The Growing Importance of Content Marketing
In a recent survey the Content Marketing Institute (CMI) reported that 71% of B2B marketers agreed that content marketing has become increasingly vital for their organizations over the past year. This statistic underscores the growing reliance on content as a means of informing, educating, and engaging professionals.
In particular, B2B technology vendors are leading the charge in content creation. They invest millions of dollars each year in content marketing to cater to their target audience effectively. CONTENTgine’s model is predicated on helping vendors get targeted exposure for their content outside of their inbound traffic.
Role-based deep dives within targeted accounts, and more broadly within industries, are crucial to getting the proper exposure. Inbound traffic is self-selecting, but figuring out who to target with outbound messaging requires providing the right message for the roles you’re going after.
The Power of Role-Based Content
B2B content is not just about promoting products or services but also providing valuable insights that empower professionals to excel in their roles. Understanding the specific needs and challenges and the latest trends and solutions professionals need for their jobs is vital for continued audience engagement. The topics, trends, and solutions that can help an IT leader will, of course, be different than those for a Marketing professional.
What we find in our audience development analysis is that understanding and breaking down roles within broader Department groupings (i.e., IT, HR or Sales) and then catering content to key topics for each drives the most engagement by a significant margin. Our content recommendation engine on Contentree.com is built on this logic.
Since we market to ALL professionals across hundreds of product categories and B2B solutions, both within and outside of Technology, we experience firsthand how understanding roles is crucial in maximizing engagement. The more we focus on role-based content selection, the better our newsletter engagement rates.
Role-based Segments Improve Engagement Rates
While product-centric marketing has its place, the emphasis on role-based education often takes precedence in our outreach model because this is where we’ve seen the highest levels of content engagement. Professionals, whether the final decision-makers or those utilizing a company’s solutions directly, rely on content that addresses their specific needs. So, if you’re trying to move professionals down the funnel or nurturing contacts within key accounts, segmenting by role and creating specific content streams will dramatically improve internal marketing engagement rates.
The pivotal questions for businesses engaged in B2B content marketing are: what roles are you trying to influence, and what specifically are you showing each of those roles within an organization? Tailoring content to the specific needs of these roles is the key to successful engagement. It’s about delivering the right message to the right person at the right time – the age-old B2B marketing north star. While our account intelligence helps you determine the ‘right message’ and ‘right time’, a role-based engagement strategy aims at the ‘right person’ part of the equation and goes deeper than basic job title targeting.
