Secrets to Effective Content Marketing Strategies

According to the Content Marketing Institute, about 86% of B2C marketers think of content marketing as a vital part of their business strategy, and 91% of B2B marketers use content marketing to reach those prospective customers. You can grow your brand and revenue with effective content marketing strategies.

Need a content marketing strategy for your business? At Blue Valley Marketing, we have the right contact center solutions for you!

What Is Content Marketing?

Content marketing is considered an inbound digital marketing strategy that relies on various types of content and channels to:

Improve the user’s journey, boosting conversion
Attract a defined audience or lead into the sales funnel

Depending on the purpose, content marketing can be broken into several subsets, including:

Web content
Blogs
Video Marketing
Infographics
Podcasts
Telemarketing

That is the tip of the content marketing field. There are many other ways to use the content for your marketing. Now that you know the basics of content marketing, look for ways to grow your business with an effective content marketing strategy.

Why Develop a Content Marketing Strategy?

When you have a content marketing strategy, it can play a crucial role in generating leads and increasing your brand visibility. Content marketing can drive traffic to key pages. Companies with blogs will see a boost in their website traffic. When considering brand awareness, many people often seek out a product after reading about it or seeing a post on social media. Improving your content marketing can build customer trust, create long-term relationships, and add to your credibility.

Additionally, content marketing can increase your lead generation and conversion. Many buyers have stated that content has swayed them in their purchasing decisions. In some cases, a buyer will view or hear at least five pieces of content before making a decision.

A marketing funnel is one way to capture a potential client’s attention.

What Is a Marketing Funnel?

If you want to grab the audiences’ attention with content marketing, consider using a marketing funnel for your business. There are several stages of the funnel. Here’s a look at them:

Middle of the Funnel

With this level, you need to educate and nurture your audience with video presentations, event videos, email campaigns, newsletters, and educational resources.

Bottom of the Funnel

In the end, you need to convert those interested clients into paying customers with review pages, testimonials, case studies, and comparison sheets.

Top of the Funnel

At this stage, you want to generate brand awareness with blogs, vlogs, web pages, eBooks, press releases, and telemarketing.

Standing Out from the Crowd

The market is flooded with content, though, which means the challenge is to ensure that your content is the one that stands out. Developing a content marketing strategy is critical. It’s not enough to create unique and personalized content pieces. You need a good distribution strategy that communicates your brand value propositions to your audience in a way that leads to further engagement. You need a process that engages with your clients and prospects throughout their buying cycle.

A recent survey conducted by Ascend2 demonstrates the challenge that strategy development presents for companies using content marketing. The results indicate that almost half of all marketers (48 percent) experience significant challenges developing quality strategy and/or getting the resources needed to execute the plan.

Others are finding it challenging to create strategic objectives that are easily measurable and to create a plan that meets their budget limits. Budgetary challenges are a hurdle for 47 percent of marketers, and 36 percent name measurable goals as primary obstacles to a successful content marketing plan.

Even with the challenges, there remains a great deal of excitement about the opportunities for investing in content marketing. Marketers are committed to growing their content marketing efforts and finding better ways to demonstrate the highest possible ROI. Eighty-nine percent of respondents said that they are increasing their effectiveness at using content marketing to grow their business and engage with customers.

Blog Content Strategy

There are multiple benefits to blogging. It can:

Help your website’s SEO
Attract lead with organic search results
Helps readers make well-informed decisions
Nurtures those new leads
Shapes your reputation as a brand leader

Blogging is usually at the beginning of the conversion funnel. At this point, you will want to educate your customers who come into contact with your business. You can use this opportunity to raise your brand awareness and turn those casual customers into loyal customers. The best blogging brattice will focus on rising trends and evergreen techniques.

With blogging, you will want to incorporate:

Search engine optimization with relevant keywords and images
Long-form content that provides deeper insights into your positions as an industry leader
Use data-driven blogging to add value to your readers

Email Marketing Strategy

When you email marketing, it can help with customer acquisition and retention. You always want to have an up-to-date list of your new visitors and existing clients. Use these best practices for your marketing campaign:

Use bold calls to action to bring your recipient closer to the conversation point
Produce engaging copy to provide the reader with concise and informative content
Considering segmentation to target specific groups of your audience
Remember to personalize all messages to connect with each lead

Digital PR Strategy

When you need to reach a broader audience, consider digital PR. These methods rely on influence outreach, social media, and search engine optimization to improve your visibility and online presence. With that, you can:

Create online press releases with links to your website
Organize interviews with industry leaders
Nurture relationships with bloggers to generate more online content
Foster outreach to social media influencers

With effective digital PR, you will be able to:

Improve your SEO
Boost your brand image
Increased website traffic
Become an authority in your industry
Generate more sales and leads

Video Marketing Strategy

Like other types of content, you can use video marketing to increase your digital engagement, educate potential prospects, and boost your brand. Video marketing is an effective method of marketing. Today, many people watch videos before purchasing a product or service. These videos include:

How-tos
Demos
Case studies
Personalized message
Explainer videos

When making videos, you want to use a few of those best practices, such as:

Establishing a clear goal
Optimizing all your videos for SEO
Use an effective call-to-action

Now that you know the basics, there are a few other ways to help market your company and message.

Assessing Your Content Marketing Strategies

One of the challenges of content marketing is the ability of marketers to measure the outcomes of their efforts consistently. In fact, according to a survey by the Content Marketing Institute, only 20 percent of B2B marketers say they know how to make this assessment with accuracy. To address this issue, here are some tips to help you measure the effectiveness of your content market strategies:

Set Goals

You need to begin with knowing what you want to accomplish in your content marketing campaign. What does the end result look like to you? That’s your main objective. You’ll also need to set goals along the entire path of the campaign and measure them as you go to see where your strategies need to be tweaked.

Draw Attention to Your Brand

As you disseminate information about your brand, you’ll attract more awareness. Check your website to see how many hits you’ve had on your blogs. Do you have videos on your social media pages? Count the number of likes, retweets, shares, etc., to determine the effectiveness of each video. If you survey your clients about how they found out about a product/service they just purchased, you can begin to set a dollar amount to each like/share/retweet on social media or hits on your website.

Generating Leads

Your content should attract leads. These decision-makers have come into contact with your content, are interested, and are taking further steps to learn more about you and your products/services. You can further the conversation, literally, with more proactive marketing methods, such as telemarketing.

Incorporating Marketing into Those Strategies

Indeed, in this age of digital content marketing, an often-overlooked resource for B2B marketing is the tried-and-true telemarketing. It’s a great stand-alone tool and works well as a partner to more modern strategies. Here’s a list of the ideas presented by the Content Marketing Institute, plus an idea for how to incorporate telemarketing to enhance lead generation:

Create an eBook

If you want to differentiate yourself as an expert with deep knowledge of your industry, an ebook is one of the ways to do that. It’s an opportunity to solve a problem for your potential buyers and demonstrate your expertise. If you’ve got a compelling topic, you’ll effortlessly capture the email addresses of those that want access to your ebook.

Telemarketing pairs well with this idea on both ends of the process. You can reach out to your target audience to learn about the challenges they are facing in their work environment before starting your ebook production. This step helps you identify a topic that will garner significant interest. Once the ebook is in circulation, use telemarketing to follow up with your contacts that downloaded the ebook to see if it was helpful and what other topics would also capture their interest. In the process, you will identify clients’ needs and be able to generate quality leads.

Invite Your Target Audience To a Webinar

Webinars are similar to an ebook in that they demonstrate your expertise and capture critical information about your audience. Consider taping your event so you can post it as a resource on your website later or edit it into a video for sharing on social media sometime in the future.

Telemarketing can help you drive interest to your webinar and is useful for conducting follow-up interviews. What did your contacts appreciate about your webinar, and what would they like to see in the future? The information people share with you will help lead to the qualification of some great leads.

Schedule a Live Event

Like telemarketing, live events create opportunities for one-on-one connections that are hard to achieve in the digital world. Use telemarketing to call your potential buyers, invite them to your event, and find out if there are any barriers or reservations about attending. You can use live telephone and in-person conversations to build relationships and grow trust between yourself and your potential buyer.

Produce More White Papers

Reading a white paper can help your client solve a specific problem in an age dominated by visual information. White papers must have a prominent place in your content marketing strategy because they have a principal place in your target audience’s priority list.

We recently conducted a survey that revealed significant missed opportunities regarding white papers. There’s a sizable gap between how many white papers are being produced and the demand for them by B2B buyers. You can read more in our white paper that details the survey results.

Showcase Your Success with Case Studies

Don’t miss an opportunity to tell you about your best work. Produce a few case studies highlighting a successful solution you implemented for a client. It’s useful for demonstrating your problem-solving skills to a client and showcasing respected clients who trust you to solve problems for them.

Telemarketing works well here to follow up with potential buyers to see if they read the case study and if they’ve experienced a similar situation to the one presented in your content.

Telemarketing works well as a stand-alone marketing resource, but it is particularly effective at building loyalty in situations where your interactions with a contact have been primarily online. Here are a few other reasons why you should include telemarketing in your content marketing strategy as you strive to build lead generation efforts:

Get immediate feedback. There is no waiting to see the analytics from digital activity. You hear from your potential buyer what they’re looking for, whether they have any reservations about choosing your company and whether your content is serving their purposes. You develop real-time leads.

Find out their preferences. Maybe you publish a white paper every month, but your target audience largely prefers to read the content in smaller segments in a blog post for the information they need. Telemarketing helps you gain information about which format of the content is best for your contacts.

Make sure you are talking to the right people. So much digital marketing hits the wrong people because you’ve got incomplete information or the wrong information altogether. With a telemarketing call, you can determine which decision-makers need to receive your content.

Woman Wearing Eyeglasses with Black Headset

A Perfect Partner

Telemarketing is a practical choice for content distribution. It is even more effective when paired with a technology-based distribution strategy such as social media and/or email. For instance, when a white paper has been posted on social media, a telemarketer can follow up with your target audience to determine whether they clicked on the white paper, their thoughts about it and whether they prefer social media as another distribution method for future content. The telemarketing rep can qualify quality actionable leads for your sales team in the process.

Telemarketing should be an integral part of your marketing plan. So many of the digital distribution methods tend to be one-sided and passive. B2B environments are a great example; you may post informative, engaging blogs on your site, link them on your social media sites, and send them out to your email contact list, only to hear crickets from your audience. Telemarketing offers a unique benefit that other marketing techniques often miss, it is proactive. It provides you the opportunity to ensure that your content is delivered to the right people at the right time and hear what your audience has to say about your brand.

Telemarketing offers you immediate feedback from your potential buyers, giving you insight into their preferences and the likelihood that they will become a customer. In addition, telemarketing transitions perfectly once they become a customer, allowing you to follow up on their experience with your company, offer additional customer service, and even hear complaints before they consider switching to another provider.

Several insightful questions you can utilize in a telemarketing campaign give you priceless information about your buyer. For example, you learn:

What problem are they trying to solve, and when do they expect this problem to take priority over the other concerns they have to deal with?
What different factors do they consider when weighing the benefits of one solution over another?

Customers increasingly want to know that when they invest in your business’s products or services, they will be rewarded with your attention to their specific concerns and challenges. Telemarketing is uniquely positioned to gain an understanding of your customer’s preferences and needs.

When telemarketing is an integral part of your distribution methods, you gain important insight into the problems your potential customers are seeking to solve and the factors influencing their decisions on whether to use your product or service. By strategically using a combination of distribution methods, you can ensure that potential customers are viewing your carefully-crafted content.

When you take your campaign to a professional telemarketing organization, you are putting your content in the hands of expert communicators who know how to handle your lead and nurture your leads until they are primed to jump into the buying cycle.

The best content marketing strategies consider several key foundational aspects that must be viewed from the outset of a B2B campaign. The first core component of every successful B2B strategy is knowing who your audience is.

Organizations that focus first on identifying their target audience ask themselves who would find that content valuable, their potential customer, and who their current clients are. Most organizations are capturing data on their existing clients with every move they make, so tapping into this data is a must. You can also use telemarketing to have conversations with your clients and ask them what it is they would like to see next out of your organization. This can help you reach out to others who are not yet in the buying cycle.

As a marketer, you want to ensure your content speaks to your target audience. The right message will pull in new clients and move existing clients through the sales cycle faster. However, you must consider where each of them is in the buying cycle and sculpt your message accordingly. A survey by MarketingCharts reveals that most B2B content falls into one of six categories; video/multimedia, infographics, blogs, white papers, case studies, and detailed guides. This content lands on everyone from the pre-sales stage to the final sales process. Of course, telemarketing can help push any of these categories.

Content can’t promote itself if your target audience doesn’t know it exists; if they don’t, it might as well not exist. How you distribute your content will largely depend on where your clients and potential clients go to gain information. An obvious first option for distribution would be social media. However, pushing content through blogs on your website (and promoting the content through social media) can significantly impact how your content is consumed. Telemarketing is also an excellent channel to use in promoting content.

Think About Telemarketing

Your content marketing strategies will determine whether your B2B campaign fails or succeeds. Your business can be transformed by following the right approach. HubSpot embarked on a content marketing campaign that helped revenues grow by more than 80 percent. Monetate also put the right strategies in place to see their traffic increase by more than 200 percent and their sales double. Have you considered using telemarketing in your campaign to see similar results?

Why does telemarketing, an age-old channel, still work? It has to do with the human touch. The B2B marketers know how well received they are by decision-makers in the organizations they reach out to. Telemarketing connects people of mutual interest and furthers the buying cycle in a faster, more accurate direction.

Why Telemarketing Is Still as Valuable as Ever

Telemarketing provides a personal connection that cannot be imitated in digital marketing tools. Even with current trends showing a lot of activity in digital content marketing, you’ll outsmart your competition when you retain the opportunity for personal conversations with your target audience.

A personal conversation builds loyalty and trust between you and your potential buyer before the sale is ever made. You can listen to their reservations, walk them through any obstacles to their decision and make suggestions for resources you offer that they might find valuable.

As a lead generation tool, telemarketing is unmatched in its ability to help you identify all the key decision-makers at a company and those that may indirectly influence a decision. Digital methods are passive ways of obtaining information about decision-makers, while telemarketing helps you get directly to those involved in the purchase.

Blue Valley Telemarketing is experienced in helping companies like yours integrate digital and traditional content marketing methods for optimal lead generation. To learn more, make an appointment to tell us about your business and your current efforts to generate growth. We would love to see how we can partner together to spark a successful marketing strategy.
Do you want to connect with more customers? Consider telemarketing. Contact us at Blue Valley Marketing to get started.

Last Updated on November 20, 2023 by Ronen Ben-Dror

The Secrets to Effective Content Marketing Strategies