INBOUND ACCELERATOR

For most businesses — especially B2B brands — it is no longer enough for marketing content to sell. Marketing content needs to solve problems for customers.

Successfully placing contributed articles — also called bylined articles or thought leadership — in industry publications isn’t always an easy task. It requires developing article ideas or abstracts that publishers find attractive, pitching to the right publications, and finally, crafting a high-quality piece that meets publication guidelines and earns you a reputation for submitting great work.

Nearly everything you write as a marketer, and most public relations content as well, is intended to inspire the reader to do SOMETHING. Maybe that something is just to visit your website, maybe it is to sign up for a newsletter or download a webinar. Or maybe you want them to click “Buy Now” on your latest product.

Regardless of which action you want the reader to take, the rules for writing copy that converts remain largely the same.

Social media is no longer an optional piece of any small business marketing strategy. It must be there, in some form. But for small businesses with limits on both how much money and how much time is available to commit to social media, the options can seem overwhelming.

Should you focus on creating ads for Facebook and paying a per-click fee for the opportunity to get your business in front of more eyes, or spend more time on creating organic content (posts, links, videos, etc.) to increase engagement with the followers you already have?

The philosophy we subscribe to at JONES, and have been able to bring to fruition for some of our most successful clients, is the idea that everything you do in marketing and public relations is connected. And it should all be pointing, ultimately, toward bringing in leads and closing deals.

Our client West Corporation has successfully done just that with its healthcare communications and patient engagement technology department, working with us to take communications strategies from concepts through research, writing and design, promotion, and inbound lead generation all the way to finalized sales that

Creating high quality marketing content requires a significant investment of time and expertise, especially if you are putting your best people to work creating it (and you should be — here’s why). If you want to get the best return for that investment, don’t just create a single piece of content, use it once, and then move on.

There was once a time when addressing someone we barely knew by their first name was abrupt, at best, and practically scandalous at worst. Yet today, we expect the companies we do business with (or even the ones we’ve just barely “met” online) to greet us by name in emails and on their websites.

Personalization of some type is used by 85 percent of organizations in their marketing content.

B2B marketers have fully embraced the need to use content to reach their target markets — 93 percent are involved in some type of content marketing.

Why? Because content marketing costs 62 percent less per lead than traditional outbound marketing, and it can impact everything from web traffic and thought leadership to customer acquisition and customer loyalty.

Some of the most compelling market content, especially in the B2B marketplace, is built on original research, data, and statistics that provide decision makers with solid information.

While most marketers are familiar with using surveys for market research to develop customer personas and optimizing marketing tactics, fewer have capitalized on the power of data as a basis for their actual marketing content, from reports and blog posts to videos and thought leadership articles. When used this way, surveys can provide the data that sets your marketing materials apart from the competition.

We know that some marketing content just doesn’t last—depending on where you look, the half-life of a tweet is anywhere from just 18 minutes to maybe 2.5 hours. Either way, they aren’t going to be around for long.

But there are ways of extending the life of your tweets and other social media and online content, as the infographic below from Maria Peagler of Social Media Online Classes shows.