It’s easy to read a few marketing articles and understand that content targeting has quickly become dominant as the digital marketing service of choice.
However, to truly succeed in generating leads and increasing B2B sales, you need to wield content with accuracy.
That’s where content targeting comes into play; as you would with any other form of marketing or B2B sales, you need to view your prospects online according to their segment and deliver a message tailored to bringing those specific people to a specific end goal.
You should begin developing your targeted content only once you’ve firmly established the desired end goal—what specific action on your website will you count as a success?
The answer will depend on your market, business model, and other factors, but it should absolutely involve some form of commitment; downloading something, signing up for a mailing list, making a sale, etc.
Excellent website design can work to bring different buyer personas to different goals. The important thing here is that you develop a coherent funnel of content and actions to generate the right B2B leads. You'll see a much greater increase in sales by developing multiple narrow funnels aimed at specific segments—a single large, unfocused sales funnel simply doesn't work as well.
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To deliver customers to your website and have them looking at your content, put out feelers on appropriate platforms for the buyer personas you’re looking at.
Platforms such as social media networks, email lists, YouTube videos, webinars, and e-books all target different customer types with different levels of success. By identifying the appropriate platforms and content targeting for your personas, you can maximize marketing efficiency and increase B2B sales leads.
Each platform should feed users into appropriate landing pages on your website, rather than your front page. You want people visiting your site to move through a series of content pieces tailored to their unique interests, all leading up to an appropriate call to action.
One size doesn’t fit all, so don’t try to force it to—if someone arrived at your site because of a video they saw, they probably don’t want to read through articles.
If they arrived via an in-depth analysis in an e-book or white paper form, they probably don’t need to read articles aimed at beginners on the subject—but they would be glad to sign up to receive another in-depth analysis on another aspect of the subject.
It’s important that the content marketing presented on each platform be appropriately targeted to your ideal customer you hope to reach through that platform.
Consider social media platforms alone—people who primarily use Twitter are different from those who primarily use Facebook, and both are quite different from LinkedIn’s user base. As you diversify into video, newsletters, webinars, and other platforms, the differences only grow.
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This analysis of platforms is where the latest tools of automated marketing and analytics really shine, allowing a skilled strategic marketing agency to quickly identify what types of prospects are engaging with which channels, and react appropriately without an absurd use of manpower. The level of personalization necessary to succeed in modern digital marketing concepts simply isn’t feasible otherwise.
If you want to generate leads and increase B2B sales through content marketing, contact us today and get the expert help of our friendly Open Path Digital team.