7 characteristics of_great_marketing_content

We’ve all experienced it: mismatched promotions and

messages that clearly demonstrate the sender either

doesn’t know what we’re interested in, or doesn’t know

where we are in our information-gathering process.

Writing your content for “everyone” is precisely the wrong

thing to do. Not only does it miss the key markers of your

sales cycle, it also tends to be too general and diluted to

have any meaningful impact.

7 Characteristics of Great Marketing Content

Executive Summary

Content drives business, and at any given moment

buyers are searching for information that will inform them,

educate them, or help them solve a problem. Whether

it’s a data sheet, white paper, demo script, or web page,

marketing content needs to speak to the needs of your

prospects and customers while being geared to targeted

points in your sales process.

It can be a delicate balance, but getting the right message

to the right person at the right time offers tremendous

upside: it establishes credibility and authority, creates

brand affinity, and – maybe most importantly – reduces

sales resistance.

So how do you craft great marketing content that

gets results?

While there’s no cookie-cutter methodology for every

business, there are specific characteristics that most, if not

all, successful marketing content shares.

This guide gives you the top seven characteristics – and

also gives you the seven best practices for developing

content that resonates with your target audience, no

matter where they are in the buying cycle.

1. The targeted audience: Know who you’re talking toImagine pitching specialty cat food to a dog person.

Promoting the benefits of a buffalo steak to a vegan.

Pushing a SaaS solution to a person who isn’t familiar with

cloud hosting.

Great marketing content...

1. Speaks to a targeted audience

2. Fits a specific place in the buying cycle

3. Tells your story with customer-centric examples

4. Uses meaningful images

5. Can be used in interesting, varied media

6. Employs a clear call-to-action

7. Can be parsed into additional pieces for optimum use and visibility

It’s amazing how much [content] is published

without ever answering the questions, “Who is this

for?” and “What do I want her to do?”

— Doug Kessler Co-founder and creative director of Velocity

Instead, pick a target reader – a specific persona – and

direct your content to that person. By focusing on a single

individual, you give yourself the freedom to pursue a

meaningful conversation, which helps you create content

(a single piece or a series) that addresses the person’s

unique issues, challenges and aspirations.

2. Know where content fits in the buying cycleWhether they’re prospects or returning customers,

buyers go through several process steps when making

a purchasing decision. By understanding these steps

and aligning your content with them, you can satisfy

their concerns, answer questions, ease objections, and

increase their confidence at each stage, all of which

prompts them to take the next step.

Common buying cycle steps include Discovery, Interest,

Consideration, Purchase and Reconversion. But

regardless of how many steps you identify or what you call

them, the takeaway is to have a well-planned buying cycle

for each persona, which will help you craft content that

appeals to each type of customer at each stage of their

process.

3. Tell your story with customer-centric examplesStorytelling works, particularly when it’s relevant to your

prospect’s needs and concerns. So instead of describing

your product’s features, tell the story of its benefits,

showcasing real-world examples of how it can be – or

is being – used to solve specific problems or achieve

specific goals.

Here are some ideas to get you started:

• Customer success stories

• Case studies or use case scenarios

• Solution briefs

• Best practice summaries or reviews from existing

customers

• Matrices showing outcomes or ROI comparisons

By positioning your messaging to focus on what your

customers want and need, you’ll not only increase your

reach and readership, you’ll also make your offering feel

safer and more appealing to buyers.

4. Use meaningful imagesImages make everything better – at least, everything

online. Case in point: according to recent research by

MDG Advertising, articles containing relevant images

have an average of 94 percent more total views than

articles without them. And when searching, 60 percent

of consumers are more likely to consider or contact a

business that has an image show up in local search

results.

The benefits of graphics are well documented. From

intriguing photography to informative illustrations,

countless studies have confirmed what we all know:

the human eye likes pictures. But just because you can

capture attention doesn’t mean you can keep it. In fact,

the sheer volume of visual stimuli has made us somewhat

inured to a lot of it.

One or two stock photos are

fine, but how many more

beautiful women standing in

server rooms can we take?

— Paul McKeon, President of The Content Factory

So the key is to ensure your images are meaningful to

your target audience, and that they communicate original

and relevant information.

For example: use real people, real quotes, customer logos,

infographics, charts, and photos of actual customers

using your product. Don’t use irrelevant stock images.

Images can make your marketing content pop, improve

searchability, and increase interest and engagement. But

use them wisely to ensure they relate to your prospect’s

needs and your content’s message. Otherwise they may

have the opposite effect.

7. Create once, amplify everywhereAfter taking the (often considerable) time to thoughtfully

develop and design a great piece of content, it would be

easy to publish it and check it off the to-do list. Done and

done.

But don’t do that.

Instead, make the last 100 yards of your publishing effort

about expansion – extending your content’s reach in order

to maximize its visibility and increase your brand’s authority.

This concept goes by many terms including scaling,

optimizing, repurposing, re-using, and Rule of 5. But

essentially it’s a form of “write once, use everywhere,”

where the goal is to capitalize on your primary content-

creation effort by making it available in as many

touchpoints as possible.

Here are the key practices, with examples, to help kick-start

your brainstorming.

Build content that can be used in several different ways:

• Have a meaty white paper? Extract two main ideas

from it and create two briefs, a handful of blog posts,

and an infographic.

• Planning a webinar? Make it available on-demand

from your website, iTunes, or YouTube. Post the

presentation deck on SlideShare. Create a Q&A from

the session.

• Conducting interviews for future content? Consider

turning the interviews into thought-leader Q&As,

capturing them as videos (each with its own landing

page), or creating a webinar.

Cross-promote content to increase traffic and extend brand reach:

• Include social and share links in your content

whenever and wherever appropriate.

• Distribute your content across as many appropriate

social media platforms as possible. Social media

management tools can make this a relatively quick

process.

5. Think beyond the PDFMedium matters. Just as important as the content itself,

the format it’s delivered in plays a significant role in how

well – or not – it speaks to your prospects.

Although PDFs still have a sizable fan base in the B2B

space, today’s digital options have essentially blown the

doors off the old paradigm, opening a brave new world of

opportunities in delivering information.

For example, instead of defaulting to the standard PDF,

could you create a slide-share? Animation? Infographic?

Video? If a PDF is still the best choice, could it be

interactive?

As possibilities and reader preferences continue to evolve,

be sure to consider your personas, messages, business

type, and sales funnel when determining which format (or

formats) are the best for showcasing your content.

6. Use a call-to-actionThe goal of marketing content is to spur action. Whether

it’s a download, a phone call, a form completion, or

a purchase, your content is ultimately meant to move

prospects down the sales funnel and convert them into

buyers.

To accomplish this, you need to tell readers what action

you want them to take. And the more explicit, the better.

So rather than simply adding “contact us” at the end of

every piece of content, create calls to action that match

where your prospects are in the buying cycle – their

questions and concerns. Be specific about what your

prospects can do next, guiding them along and helping

them take the next logical step.

Did you know … you can easily optimize your

images for search engines? For a comprehensive

guide to today’s SEO, download our white paper:

SEO 101: The Basics (and Beyond).

• Link to previously published content. For example,

if you mention a complementary piece of content in

a blog post, link to it. By cross-linking your content,

readers have more opportunity to spend time with

your brand and get introduced to other content

(read: expertise, offers, products, and services). The

cascading effects of this practice can be significant.

Ensure content can be found by the search engines:

• Incorporate keywords and metadata appropriately

and correctly – including what the audience sees

and what the search engines see.

• Write compelling headlines to draw in potential

readers. Be sure to leveraging keywords.

• Unsure how to optimize for search? Our white

paper, SEO 101: The Basics (and Beyond), can

help. (See what we just did there? If not, re-read the

“cross-promote content” section directly above.)

By keeping a strategic eye on these content optimization

practices, you can expand your visibility, amplify your

messages, and increase your authority where it counts:

with prospects, current customers, and search engines.

It’s about working smarter, not harder.

Crafting the ConversationNo matter what business or industry you’re in, creating

effective, useful content is critical. Is it easy? No. Not if

quality is your goal, which is should be – it must be – if

you want to stay relevant and grow in a world overflowing

with unprecedented competition for the most valuable of

resources: time.

But it’s also completely doable.

By focusing on the needs, pain points, and preferences

of your target audience, you can create content that

encourages new conversations, provides the right level of

information at the right time, and ultimately gets results.

About Act-On Software

Act-On Software’s integrated marketing automation suite

is the foundation of successful marketing programs, from

simple and direct, to sophisticated and globally executed

campaigns.

Act-On is a cloud-based marketing platform that enables

marketers to tie inbound, outbound and nurturing

programs together in a single dashboard. Scalable and

intuitive, Act-On supports sales as well as marketing and is

fast to implement, easy to use, and powerful.

+1 (877) 530 1555

www.act-on.com

Copyright © 2013 Act-On Software.

All Rights Reserved.

A note about content creep

It’s a common problem among most businesses: they create new content but keep the old stuff. Sometimes for years. Even when it’s no longer relevant.

Retiring aging content can feel wrong somehow, but retire it you must, particularly when it can be replaced with content that is newer, fresher or more up-to-date. A helpful guideline is to practice the 1:1 swap; that is, for every new piece of content, you retire an older piece.

Keeping your content fresh and current has several benefits, primary among them being that search engines love discovering new content. And since search engines are the main way prospects find you, a natural extension of new content is that it demonstrates your company is active and engaged in the industry, which increases the perception of credibility and

authority. It’s all upside.