Category Archives: Content Marketing

Statistically most B2B enterprises use content marketing for brand awareness

Certainly B2B enterprises don’t use content marketing to publish advertisements. They need to strengthen their presence on the Internet and consequently, raise brand awareness. A Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs study has revealed that (understandably these statistics are from the USA but they are quite a representative)

94% B2B small businesses are using content marketing
83% B2B small businesses use content marketing to raise brand awareness or at least have it as a goal for 2015
47% B2B small businesses plan to increase their content marketing budgets in 2015 and only 1% plan to decrease their budget
45% B2B small businesses engaged in content marketing claimed that they are effective at it
81% B2B small businesses are producing more content than they were a year ago
33% find producing engaging and quality content a big challenge
24% find it harder to arrange budget for content marketing
48% of the B2B small businesses have a documented content marketing strategy

Here is an updated list of 30 essential content marketing statistics for 2020.

The last point is very important. In order to be successful in content marketing, your organization must have a documented strategy. What does that mean?

You should know what you want to achieve from your content marketing strategy, whom are you going to target for that and what sort of content you need to produce in a given amount of time. On with the statistics…

78% B2B small businesses have a dedicated person who oversees the content marketing strategy
On an average B2B small business marketers are using 13 content marketing tactics including social media content, blogging, articles on the websites and publishing email newsletters. The use of mobile content has risen from 27% to 35%. The use of infographics has risen from 39% to 48%.
Interestingly, people are using more electronic newsletters – 82% compared to blogs – 77%.

Graphic source: the PDF report above

Social content marketing strategy and the importance of verified Twitter accounts

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Social content marketing doesn’t just involve continuously posting your content on social media and social networking websites. It also means getting attention from the people who are well-known and very active on social media circles. Famous people, well-known people, whose identity can be easily stolen and due to that people can be misled, have a facility to get their Twitter accounts verified.

This blog post on Business 2 Community gives the example of the Twitter account of Shaquille O’Neal which is, of course, verified. Shaquille O’Neal tweeted some good words about the phone company Blackphone, which the company used on its website as a recommendation. This may have brought lots of traffic on the website. Just the fact that Shaquille O’Neal is promoting a particular product can suddenly catapult the sales to crazy levels. Just imagine, a business or a company may have to pay him a few million bucks in order to broadcast the same message if the message is not voluntary.

As you may know, not everybody can get his or her account verified by Twitter. You need to be an influencer in your field, and more than that, there should be a possibility that someone might use your name and your fame to defame you hoodwink people, or simply spread misinformation in your name and cause you harm and expose you to litigations.

While there is not a direct way to leverage verified Twitter accounts, what the above link blog post intends to say is, try to get your product or service promoted by people who have a verified Twitter account and then you can use that particular message as a recommendation.

Again as it happens in content marketing, you cannot suddenly one day wake up and ask a verified Twitter account holder to give you a recommendation. You will need to establish a relationship. You will need to introduce yourself and regularly interact with that person (actually interact rather than just sound like an opportunist).

Applying segmentation to content marketing

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Segmentation in content marketing may be creating and publishing content that is very narrowly focused on a particular audience and on a particular topic. You can market content to a wider audience or a narrower audience and sometimes the problem is, you don’t even realize that.

This Content Marketing Institute blog post gives some examples of how you can do content marketing for narrower segments rather than simply publishing and marketing content for a very wide audience. Take an example of a sports channel. A sports channel telecast’s programs on multiple sports such as basketball, soccer, skating and every other sport under the sun (as long as its coverage is available and there is an audience).

In this sports channel there are also segmented programs. For example, how about a monthly recap of the best home runs across the country? Or the biggest sixers in all the cricket ODIs of the past week? Or the biggest sports upsets of the fortnight? Or what about the main highlights of particular soccer matches?

Whenever such segmented content is produced and broadcast, a particular type of audience is kept in mind. Take for example, the highlights of particular soccer matches – the audience for such a program doesn’t have time to sit through the entire matches. But they don’t want to miss out on the great stuff happening on the field, whatever may be the reason. So they would like to have a quick run through. Here is an audience that is interested in sports but does not have time to see the matches.

Segmentation in content marketing can bring focusing to your writing and even conversion rate. Highly focused groups can be converted easily compared to those who just have a generic interest in your subject.

How to play the game of content marketing as a small business with big business

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When it comes to content marketing bigger businesses with deep pockets obviously have an advantage over smaller businesses that cannot spend lots of money on creating high-quality content. Since most of my clients are one-person businesses and small businesses, I can totally relate to it. Most of them have budgetary constraints and they often have to adjust my rates accordingly (without stretching my own resources, of course).

This Huffington Post article quotes Forbes.com that 40% of brands use content marketing channels such as blogs these days. In 2013 the biggest beverage company Coca-Cola launched its content marketing strategy with a big fanfare and it became a case study for many big and small content marketing companies. The above-linked article throws some light on the ways you can score over big businesses. How can you compete with them and sometimes how can you even beat them?

You cannot beat big businesses with quantity. At the most you can publish 2-3 blog posts per day whereas a big company like Salesforce can publish 10-15 high-quality blog posts every day (they can even publish more if they want to). Then, it is not just about publishing blog posts and articles. You also need to market your content, and in fact this can be the biggest challenge faced by a small business. Bigger businesses have many channels at their disposal because they can spend their money on quality content as well as marketing channels. A small business can spend some money on getting quality content, but when it comes to marketing that content, not many options at lower rates are available. Nonetheless, some options ARE available.

Anyway, here are a few things you can do to remain in the game and sometimes even beat the bigger players:

Create authoritative content.
Focus on building your personal brand
Establish a one-one rapport with your audience that a bigger business cannot manage
Create engaging content
Be innovative and give your own personal quest to existing content from big business
Establish a vibrant presence on social media and social networking channels
Study your audience carefully and create content accordingly
Show more agility in tweaking your content according to audience-demand
Write like a person rather than a company representative
Respond to Twitter and Facebook queries as soon as possible
Promote others to enjoy reciprocity

Using content marketing to woo on-the-go modern moms

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Everybody and his or her mom has a mobile phone these days. According to this Business 2 Community blog post if you are not reaching out to young and old moms who are very busy and are constantly using their mobile phones to manage their days’ affairs, you are missing a big demographic and I totally agree.

If you talk about just the US market, according to the figures mentioned in the blog post, moms have a share of $ 2.4 trillion market and women as a whole influence more than 80% of US spending (source from Fast Company).

How should you streamline your content marketing to target busy moms who are constantly on their phones? First of all, create content that is mobile-friendly. According to the statistics mentioned in the above link, an average mom spends 6.1 hours on her smart phone and many use shopping apps. It means not only your website should be able to scale according to the mobile devices, even your content must be created in such a manner that it can be easily accessed and understood using mobile phones.

Most of the moms are on social websites – women being more social compared to men – and this is a place where you can reach them by specifically creating content for social networking websites. In order to promote your content on social networking websites from the perspective of targeting moms using mobile phones you will obviously have to spend some time interacting with people on these websites.

What sort of content would moms find useful? While we shouldn’t stereotype people into various brackets, moms are normally interested in recipes that might be healthy for themselves and their families. They may also like to talk about clothes and various shopping opportunities available. Some of the moms also like talking about the behavior of their kids. Career-oriented moms would like to know how to raise kids while doing a full-time or a part time job. Then you can also target single moms because they may have totally different issues compared to married moms.

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