Customers overwhelmingly rely on a company’s content for purchasing decisions. One survey found that most people prefer content over social media, reviews or contact with a sales rep.

So, how can you ensure your content marketing makes the right impact? 

Dig into the following information to discover the benefit of promoting engagement over pushing sales in your written content. Plus, learn how to combine the two strategies successfully.

Key takeaways:

• Promoting customer engagement is a better long-term content marketing strategy but requires patience and consistency.
• Pushing sales can be good for quick wins but has a lower return on investment.
• Companies often need good data and an outside perspective to create content marketing strategies that strike the right balance of encouraging engagement and asking directly for sales.

1. Realize that good content marketing is like diet and exercising

Staying healthy as a business is similar to taking care of physical health. Most of us recognize that getting healthy (whether losing weight, gaining muscle or something else) requires patience and long-term commitment for lasting success.

Your content marketing is similar. Pushing sales is good for short wins that are rarely sustainable on their own (like a crash diet).

Pushing can be effective when you need a rapid boost or want quick data. However, engagement through “pull marketing” is the way to go if you want enduring success.

You must provide consistent long-form content that educates, informs and entertains your target audience to draw them in and convert them to loyal followers. At the same time, you need intelligent SEO strategies that keep you visible on search engines.

In other words, good content marketing that promotes engagement is a “healthy lifestyle” for your business. Your business needs a steady program of valuable content to attract high-value customers that engage with your brand.

Dig deeper: The art of natural funneling: How to lead your readers without forced CTAs

2. Understand what consumer engagement looks like

Customers have more influence in the modern market. As a result, you have to establish a mutually beneficial relationship with inbound marketing. 

Compelling content that provides real value through actionable information builds trust and loyalty. Real engagement is more than a vote with a customer’s dollars. A client becomes a champion of your brand and increases their customer lifetime value.

Boosting engagement is more valuable than simply getting a brief uptick in sales. When your company receives a notable sales spike, don’t just congratulate yourself for a job well done.

Take time to figure out what worked, why and how to maintain that response with continuous content highlighting your brand’s value to your audience. Determine engagement by tracking how your audience interacts with you through comments, likes, clicks and subscriptions.

Discover how to match your brand strategy with your customer goals. Use content marketing and SEO practices to position yourself as an expert and thought leader that helps clients succeed. 

3. Recognize when you’re pushing sales too much

As a marketing professional, it’s surprising how often experienced business people think they’re providing value in content when they’re really still pushing sales. Anyone can get so deep in the weeds of their own industry that they lose sight of building customer relationships. 

Avoid having “sales breath” in your content by only promoting products. Desperation and self-interest push good leads away. Instead, sincerely look to help people, whether they use your service or not.

Creating the right blend of engagement and pushing sales is difficult and often requires an outside perspective to see where you’re missing the boat. You can do this through surveys or with the help of an experienced consultant or agency.

4. Discover how to push sales correctly

The need to push sales at the right time will never die. Your business requires methods to reach customers who know they need your solution and are ready to buy.

The trick to not wasting your advertising budget on low-return campaigns is constant measurement and good tactics, just like with your engagement strategy. Monitor and figure out who comes in your door (physically or virtually) in response to those campaigns. 

Now, study your ideal customers to find out what they like. Then provide excellent written content that they can respond to and keeps them coming back for more.

5. Use proven strategies for building engagement

Time-tested content marketing strategies continue to get results. Your biggest needs are quality and consistency. What makes that difficult is staying in tune with what your audience wants.

As you create content, ask yourself and your team:

• Do these pieces have an honest and relevant tone?
• Does the subject matter to our intended readers?
• Are we bringing a unique perspective?
• Are we supporting our information with good data?
• Are we giving readers something specific they can use?

To get engagement, always wrap up your content with a clear call to action that tells your readers how to apply what they’ve learned or maximize results with your help. As you build credibility and provide value, clients will take you up on that offer more and more.

Keep working on your content marketing

Devising the right blend of engagement and pushing sales takes time and smart strategizing, just like improving your physical health. 

Create a solid marketing plan that addresses customer concerns and continually refine your methods to create written content that leads to loyal customers.

The post 5 tips for balancing ‘push’ and ‘pull’ in content marketing appeared first on MarTech.

Since it’s not as fresh as some peers, marketers may wonder whether LinkedIn can still bring a worthwhile ROI. However, like other marketing tools, what you get from the site greatly depends on what you put into it.

Consider the following questions to determine whether you’re taking full advantage of how LinkedIn content can boost your B2B marketing.

Key takeaways:

• Though LinkedIn is business-focused, your content on the medium needs to have personality and help you build a community.
• LinkedIn is ideal for establishing credibility and linking to your content and website.
• Remember to appeal visually with scroll-stopping images and attention-grabbing videos.
• You can also use LinkedIn to test and refine your ideas and gain audience feedback.

Dig deeper: SEO guide to optimizing your LinkedIn profile for more connections, better leads

Are you focusing on community?

Though the site is for professionals, your LinkedIn page shouldn’t be all business. Like your other marketing efforts, infuse your personal and company pages with personality. 

No one wants to partner with a faceless, bland company. As one marketing expert said, you should create “high-five content.” 

Ask yourself before you post a comment, article or video: Will this put a smile on someone’s face or get an emphatic head nod? 

Concern for community and social responsibility is at the forefront of purchasing, partnering and investing decisions. Don’t be afraid to warm hearts or show where you stand on social issues. 

Above all, people are looking to solve problems. Discuss them in a way that shows you empathize with your core audience’s challenges. 

Even a simple meme or GIF can communicate, “Hey, I know what you’re going through.” When your target audience starts thinking about who can help them solve that problem, you’ll be one of the first names that come to mind.

Is your content consistent and visual?

You’re not the only one out there trying to capture attention on LinkedIn. Our own research on how often you should post shows that consistent effort is necessary to attract eyes and ears.

Use scroll-stopping visuals that make readers pause an extra second on your posts. A picture is still worth a thousand words, so embrace visualizations and infographics. 

You can also start to build a connection with ideal prospects by making your company come to life with images and videos of your team. Show what they do for similar clients in your target market. 

Testimonials and brief case studies are other power tools. These endorsements make your company feel like a teammate that others want in their corner, too.

Most importantly, use tech tools to maintain a consistent schedule for posting. Sporadic messaging does little to establish your professionalism, while regular posts position you as an authority and an active organization that gets things done.

Are you targeting the right audience?

Other social media platforms may have a more extensive reach overall, but LinkedIn is uniquely positioned to help you tailor your message to better-qualified leads. 

Master using the Campaign Manager to understand how your content performs with different groups. You may learn that you’re focusing on the wrong audience or lack a genuine focus on the right groups.

As you study your results, determine why you’re getting your current level of engagement and how to concentrate on high-quality leads.

Are you establishing credibility with thought leadership?

Content marketing has better long-term results than straight advertising because it builds credibility. As companies look for more suitable ways of solving challenges, valuable content makes you a name they trust and a thought leader.

Those likes and comments on LinkedIn offer an easy way to show that other people approve of you. Such responses are public social proof that’s harder to demonstrate on your own website. 

Design information that teaches your prospects and motivates engagement, whether a like, comment or click. Of course, you want to get people to your site, so always link back to the content on your web pages to boost your SEO.

You become even more trustworthy when your team members post valuable articles and make insightful comments. Your ideal prospects will see you as an organization of skilled professionals that they can trust.

Are you experimenting with and improving your content?

Remember, your goal shouldn’t be to go viral. You should laser-focus on your niche to build an engaged fanbase.

When you experiment, expect to make a few missteps. Social media provides the optimal method for testing smaller posts and ideas to finding out what hits.

The key point is to be active on the platform. Set specific goals, create an actionable plan, implement your ideas, measure the ROI, refine your strategy and repeat.

Are you taking steps to use Linkedin as a catalyst for your B2B marketing?

LinkedIn shouldn’t be the only aspect of your B2B marketing, but you shouldn’t neglect it either. As you devise or refine your LinkedIn marketing strategy, determine how you can incorporate these suggestions into your plan of attack.

The post 6 tips for optimizing LinkedIn content for B2B marketing appeared first on MarTech.

Long-form content, in particular, can turn interest into action. Do it well, and you can generate leads and increase brand awareness. The catch is that long-form content must be worth it to be effective. 

This article will discuss how to use long-form content effectively and where to include it in your content marketing plan to develop stronger B2B relationships.

Key takeaways:

• You can find long-form content in different lengths, formats and contexts.
• The benefits of using long-form content include SEO value, building trust in business relationships and educating the reader.
• You need a strategy to create and implement long-form B2B content effectively.

Defining long-form B2B content

What is long-form content marketing? Marketers tend to throw this term around generously. You can find definitions with varying word counts, but “long” generally refers to written content between 1,200 and 7,500 words. It can be as casual as a how-to guide or company brochure or as in-depth as a case study or industry report.

With substantial content, how and where you use it is as important as the content itself. To reap the benefits, you need to map your content to meet the buyer at each touchpoint along their journey.

Benefits of using long-form content in B2B marketing

What do you get from using long-form content in your marketing strategy? The benefits are vast and calculable.

Gain higher search rankings

If you know anything about content creation, you know the power of search engine optimization. Well-crafted blog content pieces have significant SEO value for several reasons:

• It increases click-through rates and time on your page.
• Google’s algorithms prefer websites rich with content.
• It increases your chances of being a featured snippet from a Google search.
• It betters your opportunity to earn quality backlinks.
• Long-form content allows you to showcase your thought leadership.

Boosting your search rankings is one of the best ways to increase organic traffic and ROI. Who doesn’t want to drive more traffic to their business?

Assert your authority on the topic

Credibility is a brand owner’s dream. Long-form content allows you to detail what you have to offer the industry and how it differs from the competitors. 

This is why choosing content topics carefully is critical to successful content marketing. It is also your opportunity to show client’s how you can help them grow their business.

What do you do best? How can you translate that into well-organized and researched content? Answer these questions, and you will have the foundation for long-form B2B content designed to grow your brand.

Refurbish your hard work into other marketable content

Long-form content that goes into great depth about a subject can morph into other valuable marketing assets. Pull stats to create infographics or quizzes for social media content. You can turn your longest posts into ebooks or courses with minor alterations. 

Best practices for long-form B2B content

You now know the “what” and “why” of long-form content. Next, let’s go over the “how.” 

Consider how you can execute quality content targeting your B2B audience and provide your marketing team with content they can store for future use.

Evaluate your competitors’ content

What are your competitors doing? How can you improve upon it? These are the first questions to ask before committing to a long-form content strategy.

A Google search can show what other businesses say on a topic. Use that information to cultivate a voice for your brand by creating something entirely new or approaching the same topic from a unique perspective. 

Think about every opportunity to show your thought leadership with what you say and how that will help cultivate long-term relationships with new or existing clients.

Start with a plan

How well do you know your target market? With customer data platforms, marketers control data collection and segmentation, creating a database of content marketing gold. 

Once you know who your readers are, you know what they want or need to know. Then you can generate a content creation plan to keep them satiated.

Use formatting techniques to keep the reader interested

What you say and how you say it are equally important. You have the expertise to speak with authority. Now you need the format to keep the buyer interested and help move them to the next stage in your sales pipeline. Consider these techniques as you put together long-form content:

• Create smaller sections, making it easier to skim the content.
• Organize with detailed headings and subheadings.
• Include a content section with hyperlinks to headings for extra-long pieces.
• Use visual aids, such as infographics and charts, to deliver your message in more ways than one.

Keep the content informative, fluff-free and flowing easily into each new heading or subheading.

Implementing long-form content into the sales funnel

Remember, just because long-form content works doesn’t mean every piece you create must be over 1,200 words. Instead, a balanced and effective B2B marketing strategy uses an omnichannel and multi-technique lead generation approach.

For example, you can impress clients with a how-to guide during the early stages of interactions. Use a case study or industry report to capture their imagination when demonstrating your field expertise. 

Then, hit them with an interactive piece near the final decision stage, such as a tutorial. Long-form content can improve any marketing and sales funnel.

Long-form content creates long-term success

Clarity and brevity are the hallmarks of B2B marketing. Apply that to long-form content to create pieces with a wealth of reusable information. Remember, longer content is only helpful when the information is valuable. 

By keeping your content informative and diving deep into how a partnership will benefit you both, you can use long-form content to develop relationships with existing and new business clients.

The post A B2B marketer’s guide to long-form content appeared first on MarTech.