Great content can attract your ideal clients, establish you as an expert and a thought leader and look after a lot of the heavy lifting for sales if done right. But crafting great content is only part of the task, distributing and promoting it is another big part, as is designing that content to generate leads for you. Sometimes gating content is the answer, sometimes a clear call to action (CTA) can do the trick or sometimes you might want to lean on pixels and custom content triggers to entice readers into the funnel.
White papers are powerful marketing tools, they have the ability to define you as a leader in your industry and provide a platform to present your unique value proposition (UVP) in an educational versus sales-based format. A well crafted white paper is easily leveraged to capture leads through gating; making the paper available for download only after the interested party has provided their email and often some information about the organization they are from.
We start white papers by interviewing your internal subject matter experts, then collecting quotes and observations from other industry experts (these can be analysts and from academia but they can also be suppliers, clients or complementary vendors or service providers in your space.) An effective whitepaper is educational first, ideally makes some bold claims and can even be controversial.
Case studies are a synopsis of how your solution has been implemented and helped another organization. Often framed in a variation of the “Challenge”, “Solution”, “Result” structure, case studies are easier to produce when you have a process and method in place before the implementation, rather than trying to create the case study and capture data after the fact.
Case studies are incredibly helpful for new prospects to help them understand what kinds of businesses use your solutions, what challenges it solves and the types of results they can expect. For this reason, it is beneficial to have a selection of case studies covering a variety of applications and organizations to ensure your prospect can adequately identify with a relevant case study subject.
Blog posts are one of the most commonly used but most poorly done content marketing activities in the market. A good blog post will help with organic discovery through search, will keep your reader on the site after reading the blog post, capture an email, blog subscription or trigger a pixel and potentially even generate a lead. Only looking at blog posts as a top of funnel marketing tool is a missed opportunity, an effective blog is a lead nurturing tool and should contribute to all stages of the funnel by providing content for all types of decision-makers and the various buying stages they are going through.
Webinars are an effective way to merge education or thought leadership with sales while capturing critical information from potential leads upfront. It is an intimate way to engage your audience and is more scaleable now than ever before. Because of the time-bound elements of webinars, they provide many benefits other content marketing doesn’t; they have built-in urgency, calls to action and have repeat power most organizations don’t think to leverage. They are also a perfect opportunity to bring the marketing and sales teams together on projects to drive sales.
Based on who the decision-makers are in your target prospect companies and how they generally seek out and consume content, we will work to create relevant content to attract them at each stage of the buying journey and lead them to the next.