5 Steps to Content Marketing Success from Mixtur Interactive

five steps to content marketing success

a practical guide for B2B marketers

What is content marketing and why should we do it?
The world has changed for B2B marketers. Gone are the days where we as
best practices guide

marketers controlled who got what message and when. Today our prospective
buyers use the Internet to get information from peers, associations, media and
other third parties—think search engines, Blogs, community sites, social networks
etc. They have specific business problems that they need to solve and are looking
to minimize their risk when choosing both the type of solution and the vendor that
will provide it.

...successful content marketing takes strategic
planning, smart execution and a sustained effort.

If we want to play in this new world we must create content that draws prospects to
us, and place it exactly where they are looking. Sounds simple right? Well although
it’s not rocket science, successful content marketing takes strategic planning, smart
execution and a sustained effort. This paper will guide you through the five key
steps you need to follow to ensure your content marketing efforts fill the sales
funnel and drive bottom-line revenue.

Types of content
It’s not just about whitepapers:
@ Print: Digital:
• Tips and tricks • Blog posts • Videos
• How to guides • Web pages • Presentations
• Best practices • Webinars • Photos
guides • Enewsletters • Infographics
• Things to avoid • Online courses • Tutorials
• Category guides • Widgets (e.g. ROI
• Analyst reports calculators)
• Survey results • RSS feeds
• Product brochures • EBooks
and datasheets • Articles
The many forms of content. • Case studies • Podcasts

@Mixtur | 206.965.9505 | mixtur.com | 1


Step 1 – Determining the right content
Before you can determine what content you need to create, you must first understand
the stages of your sales cycle, the target audiences you need to address and the
problems they are trying to solve. Once you’ve determined those factors you can build
out a content matrix to guide your creation and distribution path.

Before you can determine what content you need
to create, you must first understand the stages of
your sales cycle, the target audiences you need to
address and the problems they are trying to solve.

To illustrate the process let’s imagine that we’re selling CRM software to enterprise
organizations. We’ve determined that a sales administrator is usually the primary
person to research solutions and act as the product champion. Someone from the
IT department is involved to ensure that any solution chosen is compatible and
secure, and purchase approval is with the VP of sales.
Marketo’s definition of content
marketing In the table on the next page the columns are the stages of the sales cycle, and
“The creation and sharing of content
the rows represent the buyers we need to address. The matrix is populated with
for the purpose of promoting a examples of content elements required to generate awareness and leads, move
product or service”1 prospects through the sales cycle, and maximize retention and revenue. Your matrix
will probably breakdown the sales cycle into more discreet stages and may involve
more players, but our example will give you the framework you need to get started.



Sample Content Matrix
Awareness Consideration Decision Retention
Research category, define Short list vendors, evaluate Contract and pricing negotiations, Ensure usage and satisfaction
requirements, research vendor vendor solutions make purchasing decision to retain customers and
landscape increase revenue

• Best practices for sales • Product demos and • Contracts and licensing • Product tips and tricks (email
Researcher / Champion
Sales Admin

automation (downloadable presentations (Web site, shared series, Blog posts)
• Pricing schedules
PDF, shared presentation, presentation and video)
• Completed RFP • Product news (email, Blog posts)
Webinar content, podcast, Blog
• Product collateral and Web • Customer-only Blog / forum
post series)
content
• Analyst report on state of • Customer satisfaction
• ROI calculator (Web site) surveys
CRM industry (downloadable
PDF, Webinar content) • Free trial • Comprehensive online help
• Buyer’s guide to • One on one Web or face to and FAQs
face meeting
enterprise CRM solutions • Customer case studies
(downloadable PDF) • Tutorials
• Industry specific case studies
(downloadable PDF, shared
presentation, shared video)

• CRM and the secure • Completed RFP • New integration guides (PDF)
Influencer
IT

enterprise (Downloadable
• Tech news bulletins (email
PDFs, Web content, Webinar)
series)
• Integration guide (Web • Customer only technical
content, downloadable PDF)
forum
• Deployment options (Web
content, downloadable PDF)

• Key drivers to sales • Sales executive roundtable • Contracts and licensing • Customer case studies
Approver
VP of Sales

productivity (downloadable (Sponsored Webinar-invite only)
• Pricing schedules • Custom ROI analysis
PDF, presentation, Webinar
• Custom ROI piece • Completed RFP
content, Blog post series,
podcast series) • Custom demo
• Industry specific case studies
(downloadable PDF, shared
presentation, shared video)



As you’ll see in the sample matrix on the previous page, many of the content ideas are
produced in different formats, so you can maximize the investment in your material
and distribute it in as many relevant places as possible—more about this in step 3.
8 is the magic number
As you develop your matrix, think about how each piece can be used. For example,
B2B marketers on average use 8 can a piece be used for generating new leads as well as for nurturing existing leads?
content marketing tactics

2011 study from CMI and Marketing
Profs 2 Step 2 – Making your content great
Whether your content is a best practices white paper or a product demo, always
strive to make your content relevant, useful and of high quality. When you are
creating content for the awareness phase of the sales cycle you should also follow
these guidelines, especially if you plan to use a piece for lead generation:
• Meet an untapped need – deliver content that uniquely helps
educate the reader.
• Be credible – remember our target buyers have a lot at stake
55
Lead capture
when it comes to recommending and choosing B2B solutions,
so your content must be credible. Building credibility can take
several forms, from backing up statements with published
We all want to generate leads, but statistics, using respected third party authors or citing other
how do you decide what content to respected organizations or individuals in the field.
put behind a registration page? If • Don’t do a sales pitch – there is a time and a place for a sales pitch,
your content meets these guidelines
and it’s not in an early stage awareness lead generation piece.
then there’s a good chance people
will register for it:
‰‰ Relevant Step 3 – Making the most of your content
‰‰ Useful
Developing great content is a time-consuming process, so it’s key that you give your
‰‰ High quality content ‘legs’ and make it work as hard as possible for you. Let’s use an example from
‰‰ Meets an untapped our content matrix in step 1. Our imaginary CRM company determined that a good
need
awareness piece for the champion buyer role was on the theme “Best practices for
‰‰ Credible sales automation.” Now some sales administrators may prefer to download and
‰‰ Not promotional read a piece, while others would prefer to listen to a podcast. Re-purposing your
Remember to optimize your lead content into different platforms, will help you satisfy the needs of different users
capture page, and keep the form and maximize your reach. Here’s how we can make the most of the content that
short (only collect what you really, was developed for that piece:
really need).
• Downloadable PDF – available behind registration on the
company’s Web site, and for use in content syndication programs
(see step 4 for more on this).



• Webinar – create a Webinar version of the same content, featuring
the author, customers or third party speakers. Use as a lead
nurturing tool and make the archive available behind registration.
• Presentation – upload a presentation version (may or not be
the same content as the recorded Webinar) to sharing sites like
PRESE

SlideShare and Prezi.
NTATIO

• Blog – create a series of Blog posts on key aspects of the content.
AR
BIN

BL ST Offer the downloadable PDF to generate leads.
WE

A
N

OG C
POD • Podcast – create an audio-only version of the content leveraging
the Webinar or presentation content you have created.
PDF
Remember that your content has a limited shelf life. Certain types of content lend
themselves to being refreshed and re-published, so you’re not starting from scratch.
Others only have a short time in the sun—so make sure you give your content ‘legs’
while it is still fresh and relevant.
Give your content ‘legs.’

Step 4 – Getting the word out
Making sure any content you create is optimized from an organic search perspective
is very important, but there is much more you can do to promote your content.
Here are some ideas both paid and unpaid for getting the word out.
• Content syndication – this is where you pay a third party
publisher to promote your content, usually for a fixed price per
lead. Before embarking on this or any other paid promotional
keyword
opportunity you need to have a good understanding of what you
Content and SEO can afford to pay for a lead (more on measuring ROI in step 5).
To get the most organic search • Paid search – use relevant content as offers in your paid search
benefits from your content, make programs, driving respondents to an optimized landing page for
sure you optimize both the actual lead capture.
content for your targeted keywords, • Online advertising – content offers can be used in targeted
as well as any metadata items like
banner advertising campaigns using ad networks or through
image tags or tags on third party sites
deals with individual publishers. Most ads are placed on a CPM
where you post your content.
(cost per 1,000 impressions) basis, but some publishers offer CPC
(cost per click) or CPL (cost per lead) pricing models. This can
be a good way to kick off awareness of a piece, but you have to
understand the metrics behind the pricing models to determine if
this is a wise spend.



26
• Social media – let your social media contacts know about your
new content (this includes traditional media and the Blogosphere
of influencers that you follow). Post on your Blog site, and don’t
forget to Tweet! Make sure all of your employees post a link to the
content on their LinkedIn page, and promote in relevant groups
and on your company’s LinkedIn page.
26 is the average % of B2B marketers’ • Comment fodder – as you do your rounds of the Bloggers that
total budgets that are allocated to you follow, be sure to mention and link to your content where
content marketing efforts
relevant using the comment functionality.
2011 study from CMI and • Promote on your Web site – this seems obvious, but most
MarketingProfs 2 companies don’t do a good job of promoting their content
on their own Web property. Maximize the piece’s exposure by
promoting it with links or banners on all relevant pages.
• Social sharing – add social sharing icons to your content to
encourage sharing. Eccolo media found in their 2011 B2B Technology
Collateral Survey3, that adding social sharing icons actually changed
people’s perception of the content in a positive way.
• Non-paid channels – look for channels where you can upload
your content, and don’t stick with just one site per channel.
Upload your photos or images, videos, presentations, podcasts on
“...adding social sharing icons actually all relevant sites and make sure you tag them with your keywords
changed people’s perception of the to facilitate search.
content in a positive way.”
There are many other tools and channels for getting the word out about your
content, including those mentioned in this Mashable article by Shane Snow. 4

Step 5 – Measuring ROI to determine if it’s working
Content marketing is not free by any means. Even if you don’t incur the hard costs
of external authoring or paid promotion, you need to account for the internal
hours spent creating and managing your content marketing program. That
means that tracking and analyzing return from your content marketing initiative
is as important as any other marketing campaign. But there are some challenges
to really understanding ROI, as often a prospect is touched in several different
ways, one of which may be a content piece. That argument can be made for any
marketing initiative these days however, as it is rare that sales or even leads are
really a result of only one touch. The effects of viral sharing of content compound
the difficulty of coming to a hard ROI number for content marketing. That being
said here are some things that you can and should track:



Top content marketing metrics • Visits and leads by content piece – where you control the landing
measured by B2B marketers page and form, you can track Web visits and leads by incoming
URL by appending unique campaign codes. Create these unique
Web traffic 58% codes for each placement of the content that you would like
to track, including paid search campaigns. These codes can be
Sales lead quality 49% passed into a lead record database using hidden fields, along with
a code for the content piece itself. Setup goal tracking in your
Direct sales 41% Web analytics platform and you’ll be able to see visits and lead
conversions by each source you’ve assigned a campaign code to.
Sales lead quantity 41% If your lead form is integrated with your CRM or marketing
automation system, then those fields can be passed into that
Qualitative feedback
from customers 40% application, and depending on the system you should be able to
run a report that gives lead status by campaign.
SEO ranking 40%
• Leads from content syndication – leads from these campaigns
Inbound links 30% are easy to track as they are normally sent from the publisher in
a spreadsheet. You just then need to assign unique campaign
2011 study from CMI and coding to those leads as they enter your CRM or marketing
MarketingProfs 2 automation system.
• Social sharing statistics – adding a ‘share this’ widget to your
content will give you insight as to how often your content is
being shared, and to which platforms.

Even though in most cases you can’t just attribute a closed sale to one content
piece, by following the tips above you at least get a good idea as to which pieces
are creating the most interest and leads, and are making a contribution to sales.
e
ur
as

In for the long haul
me

ate I hope this paper has given you a useful framework to plan, execute and measure
cre
your content marketing initiatives. One last comment I’d like to make on this
ote
pro te

subject is that the real fruits of your labor only truly become apparent over time,
prom
asure

as content gets shared and distributed across your universe. To be successful your
create

mo
me

sha content marketing, social marketing and other inbound efforts like SEO must be
inextricably linked. Through this concerted effort you will see over time higher
re

e lead volumes and lower cost per lead over traditional outbound efforts. If we can
shar manage the sales funnel effectively, these metrics should lead to what we really
care about – more sales at a lower cost.



Contact Info Need help with your content marketing?
Mixtur Interactive, Inc. Planning and executing an ongoing content marketing program can be a little
900 Winslow Way East, Suite 100 overwhelming. Mixtur is here to help with any aspect of your content marketing
Bainbridge Island, WA 98110-2451 initiatives—from planning the pieces you need, through to authoring, distribution
U.S.A. and ROI analysis. Our seasoned team of B2B marketing professionals is experienced
1 866.268.3994 (USA & Canada) in producing all types of content including: white papers, product demos, case studies,
podcasts, videos, Webinars, product collateral and Web site content. Call us today on
1 206.965.9505 (voice) 1-866-268-3994 to discuss how we can help you create content that gets results.

1 206.965.9507 (fax)
Resources and citations
clientservices@mixtur.com
1
“Creating content that sells” – Marketo
2
“B2B Content Marketing:2012 Benchmarks, Budgets & Trends” – Content Marketing
Institute and MarketingProfs
3
“Eccolo Media 2011 B2B Technology Collateral Survey Report” – Eccola Media
4
“6 Turnkey Tools for Content Distribution” – Mashable

“100 inbound marketing content ideas” – Hubpsot

“How to brainstorm content that rocks and converts” – Hubspot

© 2012 Mixtur Interactive, Inc. All rights reserved.
Mixtur, the Mixtur logo, and all other logos are
trademarks or registered trademarks of Mixtur
Interactive, Inc. or of their respective owners.


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5 Steps to Content Marketing Success from Mixtur Interactive

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5 Steps to Content Marketing Success from Mixtur Interactive