-
- News
- Books
Featured Books
- smt007 Magazine
Latest Issues
Current IssueBox Build
One trend is to add box build and final assembly to your product offering. In this issue, we explore the opportunities and risks of adding system assembly to your service portfolio.
IPC APEX EXPO 2024 Pre-show
This month’s issue devotes its pages to a comprehensive preview of the IPC APEX EXPO 2024 event. Whether your role is technical or business, if you're new-to-the-industry or seasoned veteran, you'll find value throughout this program.
Boost Your Sales
Every part of your business can be evaluated as a process, including your sales funnel. Optimizing your selling process requires a coordinated effort between marketing and sales. In this issue, industry experts in marketing and sales offer their best advice on how to boost your sales efforts.
- Articles
- Columns
Search Console
- Links
- Events
||| MENU - smt007 Magazine
Turbocharge Your Sales with Content Marketing
October 7, 2013 |Estimated reading time: 5 minutes
I was talking with a friend in the PCB industry last week who had received an invitation to quote on a board from a defense contractor in the mid-Atlantic area. Upon asking why the company had selected them, the contractor informed my friend that his team had read all the articles, posts, and other content the PCB manufacturer had on their website and shared in places like LinkedIn groups. The contractor was impressed by the PCB company. The PCB company in question had no representation in the mid-Atlantic area and had never contacted this prospect before. The prospect found their content, liked it, and contacted them. My friend told me that, in all honesty, he wouldn’t have known where to begin in searching for the right contact among the thousands of engineers and R&D and purchasing people at this company. Thanks to content marketing, that contact found him.
You can do this too, but keep these guidelines in mind:
Content Marketing for B2B is Growing
Content Marketing is a way of engaging and attracting existing and potential customers through content creation and online distribution. This discipline is taking over marketing for one simple reason: The Internet and social media have enabled customers to go out and look for the answers to their problems.
The Content Marketing Institute (CMI) interviewed 1,400 businesses in August 2012. Eighty-eight percent of them indicated they would spend as much or more on content marketing in the next 12 months. Companies decreasing their spending on content marketing? Only 2%. They’re not doing this because they were told to; they’re doing it because it works.
Use a Variety of Methods to Distribute B2B Content
In the CMI study, 87% of companies used social media for content distribution, 83% used their website, 78% used e-newsletters, and 73% used one or more blogs. The key here is that companies are using multiple methods, not just one.
Of the social media used, 83% distribute content via LinkedIn, 80% use Facebook and 80% also use Twitter, 61% use YouTube, 39% use Google +, and (perhaps incredibly) 25% use Pinterest. Think about that. The study found that the average number of social media used per company was five. Five! Know Your Goals
Two main goals exist for using content management: Increased brand awareness and increased sales.
The CMI study found two main themes: The first was increased brand awareness and establishing thought leadership. The second was to generate sales leads and acquire new customers. When you go back to rule number one and find that 88% of these companies are spending at least as much or more on content marketing this coming year, that would indicate that they are accomplishing these goals.
Creating Content is Hard
Content marketing requires something that a customer can sink his teeth into. Armed with the knowledge gained from your content, they are incrementally better at their job. The content you have now isn’t good enough in this new world: Your technology roadmap? No. The fact that you are $300 million in size? Nope. ISO 9000? Naw. Sounds like those are all about you. Content marketing is all about your customers' problems.
Creating enough content is really hard...until you have your “aha” moment.
Think about the companies mentioned above--they need to come up with content for their website, their blog, their e-mail newsletter, and, on average, five different social media. And the content you put on Twitter is very different from the content you put on YouTube. And content can’t be created and posted every six months. Your customer will go elsewhere waiting for your next post. But you can take your content and re-purpose it. Say you do a six-minute interview with an industry guru. The first thing you could do is chop it in three (because the magic number for attention spans these days is two minutes). Now you have three interviews you can post to YouTube. Then you take the interview, transcribe it, and offer it as a white paper or case study. Then you take the transcript and chop it into six 400-word blog posts. Now you have 10 pieces of content from your six-minute video.
Jump on the Bandwagon or Get Run Over
The longer you wait, the further you'll fall behind. Let me put this idea another way: If the market you are addressing suddenly decided that they would like to buy your product in red, what would you do? Offer it in red, or lose sales to this new “fad?” Well, your customers are looking for content, that’s the new “red.” You can decide to offer content after everybody else already is, but you’re not going to be in an envious position being last. Just "Winging It" Will Kill You
Great content takes planning and a content pipeline providing you with great content on an ongoing basis takes a lot of work. Just winging it with your content execution will get you the same results as winging it in product development.
Forty-five percent of Internet searches are initiated by people researching products or services. Search engines look for relevant content. One of their tests for relevancy is how new content is. Companies publishing new content get ranked higher. When a new technology comes along, businesses figure out a way to take advantage of it. Content marketing is the next step in companies taking advantage of the internet in general, and search engines in particular.
This may seem like a lot of time and effort, and it is. But...how do you think my friend felt when he had that conversation with the defense contractor? That conversation boiled down to, “Hi, you don’t know me, but my team and I are really impressed with the way your company thinks and your take on the technology we use in our PCBs. We would like to talk to you about the idea of you building several hundred thousand dollars of boards for us.”
How often do you get those types of phone calls? Well, now you know what you need to do to get one.Bruce Johnston is a sales consultant specializing in social media and especially LinkedIn. He has over 25 years experience in high tech sales and management. He can be reached at brucej@practicalsmm.com or through his profile on LinkedIn.