More and more tech companies are pursuing a content marketing strategy. Whereas 5 years ago, the buzz was all around Google, we’ve now been encouraged to be more sensitive and gain a granular understanding of our target audience, aka buyer personas and to create lots of helpful content that they will find useful. The idea being that approximately ¾ of buyers research their decisions online and your content will be found as they research their planned purchases online. However, often after a great deal of time and money, it is not yielding the desired results – let us explain why:
To get content creation right, you will have identified your buying personas and have indepth overviews of them. You’ll have a really good insight of their buying process and would have mapped your content plan out accordingly e.g. an e-book at their awareness stage through to product videos at their decision stage. You launch your e-book on line and expect content downloads to roll in but they don’t. Here’s some 4 ideas why:
1. IS IT IN A PROMINENT AND RELEVANT PLACE?
Your hero content offers should be in a prominent place – especially if they are showcasing your thought leadership - like at the top of your home page or in a relevant place on another page. Don’t listen to web designers who say it will ruin the flow of the page – get it in! Also make sure when inserting the content offer into your website its in a logical place – for example at the end of a blog and matches where the buyer is in their decision making cycle.
2. HAVE YOU CREATED AN EYE CATCHING TITLE?
Sometimes, you can spend so long both writing your content offer and researching key words for SEO optimisation, you can lose the wow factor and become another me too e-book like your competitors. Treat the title as if you were an author trying to write a best-seller. Come up with a range of options and run each through a headline analyzer like this free tool by CoSchedule to determine which title performs best.
3. ARE YOU PROMOTING IT ENOUGH?
Often it is easy to spend so much time creating an e-book, you can run out of time to publicizing it. It is important to map out a content promotion plan where you could list things like publishing dedicated post on LinkedIn, a series of different tweets promoting it, paid adverts promoting it and even sending it out to your database and customers. Also remember to keep re-promoting your e-book using these channels on a regular basis.
4. HAVE YOU CREATED A DEDICATED LANDING PAGE?
Also it is imperative that you create a dedicated landing page for your content offer which has an attention grabbing headline and succinctly explains the benefit of your content offer. You also need to make sure there is nothing on the landing page that puts the reader off downloading your content offer like a form with too many fields that asks for a phone number. I love the analogy from HubSpot that the length of the form should match the perceived value of the content offer to the reader.
Hopefully this has helped you think of the wider picture when creating your content offer so all your effort and investment pays dividends. At Resourceful Marketing, we are a HubSpot marketing consultancy who specialises in helping B2B tech companies grow. We've got a free lead generation e-book to help give you more ideas to boost your sales.
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