6 Social & Content Marketing learnings to easily implement in B2B organisations

It was a great learning experience to be part of the B2B workshop at the Content Marketing Asia Summit in April 2017. While the highlight was interacting with folks from LinkedIn and Hubspot to clearly understand the nuances of content marketing for the B2B sector, it was good to network with participants who were veterans in the domain, some amateurs (like me), some struggling to convince their clients while some figuring out how to get new ones.

I have been wanting to write about my learnings from the workshop, but work kept me so busy that I dint have time to pen them down. A couple of weeks gone by, here I am listing down some of the learnings that I have actually started to implement at my company CleverTap.

Learning #1 : Think like a publisher & not a marketer

In a B2B scenario, ‘Product Marketing’ has gained a lot of importance. However, a shift to a ‘Content Marketing’ approach as suggested by Katrina Neal from LinkedIn, helped me understand that companies all over are investing in publishing content that matters to their audience & not in content they deem fit for the product/company to market.

Fortunately, at CleverTap we understand what are the problems our customers are facing and try to address the same via Content Marketing. While sites like Quora (our key focus platform), BuzzSumo, Google Trends & social listening tools help us understand what the audience is looking for, tools like Hubspot Blog topic generator & Co-schedule Headline Analyser helps us find a good fit to the context.

Yes, we do not just market our product via our blogs. We publish content that people would benefit from or enjoy consuming. The marketing team works like a publishing house, with a definitive process, a set calendar & an organised structure (a big thank you to Trello).

Learning #2 : Do not underestimate the power of Internal communication

Irrespective of the size of a company it is always important to have the internal stakeholders on the same plane when deciding the Content Marketing strategy. While the Top Management buy in at CleverTap was not a hurdle, we made it a point to have the entire company (we are only a 35 member strong team) to understand where we are headed. With all of us working towards the same goal, it is easier to leverage the abundant knowledge that resides internally to be used in content creation & distribution!

We also have a mandate, where every single one of our employees contribute towards our ‘Mission Blog’ :P

Learning #3 : Worry about optimization & distribution even more than creation

We all understand how important it is to create good quality content. But even good quality content does not ensure achieving goals, if not distributed well. The detailed presentation by Katrina Too from Hubspot touched upon the various facets of content optimization & distribution.

At CleverTap, even though most of us are involved with content creation; content distribution is a separate cadence. I take care of content distribution across Social Media channels & my job begins from optimizing the content to be fit for each media channel.

We have begun to incorporate many of the best practices discussed at the workshop such as:

• Long format content to enable more shares
• Making content more sharable (Look at this example of a Blog post where we keep experimented with prominent CTAs & Sharable in-content snippets to engage our readers)
• Involving influencers, by using their quotes & also back linking their articles.
• Sharing links on Twitter at a slower pace (max 1 in a hour)
• Targeting an audience on LinkedIn while sharing content
• Increasing reach by boosting posts on Facebook to target audiences

Learning #4 : Don’t shy from talking about things beyond your product

How many ever times we are told, we forget that our customers are people like us (not robots with a single interest) and will like to see, read, share different types of content. Even in a B2B set up, the workshop taught me that it is fine to connect to the audience beyond the need to always sell your product/service. Building a relationship with your customers is definitely a focus area and what better way than sharing varied content; probably such as a tweet about what happens behind the scenes; or even just putting a face to a name of an author on the blog :)

At CleverTap, we proactively engage in retweeting, letting out employees talk for us & sometimes even our clients instead of publishing every bit of content on our own! This makes a healthy mix of content from the company & beyond.

Learning #5 : Be prepared to be your own designer

Indeed a valuable lesson for every content marketer. It is common sense that visuals attract people more than just plain words, so every content marketer must be equipped to design a visually appealing asset. This can be used as the main content piece (such as Videos & Infographics) or even as a promotional tool (images, gifs etc)

At CleverTap, while our design team does a great job to help with amazing visuals, the content marketing team’s needs are never ending! (imagine wanting 5 images to promote the same blog post across 3 different channels in different sizes)

The workshop, helped me gain confidence in allowing myself to pick up a paint brush (figuratively of course). Thanks to sites like Canva & Pablo, our upcoming webinar has been promoted heavily across all channels with minimum help from the core design team! Easelly is another fantastic tool to create simple infographics.

Learning #6 : Save the metrics for yourself

This was an eye opener for me at the B2B Content Marketing Workshop. When Virginia Sharma from LinkedIn, told us to ‘Save the metrics for yourself & only use Analytics in your presentations’ most of the people in the room were pleasantly surprised.

What we understood was that we need to separate the ‘What’ (Metrics — Link Clicks, CPC, MQL count etc) from the ‘So What’ (Analytics — Time spent on site/blog, Social Mentions, Shares, Engagement Rate ) and only present the metrics that really matter to the stakeholders.

At CleverTap, we are aware of how Content Marketing is a continued effort and the ROI takes time. We focus on analysing how customers reach our content (GA — Sources via UTMs) ; engage with our content (Heatmaps via HotJar), share (Social Media tracking) & finally convert to MQLs (Hubspot forms).

It will be great to know how my fellow participants & marketers implement Content Marketing in the B2B set up. Do leave your thoughts in the comment section below!