The right content strategy to get ahead of your competitors in the Content Marketing game

HubSpot Marketing Benchmarks for Business Blogging Performance 2014

THE CONTENT RACE TO BECOMING AN ONLINE AUTHORITY

Acquiring traffic through Content Marketing relies heavily on search engines and on the volume of content they can index on a given website.

As more and more companies understand the importance of blogging (or publishing new content on a regular basis), the competition is going to be about who can produce the highest and most relevant density of content on a given topic in order to become the authority and rank on Google’s first page.

The challenge with producing more content, besides having the resources to do so, is to find the right content strategy to provide diversity of topics, relevance of content, and answer business requirements for conversion.

MOST EFFECTIVE CONTENT STRATEGIES FOR B2B & B2C AUDIENCES

For B2B & B2C companies, a suggested content strategy would be to produce:

• Utility content that answers as many questions your target audience has along their buyer’s journey related to your product and services. This requires of course to have map the buyer’s journey and surveyed your customers, or your sales team to understand what are the most common questions and concerns you need to address through content articles.
• Thought leadership content (that is also more easily shareable on social media) that educates and inspires and current and future trends.
• Storytelling content about your company (values and culture), your social responsible initiatives, interviews of your customers , your employees, and your suppliers, etc.
• Corporate content that communicates on new products and services, events you participle in, new hires, etc.

For B2B more specifically, you could add the following to the content to the mix:

• Reports, white papers, and case studies showcasing the company’s expertise and experience (this content could be “gated” requiring to sign up before downloading).
• Buyers guides and FAQ to help customer make decisions.
• Curated content sharing industry news & trends you think are relevant to your target audience.
• Webinars to discovers your products or services more in depth (requiring to sign up before participating).

For B2C more specifically, you could add the following content to the mix:

• storytelling articles about how you select your products, your quality control process, about how you care about the products or services you sell.
• curated content related to lifestyle, entertainment, product related trends, celebrity news, other utility content.
• user generated content through contests, testimonials, guest bloggers.
• promotions, special deals, and contests.

IT’S A CONTENT VOLUME GAME

All this extra content will supercharge your ranking on search engines (SEO), boost engagement on Social Media (as you’re sharing more valuable content), and provide more content to publish in your newsletters. But, most of all it will put you ahead of your competitors in the Content Marketing game if you publish more than they do!

Check the HubSpot inbound marketing report benchmarking over 7,000 SMBs and illustrating how publishing a lot of content on a regular basis dramatically impacts website traffic and sales leads.