It won’t have escaped your notice that content and b2b mobile marketing are hot topics right now, but did you know that content marketing is now the second largest component of digital marketing budgets?
Content creation and management are just behind b2b mobile marketing (which includes website mobile optimisation) as the biggest expenditures for companies. So what is content marketing?
Wikipedia describes it thus: Content marketing is any marketing that involves the creation and sharing of media and publishing content in order to acquire and retain customers. This information can be presented in a variety of formats, including news, video, white papers, e-books, infographics, case studies, how-to guides, question and answer articles, photos, etc.
It is marketing designed to pull potential customers towards your business by creating interest and trust in your brand in a friendly and informative manner – it is not hard sell, it’s about building relationships.
Although it’s a rapidly changing field, it’s no longer considered novel for a company to have a blog or be active across a host of social media channels. It’s the baseline. If your company’s content strategy is below-average, you run the risk of falling behind your competition. And the same is true if your website and email marketing campaigns aren’t mobile friendly.
With an estimated 30 trillion pages on the web, it’s hardly surprising that you can’t always find what you’re looking for on Google, Bing, or Yahoo, despite their best efforts. People are becoming more social in their buying habits, even in the B2B arena – it is claimed that more than 60% of B2B purchase decision makers and influencers use their smartphones to gather information when purchasing products or services and they look on everything from Google to YouTube, LinkedIn to Pinterest.
Given these factors, the importance of good content marketing produced on a regular basis becomes apparent. The more quality content you produce and distribute in the digital channels used by your target audiences, the greater the likelihood that you will build a strong brand presence that is trusted and that will draw customers to you.
It is said that video accounts for more than 50% of all mobile data, a figure that’s rising rapidly. As such, this represents a significant opportunity for marketers to reach their audiences with compelling and engaging video content. Any way that you can condense content into a video will increase engagement with your visitors, whether via testimonial, product explanation/instruction, how-to, corporate or safety videos etc.
In 2016, brands on the ball will move their SEO budgets from purely search engine to optimising around social media networks. This isn’t the beginning of the end for search engines, far from it, they won’t be going anywhere in a hurry. It does, however, represent a growing opportunity to gain favour amongst key target audiences.
Ownership of mobile devices is only going to grow. Because of this, it will be important for marketers to know what their audience is using each device for and how to adjust content based on this data. It will be important to know where your clients are hitting pain points during their cross-screen experience so you can tailor your communication platforms to best meet their needs.
If you’d like to discuss your content and mobile marketing strategies give Alan Myers a call on 0116 278 7788 or drop him an email…