In a crowded B2B market, you’ve got to give more to get more.
One of the most effective methods for earning the trust of potential customers is to offer quality content that is deeply useful. This is not an easy ask.
To create content that can serve a purpose for your potential customers – content that they are likely to engage with over and over again, and incorporate into their own business practices – you need to invest substantial time and energy. You may even be offering tools or advice for which you would usually charge. Are you giving away your trade secrets? Or are you embedding yourself into the very businesses you hope to land as clients?
So, who does it, and how? Let’s take a look at three effective marketing campaigns built around high-value content assets.
1. Deloitte’s tax@hand
Deloitte offers short, easy-to-read tax guides for dozens of countries and economic areas. They also publish tax news blog posts tagged and easily sorted by country – so clicking on Bahrain gives you access to summaries on Bahrain-specific topics, as well as posts related to the Middle East region and world tax news.
Collating and curating this knowledge is likely something Deloitte strives to do for its own employee knowledge base. Making it available to other tax professionals keeps these professionals in Deloitte’s orbit, returning again and again.
2. Atlassian’s The Agile Coach
The Agile Coach is a comprehensive overview of different approaches to Agile management and structure. It’s a valuable resource for those interested in self-training or training team members in how Agile works. And as one learns more about Agile and how best to implement it, gentle nudges make it clear that Atlassian products like Jira, Confluence and Trello can support Agile management best practices. The result? Win-win for Atlassian and those who want to implement Agile-based project management.
(Hubspot’s Academy gets a shoutout as well, for making obvious the ways in which their products can be best implemented through useful training guides.)
3. Ércule’s Content Strategy Optimization Guide
For you SMEs out there, don’t dismiss a give-more content marketing strategy as something only suited to major players with thousands of employees and deep pockets. Take the small content optimization agency Ércule, who recently published a template and guide for assessing and optimizing content.
The impressively thorough guide and downloadable template tool demonstrate the kind of detailed, results-driven work the agency is able to accomplish. And making the guide freely available not only endears the agency to content managers around the world, but makes them more likely to sign up for the small agency’s newsletter.
In effect, Ércule establishes itself as part of a conversation among those people (content managers) they most want to attract.
Give more to get more
These kinds of high-value campaigns do take a substantial investment. Time, money, knowledge – these are finite resources. However, high-value ‘content pillars’ can be blogged about, linked to, promoted on social media, be turned into webinars and more. Investing in and giving away high-value content can provide many content assets for your business and keep your firm top-of-mind for potential customers.
Jessica E. Brophy 