Building a content strategy
Most companies and credit unions are posting to their blogs and social media channels. Do you know why?
Because companies with blogs produce 67% more leads per month than companies that don’t, according to Demand Metric. Dollar-for-dollar, content marketing drives three times as many leads as traditional marketing.
The content provided should provide value in terms of educating clients in the areas in which we have expertise. Those areas of expertise also align with your company’s lines of business, which can make for an excellent segue into your offerings over time.
Quality communications following a strong content marketing strategy brings in business.
10 steps to jumpstart your content marketing strategy
Content marketing strategy takes your brand’s strategy and converts it into storytelling that supports the brand. Dig into the business objectives and the plans to support those objectives, then build an ongoing story around them. Here’s how:
Identify your primary and secondary audiences and their pain points.
Align your lines of business to those pain points.
Determine your business purpose for creating content. Broadly, you’re seeking brand awareness, thought leadership and lead generation. Do not just skip straight to lead generation. You’re building a relationship – yes, it can be accomplished digitally – so find the feels around those pain points.
Define your market and provide context with the issue occurring in the market to find how your company can address the issues with authority.
Perform a SWOT on your company and your competitors to leverage strengths and downplay weaknesses, as well as identifying your opportunities and threats.
Based on the pain points, identify the feelings people have around those. Yes, even in B2B, people are people and have a million feelings about their careers. Find the feels.
Establish your corporate voice and be unique.
Determine the volume of content for each stage of your prospect and clients’ purchase cycle. The longer your sales cycle, the more top- and mid-level content necessary.
Establish what your content calendar should look like with regard to the seasonality of your business, optimal frequency for your budget, formats from video to webinars to social media, and distribution channels.
Identify the SEO keywords for which you should be trying to rank based on your business and your competitors (not just business competitors, but others who will likely be trying to rank for the same keywords). NICHE PRO TIP: Longtail keywords that are highly specific to your business may be the way to go to bring in new potential users.
Content marketing begins & ends with your audience
No. 1 in this list is to begin with honing your audience, and No. 10 is search engine optimization. That’s because, while SEO is important, your ultimate goal is to be a useful resource of actionable information for humans with your company’s content marketing. Good search engine optimization is something you earn for delivering high-quality content that captures attention.
A critical piece to No. 1 is finding the feels. Yes, for B2B communications, too. People have a lot of feelings about their work; they may be under a lot of stress or excited about a potential promotion or meeting a certain KPI. By understanding those feelings your audience has about their work, the better your content marketing can connect with them.
Nearly all marketers agree, custom content is a critical element of marketing now and will remain so in the future. Why? Because 70% of people would rather learn about a company through quality content than ads, so it follows that 59% of B2B marketers find their company blogs to be the most valuable channel. Plus, content marketing drives 3X the leads for a fraction of the cost of traditional marketing.
Don’t have the time or the right expertise on your team? You’re not alone! Demand Metric also found that 62% of companies outsource their content marketing. If your company is ready to reach credit unions and community bank decision makers and influencers more effectively, reach out to Sarah at sarah@cookeconsultingsolutions.com to learn how Cooke Consulting Solutions can help.