“You need to know which channels suit your audience and your business and how to reach your audience through those channels. Base your decisions on evidence, not assumptions.”
When it comes to content distribution, there is no one-size-fits-all solution. It varies with the business. You need to know which channels suit your audience and your business and how to reach your audience through those channels to get the results you are looking for. It’s all about understanding which channels are best for you.
In some ways, B2C marketing is easier than B2B marketing because you are able to speak directly to the consumer, who is often the buyer. B2B marketing is often more difficult because there may be many people you have to influence before you ever get a decision and the sales cycles are usually longer. A further issue is you’re trying to reach people within an organization who don’t want to make a wrong decision, because their job depends on getting it right. Finding those channels to reach the right people is often quite a challenge for businesses. It involves knowing where the audiences you need to reach go and what channels they use. It also involves testing and experimenting, but if your audience doesn’t tweet, you may not want to put things on Twitter.
In B2B marketing, it’s a long sales cycle that involves raising awareness, educating target audiences about why it’s good for them, and getting them to start thinking about the decisions they need to make until they reach that decision point.
You can use a number of strategies to ensure that your content is reaching the key audiences at the right time. Digital channels offer great opportunities and keyword research and search optimization are essential. Valuable content can be gated and you can build in measurements that allow you to
statistically break down the types of people using your content. There are both paid and unpaid exposure and you can experiment to find out which works best for your campaign. They often involve higher cost, so it comes down to maximizing the return on your investment and how much you are
willing to spend and working within your budget. The better the results, the more you can prove that it works and evidence brings the confidence in knowing which channels to pursue and which to drop. Making evidence based decisions wherever possible is critical to success.
This is an excerpt from 11 Experts on Using the Content Lifecycle to Maximize Content ROI. The eBook was generously sponsored by Aprimo.
