The Case
for Content
Marketing.
Ideas and tips for delivering
consistent, ongoing and
valuable information to buyers
and have them reward you with
their business and loyalty.

Attract more B2B prospects
and convert more leads with
compelling, contagious content.
Content marketing is communicating with
your customers and prospects without selling.
It is non-interruption marketing.
The strategy is to deliver consistent, ongoing
and valuable information to buyers and
have them reward you with their business
and loyalty.
The best part of developing relevant content
is that it has no shelf life. It works forever,
generating organic search results that lead
prospects to your content and conversion to
becoming customers of your business.
We hope you enjoy this collection of ideas
and tips from our team and some of the
best content marketing minds in the business.

Mark Schaefer
from {grow} Blog
What’s the difference between
a social media strategy
and a content marketing strategy?
At the core, there isn’t much difference .
Both are about connecting to relevant online customers,
serving them with helpful content, and encouraging
engagement in a way that ultimately leads to some interaction
and business benefit (like a sale).
But there is one big difference.
You might be able to fake a social media strategy by checking a box.
You can’t fake a content marketing strategy because there has
to be some thought and effort behind the content for anybody
to pay attention. You have to consistently create something
meaningful for any initiative to work.

Tell your story, naturally.
When you’re able to brush off the instinct to sell,
and just engage on a topic, it becomes much
more natural to tell your story in terms that resonate
with ideal customers.
Soon, industry expertise will become the fabric of your story.
Dave Morris
from MLT Ideas@Work Blog

Doug Kessler
from Guest Post on Marketing profs Blog
Co-founder and Creative Director for London-based Velocity
It's time for content marketers
to cut the ink-stained umbilical cord.
The Internet as we know it has been with us since the mid-nineties—
more than twenty years. Broadband has been with us for more than a decade.
The first iPhone is five years old, and the first iPad is three.
And yet...
Well, for content marketers, the new medium is the Internet, and though
we don't yet know what that really means... we can be pretty sure that
it's more than one big, distributed pile of text.
Gutenberg has left the building.
We're still producing dense
white papers that people
are supposed to download,
print out, and read.
The blog is the core of every
content marketing strategy
and the e-book eats up most
of our budgets.
Most infographics are really
just magazine-style editorial
graphics that are best
consumed on paper.
SlideShare is still full of
documents instead
of stories designed
for the screen.

Create content your prospects
need, want and use.
Contagious content is designed to gain the attention of
prospects you know about as well as helping to spread
your ideas to others who have yet to raise their hands
to identify themselves.
It's contagious because it's clearly focused on your
prospect's priorities and perspectives to quickly
promote recognition of value.
Marketers will capture prospect
interest—and keep it—because
their content is discussing
solutions to prospect problems
and offering insights and
knowledge they need.
Ardath Albee
from Marketing Interactions Blog

Billy Mitchell
from MLT Ideas@Work Blog
Customize the most helpful information
you can provide each buyer segment
for better B2B marketing content.
Forget all the things you want to say about your company.
What do the people you sell to need to know? Are you listening?
The more specific you can be with this information, the better.
You sell to a tough audience: business decision makers. So stop selling
them and start telling them.
Tell them the truth — that’s all they want to hear.
And never stop improving your customer relationship management —
the more you know about your customers, the more you can help them.

The formula for
content marketing success.
The very best way to get started with content marketing is to build
the ultimate FAQ, using customer questions. But which questions,
and how many? Use this three-component formula:
Jay Baer
from Convince & Convert Blog
1. What are your personas?
How many distinct buyers do
you have for your products
and services? Remember, to
be a persona, they need to be
distinctly different from one
another, with unique needs
and use cases.
2. What are your buying stages?
How many stages of the awareness,
consideration, interest, nurturing,
sales funnel/buyers’ journey do you
have in your company? Again, this is
often more complex in B2B.
3. What questions need to be
answered to move to the next stage?
To progress along the buyers’ journey,
prospective customers must have
distinct questions answered, either
overtly or tangentially. The number
and type of questions that need to
be answered will vary at each step
of the journey, but as a general rule
the questions are much more broad
at the beginning, and much more
specific near the end.
Essentially, your initial list of questions
can be generated using this formula:
Number of Personas
X Number of Buying Stages
X Number of Questions in Each Stage
= Number of Questions
You Need to Answer

Ellen Sheftel
from MLT Ideas@Work Blog
Defining engagement in
B2B content marketing.
In terms of B2B marketing, engagement should be viewed as a
marathon instead of sprint. For instance, engagement in B2B marketing
is not becoming an overnight social media sensation. Instead, it is
becoming an established thought-leader in the industry by commenting
on current conversations in order to slowly grow a following of quality.
We should also understand engagement to be a two-way street.
We want prospects to be viewing our website, downloading our content
and following us on social media. In order to keep prospects connected,
we must be actively providing them with a dynamic website,
compelling content and a fresh social media presence. By ultimately
doing these things, in time, our prospects have the potential to turn
into customers.

Miniskirt philosophy for content.
I get asked all the time what is the
right length for content?
Is there a magical length that a video
should be to go viral?
Can a blog post be too long or too short?
My answer is always the same and that is the
Miniskirt Philosophy as I like to call it.
Long enough to cover the essentials,
but short enough to keep it interesting.
Yes, it is that simple. You are welcome.
CC Chapman
from CC-Chapman Blog

Vann Morris
from MLT Ideas@Work Blog
The buying cycle and buyer personas
in B2B content marketing.
In developing buyer personas, remember their connection to the buying cycle,
as different stages lead to different content. Demographic information is helpful
in tailoring your message (e.g. a millennial vs. a baby boomer), but a buyer
persona doesn’t do its job if it isn’t helping develop content related to buying.
With someone early in the buying cycle, their issues are going to be more
top level than someone who is more knowledgeable. Develop content that
can educate them on the topic – and have it in multiple areas on your website
so they can find it. A chief factor in conversion optimization is not making
your prospect look for information – it has to be obvious.
Later in the buying cycle, they will need information that would come from
an initial sales meeting. How does your business work? What is your process?
What data (e.g. testimonials, case studies, award recognition, etc.) speaks to
your capabilities? What is your pricing? All of these things are important, and
the informed consumer can learn about it through your content. And if you
don’t have this information, they will find someone who does.
So when you build out your B2B buyer personas, be sure and remember
the point of them – delivering relevant content.

Break through the barriers
to enterprise content creation.
If it’s becoming a challenge to get your C-level executive to write the
thought leadership content you need for your corporate storytelling efforts,
remember that, while some CEOs may love to write, nearly all of them
like to talk. Try capturing their insight and ideas using a more conversational
format; for example, interview them using Skype and record the conversation.
Your content editors can then turn the resulting audio (or video) and
transcripts into multiple content marketing pieces (e.g., blog posts,
white papers, etc.). Or, if the recorded content is high quality, you can even
use it in its original format as the basis of a podcast. Even if your CEO isn’t
available to be interviewed and is unwilling/unable to write an article,
ask if he or she would be willing to answer a few questions via an email.
In other words, don’t block the content marketing process by trying to
force your executives and staff members into doing something they aren’t
comfortable with — there are plenty of other ways to generate effective
content marketing.
Joe Pulizzi
from Content Marketing Institute Blog

Glenn Taylor
from MLT Ideas@Work Blog
Knowing your clients creates compelling
B2B content marketing.
When was the last time you did a deep dive on your clients’ needs, wants
and expectations? Are they receiving your content and coming away with
the correct impression? Are you making assumptions in your content based
on out-of-date research? If any of these questions strike a chord, here are
some simple steps you can take to “true up” your knowledge base:
Get a dialogue started – get the opinion that matters most: your client’s.
Do some quick in-person or phone interviews with a handful of customers.
You’ll be surprised at how much you can learn.
Jump the wall – don’t forget to check out what your competitors are doing
and, even better, what your customers think about what they’re doing. You are
being compared to them every day.
Investigate your sales cycle – do some research with your best sales people
and hear what they hear every day from potential and existing customers.
Define the hot spots within these interviews, and develop content to address
them. Your sales team is the final link in the sales cycle; make them an ally
and you’ll see your content marketing strategies soar.

Make your customer the hero of your story.
The best content has a human element to it.
Why?
Because your readers are people, which means they will relate
better to your story if you relate it to them on their level. Even if
you sell something inherently boring like technology or toasters,
focus on how your products or services touch people's lives.
By the way, when you are talking about people,
a good rule of thumb is this:
Be specific enough to be believable and
universal enough to be relevant.
Which is a good rule for content, and for life.
Ann Handley
from MarketingProfs Blog

Need an inbound lift?
If you’re looking for an
agency that can get your
B2B content marketing ideas
off the ground, look no further.
Give Billy Mitchell a call at
800-265-1244, ext. 227, or reach him online at
bmitchell@mltcreative.com.
Hurry up, though. We can’t wait to get started.
MLT Creative brings decades of B2B marketing experience to building your
brand and business. We craft winning programs with results that matter.
MLT Creative is a B2B marketing agency, based in Atlanta.
Founded by partners Billy Mitchell and Glenn Taylor, we are known as the
Idea Launch Pad for B2B marketers.
4020 East Ponce de Leon Avenue
Clarkston, GA 30021
www.mltcreative.com
Phone: (404) 292-4502
Fax: (404) 292-4480