content marketing

Seven ways to distribute your content widely

If you followed our tips from last week's Funnel Vision you now have loads of great digital content for your B2B marketing. You've got white papers, videos and webinars from your own great ideas, and great ideas from others who have a view that supports your own. How do you get that great content out into the hands of yourtarget market? And is there a way to leverage others to do some of the work for you? Maybe a key partner or two, your sales people, and your audience itself can help to get the word READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|Tactics|

Five steps to leveraging 3rd party content

With the best will in the world, you will never be able to create enough content to meet all of your market's appetite for content. So are asking your audience to read widely. Those other sources include your competition, as well as others who might not be competition, but definitely are not arguing a view of the issues and solutions that helps your case. In today's blog, we'll show you five steps to leveraging 3rd-party content so you can meet more of your audience's demand for content, without having a huge content team, yet still select content READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|Tactics|

Six steps to building a content roadmap for years of killer content

Want to receive more content like this? Subscribe to our monthly B2B marketing blog! Get your copy of our 2014 Sales and Marketing Alignment Report Building great blog content scares many away from content marketing. They'll say something like "I don't have that much to say about it (the topic)." Others blog regularly, but their topics are chosen randomly and don't build any kind of brand or slowly sway opinion. The purpose of any blog should be to remain positioned with your market, and to subtly concept-condition them. That is, if your blogs do their job, you'll enjoy inbound leads READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|Tactics|

How to build a marketing message that creates opportunities that only you can win

Want to receive more content like this? Subscribe to our monthly B2B marketing blog! We're all somewhat in love with the products and services that we take to market. And we can all tell good stories about why that product or service is fantastic. A couple of challenges to that. Firstly, what if the buyers that you're communicating with aren't really looking for a solution like that just right now? So certainly, to deal with that first issue, certainly, we need to create messages that talk about the challenges and the needs that the buyers have to stimulate that READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|Tactics|

How much does content marketing actually cost?

Last year, content marketing spread like wildfire. Now, over 91% of B2B marketers are currently using content marketing, according to a survey by the Content Marketing Institute. And even more excitingly, content marketing has been proven to be one of the most effective tactics for lead generation. Despite this, businesses are somewhat lost when it comes to the numbers. Even now, business owners are still doubtful about their content marketing spend. Some common questions are: How much should I spend on content marketing? What portion of my marketing budget should be allocated to content marketing? How much READ MORE ›

By Chris Fell|Velocity|

How to create compelling content

“What am I expecting my audience to do differently tomorrow?” If you can’t answer this question after consuming a piece of content, then what was the purpose of the communication at all? All too often we finish building our content piece, summarise what we have written, and then fizzle. Or we deliver a vague or unrelated product pitch. In his latest video blog, Hugh demonstrates how to reach a convincing and persuasive conclusion with your content. He shares a sure-fire method to building compelling content and stresses how important it is that your content takes your buyer one step forward READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|Tactics|

Grow your business with the Content Marketing Domino

I love those crazy Youtube videos where dozens of (usually nerdy) students have spent weeks crawling around on hands and knees laying out hundreds of thousands of dominoes, all in preparation for the big moment that kicks off one almighty chain reaction. A great B2B content marketing strategy should have exactly this effect on your target audience. What's the link? The role of content is to influence the thoughts, opinions and decisions of your buyers with the ultimate goal of generating more sales. Each piece of content within your content strategy has a role to play, i.e., READ MORE ›

By Chris Fell|Tactics|

How to choose content to get buyers across your funnel

Do you lead or do you demand? I read a great article from the Content Marketing Institute asking whether we should focus on lead generation or demand generation. I'm going to show you how to answer that question for yourself. In the article, the Content Marketing Institute - a very highly regarded organisation by the way - argue that your content strategy can't deal with both Lead Gen and Demand Gen. Lead Gen is all about names and Demand Gen is all about shaping behaviour. Well, I'd argue content strategy must deal with both. What about positioning, READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|Tactics|

Digital marketing disconnect: The vaccum facing leaders

"There is a digital disconnect in executive ranks, a leadership vacuum created by a mismatch between expertise and authority." So says Jake Scrofman in The Harvard Business Review Blog. This pithy summary hits the nail on the head. In many, many of our meetings with prospective and current clients the senior team are aware, in principle at least, of the potential of digital, inbound marketing to drive increased revenue, improve sales and marketing efficiency and a reduction in their cost of sales. But they don't know what and how to change. The result is they cling to READ MORE ›

By Chris Fell|Tactics, Velocity|

B2B Marketing in 2014: Content, Context & Conversation

Content Marketing has emerged as one of the key growth areas for B2B Marketing in 2014. It seems like everyone is jumping on the bandwagon. And yet, as Doug Kessler so eloquently explains, we are in the process of drowning in a deluge of drivel masquerading as thought leadership. It’s just that Doug didn’t use the word “drivel”. More on that later. Diverting the deluge of drivel How can we avoid contributing to this deluge of drivel? David Meerman Scott - referring to a conversation with Greg Alexander at Sales Benchmark Index - highlighted the important linkage READ MORE ›

By Bob Apollo|Sales, Tactics|