Startups have a lot on their plate. Between securing funding, hiring a great team, and finalizing the tech, there’s not much energy for other things. So why should content marketing for startups be a priority?
Keep reading to learn about the benefits of content marketing and start building out your plan.
What is Content Marketing?
Content marketing utilizes informational resources, whether blogs, social media posts, webinars, or flyers, to attract and retain customers.
Why is Content Marketing for Startups important?
Content marketing is an excellent way for startups to raise brand awareness, develop customer trust, and gain credibility in their industry. In the earlier startup stages, before loyal customers and word of mouth have become lead generation sources, potential customers need a way to learn about your company.
Prioritizing content marketing also has internal company benefits. By preparing content that answers common questions and guides customers to a sale, team members will save time and energy on each lead. You can use this extra time for other essential business tasks or supporting even more customers.
Choosing the Right Strategies: Content Marketing for Startups
Content marketing strategies are not one-size-fits-all. When choosing strategies, it’s helpful to think of content as an extension of your brand and company. Is the content being released in line with your brand’s voice? Is it driving conversions or helping your company reach a specific goal? And, logistically speaking, does it fall within your company’s budget?
All content should attract and resonate with your buyer personas. If potential customers are moving through the buying process and converting to a sale (if that’s your goal), then your content marketing strategies are working.
Here are some questions to ask when planning your content marketing strategies:
Source: semrush.com
4 Effective Strategies: Content Marketing for Startups
1. Keep it Evergreen
Trends come and go fast. Creating content marketing strategies that are true to your company and that can be reused and repurposed in the future is a great way to educate your audience and drive conversions. Sharing this educational, high-quality content will help establish your startup as a trusted source. For example, if someone searches for the basics of cloud storage and comes across your purely informational blog, they become aware of your business and will come back when they start considering options.
2. Match the Buyer’s Journey
Ideally, we want all customers to convert to a sale, which means there needs to be content that supports them during all stages of the buyer’s journey. For example, If all your content is surface-level industry information, your customer might drop off at the consideration stage. Or if it’s highly specific about a particular product, you might not be getting people in the door. Here are some content ideas that coincide with the different stages of the buyer’s journey.
Awareness: Focus on the basics of your industry, educating the audience, and naming the problems for which you have the solution.
Consideration: Now that they know what they need to solve, provide their options and the differences.
Decision: What sets you apart from competitors? The customer has a shortlist of potential companies at this point. Now, it’s time to sell.
3. Optimize
You have great content; now, let’s get it in front of people. Your thought-out video detailing your company’s service doesn’t mean anything if the right people aren’t seeing it. Choosing valuable keywords and optimizing content accordingly will cause it to rank higher in search results and get more eyes. Our key optimization tips are:
Incorporating the keyword consistently throughout the piece
Adding internal and external links
Dividing up text with H2 and H3 headings
Adding images to enhance your points
4. Test Things Out
Though there will always be a need for evergreen content, don’t be afraid to get creative. Try new media forms and platforms to see what works best for your startup. The marketing industry changes fast, and buyer habits are constantly evolving. Testing out new tactics and analyzing the results is crucial to keep up with competitors. Here are some more recent content marketing strategies that are on the rise:
Building your Content Marketing Strategy with Lake One
Content marketing for startups is crucial to becoming a trusted brand in your industry. Tailoring your content marketing strategies to your business needs, goals, audience, and industry is essential. Lake One is here to help you do so. Don’t hesitate to reach out with any content or digital marketing questions.
Successful full-funnel marketing strategies drive awareness, educate your audience and convert them to leads simultaneously using a variety of channels. Mobile devices (yes, your smartphone) make it easier for marketers to connect instantly with their audience.
How you decide to send the message to them that your startup or business solves the need they’re looking for makes the difference.
Read more below to discover top full-funnel marketing strategies.
Have you ever been researching a product and can’t find the information you are looking for to make a purchase confidently?
This is probably because the company lacks a mid-funnel marketing strategy. Each stage of the buyer’s journey needs customized content that easily guides buyers along their way to make a purchase.
Read more about creating a successful mid-funnel marketing strategy below.
A 2022 HubSpot survey found that short form video content has the highest return on investment compared to any other marketing strategy.
That sounds like a good marketing tactic for any industry, especially manufacturers.
And let’s be honest – Many manufacturers haven’t had to market to the public unless you’re talking about specific industries like fashion and lifestyle brands, who, for years, have built corporate marketing strategies that drive sales.
Manufacturers who create goods and services rely heavily on their sales team. Their approach has to be specific with tradeshows, industry advertising, or while cultivating customer relationships. Today’s landscape is competitive, and it’s time for manufacturers to adapt their marketing.
Here are five ways manufacturers can leverage short-form video content.
Picture this, you’re scrolling on social media and see a random post on your feed about a new product. One catches your attention. You click through to get to the main post, read the caption, and inspect the picture. Feeling compelled to learn more, you navigate to the company’s website. From there, you hop on a landing page to read about this insanely attractive product you didn’t know you needed. You’re hooked.
Welcome to the first two stages of the inbound marketing funnel – you’re not alone in this journey. Marketing gurus in this digital era use various strategies to capture their target audience’s attention. They want their audience to act and then somehow develop a long-term relationship with each of their customers.
That’s the goal – not just to get sales and increase profits, but to build a meaningful relationship. In short, inbound marketing is a non-invasive approach to marketing for the right people at the right time in the right place.
Discover more about the inbound marketing and the funnel experience below.
While the focus of content marketing is to attract leads, it doesn’t necessarily help convert prospects into customers. Creating a sales enablement content strategy helps. This content is specifically created to arm your sales team with materials to engage prospects as they make their way through the funnel and close deals.
Follow these steps to create a sales enablement content strategy to help you convert more prospects into customers.
1. Review the content your sales team uses
Find out what content the sales team is currently using. Learn what content engages prospects and starts conversations, and which content isn’t useful. The marketing team should also ask sales what content they use at each step of the buyers’ journey. This information will help marketing focus on the types of content they need to create and identify any content gaps.
2. Take inventory of your current content
Perform an audit of your existing content and review which items can be useful to your sales team. You also need to identify where each piece of content fits on the buyers’ journey, so sales understands which content piece is appropriate at each step. Some examples of content the marketing team can provide are:
Case studies
White papers
Infographics
Ebooks
Testimonials
Blogs
3. Create new content to fuel both sales and marketing teams
Next, it’s time to create new content to fill the gaps. The new content should help sales engage prospects, and it should help marketing attract qualified leads. While both teams play a role in deciding what content to produce it is important to keep your buyer personas in mind to ensure each content piece speaks to your target buyer(s). When handing the content over sales, marketing can also provide them with email templates to increase content promotion. An effective headline can make or break your email open rate.
While your marketing team can likely create most content in-house, there are some items you might need to outsource – such as videos and demo videos — depending on what resources you have available. When outsourcing content creation, make sure to provide clear, direct instructions to ensure it has the right messaging and tone. Attaching a content brief to the assignment can help with this and save time.
5. Align content to the buyers’ journey
After the content is created, it’s essential to determine where it should be used in the buyers’ journey. Sales and marketing should work together to establish when prospects need each content piece, and how sales will distribute it. To assist them, marketing can create emails or social posts to help promote the content. Marketing can also gate the content they are promoting. This way, contact information is captured for the sales team, and can be used for future marketing campaigns. Both teams should also discuss how to repackage the content– such as turning blogs into ebooks or videos – to help increase engagement.
The final step is to measure how successful the sales enablement content is in terms of metrics and in advancing prospects through the funnel. This can be done in several different ways. For one, marketing should talk to the sales to get their take on how well each piece of content is engaging prospects and helping to close deals. Sales should also provide overall feedback as to how well the content was received.
In addition to getting feedback from sales, marketing should use analytics. The metrics used will depend on what tools marketing is using to track performance on each piece of content. For example, pulling the click-throughs on calls-to-action, demo requests, and emails through analytics can determine how many prospects are engaging with the content.
When creating a sales enablement content strategy, it’s important to remember this is only one piece of marketing’s content plan. Marketing still needs to rely on its other tools and content to attract top-of-funnel leads that sales can turn into prospects and guide through the rest of the funnel. Sales enablement content benefits sales by helping them turn middle-of-funnel prospects into customers.
If you need help moving your prospects through the funnel, let Lake One help. Our experts can provide guidance and tips on how to convert leads into customers.
When you’re not meeting your revenue goals, the finger-pointing starts between your sales and marketing teams. Sales blames marketing for not generating enough leads. Marketing blames sales for not converting the leads into customers. Sales and marketing alignment is missing. This can go back and forth, creating hostility between two groups who need to be working together. Sales and marketing have the same goal – to increase customers and revenue. To achieve this, you need to curb the finger-pointing and get the two teams to align and work together.
Use these best practices to align your sales and marketing teams.
Increase communication
First, get out of silos and learn about the other team’s goals. The easiest way to do this is to schedule regular meetings with both teams. During these meetings, sales can educate marketing on their process and review quotas and metrics. Marketing can then share what initiatives they are working on, what campaigns are running, and what metrics they are tracking.
Create a Content Process
Marketing should include sales in their content brainstorming process. Together, the teams can generate content ideas helpful for sales to gain new leads. From there, sales can promote content in conversations with prospects, and on their personal social media channels. Video is a great way to promote new content with prospects. The use of video is growing as a marketing tool. It is an effective, personal way to communicate that builds trust and increases sales.
When marketing focuses on promoting thought leadership and expertise at the company, they should not overlook the sales team. Make sure to include sales in new content. These are the individuals that prospects interact with the most, so marketing can promote them through guest blogs and social media posts.
Understand Your Roles & Goals
It’s critical for sales and marketing to truly understand what each team member’s role is, and how it helps the company achieve its goals. Sales might not understand why someone writes a blog, and how that content helps generate leads. Marketing might not know how sales breaks down each person’s responsibilities – whether they sell to specific regions, or they each sell a specific product. It’s important to break down any misconceptions, create clarity around what each person does, and how it helps sales and marketing alignment.
To hit company goals, it’s essential for sales and marketing to understand which potential customers they are targeting. Marketing needs to know who to target with their content, keywords, and ads. Sales needs to know who they are selling to. Get everyone on the same page by creating buyer personas and a buyer’s journey map showing how they make purchasing decisions. The buyer personas should include the buyers’ demographics, size of the organization they work at, type of organization, role, priorities, and challenges. In the journey map, make sure to document what activities the buyer engages in, his or her objectives, what information he or she consumes (or needs), and what types of communication he or she uses to get the information.
It’s important for sales and marketing to share feedback they get from clients and prospects with each other. When the marketing team gathers data from surveys or feedback forms, they must share the results with the sales team. It’s also important for sales to share what they’re learning on calls with prospects, such as what questions they have about the product or company, what misconceptions they have, what they like about the product, and more. This will help marketing figure out what gaps need to be filled with their content, on their website, and in their campaigns to better promote the company and attract qualified leads.
Share Access to Documents
Does your marketing team have a plethora of blogs, white papers, and even one-sheets and brochures that they keep within their marketing files? This content is meant to fuel the sales team, so they must have access to it. Create a shared space (whether it’s on Teams, Slack, or another platform) where the two teams can share content. This will help your sales team feel more enabled, and it will help demonstrate what marketing is doing to help them.
Socialize
To get the sales and marketing teams to work together better, they need to get to know each other. Organizing social activities with both teams can help improve the relationships between team members. This helps cultivate a collaborative environment where everyone feels included.
Understand Each Other
Finally, one of the most important ways to achieve sales and marketing alignment is to create an understanding that both teams are trying to help the company – and each other – achieve their business goals. While both teams have different tasks, their end-goal and intentions are the same.
About Sales & Marketing Alignment Services at Lake One
At Lake One, technology is at the core of all our sales and marketing thinking.
We work with our partners to make sure their basecamp is “right sized” for their organization.
That the goals and strategy are leading the technology choices and not the other way around.
But most of all – that the technology is embraced and providing value to the organization.
For additional tips on how to align your sales and marketing teams, contact Lake One to talk to our experts.
Do you have a great company with superb services, yet you’re struggling to attract new customers? It’s probably not your product – it’s more likely an issue with your marketing strategy. This is where using an inbound marketing methodology can help. This strategy focuses on turning strangers into customers and building your brand presence.
Learn more about this strategy, and more importantly – why it works.
What Is Inbound Marketing?
Inbound marketing focuses on four key stages to better promote your business: Attract, Convert, Close and Delight. Each stage has specific methods to convert casual observers of your company into customers, and ultimately, brand promoters.
Attract: This first stage attracts strangers through blogs, social media posts, keywords, and web pages.
Convert: The next stage turns visitors into leads through calls-to-action, landing pages, lead forms, and contacts.
Close: The third stage focuses on converting leads into customers. This can be done by sending email campaigns, creating workflows, conducting lead scoring, and integrating with a CRM.
Delight: The final stage is to turn your customers into promoters of your brand. You can do this through social media posts, smart calls-to-action, emails, and workflows.
Why Inbound Marketing Methodology Works
Now that you know what inbound marketing is, it’s time to talk about the part you really care about – why this method works.
It increases your website traffic
Inbound marketing focuses on increasing your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and your content marketing efforts with robust pages. Doing this can drive more targeted traffic — and qualified leads — to your website. Creating more content (like blogs, articles, and pages) tied to the specific keywords that are relevant to your customers can help increase your ranking on search engines, like Google.
It enhances your qualified leads
With inbound marketing methodology, you are not just creating content for the sake of producing content. Under this strategy, you are creating content to attract your targeted audience. To do this, you want to think about what your potential customers are interested in and what they might be searching for. This can include blogs on industry trends and how-to articles that can drive them to your site. Your audience now has a much better understanding of who you are and what products and services you provide, so they become a more qualified lead than someone who just clicked on an ad.
There is also another perk to creating good content – it can get picked up by other websites and publications. This puts your content in front of their audience as well, to attract more leads.
Image Source: HubSpot
It allows you to show them what you do
When you publish engaging, quality content on your site, your leads will associate that same level of quality with your company. Your content also demonstrates your business’ expertise, and how your products and services can help your customers. This allows leads to have a clear understanding of what you do, why you do it, and how you do it.
It lets you control the content and the costs
Inbound marketing can be a cost-effective way to promote your brand. When you run an ad, you need to pay for the ad spot and the creative. With content, you can likely create it in-house. It will only cost time. Plus, you own the content, so you can keep it on your site and reuse it as you need it. You can use one blog on your website, in social posts, emails, and more. This makes inbound marketing campaigns more effective than outbound campaigns – getting as much as three times the ROI on inbound campaigns, according to HubSpot.
It helps you build relationships with your customers
Inbound marketing methodology involves creating quality, relevant and useful content that will help your customers – and potential customers – do their jobs better. This content helps them learn to turn to you when they need answers. They will start to build a relationship with your company and will become loyal to your brand. Engaging with customers on social media and reading and responding to any comments they leave on your content will also help enhance this relationship.
It moves leads through your funnel faster
When you make a new purchase, you likely research the product first, right? So, if we do it, then we should expect our customers to do the same thing. Inbound marketing methodology accounts for this and helps you capture leads and move them through the sales funnel by offering targeted content at various stages. For example, you might provide general product information and calls to action to those at the top of the funnel. Then at the middle of the funnel, you might provide content specific to your company’s products and services and encourage them to fill out a lead form or subscribe to your blog or a newsletter. And finally, you might provide pricing information to those who are at the bottom of the funnel and are close to closing a deal.
Image Source: HubSpot
It provides you with metrics to measure your marketing efforts are working
One of the hardest parts about marketing is showing your ROI. Inbound marketing can resolve this. This strategy allows you to get measurable results on your campaigns, website, and individual content items. You can pull metrics through Google Analytics to get page views, the amount of time people spend on your site and demographics on your visitors. You can also use your CRM, like HubSpot, to track information on your campaigns.
While it can take some planning to execute an effective inbound marketing strategy, it can be very effective in turning strangers into customers. If you need help getting started, contact Lake One to help you create your inbound marketing strategy, execute it, and measure it!
Do you find yourself spinning your wheels on your inbound marketing strategy? Or maybe you’re just starting to entertain the idea of incorporating it into your overall marketing program and find yourself unable to get it off the ground. You’re not alone. There is no shortage of inbound marketing challenges, but there are far more rewards once you can move past some of those obstacles.
Here are the most common challenges of inbound marketing that prevent you from having a successful strategy.
Incomplete Strategy
When it comes to the various challenges of inbound marketing, this is one you’ll see often. Not for lack of good intentions, but because often people are ready to act before they analyze and plan. Don’t get us wrong, you don’t want to find yourself in a situation of analysis paralysis or placing perfection over progress, but you do need a plan in place before you dive in.
The whole point of an inbound marketing strategy is to attract targeted and qualified leads and turn them into customers, so your strategy needs to be built around those clear buyer personas and have a plan in place for each stage of the buyer’s journey. So if you’re starting a blog, for example, you need to create a content strategy. If you’re planning to do social media marketing, you’ll want to identify the social sites that your personas are utilizing and create a posting schedule. Having clear strategies in place can often eliminate or at least reduce some of the challenges of inbound marketing listed below.
Resources
As you likely know, this challenge isn’t specific to just inbound marketing. Having limited time and resources is often a challenge across the board. There just isn’t enough time (or money) in the day, right? And to put a solid inbound marketing strategy into practice, you need those resources, as it can be pretty labor-intensive.
To implement inbound successfully, it often requires you to create a lot of relevant content and produce it consistently. Keyword being consistent. And more than just creating content like blogs, white papers, and case studies, you’ll need to master SEO, have a social media presence, and don’t forget about email marketing.
If you don’t have the necessary time or resources to dedicate to your marketing rigor, you can often address the issue by partnering with freelance writers or agency partners. By going it alone, you might be inhibiting the success of your inbound campaign.
Persona Alignment
You know all that content we talked about needing to produce? One of the challenges of inbound marketing is that you can’t write content for just anyone. You need to ensure that your content and inbound marketing strategy align with your target audience, AKA, your buyer personas. When you curate content designed specifically for your buyer personas, you might even be able to reduce the amount of necessary content that needs to be created. By narrowing your focus, you put quality over quantity, producing better results, and helping reach your potential customers.
Since resources, or lack thereof, is one of the challenges of inbound marketing, it’s essential to work smarter when it comes to the tools you incorporate into your overall strategy. That said, it can be hard to find the tools that are right-sized for your business, and that will cover all of your needs and that you and your team will actually use. But it can be nearly impossible to execute an effective inbound strategy without a proper marketing tech stack. Tech like:
If you’re lucky (and smart), you’ll utilize a tool that covers multiple bases. When you implement a marketing technology stack, you’re building the framework for a solid inbound marketing strategy. The tools you decide to use are the bones of your plan and enable your team to take your marketing to the next level. This includes:
Better aligned sales and marketing teams
Marketing automation and reduction of manual work
Increased lead generation and the ability to nurture leads
More impactful analytics, insights, and reports
Streamlined processes and the simplification of complex operations
Ability to generate and carry out a comprehensive strategy
Poor User Engagement
Picture it, you have a clear strategy, you have the time and resources you need, you’re aligned perfectly to your personas, and have all the right tech, but you’re still seeing low user engagement. Your strategy must be off, right? Not so fast. What’s the doorway between your prospects, your brand, and a potential sales opportunity? Your website! Before you throw your strategy out the window, be sure to check your website.
A poor website user experience can be a significant weakness and challenges of inbound marketing that will likely be reflected in high bounce rates and potentially low time on page. Be sure to look at things like poor website design, poor mobile-optimization, and poor user experience. If you find you have issues with any or all three of those areas, fix them. It really is that simple.
Here are some ways to make the content and design of your B2B website purposeful in driving conversion:
Create clear CTAs (Call-to-Actions)
Ensure a quality user experience
Use the right language and tone for your buyers
Cluster content strategy around topics
Have supporting pillar content with blog topics
Humanize your images and videos
Learn more about how to master your B2B website strategy and drive growth here.
Misalignment of Sales and Marketing
We already noted the importance of having a clearly defined inbound marketing strategy upfront. Still, all of that can be for not if your internal teams, specifically sales and marketing, aren’t aligned.
One of the common marketing challenges is that the marketing team has one viewpoint of what makes a great lead and the sales team has an entirely different one. If marketing is creating content to attract the wrong target, then the leads will likely have a lower conversion rate into sales. It’s a lose-lose.
209% higher revenue from marketing-generated leads (Marketo)
Win more customers – 67% higher probability that marketing-generated leads will close (Marketo)
Keep those customers – 36% higher retention rates (MarketingProfs)
24% faster three-year revenue growth and 27% more rapid three-year profit growth for B2B (SiriusDecisions)
Expectation Setting
Remember, results take time. Even if you’ve overcome all of the challenges above, you can’t expect to grow your website traffic, write the world’s best content (at scale), generate new, quality leads, and convert them to customers overnight. Your expectations need to be realistic. Whether it’s internal or external stakeholders, make sure that expectations are set up front and well-aligned. Then give it time to work! Work your strategy, be consistent, measure results, and then adjust as needed.
While the challenges of inbound marketing can be tough to overcome, it’s worth the time and energy to implement a successful strategy. But if you find that it’s more than you or your team want to take on, there are resources out there that can help—interested to learn more? Chat with one of our experts and learn how Lake One can help you take your inbound strategy to the next level.
While traditional marketing efforts have served manufacturers well for many years, incorporating a modern approach now is a must. Content marketing for manufacturers, in its simplest form, is creating content that answers your potential buyer’s questions early in their research process and throughout the buying journey.
The content you create serves many purposes: create brand awareness, generate leads, build credibility with buyers, and much more. So, if your buyers are searching for answers to their questions and you haven’t created any content for them to find, who will they get their answers from? Your competitors.
Why is Content Marketing Valuable for Manufacturers?
Marketing and selling to B2B buyers, in general, can be tricky, and the landscape is ever-changing. Add in the complexities of product and channel for manufacturers, that only compounds the challenges. Focusing on content marketing can help. Here’s how:
Build Credibility and Trust
A B2B buyer is looking for a solution to their problem that they can trust. It’s not common that they will just accept the first solution they find. They will likely look around to find the best solution for their needs before making any decisions. That’s why it’s important that your content showcases your expertise, experience, and showcases the value you can bring. Ultimately people want to work with someone who is credible and trustworthy. Highlight those things by creating case studies, client testimonials, and more.
Increase Visibility
Organic searches can be your most significant source of traffic and revenue. According to HubSpot, their biggest source of traffic is and continues to be blogging! Part of your content marketing strategy should include promoting your content across the channels that your persona uses. Whether it’s using SEO to show up on the Google SERP, posting on Facebook, or using paid ads on LinkedIn. This allows you to reach more people and increase your brand awareness.
Gain a Competitive Advantage
Content marketing for manufacturers is especially important because if you’re not doing it, you can trust that your competitors are or will at some point. And if they aren’t yet, then you’ll have an advantage by getting your content out there first. Content marketing is a great way to gain market share and move up the ranks in your industry.
This is a benefit of content marketing that is often overlooked but can be a powerful one. Content marketing allows you to give life and a personal touch to your products or services. People don’t just want to work with a company, they want to work with people. Your buyers want to work with people who truly care about their customers and provide value to them. Creating content that showcases your mission and the company’s personality can help build trust and humanize you further.
Solve for Complex B2B Buying Cycles
We don’t have to tell you that products in manufacturing are usually technical and complex. While the buyer is often sophisticated and specialized themselves – like an engineer, they’re still looking for educational materials. In fact, a survey conducted by engineering.com found that overwhelmingly – engineers still turn to search or website blogs to find answers to their most technical questions. Your content should be what guides them to a solution and exceeds their expectations.
Content Marketing Strategies for Manufacturers
Fewer than one in four respondents of the Manufacturing Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends survey noted that they have a documented content marketing strategy. Those with a written strategy report the top benefits as being an aligned team around joint mission and goals, and that it makes it easier to determine which content to develop.
Every marketing initiative needs to be driven by a solid strategy and end goal in mind. Content marketing for manufacturers is no different. Here are some tried and true strategies below. Also, who says you have to pick just one? Often the best results come from layering strategies.
Content for SEO
Supercharge your content marketing efforts by aligning it with SEO. Not only will you be educating and helping potential buyers who are coming to your website, but you’ll also be casting a wider net by adding the Google SERP to your arsenal.
Start by doing some keyword research on what your personas are searching for on Google. The idea is to find out what questions your personas are asking and use that information to create an SEO strategy that promotes your helpful content.
Look for keywords with a lower keyword difficulty and a fair amount of search volume to use as a blog topic. Focus on providing value for your persona and solving their pain points, while keeping in mind some SEO best practices, like including your keyword in your title and linking to outside sources of information.
Account Based Marketing
HubSpot defines ABM as a focused growth strategy in which Marketing and Sales collaborate to create personalized buying experiences for a mutually-identified set of high-value accounts.
At its core, it turns the funnel upside down and aligns sales and marketing to hunt with spears instead of nets. Manufacturers benefit from building an account-based marketing framework by:
Creating higher quality opportunities
Tightly aligning sales and marketing
Streamlining and often speeding up the sales cycle
DemandBase found that companies that have been using ABM for at least one year saw an increase in 10% revenue, 19% of those surveyed saw revenue growth in excess of 30%.
So, where does content come in to play? You use highly relevant content to engage your target accounts. For example, ABM could call for a LinkedIn ad for a white paper or video with a call to action to download your case study. The best part about content for ABM? It can be repurposed elsewhere for inbound marketing or leveraged in nurture sequences.
Inbound Marketing
Inbound marketing is a great way to establish credibility and be present when your persona is ready to have a more sophisticated sales conversation. Having that credibility reflects on your company’s products and services. It shows that you’ve thought about your persona’s pain points and address them in your services. The goal is to keep your company top of mind when they are ready to solve their problem. Here’s are the three phases:
Attract: Here is where you draw in the right people (right being the key word) with content and resources that they will find valuable. This will help establish you as a trusted source and someone they’ll want to engage with. Whether it’s using SEO to show up in the Google SERP, utilizing an email list for email marketing, regular social media posts, or even pay-per-click advertising.
Engage: This is where you will present your insights and solutions to their problems and goals. If you can either solve their pain point or help them reach their goal, they are more likely to do business with you. Every professional buyer has their own unique sales process. This is why it’s important to create content that addresses each stage of the buyer’s funnel. This includes having a diverse field of topics while using different delivery methods such as blogs, tools, e-books, and pillar pages. You’ll also engage by leveraging marketing automation to nurture your leads into customers.
Delight: Last but not least, delight. Here you provide help and support customers to find success with their purchase.
Content marketing plays a major role in a sales enablement strategy. Implementing a B2B sales enablement strategy can align your internal teams and empower your sales team with the tools they need to close more deals. Marketing does this by providing should provide various resources such as blogs, guides, and demonstrations to help sales close more leads. For example, a sales rep can refer to a helpful pillar page to showcase your company’s expertise in a certain area.
Before you put together an effective social media strategy, you must ask yourself:
What channels are my target personas using? (Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.)
What kind of content will they engage with?
How can I get them within my reach?
What is the goal of my social media campaign?
Social media can be a great way to engage with your persona’s, but don’t spend too much time on a channel that might not make sense. Focus on creating a strategy that works within the areas your personas are spending the most time. Each social media channel should be used to promote the content you create. Pay attention to who engages with that content and how they respond to it. This can give you a better idea of what their looking for and provide any insight you might have never thought about. It can also be a method of qualifying your leads.
Content Marketing Tips for Success
Be Consistent
Content marketing for manufacturers should be organized and consistent. The content you produce should be created with a purpose and part of a well planned, longer-term strategy. Creating content once every six months isn’t going to move the needle for your overall strategy. Find a content creation cadence that works for your company and stick with it.
Align Sales & Marketing
Having your sales team tightly aligned with your content marketing strategy will maximize your results. When your sales and marketing teams are aligned, sales is more likely to use the content that marketing is creating and marketing is more likely to create good content for sales. Everybody wins. It’s essential to have the right tools and technology on hand to allow sales to follow up with any qualified leads as soon as they engage with your content.
Content marketing doesn’t need to be cranking out blogs every single week. Make it a fun and creative way to portray your business’s personality, expertise, and value. Everyone digests information differently. Some enjoy reading a blog post, while others will benefit from an infographic or tool. Utilize the many different formats and get creative with it. One great way that’s proven its worth is video marketing. Learn about the benefits of video marketing here.
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