Those who can produce quality content in the digital age will be the first to win in competition.

As brand owners pay more attention to content marketing and increase their budget investment, the demand for brands to quickly monetize content is also on the rise.

Data shows that 70% of brand owners say that content marketing has increased a lot last year compared to the year before.

What is content marketing?

It is not just about content production and promotion. Content marketing is a complete methodology from top-level strategic design to content implementation. Many content creators do not have the awareness of top-level strategic design. They focus too much on details and lose the steps of content strategic design. It is a pity and a situation that needs to be urgently changed.

The key to content marketing is not to publish incremental information, but to build the entire content ecology, clarify the logical relationship between content and content, and design based on value delivery based on different target audiences and customer, partner, and government relationships. content ecosystem.

The form of content and the specific details of the content to be output must be extended based on this content marketing system.

Looking at the entire content marketing field in the coming year, I think content marketing will have the following characteristics:

1, the boundary between content and advertising becomes blurred.

Good content itself has a strong ability to carry goods. Content is the carrier of two-way communication between brands and users, not just a medium for brands to output one-way information to users.

And the ability of good content to carry goods over time, it will play a greater long-tail effect. Advertising has always been regarded as the main way for brands to spread and acquire traffic.

In the future, it will become mainstream for companies to output information and acquire customers through content, and content can not only convey information, but also produce significant effects. Some explicit indicators such as how many fans it brings, and even how many clues it brings. These are KPIs for content marketers.

At this time, advertising is increasingly used as a form to support the dissemination and diffusion of content. The content is the subject, and the advertisement becomes the object.

2, B2B content marketing is especially hard to do.

B2B content marketing is vertical and has strong specialization attributes. It’s not that people in this field are not interested or feel irrelevant. This also makes B2B marketers focus more and only target a specific target group to create content that these target audiences love to watch. This is actually an underestimation. The value of content marketing.

In an industry, when it comes to the upstream and downstream value chain, in addition to your customers reading your content, whether the downstream customers of your customers need to see it, and whether the upstream suppliers need to see it are all content marketers need to consider, and only focus on one type of group of people. It is destined to make your content marketing more and more single until it has a ceiling effect, and deciding who becomes your marketing audience depends on your business purpose.

At the same time, because the B2B business model is relatively complex and involves a large number of people, group decision-making is one of its main business model characteristics, and it is also a great challenge for content marketers to differentiate content, not to mention direct content from direct customers. , it is even more difficult to carry out related and differentiated marketing to the upstream and downstream industries of customers.

Again, retention of content assets is important.

High-quality content has become more and more part of the accumulation of brand assets, and can be reused. One of the challenges that B2B digital marketers face in their daily work is the shortage of resources, market analysis, content marketing, and media delivery. Doing, and data analysis, etc., and staffing is relatively simple.

Therefore, it is extremely challenging to require B2B marketers to grasp from strategy to execution to operation. In addition to the need to switch ideas, they also need to master the basic knowledge of different digital marketing fields, which is already a labor-intensive job.

The production of content accounts for a large part of the energy, so whether the content can be reused, it is a smart approach to make some adjustments and tests on the basis of the content that has been produced, and combine other digital marketing methods to produce results.

What kind of content can become premium content?

The first and foremost key here is the monitoring of content effects. Subjective experience judgments are unreliable. Using data to speak, what kind of content has a high click-through rate and can represent the core value of the enterprise can be considered as high-quality content, and it should be in some way. Save this content.

B2B content marketing is so difficult, how to consolidate the content? Here are some thoughts to share with you:

1. Valuable content is important, but content should not be done for the sake of doing it

Don’t blindly produce meaningless content in order to meet the target that I have to post several articles once a week on the official account, even if the content may not resonate with users, don’t blindly follow the trend just to see that the short video is very popular, and waste a lot of money Focus on the production of short video content.

The content of short videos is actually very difficult to reuse. One video is over. Many people watch short videos for entertainment and leisure purposes. They do not come for the real content value in order to kill time.

2. To do content, always uphold the customer-centric thinking

It doesn’t matter what kind of earth-shattering content you want to make, what matters is your customers, i.e. consumer insights, what your partners are interested in, and what long-term value they want from you.

From the perspective of value, you should think about what benefits you can provide and whether you are attentive. Customer-centric thinking is long-term thinking and sustainable development thinking.

3. Sufficient research work is required before content planning

From the top-level strategic design to the implementation of content marketing, it is necessary to spend enough time to conduct research, including research on competing products, research on customer behavior habits, and research on core competitiveness.

Many people will ask that the speed of content creation is very fast. If I catch hot spots in real time, how can I have time to plan so much? It sounds like this logic is fine, but the problem is later.

Content that has not undergone sufficient research work may still generate some high browsing or clicks in the short term, which is considered to be good content, but in the long run, due to the lack of long-term planning, there is no top-down design of content ecology, and the content is constantly changing. There will be a lack of relevance and continuity in the production process, resulting in logical confusion, lack of consistency, and loss of the long-term value of content marketing.

4. The importance of a balance between professionalism and readability

B2B content production has relatively high requirements for professionalism and high technical barriers. For example, in the medical and health field, the target customers are doctors, and for the education of doctors, it is necessary for professional doctors to produce professional content that can resonate with peers, thereby affecting and He is similar.

Some doctors have high level and ability, but their writing is not good. Then invite them to endorse some professional fields for the company. The doctor and the advertising company copy will be in battle at the same time, the doctor will provide the original content, and the advertising company copy will be carried out according to the nature of the communication channel. Polishing to improve the readability of the content.

As mentioned earlier, if content marketing is limited to a specific field, the value of content marketing will also be underestimated. Brands need to be out of the circle. If doctors and patients are also affected, then the content needs to be readable and easy to read. , how to balance professionalism and readability, the relationship between legibility is crucial.

5. B2B content also needs to play emotional cards and consider spiritual needs other than customer interests

Emotional cards have always been the trump cards for B2C brands to impress users and cause deep resonance.

Although the object of B2B communication is standing behind a company or entity, when communicating, it is still communication between people.

Considering the other party’s psychological needs is an important support before considering the other party’s actual purchasing needs.

Although serving the same enterprise entity, the needs of different purchasers or business representatives may also be different. Therefore, on the basis of understanding the general needs of the enterprise, it is also important to deeply understand the action mode of decision makers and individualized needs.

After content production and creation, what is equally important is the application layer of the content. The same content is applied in different channels, and its forms and methods are also different.

For example, white papers in professional fields can well establish the authority and thought leaders status of enterprises in this field. The most important thing is that the content is forward-looking and professional, which is not suitable for promotion on pan-entertainment social media platforms. The official website, WeChat and authoritative media are relatively good channels, while for the popular social media, the speed and update frequency of content production and release are required.

But no matter how the form changes, one thing that cannot be changed from so many changes is that the positioning of the brand itself and the image it wants to convey to the outside world must be consistent.