B2B marketers are running around in circles trying to find the magic formula to successful content marketing, and it can be stressful wondering if something as important as your efforts in this area are going unrewarded. But before you scrap your strategy altogether, consider tossing in a dash of these three things that might mean the difference between sucky and successful.
Fun
Oh, it seems so obvious, doesn’t it? But if you’re not having fun creating your content marketing assets, what makes you think your audience will have fun reading it and keep coming back for more? This is not to say that every piece of content you create written or visual needs to be like a walk through Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory, but the purpose of content marketing is to inform and entertain. You may be doing a great job informing but don’t forget to entertain.
Measurement
You’re all worried about your content marketing not working but .how do you know if it is or not? Are you measuring the phone calls it generates? The downloads from its form? The on-page clicks? The social media buzz around its title or URL? If not, you should be. Put a trackable phone number on every single asset. Measure your ROI. Track clicks. Measure everything there is to measure about your content marketing so you can get an accurate read on its success then do more of what works.
An Editorial Calendar
When you get to the point where you’re generating a lot of content, you need to have a way of organizing the way it’s being shared. Your content may be awesome fun and measurable but if you’re not sharing it regularly and on numerous channels, then how do you expect it to take off? Create an editorial calendar weekly; biweekly: whatever works best for your biz and use it to mete out your assets on various platforms. It can be as basic as, Column One: share these assets on LinkedIn on these days. Column Two: share these assets on Facebook on these days. The key is staying organized and making sure you’re not creating assets just to have them sit around doing nothing.
Want more tips on successful B2B content marketing? We have a free white paper on the topic that you can download: The Marketer’s Guide to Proving (and Improving) Content Marketing ROI.