Content marketing

Strategic content marketing calls for interesting topics and effective arguments tailored to the target groups, along with a well-defined audience.

1. Knowledge and experience from your team

When looking for information about the people responsible for purchasing decisions among your customers, you often need look no further than the knowledge and experienced gathered from previous customer relationships. Who are these people? What challenges do they face? How does your product help them overcome these? Where do customers and other interested parties find information? What interests, drives and motivates them in their professional and personal lives?

2. Systematic analysis along the customer journey

A systematic analysis of your customers’ behaviour and challenges along the entire customer journey provides the input needed to identify and prioritise topics and channels. It is here that we find the various opportunities and benefits that your product offers to customers, whether they are engineers, purchasers, users, controllers or managers.

3. Detailed buyer personas

A detailed profile of the people involved, also known as a buyer persona, forms an important basis for creating successful content. The more you know about the buyer you wish to reach out to, the more effective your texts, images and video material will be. These detailed personas are based on empirical knowledge, and are made more precise through sociodemographic or neurological categories like Sinus-Milieus or LimbicMap.

4. Content strategy and storyline

The content strategy sets the goals, storyline and ways of handling content for all communication measures. A consistent storyline is vital to a successful content strategy. It is also important to prioritise topics rather than channels, and to stop thinking in terms of online and offline channels as if they were separate. This is a much more efficient way of working that can lead to major savings. Prioritising topics means creating a briefing for a topic regardless of the format in which the content is presented.

1. If your target is searching for a specific solution for their challenge and wants to learn something, they need effective content in a variety of formats. These include blog posts, landing pages, white papers, brochures or webinars, along with user stories for websites and specialist media. This content aims to maintain the target’s interest and ensure that they come to you again the next time they need information. It offers excellent potential for targeted SEO.
2. People who like to stay up to date want information about news and trends, presented in a concise and easy-to-find way.  News, infographics, newsletters, social media posts and press releases, when cleverly linked to an attractive offer, are a good way of generating potential leads.
3. Those who just want a quick overview of everything enjoy having fast access to information. Explainer videos are a good way of conveying technical information in an entertaining way. Cleverly presenting facts, figures and data keeps the user’s attention. Dialogue-based comments are good for generating reach on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram and other platforms.
4. If you want to communicate your company’s identity and values or build trust, then you must create space in your content strategy for background stories, interviews and reports. These create transparency and generate sympathy and empathy. They let you demonstrate that you are more than just the sum of your products and services. They give the reader confirmation and allow them to identify with you.

The choice of channels depends on the target industries and regional focus. To find the right channels, start by taking a look at which ones you use already, together with your internal resources like a legally compliant database (GDPR). You should then expand this by analysing the channels that your customers and competitors use.

Our experience in B2B marketing for technical products and services shows that the following points are essential for a successful strategy:

• Turn your website into a content hub. It is the heart of your digital communication and must interact with all other activities.
• Specialist media still play a major role in many industrial sectors. Most publishing houses also offer online portals. Collaborating with these media outlets for advertising and editorial purposes can help to increase your reputation and brand awareness.
• You should also use the active contact with your customers and other interested parties, providing them with information through targeted email marketing.
• LinkedInhas become the leading business-focused social media platform in the international B2B sector. In the target industries that we observe, this is by far the most used channel, followed by YouTube and Facebook. Support your team with a clear guideline and effective tools for dialogue-based communication in social media.
•  hat im internationalen B2B-Geschäft eine Führungsrolle übernommen. In den von uns betrachteten Zielbranchen ist dies gefolgt von YouTube und Facebook der mit Abstand am häufigsten genutzte Kanal. Untersützen Sie Ihr Team durch eine klare Guideline und konnkrete Hilfestellungen zur dialogorientierten Kommunikation in Social Media.

Content marketing requires significant resources, a wide range of skills and solid management. The storyline described in the content strategy provides the guiding principle for all measures. The core of every good content marketing strategy is the editorial plan. This provides specific information about the planned content, channels, frequency and responsibilities, with goals and purposes defined for every item. The timing and approval process are defined, while targets and review processes are planned for all channels.

Long-term planning and agile project management can help prevent the kind of last-minute stress that many content producers suffer.

We can help if you need support:

• We can offer a content audit to give you an overview of the current state of your content.
• We can develop your content strategy together with your sales and marketing teams.
• In the execution stage, we can provide support for producing text and film material. We make sure that you publish relevant content that is informative, useful and entertaining. In short, content that has the desired effect on your customers.