Getting Innovative with B2B Content Marketing

When some­one talks to you about inno­va­tion, make sure they come from a place where inno­va­tion is a proven part of the cor­po­rate cul­ture. Adobe was born out of inno­va­tion and con­tin­ues to kick­start inno­va­tion at every opportunity.

Get­ting inno­v­a­tive with B2B mar­ket­ing con­tent is an absolute need in today’s cus­tomer influ­enced, data-dri­ven mar­ket­ing envi­ron­ment where the sheer vol­ume of con­tent pro­duced every day threat­ens to bury your brands con­tent in a sea of irrel­e­vant anonymity.

Rise Above and be Heard

Every brand needs to cre­ative­ly inno­vate method, process, and con­tent in their B2B mar­ket­ing efforts in adopt­ing a B2C men­tal­i­ty that treats each cus­tomer unique­ly with time­ly and rel­e­vant con­tent dur­ing their cus­tomer con­ver­sion jour­ney of research, dis­cov­ery, and pur­chase. After all, the buy­er in the B2B world is a real per­son look­ing for a pos­i­tive cus­tomer expe­ri­ence just like any­one else whether they are pur­chas­ing a new smart­phone at the local brick and mor­tar store or a suite of mar­ket­ing cloud soft­ware to man­age their dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing plans online via your ecom­merce websites

Research

Before one can rise above the crowd and be heard, you have to be able to be found when the cus­tomer is doing his/her research into the prod­uct options to fill their need. The fun­da­men­tal require­ment of rank­ing high on all the search engine results pages tops the list of things you must do to allow your con­tent to be found. Opti­miza­tion of your brands web­sites will get you there pro­vid­ed you do it right and main­tain those sites in the face of search engine algo­rithm adjustments.

Let’s talk about the mar­ket­ing team for a moment. Since I know Adobe, I’ll use it as a case in point. The Adobe Mar­ket­ing Cloud has eight indi­vid­ual solu­tions that make up its iden­ti­ty. Each part has its role but the mar­ket­ing team is one cohe­sive unit. Through the coor­di­nat­ing core ser­vices with­in the Cloud itself, we have inno­vat­ed the cus­tomer expe­ri­ence in two ways. First, the cus­tomer iden­ti­ty is sin­gu­lar and unique and shared across all the Mar­ket­ing Cloud solu­tions through a core ser­vice called Pro­files and Audi­ences. When you access any of our dynam­ic prod­uct land­ing pages you are one per­son, not eight dif­fer­ent peo­ple. Every time you opt-in to read a white paper or view a demon­stra­tion, that infor­ma­tion updates your com­mon mar­ket­ing pro­file with infor­ma­tion you want us to have.

Dis­cov­ery

Sec­ond, we fur­ther inno­vate that process through cus­tomer ana­lyt­ics by matur­ing your pro­file using your cus­tomer attrib­ut­es i.e. actions you take while on our web­site. Put sim­ply, the bet­ter we know you, the bet­ter we can con­nect with your needs and desires in mak­ing your cus­tomer expe­ri­ence pos­i­tive and pro­duc­tive for both you and the brand. The inno­va­tion is a closed loop, shared process where the entire mar­ket­ing team works in a col­lab­o­ra­tive envi­ron­ment dur­ing your dis­cov­ery phase of mak­ing a pur­chas­ing decision.

In this man­ner, we can pro­vide the B2B con­tent you need in real time at the moment you need it. It will be rel­e­vant, fresh, and tar­get­ed at you per­son­al­ly. We will be there with you dur­ing the jour­ney to pur­chase whether you choose our prod­uct or not.

Adobe Sum­mit 2015

We just com­plet­ed our US Dig­i­tal Mar­ket­ing Sum­mit and are build­ing toward our EMEA event at the end of April. In the US Sum­mit, we held a ses­sion of B2B con­tent mar­ket­ing. It is worth the invest­ment of time to watch the video pre­sen­ta­tion. The pro­duc­tion of B2B con­tent is on a sig­nif­i­cant upswing and will con­tin­ue to be for some time.

The point of the ses­sion was to show the impor­tance of get­ting your B2B con­tent above the noise of the moun­tains of con­tent being produced.

https://blogsimages.adobe.com/digitaleurope/files/2015/04/graph-1.png

https://blogsimages.adobe.com/digitaleurope/files/2015/04/graph-2.png

It won’t get any eas­i­er to stay rel­e­vant and heard unless you take some strong inno­v­a­tive action as I’ve described. Furthermore,

The con­tent flow must be unbro­ken and fresh

• Con­tent must be devel­oped for each phase of the cus­tomer jour­ney includ­ing lead gen­er­a­tion con­tent (blogs/whitepapers/eBooks/paid ads) dur­ing the cus­tomer research phase, prod­uct infor­ma­tion and dynam­ic land­ing /product page con­tent dur­ing dis­cov­ery and clear prod­uct pric­ing and prod­uct options dur­ing the pur­chase phase.
• Mea­sure the effec­tive­ness of your con­tent to keep aware of the impact it’s hav­ing. Is it res­onat­ing in social media via strong engage­ment num­bers? Is your lead gen­er­a­tion con­tent dri­ving traf­fic and unique site vis­its back to your prod­uct and land­ing pages? What’s the impact on rev­enue over time? Don’t be afraid to change the strat­e­gy if you’re not meet­ing estab­lished per­for­mance num­bers (KPI’s).

We are all in the busi­ness of man­ag­ing real­i­ties and the real­i­ty of what’s going on in B2B mar­ket­ing is an explo­sion of mar­ket­ing out­lets with the resul­tant frag­men­ta­tion of media con­tent to align with each out­lets most effec­tive for­mat. The mar­ket­ing bud­get effec­tive­ly shrinks with each new media out­let (social, print, email, owned web prop­er­ties) you add.

Join me at the 8th Strate­gic Mar­ket­ing and Brand­ing Forum on April 24, 2015 as I explore inno­va­tion in B2B con­tent marketing.

https://blogsimages.adobe.com/digitaleurope/files/2015/04/bottom.jpg