When it comes to developing a content strategy, there’s a delicate balance between originality and reinventing the wheel. That’s where content marketing blogs come in.
I love to tell people I market to marketers. The Kapost marketing team is constantly thinking of creative ways to give fellow marketers more insight on how to reach their target buyers with the right content.
With this in mind, it’s no wonder we have a ton of content marketing blog posts that outline just how a content strategy brings success to your organization. In fact, we gathered our favorites and broke them into categories so you can check out anything that speaks to where your strategy (or tactics!) needs to be kicked up a notch.
Killer Content Marketing Blogs Recommended for You
Thinking strategically about how your content fits into your marketing plan allows for more effective content. Simply pumping out assets that don’t provide value to potential buyers won’t bring any value back to the company—particularly in brand reputation.
Instead, focus on each of these areas: marketing strategy, demand generation, customer experience, and marketing analytics. With a solid foundation in each category, your content strategy has the fuel to deliver real results:
Content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing and generates about 3 times as many leads. Source: NeilPatel
Marketing Strategy
This section addresses high-level advanced strategy primarily geared towards marketing leaders.
How Product Marketing Benefits Your B2B Organization
Have you ever had to justify product marketing to your team or leadership? We break down the fundamentals of why no marketing strategy is complete without developed product marketing.
Here’s how you’ll know your team needs some product marketing help:
- Lacking a well-informed team member: Product strategy and roadmap discussions are made without someone whose main job is to understand the market, customers, competitors, and how to influence them.
- Poorly planned product launches: Decisions to invest in a product do not include a product launch plan and budget.
- Limited view of product marketing: Your product marketing team is seen almost exclusively as a content shop that owns collateral, website updates, and sales training.
- Ignoring customer knowledge: Demand generation, marketing, and product teams are not led by product marketing’s customer knowledge.
- Not enough bandwidth: The product marketing team does not have the right skills, time, or resources to develop an understanding of products, markets, and customers.
Sound like you? See the value product marketing brings to your organization.
Content Marketing Strategies for Every Industry
Sure, industry-specific strategies exist. But universal truths that work across all industries are some of the most powerful tactics. People love the familiar, and these strategies will hit home across the bases. Here’s a brief excerpt:
“For example, asking fans to submit their photos from a concert to Facebook is a great way for bands to get new content with little investment. It’s a win-win for everyone: the photos provide free content for the band, and fans earn a spotlight on their favorite band’s page.”
Not a band? See how you can apply this to your B2B organization.
How to Use Content to Bolster Your Brand Awareness Strategy
Addressing each and every phase of brand awareness is critical for your content strategy. Here, we break down the five stages you need to touch on, plus effective corresponding content types. Here’s a sneak peek at the stages:
- Who Are You?
- I See You
- I Like and Prefer Your Brand
- I Must Have Your Brand’s Stuff
- Customer Raves and Testimonial
To top it off, here’s the best content for each stage.
Demand Generation
From lead generation to nurturing, to sales enablement, these blogs connect the dots between sales and marketing.
Chicken or the Egg? Where Content Fits into Demand Generation Strategy
It’s a conundrum as old as time: which came first, the chicken or the egg? For B2B marketers, the question becomes which came first, the demand or the influence?
Content is truly a jack of all trades; it not only generates demand but also influences leads and opportunities.
The most effective way to work content into a demand generation strategy is to keep your content and demand gen teams constantly in contact.
The Lead Gen Mistakes Marketers Are Making
We all make mistakes.
Are you part of the 61%? If so, all is not lost. Correct these seven mistakes you might be making. Here’s a sneak peak at number four:
According to Jason Falls, Author of No Bullshit Social Media, people are “not targeting in granular enough ways to attract qualified leads.”
It’s essential to market to the decision makers in a company. Get super clear on potential buyers by creating and working with buyer personas. Then make tweaks based on the results. Taking this simple, repeatable approach to customer connection helps generate leads of value, rather than “spray marketing” to a general audience.
How to Optimize Content for Sales Use
Content Marketing Institute’s latest trends report reveals that 29% of brands’ total marketing budget goes to content, and 85% of B2B organizations attribute their success to content marketing. In Salesforce’s Second Annual State of Sales report, 57% of survey respondents identified high-quality content as a top driver of sales.
Would you agree with these results? If you’re seeing a disconnect between these statistics and the role of content in your marketing operation, your content probably isn’t properly enabled for your sales team. Fix that.
Customer Experience
A positive customer experience leads to an engaged buyer; it’s as simple as that. These blogs are all about providing brand consistency, accessible solutions, and customer support.
6 Different Types of Buyer Journey Maps
From “The Linear Model” to “The Emotional Map,” buyer journey maps can come in all shapes and sizes!
Needing a little creativity for your own customer journey map, or maybe looking for one to frame your content strategy around? These six examples are our favorite because they each resonate across industries. See which one strikes your fancy.
Brand Guidelines: How to Document Your Style
Are you creating content with your customers in mind? Well, if you don’t have a documented style guide, your customers are probably taking the brunt of your mistakes.
Here’s what this how-to blog covers:
- Getting started on your style guide
- Including the necessities
- Making your guide the most effective it can be
As your customer experience becomes more consistent, brand awareness and trust are bound to improve. Eliminate the confusion for potential buyers and direct them to what’s really important.
7 Tips For Gaining Better Customer Feedback
Most marketers fully support gathering customer feedback. Why?
Feedback offers a clear window into the why of consumer behavior, including:
- Why people do or don’t care about a product or service
- Why one feature or product is better than another
- Why offerings fall short or perform better than expected
It’s no wonder marketers see this information as incredibly valuable to their organization. But asking customers to give truly helpful feedback isn’t as easy as it sounds. Here are seven tips that give you the customer participation marketers dream of.
Marketing Analytics
It’s no secret marketers love their data points, and you don’t have to wonder why. Analyzing campaigns and assets with metrics shows us what works and what doesn’t, so we can make the good stuff even better.
Hidden Content Marketing Success Metrics for B2B
How do you track your B2B content operation metrics? In this blog, we cover three different metrics that are too often overlooked:
- Health of content production
- Bottlenecks in workflows
- Coverage gaps
If you’re not sure how your organization tracks these areas, you need to revisit your success metrics.
Does Marketing Increase Revenue?
As a marketing team, you’re probably responsible for showing just how much you bring to your organization. Of course, marketing increases brand awareness, allows for sales enablement, and more—but what’s the dollar value of that?
The most effective content marketers meet daily or weekly to talk about their content progress. And you can bet that part of that meeting is determining what revenue their content efforts are bringing in.
Calculate how marketing is affecting your organization’s revenue with three simple questions.
4 Simple Marketing Metrics Templates for Analyzing Content ROI
Not satisfied with knowing just the general returns your content is getting? We aren’t either. At Kapost we’re committed to providing value to not only our organization but also to our readers.
Proving value means delving into the data that matters to determine what content is effective. If you’re not sure where to start, you’re not alone. A lot of people don’t know how to content score, which means they’re missing out on valuable learnings.
Here are four templates to ground your content marketing in data.
Your Content Is Only as Good as the Strategy Behind It
We hope this collection of content marketing blogs helps strategists and creators alike. Whether you’re responsible for content creation or strategy, aligning your content to a data-driven strategy gathers more qualified leads.
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