Attracting potential customers and building awareness for your product/service is critical for business growth. A buyer’s journey takes time and often purchases aren’t always instantaneous, especially in the B2B world.
One of the most effective ways to build awareness, attract the right personas, and further nurture them into becoming paid customers is through content. Not just any content, but it has to be engaging and speak true to the challenges they are facing. Otherwise, you’ll find that the content won’t perform well in terms of gaining good awareness and ultimately, leads and sales.
That being said, let’s take a look at some stats before we dive into specific content types that will help you build out more awareness for your business:
- The top goal companies have for their content marketing efforts is brand awareness.
- Content marketing is 3x more cost effective at lead generation than paid search.
- Websites that have a blog attract 55% more traffic.
- Blog titles containing 6-13 words generate the most traffic.
- Blog posts are statistically the most effective tool for building brand awareness, with 31% of B2B companies listing short articles as the highest-performing content in this respect.
- B2B companies who blog consistently receive 67% more monthly leads than companies who don’t blog regularly.
- 66% of B2B marketers are distributing content through paid channels.
Let’s get to it!
Why Content Marketing is Important
Before we dive into the reasons why investing in content marketing is critical for business growth and success, it’s also important to note the following:
- The amazing thing about content in general is that you will develop a ton of it and only 1 or 2 really great pieces will go viral — so don’t push for virality in everything you do. Instead, stay true to the problem you’re solving in your specific niche and be clear that you are an expert within that.
- Great content adds value, and as people consume your content, they will be more inclined to buy from you over time. Don’t think of content as transactional.
- Be intentional. Every piece of content you generate should be aligned with the buyer journey and their lifecycle stage. Don’t create new content just for the sake of having new content. Have a purpose behind everything you do.
Blog Consistently
Get into the habit of planning out your content quarterly and put in the necessary research as well as resources to get everything organized. Also make sure that you have a clear blogging strategy in place to support your awareness efforts.
Here are key steps that I take:
- Use Answer the Public to get topic ideas.
- Implement a simple Google search to see what has already been written around the topics you want to write about.
- Check out news sites that are relevant to your topic.
- Look at Moz and Google Keyword Tool to research additional queries.
- Build out content clusters by topics.
- Leverage a simple project management tool like Monday.com to organize your publishing schedule. Even a Google Sheet will suffice.
Create Long-Form Content
Since building awareness has less to do with lead generation and more with amplifying your reach towards your target personas, you won’t need to worry about gating your longer content assets. Instead, you’ll look at specific KPIs that not only align with your awareness goals but then gain a better understanding of which content pieces drive better engagement too.
Here are some things to be aware of with long-form content:
- Word count exceeds 2,000.
- Input strong CTAs so that you can build more awareness and even generate leads and subscribers.
- Don’t be afraid to promote your longer form content so that it is exposed to the right audience.
- Make sure you cover a topic you are well versed in and can showcase your expertise further building credibility along with thought leadership.
- Don’t push for virality. Instead, push to build value that will be reshared.
Develop Videos
A great opportunity that will help grow your awareness is video. There are a ton of different ways that you go about creating videos through repurposed content and even splicing up existing videos into smaller clips. Your ability to get creative is nearly limitless.
Further, videos are much more engaging when it comes to being able to tell your story and also illustrating what it is you as well as the problem you solve. Check out the following stats:
- 94% of video marketers say video has helped increase user understanding of their product or service.
- Over 70% of viewers say YouTube makes them aware of new brands.
- 86% of marketers say video has helped them increase traffic to their website.
- 84% of marketers say video has helped them generate leads.
- 83% of marketers say video has increased dwell time on their website.
- 78% of marketers say video has directly helped to increase sales.
Push a Podcast
Starting a podcast is the easy part, the ability to stay consistent with producing content every single week or month becomes more of a challenge. One of the easiest ways to ensure you stay consistent is to try to tie in your podcasts with your blog posts and the other content assets you are producing.
Doing so will allow you to work on repurposing content rather than having to create new content from scratch. Here are other podcast ideas to help get you going:
- Interview industry experts.
- Read snippets from other blogs or books that are relevant to your industry and then extrapolate with your own thoughts.
- Discuss specific problems in your industry and draw you audience engagement to create a series every month.
Over to You
As you continue developing and distributing content to build awareness, know that it’ll all take time to see your desired results. Content in general is a long-term play and process. Approaching it as such will help you stay consistent with leveraging it to drive awareness.
Finally, don’t be afraid to test and promote as much as you can. Collecting enough data to see the type of content and the topics that are best supporting your awareness goals will help you continue creating engaging content.
