Your company brand is more than your logo and website. Your brand is your company’s identity. It’s how others perceive you. You can’t buy one, borrow one or steal one. You have to build it. You earn your brand over time. Your brand can be built by maintaining consistent one-to-one message communication and value delivery to your prospects and clients over an extended period of time. But if you rely on this alone, the progress of building and establishing your brand will be slow.

Is a blog a marketing tool or a sales tactic? The answer is yes. A blog that’s a forum for educational content that resonates with your target personas is both. Blogging has long been identified as a productive marketing tool. Blogging supports marketing’s objectives when its' content attracts new visitors to your website and helps convert those visitors to leads. However, if that’s the only function of your blog, then you’re missing out.      

Content creation can be a robust process depending on the amount of content you are publishing during a set timeframe. To keep your process organized and strategic (and to keep marketers sane), we’ve found a detailed content calendar is key. This post lists a few benefits of using a content calendar and a few items we think should be included on every content calendar to make it most efficient and beneficial.

Creating compelling B2B content is only half the battle when it comes to a solid content marketing strategy for your business. While your content must be grammatically correct, educational, formatted properly, and a good representation of your brand, it must also be strategically created following proven best practices that most inbound marketers follow. These tactics are what help ensure your content isn’t just interesting or nice to read, but ultimately driving prospects closer to doing business with you and taking some kind of action or next step.

When it comes to developing a strategic marketing plan or sales process, one of the first things we recommend any company to do is to get a clear and accurate understanding of their customers and prospects. What’s key here is that this profile (commonly called a Target or Buyer Persona) is based on research, not assumptions. Which means you’ll need to conduct some actual research (or hire a company like LeadG2 to do it for you). The most effective way of doing this is with a mix of online surveys and live interviews. The surveys allow for a large sampling size, while the interviews allow for a deeper dive and further understanding. You can dive a little deeper into what that target persona survey process might look like here, but for the sake of this article we’ll be focusing on what it is exactly that your Target Persona should tell you about your B2B prospects so that you can have better and smarter marketing, content, and sales conversations.

Here’s a question that we've received a few times from regular readers of our blog:

What would you say is the right number of blog posts a business should post each week?

Do you want me to build a house for you? Probably not. You could make sure I had everything I needed to build a beautiful house for you—lumber, bricks, nails, cement, pipes, wires, etc. You could even make sure that I had all the right tools—hammers, saws, ladder, etc. But you probably still wouldn’t want me to build your house. In fact, I can guarantee that even if you supplied me with all of the materials and tools needed to build a house, you would be terribly disappointed with two things. First, you would be disappointed with how long it took me to deliver the finished product. And second, you would be even more disappointed with the quality of that final product.

If you’re on the wrong road, driving faster won’t get you where you want to go. If you’re putting out the wrong kind of content, creating more of it won’t attract the prospects you need.

Good writing isn’t enough to fill your sales pipeline. To generate results, content has to be strategic.

Strategy helps you in many ways, but here are the top 5:

Are you asking your sales team to perform with one hand tied behind their back or blindfolded? Maybe you’re not hindering their ability to sell to that extreme, but many organizations are creating unproductive environments when they don’t provide their sales teams with the resources they need. Often the scarcest resource of all is content the sales person can use to at various stages of the sales process. Research indicates that sales reps can spend up to 30% of their day looking for or creating content (KnowledgeTree). It’s getting more and more challenging to capture the attention of a prospect; uncover a need and opportunity; demonstrate value; and maneuver through the increasingly complex decision-making processes of our prospects. Having the right content to share with a prospect in just the right format and at just the right time can be invaluable.         

For your content to resonate with your audience and get a response, they have to be able to identify with it. They have to feel that it applies to them. If your content is generic or sounds like it’s written to someone else, your prospects will keep clicking through the Internet.

How can you come up with content that not only matches who your target prospect is, but also where he or she is in the buyer’s journey? That’s what we’re going to dig into in this post.