content marketing Archives

4 Strategies for Upgrading Your Content Marketing in 2023

In the middle of 2023, it’s safe to say content marketing is no longer the innovative, groundbreaking strategy it was ten or even five years ago. According to recent research, nearly 70% of companies plan to increase their content marketing budgets this year.

And while it’s likely too late to win the first-mover advantage in content marketing (unless your industry is very niche or specialized), producing higher-quality content is arguably more lucrative than ever.

That’s because the massive increase in spending and strategy on content marketing has come partially as a response to the jump in buyers consuming content to help them along the buyer’s journey. From blog posts to industry publications and media properties, business buyers in almost every field are using content to help them evaluate options and better understand their needs.

The secret to success for marketers is to focus on the needs of your audience. Too many businesses treat content marketing like an obligation, churning out four blog posts a month because they have to. If you want to make your content better resonate with the right people, start with the steps below.

Too many businesses treat content marketing like an obligation, churning out four blog posts a month because they have to. Click To Tweet

Assess Platform Choices

Most companies that engage with content marketing follow a similar pattern: they choose one or two platforms to create and publish content, then never think about them again. It’s easy to get caught into this day-to-day routine, but it’s vital to continually think about the places your company is leveraging content marketing.

New social media platforms and communication tools release every day. And while not all of them will be worth the time and effort, some might be. For example: when TikTok first launched, many companies doubted whether or not short-form videos featuring lots of music and dancing would be effective for marketing – especially those in B2B industries. But years later, TikTok is a popular place for all kinds of content, from the consumer ads you might expect to advice for CPAs and accounting firms.

We’re not suggesting you add new platforms to your marketing once a month or once a quarter. We recommend you keep an ear to the ground so you know about new media that might fit your content marketing well before your competitors.

Consider the Human Element

We’ve used people, emotions, and other parts of the human experience in marketing for centuries – remember the famous carousel scene from the TV show “Mad Men”? In it, a team of executives from Kodak suggests naming their new slide projector “the wheel” because of its shape. But Don Draper looks deeper to understand that consumers don’t care about the product’s shape; they care about the nostalgia it creates upon viewing old photos.

We often get objections from clients and prospects that sell to other businesses: “Nostalgia is great, but I’m selling software for specialized manufacturers. What does that have to do with humans?” Remember that no matter how dry or industrial your product seems, there’s always a way to connect to humans because they’re the ones ultimately making the buying decision.

One of the best ways to help you incorporate more of a human touch into your content marketing is to interview previous clients and ask them how their situation changed. Your product or service likely had a quantifiable impact on their business, affecting the people working there. Depending on your relationship with the clients you speak with and the nature of the conversation, you could publish the conversation as a case study in audio or video format.

Plan a Pivot Away From Personal Data Marketing

Over the last decade or so, the world of digital advertising has followed a relatively straightforward model. Advertising platforms like Google and Facebook collect data about the people using their platforms, then sell companies on the ability to use that data to maximize profits. While this model raked in billions of dollars in advertising money, it also created an unpleasant situation where companies needed to lean on an intimate knowledge of search and social media users to sell to them more effectively.

In the last three or four years, signs have emerged that this model is starting to disappear. In late 2021, Facebook (now Meta) announced they would no longer offer “sensitive” ad targeting categories like race, health conditions, and specific political ideas. Similarly, in a major iOS update from 2021, Apple required apps to ask permission to track user data, a request many users denied.

The writing is on the wall: in the coming years, third-party personal data collected by advertisers will no longer be the gold mine of advertising it might have been in the early 2010s. If you’ve been relying a lot on advertising data or a similar source, you need to consider how to pivot your strategy away from this resource. User data will always be available, and this shift won’t happen overnight, but it’s still critical to prepare now so you aren’t caught off-guard by something accelerating this trend.

Think About User Intent

One trend in the current era of content marketing is optimizing for user intent. In 2023, there’s so much content out there for almost every industry that the biggest challenge for both B2B and B2C buyers is finding out which kinds of content will help them meet their professional needs. It’s fantastic if your site has a great content library, but it isn’t living up to its potential if you don’t organize it well.

In a recent article for the Content Marketing Institute, strategy chief Robert Rose points out that organizing content by “e-books, white papers, videos, etc.” asks them to choose the kind of experience they want before knowing the topic. Instead of this traditional method of organization that often results in challenges for first-time users, take a deeper approach to your content’s organization and accessibility by grouping it by customer intent.

And if you’re unsure where to start when grouping content by intent, try applying the pillar strategy to content you create for two or three of your most common buyer scenarios – copy them exactly from an existing client, if you need. Start with the buyer’s situation as your pillar foundation, and expand from there.

Last Word on Updating Your Content Marketing Plans

Even in the buttoned-up industrial sector, today’s internet is noisier than ever. Your content marketing strategy of producing a set number of monthly posts is a great start, but it’s not enough to help you reach the top of your field regarding content. To truly reach your intended audience, your content has to focus on their needs and meet them on the platforms they’re already comfortable with.

Are you interested in expert advice on improving your content marketing plan or developing a new one? Our team at FunnelEnvy is ready to help. Just click here to fill out a short quiz so we can learn more about how we might be able to help take your content game – and other elements of your digital marketing – to the next level.

By Raj C|2023-06-14T07:58:04-07:00June 26th, 2023|Conversion Rate Optimization|0 Comments

4 Best Practices for Creating Engaging B2B Content

There’s a massive amount of content on the web today. Even before the global pandemic that forced everyone to stay home, reports indicated that over two-thirds of all data on the web was created sometime in the last few years.

Unfortunately, a lot of that data isn’t practical. The same is true in the world of B2B content. Many companies are embracing the practice – more than 4 in 5 B2B marketers use content marketing as a strategy, according to HubSpot surveys from 2021.

The problem? Not enough companies are doing content well. The prevalence of content marketing strategy means that many organizations are rushing to put out content simply “to have something there,” or even worse, just as a way to game SEO algorithms to increase their page rankings.

If this sounds like your company’s strategy, it needs to make a change. Whether creating content for a specific part of your funnel or more generalized marketing content, here are four tips to give you a better chance of engaging your audience.

Remove Fluff and Filler Ruthlessly

If you’ve done any kind of search recently related to any type of marketing or digital business phrase, you’ve probably noticed a common issue. There’s a lot of useless content out there. Sure, you can still find valuable stuff on any subject, and Google has been trying its hardest to update its algorithm quickly enough to weed out low-quality search results. But the proliferation of content and search engine marketing means there are still plenty of pages designed just to help the publisher move up search engine results – not to help someone in their target audience.

There are two simple (but not always easy) methods for making your content more valuable. First, you have to cut all fluff and filler from your content. Be ruthless – if there’s a question about whether or not something is worth including, you should probably scrap it. This ruthlessness even extends to things writers love, like using outside anecdotes or drawn-out metaphors.

It’s particularly important to make your content easy to interpret and valuable when it’s being used further down your B2B funnel. Decision-makers at companies making significant purchases usually want to maximize their time considering different vendors and solutions. Sifting through unnecessarily long content doesn’t give them a positive perspective of your company or its offering.

It’s particularly important to make your content easy to interpret and valuable when it’s being used further down your B2B funnel. Click To Tweet

The second important step in removing fluff and filler is making your content more digestible so prospects can scan and read it more quickly. This method is called “scannable content.” According to Microsoft, a few essential strategies for scannable content include:

Put your most important content above the fold or the part of the page the user doesn’t need to scroll down to see.
Be brief, clear, and concise. Don’t use more words than you need.
Include navigation options for a long document.

You might also think about using progress bars or page numbers so users know how much more they have left in the content. Some more modern publications will even estimate how long it will take to read a piece of written content.

Use the Right Hook

By its nature, B2B content has to be highly customized. Buyers in this sector have specific and dynamic needs regarding what they’re looking for out of a business solution. These discerning needs are part of the reason tactics like content and account-based marketing are so popular with B2B marketers in the first place.

And while the personalized requirements of B2B content marketing might make the process more difficult in some ways, in another sense, it makes creating engaging content easier. Knowing a lot about your prospect’s specific needs and challenges means you can present more relevant information.

In content marketing parlance, a “hook” immediately grabs users’ attention and makes them want to continue consuming the content. Whether it’s a headline, the first sentence of a blog article or social media post, or the initial words of a video, a good hook can be the difference between someone consuming an entire piece of content or bouncing out of it quickly. In any B2B content setting, you want to make your hook as personalized as possible. In the best-case scenario, a prospect should feel like you’re speaking directly to them.

Be Interactive

This tip isn’t always fully applicable, depending on the channel you use for your content. But if you’re using a platform where interaction is a big component – such as social media – it’s important to include an avenue for users to engage with the content. In the B2B setting, it’s common to see posts on social media that ask users to share their own experiences, for example.

If you can’t make your content directly interactive for users, try to help them imagine themselves in the same situation. Visualization is one of the most powerful psychological tools available to us as humans. Putting your content’s audience in a position to visualize themselves using your product or service is one of the best ways to help nurture them closer to converting into customers. Whether you achieve this by including a few poignant questions at the end of an article, or some interesting visuals in an infographic or video, it’s critical to draw the user into becoming more than just a passive consumer of your content.

Measure and Analyze the Right Metrics

These steps are fantastic, but some may work better for you than others. Some may not work at all! How will you know if this is the case and which tactics may or may not apply? There’s only one way: measuring and analyzing how well it performs.

The big challenge many companies face is not necessarily analyzing metrics – it’s choosing the right metrics to follow. We see numerous prospects encountering the same problem: their high-level metrics like views, click-through rates, and session time numbers are good, but they aren’t leading to conversions or sales.

That’s why it’s so important to track the correct numbers. In the hugely broad, dynamic world of business data, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by fancy metrics or numbers that seem important but don’t tell you much about your content. To overcome this challenge, think intentionally about a few of the most critical numbers that matter to your business and its content efforts, then make sure you stick to tracking just those numbers. It’s okay to revisit your core metrics from time to time to ensure they are still working the way you need, but don’t be swayed from measuring the KPIs you initially decided were most important.

And if you need any help figuring out which metrics to track or how to keep your content engaging, our expert team at FunnelEnvy is ready to help. We have several years of experience working with B2B companies to optimize their funnel content and ensure they can stand out in today’s noisy content marketing sector. Click here to fill out a short questionnaire and learn more about our pricing structure.

By Raj C|2022-11-17T03:29:55-08:00November 28th, 2022|General B2B Funnel Advice|0 Comments

How to Map Content Creation to Your B2B Funnel

Anyone working in marketing today is probably aware of the importance of creating content. Thanks to the growth of content marketing over the last decade or so companies in every field are rushing to produce content they believe will drive revenue and improve their brand awareness among their target audience.

Unfortunately, many content marketers don’t get it right. They direct an internal resource or outside contractor to churn out a set number of content pieces about pre-arranged topics on a monthly or quarterly basis. Robert Rose, chief strategy officer at the Content Marketing Institute’s Content Advisory consultancy, has spoken about this issue before, calling it the “vending machine” approach to content creation.

As Rose points out, not only does this approach not scale, it positions content as nothing more than a to-do list for the marketing department. A better approach is to first understand the goals and objectives behind each piece of content pertaining to different stages of your sales funnel. From there, you can create content in a way that aligns smoothly with your funnel and provides tangible value for your audience.

How do you go about doing that? It’ll be slightly different for everyone depending on your specific target audience and the funnel for which you’re creating content. Below, we dive into a few tips that any marketer can apply to B2B content creation.

Revisit Personas and Funnel Steps

Before you start churning out content assets, it’s essential to take a step back and go over the fundamentals of your funnel. Begin the process by going over your buyer persona, which according to HubSpot best practices, should include information like:

Demographics including age, income, location, etc.
Communication preferences that indicate how they like to receive information and engage with potential vendors
Goals for both their personal and professional lives
Biggest challenges particularly as it relates to the product or service being marketed

As you (ideally, along with your primary content creators) review this information, remember to spend time considering whether or not anything is outdated or inaccurate. This is a great time to update your personas and make your marketing efforts more effective.

Beyond that, you should also look at each step in your funnel to see how people inside it go from a stranger unaware of your brand’s existence to the conversion action you desire. This process will also unlock a vital source of ideas for content and make it much easier to align each piece with your funnel.

Here’s an example: let’s say visiting a landing page is an important step in the funnel for which you want to create effective content. By drawing on the existing content, language, and media on the landing page, you’ll have a starting point for content you want to map to that funnel segment.

Experiment With Different Channels

One of the double-edged swords of modern digital marketing is the array of different kinds of media we can use to reach an audience. The most common formats are e-mail, social media, blog posts, and videos. Clever marketers can develop an endless variety of themes and formats within just these four channels.

If you haven’t already, you need to work on aligning your different marketing channels with each stage of your funnel. These insights will be key for understanding what type of content to produce for different segments of your audience.

Here’s another concrete example: you typically use video advertisements on social media networks to attract people to your brand and make them aware of your offering. This is a standard way marketers use video content for the top of their funnels.

If you haven’t already, you need to work on aligning your different marketing channels with each stage of your funnel Click To Tweet

But what if, instead of only using video for social media ads, you also incorporated video at the later stages of your funnel? Maybe you publish a video interview with a satisfied client in which they discuss some of the most significant benefits of your offering and why it worked. In this case, you’d use video for your funnel’s middle segment.

It’s impossible to definitively say which combination will work best for your funnel and audience. Remember to measure and track the data so you can compare how each channel works for each segment of your funnel.

Add a Personal Touch

It’s wonderful to understand your sales funnel as a progression of different steps and know what kind of content will work best for prospects at each one. But to maximize your content’s effectiveness, you must find a way to express an understanding of what your target audience is going through.

Take a look at this excerpt from a landing page for Drift, a conversational marketing tool focused on interactions via chatbot and messenger platforms:

From the very first word of the copy, they ask the reader to envision how their work situation could be made better by using Drift. Sure, the message may not be as effective for people who don’t manage a sales team daily. But because the team responsible for marketing Drift has a deep understanding of their target audience, they can add this personal touch that speaks directly to the goals or challenges of their ideal prospect.

It’s vital to incorporate these kinds of highly-specific messages in your content, no matter what stage of the funnel you intend. If you don’t feel confident enough in your audience’s understanding to add these personal touches, revisit the first step in this post to deepen your knowledge.

Solicit Real Feedback

Our final piece of advice for mapping content to different funnel stages is straightforward but not always easy: ask a real person! One of the most common mistakes we see in the prospects and clients we work with is the “bubble effect.” A team of marketers gathers (virtually or in-person) to figure out the needs and challenges of an audience without any input from real people in that audience.

This approach is okay in the earliest stages of your marketing or when resources like time and money are drastically limited. However, you shouldn’t run a content marketing campaign for an extended period without getting input from the target audience. Whether you receive that input from a formal survey, a casual in-person meeting, or a quick video call, it’s critical to integrate it into your content creation efforts as soon as possible.

Final Thoughts on Mapping Content Creation to Your Funnel

Content creation as a strategy for digital marketers probably isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. However, the format of that content and how you create it will change. The best-performing content marketers will be the ones who can closely match their content with the specific challenges of their audience – in a time-sensitive fashion, presented via a format that fits their lifestyle.

Are you looking to get some expert insights into how you can do a better job of matching content to different parts of your sales funnel? Click here to fill out a quick questionnaire and see if you might be a fit to work with our team at FunnelEnvy.

By Raj C|2022-08-24T07:12:51-07:00September 5th, 2022|General B2B Funnel Advice|0 Comments

If you care about B2B conversions, stop producing content

Houston, we have a problem.

As enterprise focused B2B marketers, we have a problem.

We all agree that we want to grow traffic to our website, turn the traffic into leads and convert the leads into customers.

Yet, we have all blindly trusted the theory that, producing more content, showing product options, displaying more testimonials, and creating more case studies will get you a bigger pipeline.

Let us be the first to refute this claim: more is not better.

In fact, with every additional piece of content or white paper you are killing pipeline. Why, might ask?

Because you are simply overwhelming your customers.

Explanation please!?

To illustrate this point, let’s talk about Cognitive Load.

Cognitive load refers to the total amount of mental effort being used in the working memory.

When we put irrelevant, unnecessary and distracting information in front of people, we fill up that working memory. The result is a decreased ability to absorb information, learn and ultimately make decisions.

While it may seem that having multiple content options on your website increases the likelihood that you will connect with your visitor, it actually has the opposite effect.

When customers are given too many content options you are forcing them to make decisions that take up their mental resources, derailing your chance at a direct path to purchasing.

Can someone say cognitive overload?!

Think about it this way: the most important factor in the design of a website is making it easier for customer to find what they want. Customers crave simple and easy navigation over anything else in regard to design.

Most important factors in the design of a website

If your website presents multiple decisions for the user, you filled with decisions for users to make, you are not making it easy for them to find what they want!

Let’s break it down.

Let’s take a look at some examples unintentionally cognitive overload.

Content.

As marketers, we are producing too much content that is both expensive and unnecessary.

In reality, only a small portion of your content is necessary to help the customer move down the purchase funnel and it is our job as marketers to present that one (perfect) piece of content. Sadly, we are letting our customers down by allowing them to read irrelevant content and thus, introducing cognitive load.

Produce more content

Calls to action.

While letting visitors chose from multiple CTA’s may seem like a great way to help customers find what they want, it actually leads them to confusion. Rather, you should be putting them on a specific path that you have identified as most effective for conversions.

Multiple calls to action

Product options.

If you’re selling an enterprise focused product, it is likely that your website is showcasing all of the products and services that you offer. Again, this overwhelms customers.

We should know about our customers well enough so that we are only showing the products that we believe (based on research) they are likely to buy! Don’t give them fifty options and hope their first selection is the one best suited for them.

Analytic Solution

Case studies.

A customer only works in one industry; do not show them case studies from other industries where the use cases might be completely different. This content is irrelevant, distracting and increases cognitive load.

All case studies

Industry solutions.

We are asking customers to unnecessarily identify themselves. Having to go through a selection process, like the example below, does not inspire confidence that the software is well suited for a visitor’s industry.

Industry Solutions

Pricing options.

A multitude of pricing options is a perfect example of cognitive overload. We are overwhelming our customers with pricing options to the point where they don’t know which option to choose.

Target enterprise accounts shouldn’t see basic pricing tiers. Similarly, SMB’s shouldn’t see enterprise offerings. This substandard experience increases friction and reduces conversion rates!

pricing options

It is time to stop – your are overwhelming your Customers.

So, what’s the solution then? How do we make sure customers aren’t overwhelmed with cognitive overload?

It’s simple: reduce content and only show the most relevant information.

Calls to Action

Keeping this in mind, what if instead of showing everything to all of our visitors, we only showed the most relevant and effective calls to action?

Logos & Testimonials

What if we show the logos and testimonials that were most relevant to customer needs or highlighted the testimonials that most reflected their pain points?

Pricing Plans

What if we focused on and only showed the pricing that was going to be relevant for the given account and the features of those plans that were going to meet their needs?

Customer Experience

What if we only showed customers relevant experiences based on what we knew about them?

Doing things right

Doing this right has real and meaningful implications. 94% of buyers in a Demand Gen survey choose the winning vendor because that company demonstrated a stronger knowledge of their needs.

In an Accenture survey, half of B2B customers already expect improved personalized product or service recommendations. In fact, 65% of business buyers are likely to switch brands if a company doesn’t make an effort to personalize communications to their business.

The takeaways.

The more options you give customers, the more cognitive load you put on them. The result is a filled-up working memory and hindered ability to make decisions toward purchasing a product.

Instead of producing more content, focus on showing the single experience that will resonate most with your customers!

By Michelle Morrison|2018-10-01T09:48:35-07:00December 11th, 2017|B2B, Digital Marketing, Conversion Rate Optimization|0 Comments

How to Create Engaging Content for Any Business

Frustrating, isn’t it?

You’ve followed all the advice, have a sales funnel you’ve optimized the hell out of and yet see next to no real gains in revenue.

It’s enough to make you want to throw in the towel.

You’ve taken all the right steps, so what’s missing?

Well, the problem could have a number of different causes. But if your funnel is as well optimized as can be, the problem is most likely going to be with your traffic levels.

This isn’t Field of Dreams. Building a kick ass funnel doesn’t ensure sales success. It’s only one part of the larger equation. For your sales funnel to be effective, you need to be directing traffic to it.

There are plenty of options on how best to do this, PPC, Social Media, and SEO optimization are three of the most favored options. However, today I want to talk about content marketing. Or, more accurately, how to produce some kick ass content that gains views, likes, shares but most importantly, conversions. (more…)

By Peter Boyle|2015-11-03T11:14:18-08:00November 3rd, 2015|Digital Marketing|0 Comments

4 Steps for Testing Your Way to High Converting Headlines

The most valuable real estate on your blog posts, email marketing, and published articles are the first 5 to 10 words. Studies show that your headline is absolutely critical. According to CopyBlogger, 8 out of 10 people read headline copy while only 2 read on. What does this tell you? It means that you’ve got an excellent opportunity to capture readers – and that most content on the internet today is failing to effectively do so. In this age of content marketing, writers and marketers can’t afford to have their content go off the cliff. The good news is that you don’t have to be a professional copywriter to get great results with your headlines. Here’s a closer look at how testing can get you closer to high converting headlines.

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By Arun Sivashankaran|2014-04-21T14:55:09-07:00January 23rd, 2014|Testing|4 Comments

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