Edit Introduction: Content marketing is a cost-effective way to acquire customers. For TOB companies, content marketing is more like an investment. The earlier the company makes layout, the better it has. It is not uncommon for B2B content marketing to be "self-entertained". So how should we avoid this phenomenon and achieve real viral spread? Next, let’s take a look at the detailed analysis of the author of this article.
Note: The content of this article is what I recently shared in several Martech marketing practical training camp communities.
1. Content marketing in the eyes of a media person, market,
The word content marketing has been very popular over the years, and everyone probably hears the degree of calluses in their ears. Why has content marketing been mentioned by more and more people in recent years and increasingly "attention"?
- This is actually related to the company's real anxiety.
In the mobile Internet environment, the audience's time is covered by different applications, segmented media, and interest tribes, and the content and media are increasingly fragmented.
wants the same voice, and the same expression covers all media channels, it becomes an impossible task; coupled with the information cocoon caused by algorithm recommendation, users' attention is more distracted. Whether it is TOB or TOCh companies, the cost of obtaining traffic and attracting user attention is getting higher and higher.
In this case, content marketing, as a relatively low cost, more flexible form, easy to accept, and creative, is becoming more and more popular among enterprises.
So, what are we talking about when we are talking about content marketing?
According to the concept of the American Institute of Content Marketing: Content marketing is a strategic marketing method that attracts and retains a clear target audience by creating and distributing valuable, relevant and continuously coherent content, and ultimately drives profitable user behavior.
The concept of the American Institute of Content Marketing, in my opinion, is more of a concept given from the perspective of the audience.
In fact, if content wants to achieve marketing effects, it cannot be separated from the "media" communication medium. I personally think that content marketing can be simply split into 2 words, one is "content" and the other is "marketing". What is the essence of
content?
For the marketing department, all strategies, activities, plans, etc. are content. The essence is to convey your products and brand concepts to users and "sell" your "thoughts" to users. The dissemination of ideas must require "media".
What is the essence of marketing?
is to achieve our goals by discovering and meeting consumer needs.
Therefore, to understand content marketing from the perspective of media and audience, I think content marketing is based on insight into the target audience, continuously creating and disseminating valuable content in a specific medium, thereby solving and meeting audience needs.
Although more and more TOB companies are talking about content marketing and pay more and more attention to content marketing, they still do not do well in actual execution.
, for example, poor content interaction, poor self-communication, and low content reading volume, let alone rely on content to acquire customers.
Many TOB companies are indeed doing content, but most of the content produced is "self-satisfaction". Why does this happen? What content should we produce to have both traffic and sales?
is shared with you in the second part below.
2. In the TO B field, how to avoid self-interest in content marketing?
1. Making content like making products
For TOB companies, the biggest challenge is to continuously create attractive and effective content. How to establish a sustainable content creation mechanism? How to spread your high-quality content and amplify the communication effect? After I worked on the product and operation for a while, I suddenly found that there are many similar methodologies in making products and content. Let’s take a look at the product production flow chart summarized by Yu Jun, the "Father of Baidu Tieba".
Yu Jun believes that from ancient times to the present, all products can be divided into three aspects: demand, production and sales. Before making content, it is necessary to disassemble the issues of "demand", "production" and "sales" like product managers.
The starting point of all products comes from user needs. If the product manager ignores user needs and works behind closed doors, then any link in the product will not be of much significance. The same is true for applying these knowledge to content marketing.
treats content as a product, which means that content marketing also requires going through user demand research - content production - content dissemination - data analysis - content iteration, etc., which are consistent with the underlying thinking of the product.
2. Content should highlight user value
Just mentioned that content and products are actually a good pair of CPs. To do a good job in content marketing, the first step is naturally to understand and understand your user needs.
may be due to my career. When I was doing TOB content marketing, I followed many accounts in the TOB industry, such as Weibo, Douyin, Zhihu, etc. I found that many companies almost regard their official accounts as their own land. They send their bosses’ speech today, send their company to win awards tomorrow, and send company activities the day after tomorrow...
Think about it, are these contents your users want to see? Do these internal affairs of the company have a half-cent relationship with your users? Users pay attention to you, which is what unique value you can bring to him, such as: your company's main business cloud products or services.
Then you have to figure out who your user will be? Who are the decision makers, users, participants, and influencers who will buy your company’s products? Have the multi-maintained user portraits of these people's age, gender, education level, hobbies, purchasing ability, Internet access, daily active locations, etc. been established? What are the ways and scenarios you have to reach with these users? What content will users of different categories need?
Once the content producer starts to think about these issues in advance, a content product manager is born, and at the same time, he also clarifies the positioning of the content.
Here I recommend a thinking tool for TOB SaaS enterprise content strategy in a vertical field that I was once responsible for, that is, the user thinking canvas. This thinking model is actually similar to the process of marketing STP.
With the help of this user thinking canvas, you can clearly let you know what content should be done and what differentiated value can be conveyed to users.
shows you a set of data below. This is a set of reading and sharing data after I joined a TOB SaaS company in early April of a certain year, based on the user thinking canvas model, and adjusted the content positioning of WeChat public account.
It should be noted that at that time, the TOB company's official account had less than 9,000 fans, and the average number of readings for a single historical article was not more than 500. After adjustment, the average daily reading rate exceeded 8% from April to June of that year, and the average monthly reading rate exceeded 5.41%. The total monthly reading volume increased by 308% compared with the same period in history.
3. After building the TOB content framework from the perspective of user value
has clarified the content marketing strategy, the most difficult part is execution, that is, the tactical level. I remember that a chief digital officer of Coca-Cola once said: What’s different about us is the execution of the strategy, not the strategy itself. What content should the
TOB industry do to reflect user value?
can generally divide the content into the following 4 categories, and you can also understand that this is one of the concepts for building content frameworks.
For most TOB companies, unless a large group company or foreign company will have many personnel to do content marketing, it would be nice if a small and medium-sized startup company could have one person to do content.
Therefore, after the above content framework is built, everyone also needs to focus on content arrangement and time.
Here you can refer to the 70-20-10 rules summarized by Coca-Cola Company . For example, we can spend 50% of the time to create continuous content that is valuable to users, and this part of the content accounts for 70%.
The above mentioned contents are provided based on user value. As for how to write various contents, such as how to write titles to improve the opening rate? Details such as how to set a "hook" to attract more users to retain funds are related to writing skills, so I will not go into details here.
3. How to amplify the communication effect of TOB content marketing? Since
content is a product, it also needs to be promoted and "sold". Even if it seems to be very contagious, it needs to be promoted even more.
According to research by the American Content Marketing Association, generally speaking, the funds spent on content dissemination are 3.5 times the funds spent on content creation, which will increase as the company expands in size.
So, how should you "market" you have worked hard to create?
1. Media selection: Multiple channels,
. If you want your content to be spread more widely, it is nothing more than choosing as many media as possible.
Rich and willful local tycoon companies are not within our scope of discussion. For most entrepreneurial TOB companies, we still have to be careful and spend a penny in half, so we must consider the media delivery channel.
Generally speaking, media channels can be divided into 4 categories in the figure below:
. How to choose the above four media channels to amplify the effect of content marketing?
Here we can follow the "5W" Lasville program in communication theory: Who → Says What → What channel through (In Which Channel) → Who （To Whom)→What effect can be achieved (With what effects) to think and choose, that is, to reverse your content promotion channel based on the purpose you want to achieve.
For example: company heavyweight product iteration information or financing information, what you want to convey to the outside world is nothing more than the business value, product value, and brand value of your company. At this time, you must hope that more and more audiences of your potential users, partners, investors, media, etc., the better you know about this information.
You cannot just use 0wend media at this time, but you also need to use Paid media, Earned media, and Shared Media linkage to create momentum.
Of course, if you consider it from the perspective of product-effectiveness integration, you also need to consider whether you have your target users in all the media channels you choose? Which media platforms may have more users? Which media platforms are more active?
Finally, it integrates this information, arranges the media combination and performs large-scale, batch and rhythmic dissemination.
Speaking of this, there is a small reminder and suggestion to share with you:
1) First: Your product is also a media Introduction
Many TOB companies have missed a key medium - that is, your product. Many people may find it strange. How can the product become a medium? But, think about Alipay's open screen page, task completion sharing page, Meituan's red envelope page, etc. Are these products themselves a communication medium?
So, you can also combine your own company's products to think about which functions or scenarios have communicable attributes. If you use this well, you will have a small surprise!
2) Second: Take the initiative to deal with Earned media
First, sort out the media list closely related to your industry and users, as well as key media positions and roles, such as the research and reporting directions of editor-in-chief, deputy editor, reporter, and editor, and have a clear idea of the content they are interested in and good at.
For example, my former boss has a key technology that is RPA. I will ask journalists who write the most professional and continuous research in this field to talk about these contents, arouse the other party's interest in reporting, and then take the initiative to report our company's products and technologies.
Second, before the end of each year, take the initiative to contact the media you want to cooperate with, understand the other party's topic selection direction in the new year, and then combine it with your own company In the new year's product, technology and brand direction, we can think about which topics we can cooperate with the other party to enter the other party's topic selection range in advance.
3) Third: The content that is disseminated can be reused to a certain extent, but don't think about completely reusing the same content on different media
McLuhan once put forward the view that "media is information" in the book "Understanding Media". He believes that: different media, the message conveyed is very different.
For example, the same short story is made into a movie or written into a novel, and the information conveyed and focused on by novels and movies is different.Therefore, if your content is spread through different channels, try to make some fine-tuning of the content according to different media tones.
2. Audience perspective: Achieve "crazy" effect based on the weaknesses of human nature
Social currency, incentives, emotions, publicity, practical value, and story 6 elements are the six principles summarized by the book "crazy" to make everything go viral - STEPPS.
He believes that it is the role of these factors that make the dissemination content including stories, news, information, as well as products, ideas, text messages and videos contagious, forming a deep-seated reason for their widespread dissemination.
for TOB content marketing, because of the diversity of user groups, there are several of the six principles introduced in "The Madness" that may not be applicable.
In my opinion, if the TOB content marketing content truly "touches" a certain emotion of the user, it solves or dispels some of the user's concerns; realizes the transmission of product and brand value, or has value to the user, even if the effect of "crazy spread" cannot be achieved, it is a successful content marketing.
At present, more cases that everyone has seen are still cases where TOC content is spreading wildly in the circle of friends. There are very few cases where TOB content can break through the user circle and achieve crazy spread. However, not now does not mean that there will be no future.
According to the content data analysis I have done before, for TOB content marketing, if your content can be spontaneously promoted by more users, it can be achieved by combining two basic human weaknesses, namely: greed and vanity.
It is better to "tempt it for profit" in content marketing in response to human greed. For example, in response to the interests and hobbies of the target users, users are encouraged to participate in forwarding and giving gifts, courses and other material or spiritual rewards.
targets human vanity, and can publish some valuable information or create a high-end image of your own products, so that users will feel that this forwarding can make themselves look wiser, aesthetic, classy, stylish, and face-saving.
also recommends a tip that I often use in my work. I believe that many TOB industries will often hold offline meetings and invite some guests to share.
At this time, we can introduce personal imprints on the pictures and H5 invitations, add the guest's name, title and photo, and supplemented with words such as "sinvitation, strong invitation, big names, big bosses, peak duels, high-end dialogues", which will make the invited person feel very faced and automatically forward.
3. Some thoughts on the effect of TOB content marketing
1) What exactly does the effect of content marketing evaluating?
In TOB practice, it was found that some companies in the industry evaluated content marketing positions as the number of clues to MQL and SQL, while some companies evaluated the number of articles reads, forwardings, exposures, etc.
To be honest, I personally do not agree with these two assessment methods.
In my opinion, it is impossible to use rigid indicators such as MQL and SQL to evaluate, nor can it be used to evaluate, such as excessively flexible vanity indicators such as reading number and reading volume. Instead, it should adopt a combination of rigidity and flexibility, a combination of qualitativeness and quantitativeness.
After all, storytelling is the essence of content marketing, and telling a good story requires both technology and art.
The results brought by a good story are both emotional and rational for the audience. They not only impress the target audience, but also create persuasiveness and arouse users' desire to buy or participate in behavior.
Therefore, what can bring sales or clues through content marketing is effective; what can bring exposure and display to the brand is also effective.
2) Is the core of content marketing content or communication?
In many TOB marketing departments, many people are confused about the fact that their content is too small. Except for the forced forwarding of internal employees in the unit, the rest of the users are unwilling to forward.
causes this phenomenon in many ways. The most fundamental one is that the content you create has no value to the target user, and the content cannot be self-propagated. You can only rely on the leader’s “command” to force everyone to forward it.
In addition, the content in the TOB field is too entangled and the number of readings is not very meaningful.For TOC products and enterprises, the higher the number of readings, the more traffic, and the more purchases it can generate.
But the high number of readings of TOB will not bring the same effect, because behind this number of readings, it may never be your target customer. Therefore, for the communication effect of TOB content, the key is to provide valuable content to target users, and the more accurate the audience, the better.
Of course, what I express here does not mean that TOB content does not need to be disseminated or considered reading count at all. I hope everyone can understand this. Based on my own personal practice, I talked about the process of TOB content from STP to 4P (content planning, content production, content promotion, content promotion, and content improvement Perfect) from the perspectives of media and audience, as well as how to avoid self-stimulation in the content in this process to bring "traffic" and "sales" to enterprises. I hope it will inspire you somehow.
Finally, I would like to share with you a screenshot of the content marketing effect made by my TOB SaaS company from February to March this year.
In this screenshot, new users continue to retain funds until June this year. If the average customer acquisition cost of SEM in the TOB industry is calculated at least 300 yuan per person, relying on content marketing to obtain 278 customers is equivalent to saving the company 83,400 yuan.
Of course, this is just a statistical data from a certain channel in our content marketing, which may not be worth mentioning to many companies, but what I want to express is that content marketing is indeed a cost-effective way to acquire customers.
In short, for those who do TOB content marketing, this is destined to be a long and arduous road, because it requires a person to write for years and rely on his eyes, brain, physical strength, and writing skills to produce efficiently in a limited time.
For TOB companies, content marketing is more like an investment, and the earlier the company makes layout, the better it has. Time will make these contents produce compound interest value and bring continuous returns to the company.
Author: Grace, editor-in-chief of the Central Media reporter for 10 years, has worked in B2B and B2C products, Wang He Operating Miao. He is good at connecting products, operations and markets through content marketing to increase user traffic product sales; he once relied on content marketing and other market operations, and helped a TOB SaaS company in a vertical field obtain more than 50,000 MQL items within six months.
This article was originally published by @Grace. Everyone is a product manager. Reproduction of
without permission is prohibited. The title image is from Unsplash and is based on the CC0 protocol.
