By Linda Forrest

Like many B2B companies, we ourselves have been working hard to fill our sales pipeline in recent weeks and months. I was encouraged to see some statistics reported on eMarketer that validated not only our approach to seeking prospects for ourselves (one tactic being this very blog), but also the content marketing approach that we follow for our clients – whether we’re conducting media relations, analyst relations or community management for them.

The tie that binds those offerings together is content. We develop appropriate content that is then pushed out to the audience over a variety of channels, matching content to the audience through the audience’s preferred delivery channel. It’s the goal of our marketing PR agency to help our clients sell more of their stuff; to see content marketing validated as an effective means of doing just that bolsters the business case for our services.

While we’re ardent measurement advocates and commit to a measurement methodology that is, in our experience, more rigorous than many of our competitors, the most important metric to capture that leads back to our services is sales leads. It’s all well and good to see your company name in the media that your customers and prospects are reading but if that coverage doesn’t make the phone ring, it’s difficult to justify the expenditure.

Given our persuasion on the matter, it was no surprise when lead acquisition and lead conversion were listed as top priorities for B2B marketing professionals, moreso than their B2C counterparts, in recent research by Focus Research reported on by eMarketer:

What tactics are proving most effective at driving lead acquisition and conversion? Those that are educational and informative:

From eMarketer:

Marketers have an endless array of digital channels and choices for uncovering prospects, and MarketingProfs and Junta42 found 63% of B2B marketers in North America turn to content marketing as a key lead generation source.

More specifically, North American B2B marketers used articles (78%) and e-newsletters (61%) for their content marketing efforts. More educational and instructional forms of content, like case studies (55%), white papers (43%) and webinars (42%), were also used. These types of educational and instructional content were rated the most valuable for directly supporting B2B marketers’ objectives, according to Focus Research.

Information Technology Services Marketing Association (ITSMA) and RainToday.com also highlighted the effectiveness of white papers and educational references as B2B lead-gen tools. Popular content types included case studies, best practices, insight into emerging markets and business trends, and how-to advice.

Michael Brenner‘s B2B Marketing Insider posted a great piece earlier this month on the media habits of the B2B buyer and how the marketing paradigm has shifted and needs to continue to evolve to best speak to prospects through a well-defined content marketing strategy that clearly maps out audiences and how they want to receive and digest information in order to make purchasing decisions. His post is loaded with lots of great links; if you’d like to do a deep dive into content marketing, this is a great place to start.

One such link was to a post on the importance of a content strategy. It’s not enough just to build the content and expect prospects to flock to you (a slightly different forum for the ‘if you build it, they will come‘ folly but equally ineffective). Building an effective content strategy will result in a range of benefits, which Barbra Gago describes in detail in her post. Also on her site, she offers a wealth of resources that help B2B marketers effectively map content to the various personas involved in the purchase decision-making process. Determining who those personas are ties in with Francis’s post about customer segmentation from earlier this week; know what sort of prospect you’re dealing with and then develop an effective content strategy to move them into – and through – your sales funnel.

It was also Michael Brenner that pointed me to the Ultimate Content Marketing Infographic that not only lays it all out in an easy-to-digest format, but provides the rationale for its development.

Image: GetEntrepreneurial.com

Technorati Tags: content marketing, B2B, sales leads, lead acquisition, lead conversion