How different are your business’s priorities compared with this time last year? The year before that?
Political, social, and cultural change is occurring at an accelerated rate, but, in some ways, the world has slowed down. Trust is more important than ever and yet more difficult for companies to earn.
People are more thoughtful and deliberate about making decisions and, when those decisions revolve around a purchase, the need for credibility is at an all-time high. Media consumption habits are shifting dramatically, and traditional marketing tactics are ill equipped to accommodate the transformation.
To keep pace, B2B digital marketing is evolving beyond traditional marketing tactics.
Companies that want to carve out a spot for themselves in the future should focus on building an audience – a community of customers and channel partners who understand your brand identity, engage with it on a regular basis, advocate for it and, when the need arises, rely on it to solve their problems and satisfy their needs.
What does it take to build an audience? Trust. The time will soon come when trust is among a company’s most important assets. Perhaps we’re already there.
Ask yourself . . . Do you have a unique and compelling brand identity among your current customers, one that engenders trust, loyalty, and repeat purchases?
What are you known for among those you want to become customers, or do they know you at all?
Can your channel partners – the individuals and businesses that enable and support your company’s ability to sell products and services – state your value proposition? And do they trust you enough to advocate for your brand?
While traditional marketing focuses on your company and the products you sell, content marketing builds your brand. Your brand identity is a combination of your company’s values, how you communicate to your customers and, ultimately, your fundamental promise to your customers when they do business with you.
Your customers will identify with your brand identity through your content. And when you attract an audience with content that properly reflects your brand identity and builds trust among that audience, you hedge against a future that is uncertain and a business landscape that is always shifting below your feet.
B2B Content Marketing Revitalized
Content marketing is not a myopic business leader’s game. Content marketing is a tool wielded by visionaries – those who want to take control over their business’s trajectory in an unstable present and an unpredictable future. Its value is realized over time, and the dividends it pays are substantial.
Content marketing carves a path into the future for what your company aspires to be. Where it wants to go. And it builds an audience along the way.
Yes, that audience, like your customer base, is comprised of customers, prospects, and channel partners, but the difference is that this audience is receptive, active, and unified around your brand identity.
Your content becomes the path for you to transform, improve, carve, etch, manifest your identity. It gives your customers and channel partners a better sense of your company. What does it mean? Why does it exist? And, perhaps most importantly, what do you stand for?
ContentOvation will work on your behalf to attract an audience. To engage them. To sustain their attention. To earn their trust. And, ultimately, to convert them into paying customers.
ContentOvation: Your B2B content marketing partner
What separates ContentOvation as a specialist in B2B content marketing?
ContentOvation is not your typical content agency. When you hire us, we become your advocate. That means we take the time to understand your business, its strengths as well as its struggles.
Your company is not the sum of your product specs. Likewise, although you can find a menu of some of our capabilities detailed on our Solutions page, we’re not focused on selling products. We offer solutions. Solutions that take the form of holistic, integrated programs custom built to support your company’s goals and aspirations.
We are as big or as small as you need us to be. Our team has partnered with multi-billion-dollar companies, representing some of the largest national and global brands in the world. We’ve also worked with small business with fewer than 10 employees. Sometimes we help to support existing marketing or content teams; sometimes we are the back-office marketing and content team.
Forget templatized approaches. Don’t bother looking for order forms on our website. You cannot buy anything from us without a consultative meeting. We won’t sell you anything until we understand what you’re trying to accomplish.
But once we understand you, well, that’s when the proverbial rubber meets the road. We will help you create, refine, and tell your story in innovative ways that reflect your unique brand identity. We will develop and implement a content strategy uniquely tailored to your specific goals and objectives.
You have aspirations for your company. Our role is to help you reach them.
By its very nature, B2B marketing tends to be more informational. Often, we’re educating your customers to become more informed buyers and, in the process, conveying your company’s expertise and unique brand identity.
B2B content marketing falls short, however, when it forgets to be engaging or is overly product-driven, especially in the early stages of the buying cycle.
It is essential to remember that the audience in B2B digital marketing is never another company; it is the people within that company. Companies don’t make purchase decisions; people do. And if you want to use content marketing to influence those decisions, then it better be engaging.
When building awareness and attracting an audience, thinly veiled commercials will undermine your efforts and turn prospective customers off.
ContentOvation will help you find innovative ways to capture your audience’s attention. To spark their imaginations and to make them think. To help them understand how your company can make their company more successful. We’ll help you tell your unique story in engaging ways, while educating, informing and, when appropriate, entertaining your channel partners and customers.
B2B content marketing tends to be more values driven than product focused. And the buying cycles tend to be longer than in B2C, so trust is paramount. To earn trust, your customers and channel partners seek efficiency and expertise. You can’t fake expertise in B2B.
In B2B marketing, there is no camouflaging ignorance with cleverness or novelty. In B2C you might be able to get away with emotional triggers that capture attention or humor that can garner a chuckle, but B2B buyers are won over by substance.
When you hire ContentOvation to support your digital marketing efforts, you will not be working with content generalists or “SEO writers” trying to game Google’s algorithm. You will be working with content creators embedded in your industry.
In many cases, our writers are active or former journalists, who are subject matter experts in your industry. They’ve built a career, a reputation, and a livelihood producing high-quality content for audiences in your industry. They may not be familiar with the inner workings and objectives of your particular company, but they understand the trends, macro issues, and dynamics governing the industry in which your company operates.
This expertise translates into significantly higher return on your content investment. “Exceptional content” is not just part of ContentOvation’s tagline, it is an essential component of the value we bring to the table when we work with you as your partner.
ContentOvation, a B2B content marketing agency
While our name is intended to connote “innovation,” one of our company’s core values, go one step deeper.
Within innovation exists “ovation.” Ovation. It is a simple but powerful word. An ovation is an action. It is an action an audience takes in response to excellence. To being inspired. It is when a group of individuals become a unified group that collectively rises out of their seats putting their hands together repeatedly in response to excellence.
Because excellence is transformative. It transforms an audience from passive to active. From silent to clamorous. From restrained to enthusiastic. From separate to unified.
When we create content on your behalf, excellence is not an aspiration. It is our baseline.
ContentOvation’s purpose is to create the kind of content that attracts individuals and unifies them into an audience around your brand. The branded content we create on your behalf will capture the attention of that audience, earn their trust, and grow their engagement with your brand. We will convert that audience into customers and build those customers’ loyalty to your brand.
It starts with excellence and innovation. But it doesn’t end there.
Our ability to craft and tell stories about what makes you different . . . that’s what makes us different. Building an audience for B2B companies is our core mission. It’s key to our brand identity.
