How to Crush It with Content Marketing
Marketing is the engine of growth, and content marketing is the most potent and pure form of marketing. This post reveals the secret to success in content marketing and shows how to launch an effective campaign in minutes.
Marketing is the engine of business growth. Without marketing, there are no sales, and without sales, there is neither business nor growth.
In essence, the goal of marketing is to convert people who are unknown to us and unaware of our products into people who are both known and interested in what we have to offer.
Content marketing achieves this goal by providing our audience with valuable content at key points in their buying journey.
The secret to a successful content marketing campaign can be expressed as a single age-old maxim:
Give and you shall receive.
In other words, to obtain people’s emails, we must offer significant value in return.
Studies show that B2B buyers value their contact information at about $10-15 dollars, that is, the average price of a business book that one might pick up at an airport.
There are several types of content that can deliver that much value:
- How-to guides and templates
- Best practices and case studies
- Analyst reports
- Market survey reports
- Online courses and training videos
- Free tools and applications
To execute a successful content marketing campaign, one also needs a platform that offers:
- Content management
- Content distribution
- Audience engagement
- Contact management and email filtering
- Content and engagement analytics
In what follows, I illustrate these points with the help of Morebell, a modern B2B sales and marketing platform that helps companies acquire more customers by creating rich virtual buying experiences.
Content Management
On Morebell, every user can upload a piece of content by dropping a file in the browser.
For content marketing, it is essential to ensure that content can be easily consumed on a broad range of devices connected over slow and fast networks.
Morebell achieves this by transcoding content to several formats suitable for delivery to different types of devices. It also pushes numerous replicas of your content to the very edge of the network at locations across the globe.
Content Distribution
For the highest impact, we must reach our audience via multiple channels: web, social, email, QR-codes, and text messaging.
For every piece of content, on Morebell, you can create any number of unique resource locators (URLs) to be shared and tracked across the various channels.
Morebell helps you increase conversions by automatically generating preview text and images for your content and making them available to search engines, email clients, and apps via the Open Graph protocol.
When you post a link on LinkedIn, and a preview image magically appears in the post, that’s Open Graph working. Morebell takes care of this for you as part of the content distribution process.
Audience Engagement
This part is crucial to the success of your campaign.
When someone clicks on a link, within the span of just a few seconds, we must demonstrate the value of our content and entice the audience to share their contact information.
Morebell achieves this by instantly downloading the nearest copy of the content preview image, rendering it, and overlaying it with a form.
Contact information is securely transmitted and stored in the cloud. Morebell facilitates the interaction but never uses or shares your client’s information with third parties.
Contact Management
As with any other form of marketing, you can expect a large percentage of the emails captured in your campaigns to be of somewhat questionable quality.
Using these emails for email marketing can severely hurt your company’s reputation. Therefore, a clean-up step is necessary.
Morebell relies on a highly sophisticated algorithm to automatically categorize emails as valid or invalid. You also get an indication of whether it’s a free or business email.
| Status | Sub-status | Free Email | |
|---|---|---|---|
| valid@example.com | Valid | No | |
| valid@gmail.com | Valid | Yes | |
| invalid@example.com | Invalid | Mailbox not found | No |
| disposable@example.com | Do not mail | Disposable | No |
| sales@example.com | Do not mail | Role-based | No |
Campaign Analytics
Marketing is one of the most data-driven disciplines in any business.
With Morebell, campaign managers can keep track of audience engagement over time and compare the performance of different types of content assets and delivery channels.
This capability enables efficient ideation, planning, execution, and learning loops.
Summary
Marketing is the engine of business growth, and content marketing is the most potent form of marketing.
To execute a successful content marketing campaign, one needs valuable content and a robust content marketing platform.
Morebell is a modern B2B sales and marketing platform that provides content management, content distribution, audience engagement, contact management, and analytics.
With Morebell, anyone can start and run a kick-butt content marketing campaign in less time than it took to read this column.
