Content Marketing In Practice Captivate. Convert And Cultivates

Content Marketing that Breaks Through the Barrage of Information

Content marketing is a difference maker. It can help your business stand out from the crowd, generate leads, and nurture customers. That may sound like a tall order. But it's doable.

In today's world, you're saturated with information. There's direct mail, email, web content, Tweets and other social media. All compete for your attention. It's relentless.

Fortunately, useful marketing can help you combat this onslaught. But what exactly is useful marketing? More importantly, how does a marketer write B2B content that captivates prospects, converts customers, and cultivates customers?

Useful marketing meets current and future customer information needs by publishing content on multiple levels that benefits prospects and customers. It builds trust and helps build relationships.

With that in mind, B2B marketing communications must address three conditions.

· Content must be needs-focused and address a targeted audience.

· Communications must be relevant.

· Messaging must be presented in the prospects' and customers' preferred format and platform.

Content that captivates prospects

To break through the mass of information, you must publish B2B content that's compelling. Old media marketing methods like broadcast mass media are out. Personalized marketing is in. You can personalize marketing content with needs-focused messaging that speaks to a targeted audience. This one's a no-brainier. Nothing works better than content focused on a prospect's needs, wants and desires. This re frames selling into problem solving, according to Wordsworth and Holland. It also entails addressing prospects rationally and emotionally. To further personalize content, you must segment your audience. Jay Baer points out in Utility, that meaningful content helps build trust, which keeps customers coming back.

Content that converts customers

Your goal is to convert prospects into leads and leads into customers. Relevant B2B content helps you do that. Relevant content is informative and timely. You accomplish that by narrowing your scope and digging deeper into solving your Leda's pain points. You don't know when your prospect will need your products or services. But providing content that offers a relevant solution in a timely manner will resonate with a prospect. A powerful way to do that is to frame your solution as a story. As Joe Pulizzi said, "A quality story that is told to the right person at the right time will always cut through the clutter." 

Content that cultivates customers

You can cultivate customers and help them move along the buying cycle with content. That includes lead generation, conversion and nurturing customers. To do all of these effectively, you should develop content that considers the way in which your customers consume content. And it must be available where your customers gather. Where do they hang out: on your website, on YouTube, Twitter, or your company blog? Don't forget mobile. A 2011 study commissioned by Google revealed that mobile phone use exceeded PC use. Take the time to uncover how your customers consume their content. Some like print, some like video and others prefer podcast.

Making a difference with B2B content marketing

A properly planned and executed content marketing strategy can get you in front of the competition. Today's new methods put you in control. You can control your message. You can control the type of content you publish. And you can control your content distribution.

And just as important, useful B2B content benefits your prospects and customers. Content that's transparent and engaging builds trust and long-term relationships. You'll establish your business as a "go-to" resource and gain competitive advantage. You'll be "Useful".

Content Marketing has changed the future of marketing.

Your Marketing Results

You are focused on your niche

Your marketing results is to stay focused on your niche by narrowing your focus to market only one service at a time. You may have multiple modalities you are offering, but you can't effectively market them all. The more you are clear of what your focus is, the more effective your efforts will be.

When you have to decide about what to do with your marketing, decide first what niche you are offering. If you are a nursing staffing agency, you might decide whether to market your company with Hospitals, nursing homes, or ICU vs. Med surge. Each one of those might be a good niche to pick, depending on what you are offering.

Honing in your efforts. Example, "This week I will work on getting more clients for med surge in hospitals within a five mile radius" As soon as you make that decision, you will have a strong focus to reference and make decisions. The path will reveal itself once you focus on your marketing tasks.

Stay focused on the moment:

At this moment what do you need? What is the one thing that you need to accomplish today? What is so important that needs to be addressed quickly? Answering questions like this will help you determine what your main objective should be for your marketing moment.

Example: Get a new client by next month or two new ongoing clients by the end of the year or send out a new marketing mailer to potential clients.

Make sure you include a deadline for your marketing moments. If you want a new client by the end of the month, it is unlikely it will happen by attending networking events or increasing your social media activity. You will need to focus your marketing moment on developing and enhancing relationships.

Narrow down your tasks to do:

Having a huge list of tasks can get difficult and overwhelming to do. This is especially true if those tasks are vague and general. Consider what your niche is and what you need to accomplish immediately. What activity can you do today that will most likely take you in a direction to give you results? Get very specific when doing this task.

Example: Contact three new potential clients this week and ask them if you can bring donuts in the morning for coffee.

Focus on only listing activities for that week only. Revisit the list next week or revise or add to it. Activities that are not producing results may need to be modified and or enhanced. Each week decide on what is working and what is not working. Don't keep looking at ideas or tasks you aren't currently working on: that is a sure road to overwhelm.

Marketing results are based on focusing on tasks that can and will produce results. All you need is a simple, targeted plan. Follow these ideas above and you'll soon find that your marketing efforts are producing results with less effort.

It is very easy to get completely overwhelmed when trying to market your staffing business. You have marketing plans, tasks and all the same time learning new skills.

Do You Keep Score In Your Company

Do you keep score in your company? Do you know the score on a daily basis or do you have to wait until the end of the month for the books to close on the previous month? What does it cost you to have to wait to know what the score is?

And what about your people? Do they know what the score is? Do they know which number is most critical and where that number stands today? Or are they standing in center field with no scoreboard (often called a dashboard in business) to look at, and no effective way to ask for that information?

If you were to put up a scoreboard in your office, store or factory, what's the one key number that would have to be on it? This may change over time, but for this quarter or this year, what is your critical number? Is it inventory turns per year, or profit per transaction, or transactions per hour or what?

Back to our baseball field, they don't just track the score, do they? They also display historical data (how many runs were scored each inning of the game we're playing now), the number of hits and errors for each team, and current status (balls and strikes for the current batter, the number of outs, and which bases are occupied). Some scoreboards also give you the name of the pitcher and batter, and perhaps who's next up to bat. The center field scoreboard also displays many other bits of information, like the status of other games being played the same day.

What's analogous in your business? Besides that one critical number, what else might be useful for people to have within their line of sight?

There's one other type of dashboard that successful companies are using, as a management tool. This dashboard (scoreboard) shows a row for each of the company quarterly priorities (rocks) with the name of the priority and the name of the accountable person. Each column has a date, and each quarter with therefore have 13 columns for the 13 weeks.

Each week, the person accountable for that priority (rock holder) designates a color for that priority. If the priority is numerical and we're on track, that's green. If we missed but are close, that's yellow. If we're red, that means we're in the unacceptable range. 

For a milestone based priority, if we've met the milestones for that week, that's green. If we've fallen a bit behind but think we can catch up without a major change or reallocation of resources, that's yellow. If something major needs to change in order to get back on track, that's red. 

If the priority isn't so easy to define, we should talk more about how to set good quarterly priorities, but in any case, the rock holder can simply give a color based on their own prediction about where that priority will end up at the end of the quarter. There's no incentive for someone to give an overly rosy picture, because if they're showed green for 12 weeks and then turned up red.

It's Time To Move Forward

The hardest things to do is to accept the fact that something that you have worked so hard at has now come to an end. To many people it comes as a shock, to others, they could actually see it coming. I am sure that for USC coach Lane Kiffin who was terminated Sunday by USC athletic director, Pat Haden, it was something that he could probably see coming after the 7th loss out of 11 games. 

He should know, as well as you, that regardless of the turn tables that brought you to this point, reality has to sit in as you come to the conclusion that you have just been terminated from your job. Now what? Where do you go from here? How did this happen? Who is to blame? So many questions without knowing all the answers... but guess what... it's not the end of the world! As devastating as this situation may seem, you have the inner strength to move on and to rise above this circumstance and make the decision to move past this obstacle. 

Having the right mind set in times of opposition is very important and will help you to move pass unwelcome circumstances. If you have just been terminated from your job or laid off unexpectedly, the following mental exercises will release you from the mental stress that will try to hinder you from taking the next step of moving on to bigger and better things.

Exercise #1: Don't Blame Yourself

Whether you recognize that there are things that you did to contribute to your termination or whether your employer just decided that you were not the right person for the job, don't spend another second beating yourself up about it. What is done is done! I advise you to look at the circumstances surrounding your

situation and take note of all the mistakes that you may have made to contribute to your termination and then turn those same mistakes into an opportunity for self-improvement to help you to become a better employee for your next employer.

Exercise #2: Don't Blame the Employer

The first thing that comes to mind for many of us when faced with a termination or lay off is to blame the company for maybe being too strict on their policies, or not being compassionate enough towards personal issues; maybe they didn't appreciate you like they should have or maybe they placed too many responsibilities on you without providing the proper support... all of the above plus more. It is sometimes hard to look at things in the eyes of the employer. Blaming your past employer will only set you up for having an unstinting attitude towards your new employer. This is not fair! Let go of the past and appreciate all the skills that you were allowed to take away from your former employer that can be used to benefit your new employer.

Exercise #3: Be Determined!

Now is the time to make the decision to place one foot in front of the other and move forward. Without blaming yourself or your former employer, you need to prepare to put your efforts into action for your next employment opportunity. Update your resume and create cover letters that speak on your strength as a competitive candidate for the positions that you are applying for.