Content Marketing: There’s More Than One Way to Tell a Story

By Leslie Gillette

This blog series kicked off with Going Back to the Basics. So many marketing trends, so little time. We touched on four key focus areas:

• Branding and messaging
• Developing collateral and content
• Knowing your audience
• Positioning sales for success

First, you learned How B2B’s Can Embrace the Shift to Digital Buying, showing time-proven areas that help drive success, including:

• Aligning digital marketing strategy with larger brand strategy
• Ensuring digital marketing addresses your target audience
• Aligning content marketing strategy with the buyer’s journey
• Driving revenue with sales enablement tools

Content is king, so let’s dive in.

Let’s do a deeper dive into tools you can use to drive success – namely collateral. Not only do prospects and customers rely on it through every stage of the buyer’s journey, but so do your internal teams. Content marketing is always at the top of “must-haves” lists if you follow marketing trends. It has been for over a decade.

I’ve done a lot of asset development and know what resonates with clients and their partners.

Case in point: Red Hat and Splunk partnered to create joint marketing materials for various public sector activities. Both are exceptional in their fields – Red Hat is the world’s leading provider of Open Source solutions and Splunk leads the market in IT operations management. It’s easy to highlight your individual unique value propositions but harder to tell the ‘we’re better together story’.

After meeting with the team, we all determined that the first asset we should create is an overview/whitepaper. This tends to be one of the most downloaded pieces of collateral and addresses everything you want a partner piece to showcase. It’s a great piece to host on your website or provide as a ‘carrot’ for an upcoming webinar.

However, people may not want to or have time to ‘read’ a whitepaper. And then, there’s other things to consider, like how to use the whitepaper for events and social media… one size does not fit all.

The benefits of repurposing content.

People consume information in different ways. Some read, some look for high-level information, some like pictures, and some prefer to watch a short, animated clip. Others prefer many short, easily digestible written content pieces, images, or animations – whether you want your audience to learn about a product, thought leadership trend, or for internal sales teams.

Taking content and repurposing it for different audiences and uses is key – it saves time and money by not creating assets from scratch. Again, some content can be repurposed for sales teams’ bottom-of-the-funnel activities, moving the deal to the finish line. In this case, the channel partner team decided on an infographic and an animated piece.

https://porterconsulting.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/FINAL-RH-Splunk-Whiteboard.mp4

‍

Working with the client, we took the key messages from the whitepaper to create an infographic – a much less wordy and more visual interpretation for posting online or using as collateral at events (both virtual and in-person). From there, we developed the animated version to incorporate into both sales and marketing activities. Both Red Hat and Splunk agreed that “anything animated would be a welcome change.”

Analytics! Another way to get more out of your content.

You’ve created content for blogs, videos, infographics, and webinars. You’ve posted them and shared them with your internal teams. Now what? How do you measure success?

This is where analytics come into play. Look at what is performing best over a certain period of time. With content, it’s easy to see what people like and want more of versus what’s under-performing. Take what’s working and give it a little refresh – a new title, rearrange paragraphs, and update copy or images. It’s low-hanging fruit that’s often overlooked.

Want to create new assets or update existing ones?

Let’s work together. Take advantage of a complimentary marketing workshop – no strings attached.

If workshops aren’t your thing, shoot me an email at lgillette@porterconsulting.net and we can book a meeting directly.