Part 1 in a 5-part series on how to make your B2B marketing content more effective. This series was inspired by our own learnings, and what we discovered when we created our free marketing content grader. Check back next week or subscribe to see the next post in the series.
Getting Noticed in the Age of Information Overload
So, why does having truly relevant content matter? Simply put, so that your message is heard above the noise.
A defining factor of the internet age is the sudden abundance of information. Data, research, and content gush from every possible communication channel. It’s impossible to keep up with it all, to the point that an “information diet” is becoming a mainstream term. In this new reality, how are you going to get your message seen and remembered by your target audience?
One of the most important factors is to make your content seem tailor-made to your prospects’ business type and top-of-mind concerns. If you can do that, your prospects will read, share, and engage with your content at much higher rates.
Every prospect believes they are unique.
Have you ever heard a prospect point out that the results in your case study seem great, but that their business or industry is different? It’s a natural response, but very frustrating.
For instance, results from a university IT director might seem rather irrelevant to a financial services IT manager. In a perfect world, you’d be able to give each prospect specifically tailored examples to show them the results your product or service has achieved for similar companies.
Does this mean it’s important to have customer testimonials, case studies and deployment details that are targeted to different types of prospects? We think so.
It’s critical to be in the right place at the right time.
Marketing automation software has given B2B marketers the tools they need to segment by behavior and engagement with lead scoring. Adam Needles of Silverpop discusses the absolute importance of providing your prospects appropriate content for their stage of the buying cycle in this blog post.
The major catch is that creating targeted content that really speaks to a specific prospect is often an arduous task that stresses the bandwidth of already taxed marketing organizations. Tailoring content often requires new research, manual processes, and a lot more time. Yet the ROI on creating relevant content should be obvious – in our 2011 State of B2B Content Marketing Survey nearly 60% of B2B marketers reported that they tailor content by solution/use case and 69% create targeted content by vertical.
So, how relevant is your content?
In addition to analyzing your content production on your own, one quick way to evaluate your content’s relevance is with our free Content Grader tool. This online self-assessment tool will ask you about your marketing content and your content production practices. It then compares your answers to a database of 421 other B2B marketers, crunches the numbers, and emails you a detailed report on your content’s relevance and several other factors.
