A content marketing planning tool to help marketers generate a matrix of ideas for the most engaging content types for their audiences
We created our Content Marketing Matrix to help our members audit their content marketing assets as part of creating a content marketing strategy. It can also be used for content ideation, i.e. to brainstorm future content ideas to generate leads, nurture prospects, encourage sharing, and generate backlinks for SEO.
Since we created it eight years ago it's been shared many times and has inspired many 'mashups' in different formats, as this Google search shows; great to see it's been useful!
I think our Content Marketing Matrix is a powerful mindtool for marketers since it's a content mapping tool, structured to help you think through two key dimensions of which types of content will best support the path to purchase for your target audience.…
The manufacturing industry is experiencing rapid change. Catch up on the latest trends and innovations in this sector plus what we've learned about how to market a manufacturing company in 2021
Around the world, manufacturing marketers and managers are rapidly adapting and amending their marketing strategies to win more customers. Marketing for manufacturing is a unique skill, requiring a strong reliance on physical products in a digital world. That's why so many manufacturing businesses right now are relying on omnichannel marketing to acquire and retain high-value customers. We've got marketing strategies and tactics to help boost your profits. But first, let's take a deeper look into exactly how to market a manufacturing company.
How to market a manufacturing company with the RACE Framework
Regardless of your current levels of digital maturity, the RACE Framework is a structure you can use to take stock of your current manufacturing marketing efforts and find out how to…
Techniques for mapping your digital customer journeys across different touchpoints with the RACE Framework
Understanding your customer and how they interact with your business, directly and indirectly, is critical in driving improved value, repeat business, and longevity (and value) of your relationship. That's why you need a digital customer journey example.
Digital customer journey mapping helps you create a communication strategy that builds a conversation with your customers. Following your digital customers' journies helps you visualize current and planned customer journeys and the key touchpoints across different marketing channels.
So, where do you start when looking at your business and the journey a customer takes in the initial phases of a decision-making process and in follow-up phases as the relationship builds?
Using the RACE Framework to create digital customer journey examples
Our popular RACE Framework gives marketers a solid structure upon which to base their market research, customer experience (CX) analysis, customer journey mapping -…
Content hubs help you solve the problem of related content being disconnected across your site and can help grow your organic rankings for target keywords
You may not be familiar with the term “content hub,” but you’ve likely heard of the concept by some other name. You may have heard it referred to as a “topic pillar” or perhaps a “content cluster,” but what you call it doesn’t really matter.
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Content hubs help you solve the problem of related content being disconnected across your site and can help grow your organic rankings for target keywords. Beyond this, content hubs can help you increase your on-site conversions and goal completions.
What is a content hub?
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When and when not to gate your content
Generating leads and demand is a key function for many B2B organizations. Building a meaningful pipeline of interest in a product or service is an always-on activity and impacts nearly everyone across the organization, both customer and non-customer facing.
As digital has become increasingly prominent within B2B over the last decade, sales and marketing teams have been using content to build awareness and interest. As a result, the use of content marketing more specifically has seen strong growth:
Whilst there is widespread agreement that high quality, valuable content can produce positive results, there are different perspectives on how online content should be used to generate leads and sales.
On the one hand, content marketers with a strong background in SEO believe that if content is made open and available, search engines will reward…
Content marketing should explicitly be about promoting the right content to the right audience at the right time in order to achieve your marketing goals
Whether you're creating content from scratch or refurbishing existing content, your goal should be to engage and entice your target audience effectively on different platforms and, ultimately, prompt action.
Your blog posts, videos, infographics, contests and ads all need to be perfectly aligned with the buyer’s journey. This means you need to understand the awareness, consideration and decision stages.
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However, it’s quite difficult - if not entirely impossible - to do this without having a documented plan that covers effective distribution of your content. At the same time, your content marketing campaigns may end up…
Chart of the Day: A review of the content types that engage B2B audiences
How to best engage audiences is a challenge in all sectors, but particularly in B2B marketing where there are so many potential formats that can be selected as suggested by our content marketing matrix.
This new research considers the 5 most popular content types only, but is interesting since it goes beyond reviewing the content that supports B2B buying decisions, but also considers general content consumption by professionals:
This chart shows that if you want to engage your audiences, publishing other types of industry content could be popular. Covering industry trends is significantly more popular with content around to approach business challenges less popular, but still worthwhile. This shows the value in creating an digital value proposition as part of your content marketing strategy. As the visual shows you should…
Chart of the Day: Research showing the popularity of different types of content assets are used during B2B vendor service selection
Our poll featured in our digital marketing trends 2018 post showed the ongoing popularity of content marketing as a technique with marketers. This research, looks at content popularity from a different angle, the popularity of different forms of content assets during the buying process.
This visual is 'numbers' heavy, but the orange shading helps show the most popular types of content.
Which content formats are most popular?
Considering which content types are most popular, we can see that most types of content are useful to someone! This suggests the importance of using content mapping as a technique to align the right types of content with the right persona and stage of the buying process as covered in the templates and examples in our persona guide…
How to boost the effectiveness of your content marketing with properly mapped buyer personas
If you want to maximise results from your content marketing strategy, it is essential to map your buyer personas to the buying cycle. This is executed by delivering the right content, to the right people, at the right time.
If your business is B2B, your content marketing strategy is crucial to your success because 64 percent of B2B customers will engage in upwards of five blogs prior to purchase. However, a mere five percent of marketers believe their content marketing strategy is moving in the right direction, according to Top Rank Marketing.
Blogs, videos, ebooks, case studies, and infographics are all invaluable content marketing assets. And you want these content marketing assets represented in each stage of the buying cycle.
To make the absolute most of your content marketing strategy, you need to develop your buyer’s journey. This allows…
A process for content mapping and workflow
I've posted a few weeks ago on marketing automation and also this week on lead nurturing, the concept is reliant on having great content at each and every stage, so I thought a post might offer some further insight. It's also easier than you think, a relatively simple and practical process that can be tested and improved upon over time.
What exactly is content mapping?
Content mapping is (amongst other things) a process for lead nurturing by which a team prepares and organises relevant and valuable content. Once done, this content can be distributed to prospects depending on the type of lead (persona) and their point in the buying cycle (scenario).
Create and map content that generates buyers
Persona definition - you'll already understand your personas from my last posts - once again Im stressing how effective persona definition is key, otherwise how do you…
