Generate content for your marketing campaign

Mark Freidin

3rd Aug 2011

How to generate quality content for your marketing campaign

Research shows that buyers these days are researching solutions online long before they contact a company. This means there is a demand for accessible, reliable content and opens up an opportunity for retailers to attract buyers to your site for both research and purchase – an ideal combination.

To achieve this, retail marketers need to make informative content available during the research process so that buyers begin to associate that brand with the ability to fulfil their need. But generating a high quantity of content and managing it efficiently is daunting if you don’t know how!

Generating content for buyers is complicated in many ways. They research in different places, look for different types of information as they progress towards a purchase, want to consume information in a variety of formats and have shorter attention spans than in the past.

For B2B marketers selling a product or service, your buyers are quite likely to be a team of buyers from a company. Therefore, you need to market to a variety of people with a range of concerns and questions representing their different roles and departments.

You need content that is specific to the pains your product solves, relevant to the buyer’s needs and available in different formats, such as written, video, mobile and print, to address the various ways buyers seek information. Content must also be consumable in small pieces so it can be read at a glance and be relevant to the buyer.

So how do you get from the few pieces of product collateral you have today to the point where you have a broader and deeper portfolio of content to address these needs? And how do you manage all of the content?

Here are 4 steps to help get you started:

1. Identify your key messages. What is unique and important about the value you provide your customers? Capture the most important three to five messages, and then turn them into compellingly statements that characterise your messages and incite buyers to be most interested.

2. Create easy to consume ‘content chunks’. It’s important to create content that is consumable at a glance. This approach is known as ‘content chunking’. In today’s world, fewer buyers are sitting down for a long read, but instead expect to skim, browse, watch short videos or absorb information via links from tweets.

Use your newly created content chunks as a basis for multiple forms of content:

• Short white papers (less than 5 pages)
• Podcast interviews with experts on the topic
• Webcasts (less than 30 minutes)
• Presentations
• Videos
• Web landing pages and blogs.

3. Keep content fresh by building a regular research program. A great way to generate more content for your campaign is to turn your activities into research. Build research questions into your activities – events, webinars, website, presentations, blogs, community sites and social networks. The best way to do this is to keep it simple – no more than three questions at a time.

The research enables more content to be generated that can be presented in many formats from blogs to webinars. Look at each interaction with experts, customers, partners and prospects as an opportunity to get feedback and collect information to feed content.

4. Centralise content for easy access. Last, but not least, think about how you will manage all of this new content so it is easy to find, search and revise. If you have rich content, but don’t have a good way for the marketing or sales team to find it, you’ve only solved part of the problem.

Centralise and categorise content by the buyer types, stage of the cycle and products, so you can find it easily. This will also help simplify the process of revising content on an ongoing basis so it stays fresh.

Generating content can seem daunting, but following these steps and focusing some key resources on different stages can start to build a pipeline for a large volume of content that can feed your lead nurturing programs. Get going and watch the content roll.

Article by: By Lisa Arthur, Chief Marketing Officer at Aprimo