Content marketing is no new shiny thing for B2B. Businesses are relying on multiple contents like websites, landing pages, emails, frequently asked questions, social media content and more mediums. These are made to reach out to a wide base of the audience using desktop computers, laptops, smartphones, and tablets. As the reach is increasing, content and strategies, both are evolving. The stats show that 87% of the B2B marketing professionals rely on content marketing today and its trends to bring in more engagement.
If you are a B2B marketer, keep your marketing plans well informed with this article to tap the potential of “Intelligent content”. There is no sign of the slowdown in using content as per the stats. Effective and well-formed content has always worked for B2B.
Today it has become critically important for content to be innovative and interactive. For Business to Business sales, marketing through text or visuals (i.e. content) forms the spine of generating qualified leads, and enhancement of brand value.
What Is Intelligent Content?
Contents
Intelligent content is the future of content marketing and is paving its way into the B2B marketing strategy. With technology evolving on the artificial intelligence front, how the content is delivered needs to be thought over. The intelligent content can be delivered as rich structurally and must be easy to discover, can be reused and is adaptable.
Practicing intelligent content ensures:
1) Saving time
2) Building Futuristic content
3) Improved audience engagement.
Developing intelligent content requires it to be broken down into fragments and then developing each fragment in an optimized manner. These fragments are them formatted together with a semantic flow. A structured content speaks value about your business and may be time-consuming at inception but can lead to building a future-proof content that can be upgraded easily.
Intelligent content development must be adapted at a small progression pace as it is a big task that saves you multiple iterations of content.
6 Ways Intelligent Content Will Change The Face Of B2B Marketing
Go with the flow and understand the top 6-way intelligent content will change the face of B2B marketing:
1) Long-form Blogs
Developing long-form blogs brings in 9 times more engagement than the regular short-form blogs. The long-form blogs are more researched data that builds trust among the audience. You may find it difficult to always create long-form blogs so as per intelligent content strategy it is advisable to keep upgrading and updating your existing blogs often. It must be a strong part of your blogging strategy to keep updating the old blogs and make them long form.
Short Blogs do not have a long shelf life so you need to make sure that your additions increase the shelf life of the blog so that your initial effort does not go for a toss. These upgrades can make your content long-form, newer, likable by the search engine and may increase the organic traffic up to 402%.
We witness most of the B2B marketers publishing blog posts that are 500 words or even less. So there is an extra space where marketers can attract attention to their business by delivering a content that is long-form, structured and well-researched. Long-form blogs tend to be backlinked and is evergreen. When you take pains to make a long content, it connects to the audience that you have something more to offer apart from the crowd.
It is a single point to connect with every aspect the audience is looking for.
2) Snackable structure is the core of engaging Content
While we advocated the long-form content in the first point, it is to be noted that the structure of the content will become crucial now. An ill-structured long-form blog can kill your efforts to get a connection.
What do we mean when we say the content must be snackable? It needs to be understood that the content we offer to our audience is not just there to read but it must be digested well and must be presented in a pleasing manner. Here is the checklist of a well-structured blog
- Easy to grasp the vital points of the blog and as it is long, the dots must be well connected.
- Put your points across in such a way that the reader does not forget what he read.
- It should be bulleted
- Use of bucket brigades must be optimum
- Keep the sentences and paragraphs short and relevant.
Planning your content structure will help you write a well-structured content in shorter duration. You will not have to stare at the content and try to find out what is missing. Imagine your audience trying to figure of what you are trying to say, it could be a disaster.
When your structure is precise and can easily be understood, the audience would like to read more and more. This is the point when you develop connections with the lead who would qualify to be a potential client.
3) Infographic content
It has been proved time and again that adding infographics increases the engagement by more than 3 times. The massive amount of data is available on the internet now. Frankly speaking, this data is confusing the readers. They want to see a simplistic representation of this data and understand easily what it means to them.
Be the one who does it for them. Your audience must have gone through multiple blogs and would keep glued to yours if you add infographics. A mix of good design, writing, and well-analyzed data is the ideal way to represent figures in visual form. They make your long-form content compelling and attractive.
Did you know the infographics loaded blogs get shared across social media virally? It increases the traffic as well as adds to your search engine ranking. Creating a right infographic goes a long way.
4) Develop case studies
When we talk about B2B buyers, they are a segment of buyers who will buy after an extensive research. Around 78% of the buyers would go for an in-depth case study before they take a call to buy from you. A real-time case study is a simplistic way to make buyers understand your potential. So, it should have engaging content, which is written with good research efforts.
Case study must be well formatted so that it automatically answers the questions of the buyers and builds a trust that you can do the same for them.
1) Design of a case study must address all the problems and solutions. Ensure no gap is left.
2) Add evidence of the product success.
3) Add visual content.
4) Offer alternative solutions or services that you are capable of.
The case study is a great tool to showcase your work. Use headers, bullets, and bolded text to add SEO value to your case studies.
Prompting your audience to leave their email id or contact number in exchange for a piece of content like webinar, e-book, or whitepapers is a huge conversion factor. These email id’s or phone numbers shift the audience from cold zone to warm zone as they have shown interest in your content.
Now it is a matter of brand value, so the content you share with them in lieu of email id must be worth engagement. If it is not, the brand value is compromised, so you are walking a thin line here. It has been proved by the stats that almost 79% of the audience will leave their information in exchange for a webinar.
It can be the first step to a long-term relationship!!
6) Content lifecycle
Remember, your content is not floating around just to spread knowledge. It is there to bring in conversions. Hence, you need to post engaging content all the time. Content that converts potential leads into clients has a 3-5 stage lifecycle, where step by step the audience is brought closer to make the decision of purchase.
B2B buying is a long process so your content needs to be intelligent enough to first educate, build trust and convert the audience. Today only 49% of content marketers are using this strategy to get more conversion. Tread into this new zone that gets you closer to your customers.
Conclusion
As a content marketer, you and your content must always be aligned with your buyer’s journey. Engaging content is the spine of content marketing, and so is true for B2B marketing. Using the above mentioned powerful tactics will ensure the businesses make a decision in your favor. If required, hire good content creators to help you out. The content must be nurtured as the audience has become more intelligent and does not take a decision in haste. Identifying the platform that can turn your content viral also plays an important role but what matters the most is the “CONTENT”.
The audience is in active conversation with each other and the good content can spread like a forest fire. Using the interactive form of content has brought in more traffic making 53% of the content marketers adhere to this form. It helps them stand out of crowd and grab more conversions.
Content is evolving every second and you need to keep pace with it. You, competitors, are building new strategies every day to march ahead of you. We would love to hear your stories of how you made your content effective and intelligent.
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3 comments
good info thanks for sharing
Wow is my first reaction! Finally a piece of thought leadership that challenges the growing convention that marketing education does little to advance the profession of marketing. I am a marketer, hold a BBA in Marketing from the University of Cincinnati and an MA in Media from New York University.
Thanks you for share post.