As a B2B marketer, do you worry about creating content that connects with the right customers? Do you feel your objectives are not being delivered to the target audience through proper content planning?

Content marketing answers all your queries in order to deliver marketing solutions, meet business objectives, aim target audience and use the right marketing platforms to deliver the precise and tailor made content. It is an integral part of the much bigger inbound marketing process.

The primary objectives of having a good content marketing plan

1.   Drive product awareness
2. Attract potential customers
3. Engage customers in brand building activity
4. Retain customers for a long term relationship

In short, content marketing is the technique of creation, publishing and distribution of relevant content to drive brand awareness, attract, engage and retain customer with clearly defined objectives solely aimed at the target audience. Content marketing assures information access, deliverability and awareness through various channels and with such a process in place, target audience is always informed about your product/services. This is highly essential today where the prospect is information savvy and needs to know exactly what they are getting for their dollars worth.

Benefits of  Content Marketing

Content marketing is the most widely accepted promotional tool to reach target audiences through cost effective methods. Marketers or a businesses are required to invest much in sharing revenue, spending time and invest in planning to get the most of content marketing.

Some of the benefits of content marketing are :

• Uphold Trust –Earning trust from customer is the first step for a marketer in brand building process and content pieces are incredibly good at this process.
• Target the right audience and convert them into customers– Aiming for the right audience will help you focus your marketing in the right direction which is generating revenue. Good market research helps in creating the right content and facilitates conversion of target audience into business customers
• Enable brand visibility in the market– Brand building will lead to earning credibility from customers just because the brand has been ‘visualized’ well by the customers. Hence it is highly essential to remain on top by making efforts to ensure brand visibility to reach the customer in the market. Brand recall is a very important thing today what with the deluge of marketing messages.
• Build strong customer relationships– Customers are the primary resource for business development. The key for long term success rate for a business is to retain customers and develop strong relationships in the ongoing process of growth. You can plan for strategies in developing customer relationships by offering more promotional campaigns, introductory offers, product discounts etc
• Increase customer purchasing power– When the prospect is made aware about your product/service through promotional campaigns and feedback, responses or queries are received about the product promotions. This is the best strategy to instill purchasing power in a customer.

Tools in content marketing

In order to execute a highly successful content marketing strategy, it is essential to reach out to customers through powerful tools. Creation, publishing and distribution of content plays an important role in engaging a customer to know about the product. Bridging awareness and inching closer to the prospect is your primary gain through tools of content marketing

Some of the prominent tools in content marketing in use by the marketers today are:

1. E Books
2. Whitepapers
3. Article writing
4. Blog writing
5. Social media
6. Video/Audio
7. Webinars
8. E-newsletters
9. Case studies
10. Press releases/ Updates
11. Presentations
12. Info graphics/ Web analytics
13. Images/Graphical representations… and much more

These tools can be used in the research process or pre- purchase phase. they can be put to best use by publishing it at an appropriate forum a customer usually visits like social media, webinars etc. But you should ensure that the prospect is satisfied with the information provided and leave no room for confusion.

This is Part 1 of a 2 part series. Watch out for part 2 where we will talk further about content marketing strategies and various methods used today.