SEPTEMBER 20189Content that makes up the tra-ditional marketing funnel including white papers, blogs, eBooks, webi-nars, and emailers, will have to be relooked, based on the intensity of the content. The intensity has to be higher and the artefact shorter. A four-page case study will no longer work. What will attract their atten-tion instead will be short-form ver-tical video, considering 80 percent of millennials choose to watch on-line video during the consideration phase of the buyer's journey. An IBM study of 700 millennial influencers of B2B purchasing de-cisions, found that this generation prioritises vendors who offer a great client experience. Content should match these experiences. Hexa-gon, an industrial IT solutions pro-vider used augmented reality (AR) to present their annual report and gave their investors a mind-blowing interactive experience. Content that is VisualThe future of B2B marketing is vi-sual. One of our clients, a large mul-tinational corporation, is stopping its print-only quarterly internal magazine and moving to an online weekly newsletter. The newslet-ter, which will take on an increas-ingly visual format, including links to videos, will digitally engage 250,000 employees. Today, 71 percent of marketers make use of visuals in their social media marketing campaigns. Vi-sual content grabs attention and makes a lasting impression. It even boosts text, which accompanies it. Buzzsumo research found that ar-ticles published with an image once every 75-100 words got double the number of social shares than those with fewer images. B2B content marketing needs to rethink how content can be por-trayed visually. Most C-Suite news-letters today, contain nothing more than curated content repurposed as a newsletter. What if the news-letter is reworked in the avatar of a master infographic? It would defi-nitely catch the attention of the target audience and make the de-sired impression on them. Content that is of High Quality and Frequency No longer does a B2B content strat-egy depend purely on the amount of content that is disseminated. Your content marketing strategy depends on high quality content dispersed with increased frequen-cy. This justifies why 85 percent of B2B marketers attribute high qual-ity content as a leading factor con-tributing to the organisations in-creased success over the past year. How then do you define quali-ty content--especially in the B2B space? Quality content is nothing but engaging content. And what can better engage your audience than content that comes from re-al-life experiences of employees, customers, suppliers, and distrib-utors? Great stories enhance your brand, nurture leads and work in tandem with your customer experience strategy. With an increasing number of B2B organisations implement-ing content marketing strategies, competition for an audience has become intense. Going by the 2018 B2B Content Marketing Bench-marks, Budgets & Trends survey, most marketers--80 percent of all respondents and 92 percent of the most successful content market-ers--agree that their organization is absorbed in building an audi-ence. In such a scenario, focussing on building the right content is the only way to achieve optimal marketing success. When it comes to B2B marketing, it's often assumed that a more rational and business-like approach works better in influencing clients because B2B content is created with emphasis on value, cost, and quality
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