A common approach taken by Marketing Departments looking to launch new products or services is to focus disproportionately on running lead generation campaigns without first undertaking the efforts to create adequate brand awareness. The tactical approach is driven largely by ROI concerns that favor promotions with clear, measurable calls-to-action resulting in sales or marketing qualified leads. In our view, this is not the most effective or efficient method for B2B demand generation when it comes to utilizing marketing budgets. Using high quality content, B2B Marketers can plan and execute content powered branding campaigns that capture the attention of customers at the top of the funnel and draw them deeper into the sale process. Here are 5 content types that B2B Marketers can leverage for their top-of-the-funnel branding campaigns
Free toolkits – This tactic provides complementary tools that help prospects easily perform key routine tasks. A simple example of a toolkit would be the Google Analytics Campaign Builder excel macro that allows Marketers to quickly generate properly formatted Campaign URLs for complex tagging schemes. A business analytics consultancy providing a free template for assessing business intelligence maturity would be another example of a toolkit. A retail operations consultancy providing pre-built sets of metrics for evaluating retail performance could be yet another example. The key underlying factor with toolkits is that they must provide something of value to customers and prospects without any reference or connotation to sale. Notice that in this sense, toolkits are different from freeware apps or free accounts for SaaS applications which offer basic features in the free plan but then require customers to upgrade for better value.
Framework guides-Service companies can generate tremendous goodwill and brand awareness by showcasing the process maturity of their offerings through high level framework guides. Service offerings are complex undertakings involving a number of steps, roles and responsibilities, deliverables and organizational capabilities. Bringing these together into coherent framework guides that provide Clients with a step-by-step implementation approach can go a long way in establishing trust, and domain authority.
Best practice guides-This is another great branding tactic that involves showcasing subject matter expertise through deep-dive guides that focus on some very specific disciplines. Examples in the marketing domain would include a conversion optimization guide that outlines number of best practices around form design, session handling, and e-commerce store layout in order to minimize cart abandonment. Another example would be a set of best practices in implementing demand generation programs in order to ensure alignment with business objectives. Yet another example would be a guide to selecting measurement metrics for evaluating marketing performance so as to ensure that analysts can address questions from tactical campaign teams and also senior marketing leadership.
Use cases-This content type involves establishing the need for a new product, service or concept. Data mining industry is a great example where service and product vendors can create use case guides for outlining how their tool or offering can meet specific business needs. The exploratory nature of data mining implies that customers are often not aware of the specific benefits that the technology can realize for them through innovative use of data. A fraud anaytics consultancy can, for example, create use cases that outline how data mining can be used to predict new types of, hitherto unknown fraud schemes. Structuring such content without explicit or even implicit reference to its internal capabilities can provide a very strong branding and a deep sense of confidence with prospects.
Industry trends-This content type helps cement a provider’s authority as an industry leader with deep and broad subject matter expertise around a particular competency. Unlike framework guides and best practice guides, that communicate from the context of internal offerings, industry trends provide insightful information about the general direction of an industry and thereby provide food for thought for building long term capability plans. Services giants such as IBM, Accenture, TCS etc. regularly publish industry trends for key horizontal and vertical domains in order to generate interest for innovative offerings that go beyond current customer needs.
Using effective content planning, B2B companies can easily enter the consideration sphere of top-of-the-funnel audience and build confidence and authority as a first step to pitching specific products and offerings. Not only does this significantly enhance the effectiveness of downstream lead generation tactics but also improves their ROI in that it takes far lesser time, effort and expense to capture high quality leads.
