Technology is foundational to success at almost every level of business. From HR to sales to finance, every team in your business benefits from technology that enables better decision making, better data analysis, better communication with both customers and employees. More organizations are even finding out that existing technology has applications in their business for a different use than what it was designed for.
Using the right technology in your B2B marketing is essential, especially when it comes to content marketing strategy. The Content Marketing Institute defines content marketing as, “a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.” Content marketing serves as a way to connect audiences to brands by allowing businesses to position themselves as a valuable resource and tool to their potential clients.
There is no one size fits all technology that helps to facilitate the modern best practices of content marketing; instead content marketing can be improved by several different tech platforms depending on your goals. Here are some of the best ways to utilize content to help optimize your content marketing strategy.
Why is technology important to your content marketing strategy?
The technology that can improve your content marketing
- Research tools: All marketing requires research and effective content marketing requires a pretty deep dive into audience needs and interests that tech tools can help with. Research helps you define your audience, which drives all your content and even your engagement methods. You need to understand who your audience is and what they value in both a company and a product or service. Some places that businesses turn to for research and data include:
- Google Analytics: Learn where your web traffic comes from and what advertising methods are most effective.
- Marketing automation tools: Marketing automation is a very powerful way to analyze and interact with your audience. It helps you better understand what content and platforms your customers are engaging with and tells you about what resonates with your target market based on things like clicks on ads and opened marketing emails.
- Social media: Social media listening tools help you discover who is talking about your brand on social media, as well as how your competitors are positioning themselves.
- User surveys: User surveys, like those you can create and distribute through SurveyMonkey, can help you identify, gather, and organize data about your audience including things like age, location, job title, industry, salary range, business challenges, and more. This kind of data helps you create the kind of customer personas that then dictate the kind of content you’ll need to generate.
Having these specific details is key to being able to effectively target the right customers with the right information – the ultimate goal of content marketing.
- Content creation: Starting with data about your audience is paramount. Turning the right ideas into the best content to help grow your influence and market share is the power of content marketing. There are several kinds of technology tools that enable brands to create the best, most relevant content.
- Buzzsumo: What’s the best performing content out there? What content is engaging your competitor customers? BuzzSumo can help you find out with a simple content or topic search. You can find out how many social shares a certain article got, as well as see backlinks used in articles. This is useful information to have to help shape your brand’s content calendar and overall strategy.
- Keyword tools: SEO – the optimization that powers content found on internet searches – is key to helping people find your content. It’s important to use the right keywords in your content, such as landing pages, product pages, and blogs, so that more people who are searching for solutions can connect with your brand. Tools like SEMRush help brands identify what the most important keywords for their audience or content is so that creators can make sure they’re appropriately using keywords in their content assets.
- Distribution and promotion technology: Once your B2B content is created, it’s time to distribute it and make sure that it’s in front of your audience.
- Social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, or Instagram: Engaging customers on social media is an important part of sharing content. For most B2B companies, LinkedIn is the best platform to share content, but that’s not always the case and data should always be analyzed to gauge and predict performance.
- Email marketing: Email is a natural place to share blog content, infographics, whitepapers, and ebooks with your potential or existing customer list.
- Paid search ads: Help customers find your content by buying search ad space and directing certain keywords to your business landing pages and products.
- Video platforms like YouTube and Vimeo: Not all content is images or writing – some of the best performing content is video, even for B2B organizations.
- Content analysis: You’ve done all the work of understanding your audience. There’s a technology solution for that too. Most marketing automation tools have built-in optimization features, such as A/B testing that enables to test different headlines and images for the best engagement, as well as real-time performance data, which can show businesses how well their content is performing and allow them to make better, faster decisions about their content strategy.
Creating and implementing a content strategy is both an important and complex process. The ROI that most businesses receive in their content marketing efforts, however, usually make it worthwhile, as well as help to build better customer relationships. Finding the right technology for your content marketing strategy is a crucial part of your overall content success.