What’s the point of all the content companies are releasing every day?
Blogs, YouTube Videos, Podcasts, webinars, and more.
They all exist because content is the fuel for your marketing engine. If you release high quality content, this engine keeps you at the forefront of your customers’ minds and allows your salespeople to start conversations with prospects who are already very familiar with your work.
Dagmar Moreside is the head of partnerships at Payoneer, a FinTech organization that specializes in innovative cross-border payments. Dagmar has been operating within the business development and marketing worlds for over 15 years.
She specializes in content marketing and go-to-market strategies within the healthcare, marketing, and tech spaces for enterprise-level and small businesses alike.
Dagmar joined us for this episode of B2B Revenue Acceleration to talk about the importance of aligning marketing and sales, and how content can fuel your marketing engine.
Marketing and Sales Alignment
Marketing and sales are two departments that tend to be siloed, but they are really two sides of the same coin. They might be measured on different metrics but they both ultimately need to understand who their company’s customer is and what the customer’s needs are.
In the era of inbound/content marketing, most prospects have done much of their research about a company before they indicate they are interested in an official capacity.
Marketing’s job is to build the relationship between the prospect and the company through content marketing during this research period even before the prospect has reached out to talk to anyone at the company.
When your customer is coming to you, they probably have already done about 60% of the work. So they already know whether they want to buy from you and have a conversation.
Dagmar Moreside
Both marketing and sales need to understand the needs of customers. Marketing helps in this process before sales can begin the conversation officially.
It is crucial for marketing to gain feedback from sales, and for sales to feel supported by marketing before they speak to prospects. When done correctly, it’s like an orchestra where everyone is playing the right instruments at the right time.
Content Strategy Steps
Before starting your content strategy journey, you must ask yourself: “What is your unique selling proposition?” Once this is answered, you can begin marketing to one vertical. If you are able to do that well, then you can expand from there. But if you try to make content for everyone at one time, your message will not be clear.
Don’t try to do everything at once. Your message will become diluted.
Dagmar Moreside
Here are five steps that Dagmar has developed for getting started with content marketing:
- Understand your customer. This can come in the form of creating a customer Avatar for an ideal client. Who are your customers? What are their interests? For content marketing to be effective, you have to craft content for a specific audience and speak in the right language.
- Distribute your content on social platforms. LinkedIn is often a great overlooked platform for this. You can even experiment in paid versus organic reach; it might not cost as much as you think.
- Get prospects off of the social platforms and onto your website. Vanity metrics (likes and comments) aren’t worth as much as you think they are. Social media is great for promoting your content, but make sure the people who are responding to your content on social platforms are heading back to your website so they can express interest in your offerings.
- Make sure you’re getting return on your content. Blogs, podcasts, YouTube videos, webinars, and more are all content for your engine. But you have to make sure your content is dynamic and that you have access to analytics of what people are engaging with. If your content isn’t producing results, re-evaluate.
- Guest content. You can be a guest on a industry leader’s blog or share their content on yours! That way you’re in front of another audience and vice-versa. You’ll have much better Google rankings and quality scores for SEO.
Content is really your engine. It’s the engine of your website.
Dagmar Moreside
Content Strategy Best Practices
While you’re working through the five steps listed above, here are some best practices that Dagmar suggests to everyone looking to start their content marketing strategy:
- Look at industry benchmark metrics. Is your email open rate knocking it out of the park? You won’t know until you do some research. This depends on the industry.
- Have simple (sometimes even bullet pointed) messaging. Your mails can’t be too complicated or canned, they need to feel personal. Speaking to CEOs is different than speaking with middle management, so tweak your language and see what the what is resonating best with your audiences.
- Invest in content. This step is all about patience. It can take 3-6 months for you to see any traction from your audience. But as long as you are creating evergreen content, you’ll start to see value over time.
Customer Retention Rates
Once you have signed a customer, the content marketing engine does not stop. Once a new customer is onboard, you have to validate their decision to sign with you and continue to provide value throughout the customer life cycle.
The information you’re providing is different in this stage. Instead of showing them more about your products, you’re adding helpful hints and best practices to help them become successful customers. You then become a credible source of information, and your customers will be happy to have that channel with you.
This helps you become establish thought leadership and relationships in the minds of your customers, and this tips the scales in your favor when it’s time to renew contracts.
People like stories. Through content, you can show the challenges your customers have faced, the solutions you brought to the table, and the outcome gained from using your products or services.
