It is easy to get lost in the myriad of content marketing tips and strategies shared across the internet. To know what really works, one has to simply look at some of the biggest enterprise businesses online for the strategies that they use.
Businesses like Shopify, Drupal, Hubspot, and WordPress are similar in the sense that although they sell only one kind of software, it is used by customers across a range of different industries. A content marketing strategy that equally appeals to this diversified bunch is a great case study on what to do and how to do it.
Address your customers’ challenges
Your company blog does not always have to be about the product you sell or the industry your product belongs to. The content you create should strive to address the multitude of challenges and issues that your customers face in their businesses.
For example, Hubspot as a platform helps business users to execute their inbound marketing and sales strategies. But these are also users who may have trouble drafting a business plan or creating a high quality video. The Hubspot blog has to answers to such questions as well. The idea is that customers who benefit from Hubspot may also be looking for answers to questions relating to video production or drafting a business plan.
Creating content that caters to these topics helps draw such prospects from third party sources like Google or Facebook to your business website, and in turn, to the sales pipeline.
Uniquely target customer issues
Business blogs try to keep their content generic and applicable to the majority. The rationale behind this strategy is that a regular follower of your blog may not find such niche content relevant and this may reduce engagement among your blog subscribers. While this does make sense at the outset, it does not really work this way in the real world.
With over two million blog posts being published every single day, there are very few subscribers who religiously follow every blog post you write. By catering to very unique customer segments, you may uniquely appeal to multiple niches of customers.
Shopify executes this strategy quite well. Their article about selling photos online discusses the various copyright licenses that appeal to this audience. At the same time, their article for food entrepreneurs deals with FDA guidelines, expiry dates and other relevant information. This strategy of uniquely targeting customers helps Shopify be relevant to these various customer groups without having to position their brand differently.
Content diversification
A large chunk of marketing budget is routinely spent on Adwords and SEO alone. While this is not technically an incorrect strategy, focusing merely on these two channels leaves a lot of money on the table. This is because not all of your target prospects are actively seeking out your product. It is important to diversify your content and appeal to potential customers who are not in the market as well.
In short, every piece of content you create must specifically meet one of these three objectives – link building, social virality, or conversion. That is, instead of focusing only on SEO (link building), your content must also bring social media users or help convert your visitors into customers. This diversification in content is something each of these large enterprises executes flawlessly.
Give customers what they want
Content is generally used to refer to the text, images, or videos that you create for your blogs and social media channels. Content marketing goes beyond this and may refer to other forms of content that help your customers engage and come to your business.
One way that Oracle does this is through the tools section. Customers to their Oracle marketing cloud need help with tasks like marketing appraisal or calculating ROI of their investments. The Oracle tools section helps customers with these issues and is a lucrative bait to bring in new visitors as well as turn these visitors into leads or customers.
Conclusion
These are just some of the tactics that enterprise level businesses use to convert leads into customers. By applying these strategies to your own business, you will begin to be able to optimize your content to appeal to both potential customers and current customers.