INBOUND ACCELERATOR

Successful content or inbound marketing requires working from an established strategy to create comprehensive campaigns that touch on all content distribution channels to reach the most potential sales prospects and engage them in ways that generate qualified leads and closed deals.

There was a time when every conversation around search engine optimization focused on one specific topic: keywords. How to choose keywords (such as selecting keywords that have a high search rating, but are ones that allow you to be competitive). Where to place keywords in the structure of your website (also called on-page SEO). How to work keywords into your content.

Is your content marketing coming up short? Doesn’t quite have the energy and strength you’d like to see (or that you remember from a few years ago, when you were more diligent)?

When Walker Sands talked to 300 marketers and company leaders earlier this year about the role of content marketing, they found some interesting results.

Not surprisingly, content is nearly universally accepted as a part of B2B marketing: 98 percent of respondents say its performance justifies its cost.

What if you could move a prospect from “lead” to “customer” more quickly, shortening the sales cycle and improving your marketing efficiency? You can, by nurturing leads with an automated series of offers and emails that are targeted and relevant.

Market2Lead found that nurtured leads generally have a 23 percent shorter sales cycle. Lead nurturing combined with closed loop marketing also provides vital information back to your team that pinpoints actions leads take when they are nearing a decision. This means you don’t send leads on to the sales team until they are qualified, improving your sales closing rate as well.

According to a survey by Zazzle Media, marketers are finally becoming almost completely comfortable with content marketing and all that it entails.

Nearly 9 in 10 surveyed in 2019 say they feel their content marketing strategy is linked to all other parts of their business, compared to fewer than half of respondents just a year ago. The proportion of marketers who say they know the best practices for implementing content marketing has also jumped in the last year.

Every industry has individual nuances in marketing tactics, techniques and needs. And while nearly every B2B market is also filled with industry-specific knowledge and vocabulary that marketers must understand in order to create credible content, when it comes to businesses in the life sciences sphere, the need for expertise and immersion in the field is even greater.

Life sciences, as a field, encompasses a wide range of businesses, most of which support the infrastructure that enables the healthcare system, from medical device manufacturers, to pharmaceutical companies, DNA research, and the contract research organizations that take on drug discovery, pre-clinical and clinical trial research for pharmaceutical and biotech companies.

One of the most compelling tactics marketers can use when creating content is to provide audiences with useful information they can’t find anywhere else. That information is typically in the form of research — either from surveys, owned data, or by analyzing data from other sources.

Healthcare marketing has traditionally been dominated by two approaches: awareness campaigns on billboards, print media and broadcast; and general educational material, first as magazines, and now in electronic newsletters, blogs and websites. All of it is focused on a broad audience.

Between the growth of hands-free use of mobile devices and the explosion home “digital assistants” like the Amazon Echo, voice searches are rapidly becoming the norm rather than the exception.

But these types of searches require web pros and marketers to take a new approach to optimizing their pages, though some of the tips included in this infographic from Headway Capital apply equally to all types of search, including search engines’ preference for pages with fast loading time and searchers’ preference for results that provide easy-to-read information.