I recently attended an eMarketer webinar entitled “Maximizing Your B2B Content Marketing ROI”, presented by eMarketer Analyst Jillian Ryan. I have attend my fair share of webinars and I have to say this one was above average.
One take-away was on subject of “The Changing Digital Ad Landscape” which included the following feedback from marketers who participated in the research:
- Traditional digital streams are oversaturated and too expensive
- Concerns like ad blindness, viewability, and ad blocking make it harder to reach B2B buyers
- Digital ad campaigns are a one-shot strategy
- Content provides a permanent “home”. Unlike an ad, it doesn’t disappear if an action doesn’t occur straight away.
Steve Chadwick, Director, Marketing Communications at Verizon Enterprise Solutions remarked “Content marketing allows for a two-way exchange, and a meaningful, authentic dialogue and conversation with the customer. And that’s really the point – Content marketing is a long-view play, integrating email with a responsive design, meaningful content that engages and informs and technology that integrates it all to create a sustainable ROI for every step of the buying process.
When evaluating content marketing for lead generation, eMarketer found that while Content Marketing was in the top 3 as ‘Most Effective‘, it was also considered the ‘Most Difficult’ tactic to execute. We understand these issues for B2B marketers. At ContentMX we have found that these challenges can be effectively solved with:
- Content Curation: Implement a solution that allows for easy curation of content in one place where marketers or partners can quickly access approved content.
- Original Content Production: Employ an editorial team who can relieve the content creation burden to save you time and resources, increase engagement and drive more leads by creating original content in ‘your voice’.
- Emails and Newsletters that Engage: Re-imagine the Email Newsletter. Use a socially-enabled modern email newsletter platform that is integrated with curated and original content and allows for readers to directly share content and send comments to social media. A gamification component will encourage sharing through contests. Email newsletters can be difficult to produce, but modern newsletters ease that pain by integrating with marketing automation, using relevant content, easily adhering to brand standards and are built with a responsive design.
- Workflow Efficiency: Work with a robust, easy to use platform that automates marketing workflows, where you can easily identify and publish content via email, on your website, blogs and all social media platforms in a simple and interconnected way.
- Owning the Conversation: Host your own social pages to own the conversation around your content and collect the contacts who comment. Create an echo by posting all comments directly to social media and use modern email newsletters to echo the content and conversation driving traffic back to your own pages.
- Proof of ROI: Use real-time analytics embedded in your platform provide the proof you need to show management what you’re doing is getting results.
In the webinar, Steve Chadwick’s comments reinforced our concept by stating the importance of “a two-way exchange, and a meaningful, authentic dialogue with the customer.” To get started, ContentMX offers a free analysis of your content marketing strategy and examination of your current newsletter. We can provide you with a mock-up of our approach that will lead to increased sharing, higher engagement and an improved ROI.
“Maximizing Your B2B Content Marketing ROI” was well worth the time. The takeaways included some great data, such as analysis of lead generation tactics, shifts in what performance metrics are most meaningful (and demanded by management), conversion rates, strategy considerations, customer journeys and more.
Contact us to find out more about ContentMX at www.contentmx.com or email sales@contentmx.com. Click here to listen to the full eMarketer webinar on-demand.