 10 marketers are plotting to increase content marketing spends this year, success-rates still vary greatly as it’s a new concept for most.
Maria Pergolino, director of marketing for Marketo (a TopRank Online Marketing client) mutual a presentation at the Marketo User Peak on getting the message out, focused on social media and content marketing tips/tricks.
How do you succeed in content marketing?
- Make content that sells
- Make a content map
- Optimize content for search
- Repurpose content
- Learn to succeed even in situations with small or no content
We need content for nurturing, as a lead solution, for lead scoring and risk mitigation. A lot of people don’t even consider the risk mitigation aspect – by publishing content and making people feel like your company is providing fantastic information and is a chief, they’ll choose you. Without content, you’ll never even have the opportunity to be found.
What is content?
Content is not just white ID – it’s videos, it’s blog posts, it’s real-time updates, it’s FAQs. B2B businesses need to reckon beyond just white ID. Ahead of schedule when people are just learning about your product they are looking for uncommon types of content. For example, ahead of schedule in the buying cycle they may find you through blog posts. Later on, they want demo videos or perhaps reinforcement about their choice from an analyst or third party.
The bottom line: you need to carefully consider all the pieces of content you’ll need to make throughout the buying cycle.
6 rules of fantastic content:
- Non-promotional
- Relevant to booklover
- Closes a gap
- Well-written
- Relevant to your company
- Gives proof
And – equally vital – don’t forget to promote. Excellent content is not sufficient – you should be by a mix of channels from email and social media to PR and search engine marketing to promote your content. You have to help it spread, excellent content isn’t going to get anywhere on its own. You have to do everything you can to place the right material in front of the right people at the right time.
Free your content
Many B2B marketers will only place content up behind a login form. But, you should really use forms only when you really need them. Consider removing forms from ahead of schedule stage content in order to make it accessible and get others to share it. It’s so much more vital ahead of schedule-stage content gets in the hands of all because even if it’s not frankly applicable to them, they may share it with the right people at an organization. Further, with forms use only what you really need on them – asking less is key to getting more form completes.
Secret to testing with content: even though testing on the web is pretty simple, you still need to know just so what you’re testing for.
Content mapping
Content mapping is a vital part of the process – consider segmenting content for uncommon buying stages – ahead of schedule through late. Further, you also need to consider buying profiles when developing content, including industry, role, company size and geography.
When you do map, keep the following in mind:
- Map your unfilled content
- Bemused cells determine your content roadmap
- Small content is excellent and can be very effective, don’t always make long format content
- Test and optimize
- Start small, reckon huge and adapt quickly
Optimize for search
Optimize your whole site categorically it for search.
- As a replacement for of grouping by “video, article and white paper” group by specific keyword concept
- Optimize keywords in content, meta descriptions and title tag
- Ensure meta descriptions aren’t just for search engines, make them compelling so users really click through
If you’re going to make content, it is imperative you optimize it so people really see it. There’s no reason if you’re making content online you shouldn’t consider search – it’s too vital a channel to ignore.
Making content social
Add ratings, comments and ability to sort in order to let users choose the most well loved content on your site. Further, ensure you have share and bookmarking options on all content (and to networks that matter to your users).
Consider that social media is also more than just Twitter and Facebook. Find the areas that are most vital to your brand in social channels and spend your time there. In many cases it may not be the most well loved networks, especially if you are in more obscure categories.
Social sharing – make to order your emails and landing pages so they have social options. If you’re driving a lot of push traffic to pages, do everything you can to increase organic traffic as well.
Social validation – adds intelligibility and credibility for your brand. If people are saying excellent things, leverage them as social proof by re-by them in other marketing materials and making sure they are visibility to prospects. This can include quotes, endorsements, subscriber numbers, etc.
Social monitoring – start by monitoring the most well loved social media sites, but figure out a way to watch across platforms. Make the best use of alerts and be sure you keep queries running on the terms that matter.
Final takeaway – learn the three 3’s R’s of content optimization:
Reorganize – take ancient content and be sure it’s methodical and categorized. If you remove a landing page, for example, be sure to redirect it (and use 301 redirects).
Reword – Reword content into uncommon formats so you have maximum impact across channels. For example, a webinar becomes a SlideShare becomes a blog post. Optimize each for slight variations on the same topic.
Retire – when content is dated, be sure to archive but it does not need to be actively promoted any longer. Go on to making additional fresh, relevant content.
Bonus – Marketo really published the presentation on SlideShare during the talk, which I thought was quite clever as it provided immediate context to the Tweets at the conference. We’ve embedded it below to share the above concepts visually:
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