In a recent survey, we learned that one of the major barriers to B2B content marketing is time, followed closely by knowledge and resources. In an effort to help B2B marketers short on time, we have a few tips to help you work smarter, not harder. One of the best ways to work smarter is to get more mileage out of any and all content pieces you and your team create.
Share. Share Again. Share Again.
We live in a digitally connected world where the next generation of B2B buyers is digitally native. As such, it’s important for all B2B brands to have a digital presence and to have an active social media presence, even if it is only on one or two social networks. However, it can be a hard sell to allocate more time to sharing on social media since direct sales are difficult to link to social media.
Rather than allocate more time to finding and sharing content on social media, share the content you create multiple times. This benefit to this strategy is two-fold: first, you get more content to share on social media and second, you get more eyeballs on your content. By sharing at different times and dates, you can reach various sections of audiences of people.
Tip: Mix it up. Don’t just share an article multiple times with the same text and image. Swap out the text to appeal to different audiences and use fresh images to create interest.
Learn 4 ways to provide value with content.
Promote Your Content
Organic reach on social media is admittedly declining. It’s a fact. If your business page is popular and your followers are regularly engaging with your B2B content marketing pieces, you may still get a fair amount of organic engagement. However, that’s fairly rare. Rather than just letting your content wilt out on the social webs, put a small budget behind it and promote it.
Most social networks, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook, have platforms for promoting existing posts. Don’t simply post and wait. Post, promote and track. Even a smaller budget of $150 – $200 per post can increase the visibility of your B2B content, and therefore your brand.
Tip: Don’t be afraid to promote purely educational content. There are enough avenues for advertising and promotional messages. Allocate a small budget to sponsor your thought leadership content marketing pieces.
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Repackage Your Content
Central to a strong B2B content marketing strategy is quality content. Quality content pieces provide value to your prospects and clients. When you create quality content, you can take a few extra steps to repackage your content into new content pieces.
Start with a blog post that you have published on your B2B website. Now, take it and turn essential elements into a short infographic for sharing on its own on social media. Next, take the blog and combine it with a few other relevant blogs to make a long-form downloadable guide. After that, take the downloadable guide, shorten it up, and turn it into a print piece that you can leave behind with prospects. Isn’t that easy? One blog post turns into several different pieces of content.
Tip: Start crafting content with this repackaging or repurposing in mind. Often, you may have an idea that is for a longer piece that can be broken into shorter, easy to craft blog posts.
Rerun Your Content
Do you have a particular blog, guide, online presentation, or graphic that gets a ton of traffic and shares? Don’t be afraid to create similar content to maximize on the popularity of that content piece, especially if that piece is older and can use some updating.
Tip: Don’t just rewrite or recreate the same content, make sure when you rerun a piece of content that you are updating it with current best practices or trends.
Content marketing is a great way to educate prospects and clients about how to maximize your products or services and to establish your company as a thought leader in your industry. Follow the tips laid out here to get the most of your B2B content marketing pieces.
