We were just reading through the results of the CMO Survey from Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business. Oddly enough, companies are pretty optimistic about their own sales for the next 12 months, while still being not as optimistic for the economy overall, and plan to increase their marketing budgets (and focus strongly on content marketing) in anticipation.
It’s worth mentioning that technology marketers expect sales from current customers to rise, and to nurture that sale, they’re putting a lot of focus on making the customer/company relationship a top priority. The three marketing channels that they plan to increase spending on specifically are digital marketing, brand building, and new product introductions. So let’s spend a few minutes talking about how content can be used in each of these different marketing goals.
Digital Marketing
Digital marketing is a pretty broad term and covers a wide range of marketing activities, but a few things that are pretty typical in an overall digital marketing strategy are:
- Blogging
- Social media outreach
- Email marketing (Sales emails, weekly newsletters)
- PPC Ads (Google AdWords)
- Landing pages
.
Brand Building
Building a brand is more focused than an overall digital marketing strategy. It relies strongly on content to build a company or person’s expertise in a certain field or industry. A few poignant examples are:
- Blogging
- Infographics
- White papers
- Community building
- Guest blogging
- Social media
- E-books
- Podcasts
.
New Product Introductions
With new product introductions, the goal is to get your product information out to as many people in your target market as possible. The end goal should be to get potential customers to complete a conversion, which usually entails them visiting your website. So a precursor to that would be sending out press releases to industry publications and blogs to drive website traffic to optimized landing pages on your website that have detailed video tutorials and the benefits of your product, along with a contact form.
Reaching out to current customers with a new product or service can be best done by a smart email campaign – especially if you’re appealing to the B2B crowd who will need a period of education on your new product or service.
A few of the more popular content marketing activities for product introductions are:
- Press releases
- Email drip campaign
- Landing pages
- Video tutorials
- Strategic website content
The point to all of this is that whatever your marketing goals are, content will always play a heavy role in them. If you aren’t sure of how to play up your company’s content in a way that will add to the bottom line and tie in to all of your other marketing activities, shoot us an email and let us help you figure out how to work a strong content strategy into your marketing.