CONTENT MARKETING FOR B2B SOFTWARE COMPANIES CONTENT MARKETING FOR B2B SOFTWARE COMPANIES

Transcription

1 CONTENT MARKETING FOR B2B SOFTWARE COMPANIES 1

2 INTRODUCTION If you re a B2B software company trying to grow, you must find effective ways to build brand awareness, connect with customers and prospects, and make sales. B2B software companies face unique challenges as they try to educate prospective customers in real time about the problems their products solve problems those prospects might not even know they have. One way to do this is through content marketing, which 99 percent of software marketers reported using in a 2013 survey by the Content Marketing Institute. Content marketing is especially popular in the B2B software industry because of the complex nature of software solutions, explains Jay Ivey, market research associate at Software Advice, a research-based resource for software buyers. In the crowded B2B software marketplace, it can be very difficult to for buyers to differentiate between solutions. Wellexecuted content marketing allows buyers to discover and understand a solution, and it keeps a brand top-of-mind in a competitive market. But creating great content and using it strategically is harder than it may initially appear. The Content Marketing Institute s 2015 B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks report found even committed B2B content marketers face challenges including creating engaging content, producing content consistently and measuring content effectiveness. This guide is designed to help you overcome these and other content marketing challenges. It provides a framework for mapping out your content marketing strategy, as well as advice and examples from B2B software marketers who ve created and executed successful content marketing campaigns themselves. 2

3 First, Know Your Buyer Every effective content marketing strategy starts with a solid understanding of who you want to buy your product. In a B2B sales environment, you are selling to people with distinct problems and needs or you may be in the process of creating your own market. You need to figure out who the people in this market are, including their: Job titles. Biggest challenges. Work roles and responsibilities. Preferred methods of communication. Level of knowledge about your software and competing products. Reading habits about their industry, software and other business matters. You then need to use this information to create buyer personas detailed descriptions of the type of people you re trying to sell to. This will help you develop content tailored to their needs and interests. 3

4 Here s how: We decided to let the content do the targeting for us. Talk to your sales team. It s important that marketing and sales have a strong relationship, says Erin Wasson, vice president of marketing at Web-based relocation management software company UrbanBound. The company developed its buyer personas via collaboration with its marketing and sales teams. Developing personas together provides the greatest insight on customers, a unified buy-in from both departments and enthusiasm around the strategy. Assess your analytics. Review your website analytics to learn more about your customers through their behavior. Take a look at demographics, keywords, how they get to your site and the pages they view there. Look to online resources. Use public data to help hone your personas. Bizible, a marketing attribution application for Salesforce, developed a detailed picture of its customers by using LinkedIn to profile decision makers and users at each customer company, says Dave Rigotti, the company s head of pipeline marketing. The marketing team realized many prospects weren t listing Salesforce as a skill in their LinkedIn profiles, which posed a challenge to their plans to run a LinkedIn ad-targeting campaign. We decided to let the content do the targeting for us, Rigotti says. By broadening our targeting, but using Salesforce in the title of content, we were able to reach new potential customers very effectively and at an average cost per lead of 32 percent less than other promoted content campaigns. Listen in. While you re on LinkedIn, pay attention to the conversations your customers are having to better understand them. Join relevant groups and note trending topics. Do the same on Twitter, Facebook and any other social media sites your customers use. 4

5 Develop and Document Your Strategy Developing a strategy to connect with your buyers is essential to content marketing success, and documenting that strategy increases its effectiveness. The Content Marketing Institute s 2015 B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks report found that a third of B2B companies using content marketing say they have a documented content marketing strategy; slightly less than half say they have a strategy, but it s not documented. It also found 60 percent of those with a documented strategy rate themselves highly in terms of content marketing effectiveness, compared with 32 percent of those who haven t taken the time to document their strategy. Your strategy should include information about your: Goals. Do you want to improve your website s SEO? Educate your potential market? Get more qualified inbound leads? Knowing your goals will help you target your content more effectively. Buyer personas. It s important to always keep in mind who you re trying to reach with your content marketing. Brand voice. Is your brand dynamic and edgy, or conservative and traditional? You need to know so you can make your content s tone and style fit. Broad content topics. What types of topics are you going to create content around? When you don t document this, it s easy to stray from your strategy and create less-effective content. Content production process. Who is in charge of producing and publishing content? Establish roles so everyone knows what they re supposed to do. 5

6 Publishing channels. Are you just going to blog, or will you also create videos, images and other types of content? Where will you publish each type? Publication frequency. How often do you plan to publish content? Be realistic. It s generally better to publish two high-quality blog posts a week than a mediocre post every day. Promotional channels. Which social media sites and other venues will you use to promote the content you produce? Set up a process for each type of content so you re not winging it. Metrics. Use analytics to track which channels and types of content are the most effective, and reassess your tactics periodically to ensure they re still working well. Create Conversations Across a Variety of Channels Take a coordinated approach across several platforms to establish a voice, build trust with prospects and customers, and educate new markets about your company s software. Phil Haslehurst, head of marketing for Decibel Insight, says his team takes a 360-degree approach to getting content out on all channels. They create videos, white papers, guides, infographics, podcasts and blog posts. Haslehurst acknowledges it takes a lot of work, but the integrated approach is working. Consistently share content in the places your customers are looking, but don t overwhelm your followers with too many updates. Get the most value out of everything you create by repurposing content into additional blog posts, social media updates, podcasts and webinars. Remember: Promoting your content to make sure your prospects and customers see it is just as important as creating it in the first place. 6

7 Your Company Blog Blogs are a great place to house your company s original content and an effective way to draw buyers to your website. The Content Marketing Institute s 2015 B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks report found 80 percent of companies surveyed are using a company blog as part of their content marketing efforts. If you re looking to build relationships in your industry and establish brand authority, you almost have to blog, and blog well, Ivey says. Customer intelligence and Web analytics platform KISSmetrics has attracted a loyal following of blog readers by prioritizing topics important to its prospects and customers. Although we maintain a frequency of about seven posts per week, we maintain post quality above all else. If it doesn t meet our standards, we don t publish it, explains Lars Lofgren, director of growth at KISSmetrics. By making content useful, interesting and relatable, people will keep coming back. To be effective, a blog must be updated regularly (twice a week is a good place to start), so put together an editorial calendar that shows everyone what you re publishing on which day and who s responsible for writing, editing, uploading and promoting the post. Ensure each post you create is informative and engaging, and don t forget to include a visual element such as a photo, illustration or simple infographic. 7

8 Downloadable Assets: E-Books, White Papers and Guides People value content that helps them stay on top of the latest trends and offers them actionable advice they can use to perform better at their jobs and they ll share their contact information to get it. Longer-form, downloadable content is key to capturing visitors and followers contact information and converting them into qualified leads. These downloadable assets dive deeper into a topic than a blog post can, and can tackle issues customers may be struggling with or establish your organization as an industry thought leader. Rigotti recommends expanding on your company s most popular blog post topics in white papers, as readership of the topic on the blog is a good indicator of interest in the topic. Watson suggests using them to examine a new market segment, buyer persona or pain point don t just cover the same topics over and over again. Include expert input, surveys and analysis. can be one of the most effective and useful parts of your content marketing strategy. Seventy-three percent of marketers agree marketing is core to their business, according to Salesforce s 2015 State of Marketing. If you need to focus on directly generating and nurturing leads at a low cost-per-lead, the first place to start for most businesses should be marketing, Ivey says. newsletters are great vehicles for sharing insights and helping educate your customers and potential clients and it s easy to create them by repurposing your other content. Check your analytics to see which recent blog posts are most popular, and put those at the top of your message. Use a template so you don t have to code it from scratch every time. Experiment with A/B subject lines to see what your audience responds best to. 8

9 Visual Assets Visuals, such as Slideshare presentations and infographics, can help you grab your audience s attention and get your main points across. They re also a great branding opportunity. Infographics in particular, Lofgren says, are a popular, easy-to-grasp, shareable, fun way to showcase what your software can do. Decibel Insight put together a heatmap showing how current and past winners of the London Marathon would fare against each other and shared it on its blog, Haslehurst says. These are the tidbits that we hope will keep our active audience engaged, or pique the interest of influencers and customers and lead them to share. To put together an infographic, Wasson recommends getting a graphic designer s input at the beginning of the project, rather than trying to take an idea and push it into a template. 9

10 Video Videos can be especially useful for explaining complex technical solutions and building a story around them, such as the video What is DevOps? In Simple English from Rackspace, which has more than 65,000 views. For a B2B software company, video is definitely part of the supporting cast, Haslehurst says. While Decibel Insight doesn t usually get new traffic through video, he says the company s established audience finds a lot of value in it. One effective strategy for us is using video to create content that explains our software better to people who are already interested, and driving them to it through marketing and social media, he explains. Another really effective use of video is to create support content for our customers so it contributes to retention, too. It s amazing how quickly you can respond to customer needs by creating a quick video. Once you ve made it and posted it to YouTube, it s there for future customers who experience the same problem. Your videos don t have to be hourlong, glossy productions. A 30-second response to a question about your software is sometimes all you need. As with all content, keep it informative and useful, and steer clear of heavy sales pitches. 10

11 Where to Get Your Content Ideas Once you know what kind of content you re going to produce, you may feel overwhelmed by the idea of having to come up with enough ideas. Here are some of our favorite tips to get your creative juices flowing. Listen to your customers and clients. What kind of questions are they asking? What are their concerns? Stay on top of the latest news. Offer your organization s perspective on current events and what they mean for your customers. Try a Q&A. Pick an industry leader or successful customer and ask him or her to do a Q&A on a relevant topic. Interviewing other people makes for great blog content, and it helps build real-life relationships. Keep an eye on the competition. Check out your competitors content and offer your own take. Look at Google Analytics. Pay attention to what visitors are looking for when they come to your website and you ll probably find a few ideas. Technology Seed Marketing and PR Manager Katie Bissel says she looks at industry trends, general news items that are trending and common questions from customers to get content topic ideas. We figure if our customers are asking, others are probably asking as well. Trade shows and conferences are also content goldmines, says Michele Linn, vice president of content at the Content Marketing Institute. Attend the conference in the eyes of your audience. What would they find useful? Then take the best insights you have learned and turn them into a summary blog post or SlideShare. Also, think about ways you can use the content you create to connect with people at the event, and follow up with them after. 11

12 How to Produce All This Content Now that you re brimming with ideas, it s time to figure out who s going to make them a reality. Establish your editorial calendar and make production a priority. Find time to write posts yourself, hire freelancers, have your engineer write a post every now and then whatever it takes, Ivey says. Smaller organizations may need help producing content, especially if they don t have anyone on staff with strong writing or graphic design skills. Almost anyone can get involved in producing content. Technology Seed produces all of its content internally, and not only by the marketing team, Bissel says. Having everyone in the company contribute helps increase the variety of perspectives, which she finds valuable. Finding time isn t easy, but by spreading out the work and making it a priority, you can get it done. 12

13 Remember to Measure Once you start publishing content, you must measure its performance. Measurement is essential to every piece of marketing, especially online, Lofgren says. You ll be able to make better content marketing decisions if you analyze and understand your data, including those that indicate: The best publishing frequency. The best time of day to publish. Which sites drive the most referral traffic. Which topics resonate with your audience. Which platforms drive the most inbound leads. How readers respond to your newsletter list growth, open rates and click rates. There is power in being able to report on the number of leads or other key metrics that your content marketing program has generated, Linn says. 13

14 Conclusion With most B2B software companies using content marketing in some form to attract and connect with prospects and customers, sporadically posting on your blog and social media isn t going to help you get ahead. To establish your company as a thought leader, you ll need to refine your content marketing strategy and organize your team to execute it effectively. We hope the advice and insights in this guide help. If you have questions about reaching decision makers for SMB and enterprise B2B software with content marketing, the Reputation Capital team is here to help. We re content experts and have extensive experience working with tech companies. Contact us today. 14