Content Marketing Acquire Precious External Business Information

Content-Marketing-to-Acquire-Precious-External-Business-Information

Branding lies at the core of every B2B marketing endeavor. Creating valuable and contextual pieces of content that the customers can rely on helps the brands in innumerable ways, be it driving optimized sales revenue, attracting positive word-of-mouth marketing (WOMM) or building a strong reputation across omnichannel.

Read more on How Omnichannel Reputation Management Assists in B2B Branding

According to Michael Brenner, CEO & CMO of Marketing Insider Group, “Content marketing is the gap between what brands produce and what customers actually want.”

Needless to say, the narrower will be the gap the more holistic will be your content strategy.

At the end of the day, content marketing is all about diligent delivery of contextual pieces of content with consistency.

But what if your organization has already a reputable content marketing strategy? You have diversified your content deliverance framework, have been abiding by a data-driven outlook for content production, have all the latest MarTech tools in your arsenal to base your content strategy on intelligent predictive insights to attract, engage, convert and delight the customers and more than anything else have a loyal group of customers backing up you for what you do.

What next? What is it that you can still do better in terms of optimizing your reach, revenue and maybe strengthening the face value of your brand across omnichannel?

The answer is leveraging content marketing to acquire precious external business information. Having an architecture for precious external sources of data is possible through content marketing provided your brand is perceived by the audience as a valuable information repository, driven by the sole purpose of helping customers along their buying journeys rather than being a brand just promoting salesy content.

Content marketing can help you acquire and disseminate precious external business information if you mold your content strategy to be similar to a media house. In other words, project yourself as a subject-matter-expert or a media house driven by the purpose of helping customers over prioritizing sales.

At the end of the day, customers’ experience indexes define the courses of your inbound marketing trajectories.

Types of Business Information

Several types of business information exist in the form of general surveys, data, search engines, books, articles, references and internal records. These types of information can be used for planning business operations and executing various activities.

In general, pieces of information are defined more by context than by content.

Business analysts classify the types of information:

  • External Information:

A third-party is employed to make documentation available to the public.

  • Internal Information:

Data is created solely to be used by the company that produces it such as trade secrets and minutes of board meetings.

Marketers need to understand both the external information definition as well as the fact that there are several examples of external data in the business including printed materials to broadcast reports to online dissemination.

Methods to Use Content Marketing to Acquire Precious External Business Information

Marketers planning to use content marketing to acquire precious external business information must think of projecting themselves as credible sources of information. This means broadening your content horizon beyond just the internal voices.

To use content marketing to acquire precious external business information marketers must think about continuously renovating and innovating their content strategy, and that means having more unique perspectives rather than just mirroring or parroting the influences. While it’s good to get inspired, unique and insightful new perspectives are the only ultimate method to use content marketing to acquire precious external business information.

Let’s delve into a few methods to use content marketing to acquire precious external business information, thereby elevating to business relevancy and contextual quotient of your pieces of content including blog posts, articles, infographics, vlogs, videos, podcasts or any other form of content:

1. Do your homework and research information about specific organizations

An effective way to use content marketing to acquire precious external business information is to research the demographic, firmographic, technographic, psychographic and other details about specific organizations.

Often the use of first and third-party intent data coupled with past browsing and researching behaviors and the purchase histories of clients is also effective. These data points can be used to execute a predictive content strategy based on data and yet another impactful way to use content marketing to acquire precious external business information, that in turn be used to refine the persona targeting and lead nurturing strategies and ultimately optimize the sales revenue in the process.

Read more on How Intent Data Analysis Helps B2B Companies Boost ROI.

Marketers looking forward to using content marketing to acquire precious external business information must research out knowledgeable resources apart from those provided on the websites of specific organizations to:

  1. Identify senior leaders and their areas of expertise within your specific, target organizations before sending off an email or making a phone call to the ones whose areas of expertise resonate well with your content topic
  2. Content the brands that their audiences will resonate with and find relevant
  3. Attend events and trade shows where the specific target organizations too are present and talk to the leaders in-person in person if you can reach out to their organizations in the future when you create a piece of content in congruence with the business ideologies of the targeted organizations.

2. Employ Interactive Platforms to Build a Connect

Marketers looking to acquire precious external business information must employ the social channels of their brands to elicit a response from existing customers as well as prospects.

Employ social listening to understand the psychic aspects of the customers and use their voices in your pieces of content, especially to create reaction-focused content, user-generated content (UGC) or crowdsourced content.

Besides the social channels, marketers planning to use content marketing to acquire precious external business information can also tag their request for sources using relevant hashtags, can participate in relevant marketing groups on Facebook and LinkedIn and can use crowdsourcing websites such as Reddit and Quora to find out the contributors who post content specific to your niche requirements.

In general, reaching out to the influencers and social sources in person works for marketers looking to use content marketing to acquire precious external business information. But if it doesn’t you can always and ask them for their permission to use their comment or quotes in your pieces of content.

3. Get Inspired by authentic resources

For the marketers looking to use content marketing to acquire precious external business information, research can be contacted specifically to industry, professional organizations as well as brands.

Marketers can use white papers, blog posts and other media coverages as resources to pick valuable pieces of information for their research. Always, however, a link should be cited to the original source.

4. Wear the cap of a brand journalist

For marketers planning to use content marketing to acquire precious external business taking the brand, journalist role can help seek valuable resources for their content.

Marketers can consider using the Help A Reporter Out (HARO) tool by Cision which is extensively used by the marketing communication/PR world. The tool is free of cost. It can be used to create, view and execute succinctly drafted queries directly to the inboxes of the prospects and the marketers are notified every time someone responds.

5. Establishing a source network

As marketers trace new sources to use content marketing to acquire precious external business information, they should essentially document the details and job titles of the participants and their contact information.

Wrapping Things Up

Marketers using content marketing to acquire precious external business information get assess to valuable external sources of business information. These critical pieces of information can help small business owners and entrepreneurs determine their future action plans. Marketers need to use content marketing to acquire precious external business information as relying solely on internal Information extensively has severe risks including a)  failing to keep abreast of the dynamic changes in your niche, including new product or service launch or competitors’ analysis, & b) perils of falling prey to the skewed information from employees who might not be skilled enough to give best of opinions in the interest of the organization.

Thus, marketers need to use content marketing to acquire precious external business information and couple it with internal information to optimize their branding endeavors across omnichannel, besides, creating several opportunities to optimize sales revenue.

Valasys Media employs tailored services for B2B marketers to reflect on and optimize their marketing endeavors. Our services including  Content Syndication, Lead Generation, Contact Discovery, Account-Based Marketing, Lead Nurturing & Appointment Setting services have been designed to evaluate the latest marketing conditions and provide marketers with insights and tactics to execute to optimize their revenue goals and achieve other business bottom-lines.

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