Content is King in B2B Demand Generation

Personalised, Relevant Content

Things have moved on considerably in the last 10 years and creating ‘stickiness‘ on your site is about delivering content relevant to the visitor and personalised to his/ her needs. Its form – interactive/static; flash video; Pdf; web text and graphics; – needs to be pertinent to the delivery of the content and not just ‘whizzy’ for its own sake.

In B2B, ,,demand generation is embracing the concept of marketers as publishers and the need to put content at the heart of your customer engagement strategy, because relevant content is now tied into the nurturing process that marketing automation platforms like Eloqua and Genius support. Companies such as Avitage are at the forefront of recognising the need, and providing support for, a content publishing strategy. Ardath Albee writes extensively about this in her Blog and I’d recommend both sites for background on the subject.

By combining unique visitor data, which tracks pages visited, with great content and savvy form design, you can now create a triggered program of interaction with visitors, which increases click-through rates and hence engagement. Marketing Sherpa provide an example here. There are also some great tips  on MarketingProfs (need to be a member).

Key to Complex Sales

As marketing inevitably moves more and more on-line, and both passive and dynamic digital channels drive people to your site(s), the range of skills required of marketing executives must keep up. Good content is integral to the complex B2B sales cycle and drives the capture-nurture-convert-close loop which marketing must effectively support to drive revenue and align with Sales.