Getting your B2B content marketing strategy right: Karthik Nagendra

Authored by Karthik Nagendra, Founder & CEO, Thought Starters.

In the past few years content marketing has gained a lot of popularity. Almost 93% of B2Bs use content marketing to promote their product and services. They spend about 31% of their marketing budget for content creation and marketing. Almost 51% of these companies produce content daily.

Although lots of effort and money in spent in content marketing, as per CMI only 9% of marketers find it really effective. The most reason for content marketing failure is lack of strategy. In the highly competitive B2B domain 91% of marketers name a documented strategy as essential ingredient for success.  Lack of interesting content, wrong channel for promotion and absence of measuring metrics also affect the results of the content marketing.

Route to recovery

The route to recovery from content marketing failures for the companies is to include research as an integral part of their marketing mechanism. It will help to revive the content marketing efforts by setting the focus on the right areas. Here is a list of ways in which research can help you in getting better results.

Identify the right target audience and content: Most marketers try to push their content without looking into its relevance. Reports say 55% of people receiving content from brands do not find it interesting or relevant and avoid viewing them. Therefore, it is imperative to have a knowledge who are your target audience, what are their pain points and their expectations. To achieve this, a detailed market research should be carried out before the content creation. With the customer base narrowed down and their choices known marketers can create as per the customer’s interest rather than their own interest. This would help to give the right content to the right people and develop result-oriented marketing strategy.

Gaining insights into the trends: Research is the key to developing good content and strategy. With effective research marketers will be able to identify the frequently used keywords to search for the products or services on offer, where, how and the kind of content their audience consume. It  also enables to gain insights into the tactics used by competitors, trends, best practices in the industry. This helps to make the content more solid from a thought leadership perspective. This puts the marketers in vantage position and enable them to see the kind of impact their content could create and devise appropriate strategy to make their marketing campaign a success.

Customer involvement for better engagement: As per Zazzle Media, 60% of businesses struggle to produce content consistently, and 65% find it a challenge to produce engaging content. When the content is not engaging, the marketing efforts may not yield the expected results. By involving the customer in the research, the sales team would get a chance to engage further with the them. The customers feel valued and trust the brand better. By directly working with the customers, the businesses can have a better understand of their needs and preferences. This would help them to create engaging content that connects with buyers, makes a difference  to the target audience and generates brand loyalty.

Data backed content: Customers of today being well informed attach greater importance to factual data than general opinion. They like to see a date from real customer feedbacks and testimonial, surveys and others through which they can ascertain the suitability of the products and services. Therefore, close to 94% of B2B marketers who are successful always or frequently ensure that their content is fact-based and/or comes from a credible source.

Identify the right channels that give maximum ROI: There are plenty of channels for marketing. A deep research on the target audience’s demographics, interests and online behaviour will help to determine the suitable channel. This would ensure the content reaches the maximum target based giving maximum return on investment.

Thus, research can play a crucial part in the success of content marketing campaigns. However, this is a time consuming and on-going process. Businesses would benefit by engaging specialist content marketing firms for supporting them in the content marketing endeavour. These professional agencies can manage the content marketing efforts end-to-end while the business concentrate on their core activity and thereby reap success consistently.

About the Author

Karthik Nagendra is a serial entrepreneur with 15 years’ experience across strategy, marketing, operations and HR. He has been instrumental in creating many award-winning programs for leading brands like MeritTrac-India's largest Skills Assessment Company, Wipro Technologies and Accenture in his earlier stints. He has worked closely with leading universities, industry bodies, analysts and research firms globally and acted as a catalyst in providing best practices and insights to customers across sectors. He has authored papers & articles on marketing, strategy, gender diversity in international journals & has been a guest speaker at many Ivy league Universities globally. He has been featured among the Top 30 marketing Consultants in India by Consultant Review Magazine & Insight Success business magazine. Karthik holds a bachelor's degree in Computer Science from Bangalore University & an MBA in Marketing & Finance from IMI Belgium. He is currently pursuing his PhD in Marketing Management.