No doubt, internet users around the world is constantly growing each passing year and thereby users online activities is also changing rapidly. Hence, it’s very important irrespective of your business size (Small, Medium and Large) to create a high quality content resonating to the audience interest so you can promote it on various digital channels to increase your online brand visibility, to engage with the large and targeted audience, to explore new business opportunities and prospects and thereby generating high b2b revenue simultaneously.
As content (type: Text, Image, Infographics, video, Podcast) is the core element for online marketing but failing to understand and to implement various content sharing channels such as below will not let you reach closer to your business goals and therefore drags you far away from generating high revenue.
Content Sharing Channels
- Email Marketing
- Social Media Marketing (LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Slide Share, YouTube)
- Search Engine Marketing (SEO, PPC)
- Display Advertising
- Affiliate Marketing
First, let’s understand what is High-Quality Content?
Content should solve the problems or answer a question of your audience. If you fail to do so then undoubtedly it’s not considered as “High-Quality Content” from both users and also search engines.
Content is all about understanding the audience needs and problems and solving them accordingly. Content is the best way for any business to interact with the audience and build an online relationship with your audience and thereby it helps you in getting more and more new business opportunities, new prospects, and new sales leads and finally sales conversion.
High-Quality content also builds trust between you and your audience and also it triggers interest in the audience itself to promote your business content, product, and services within their circles like family members, friends, colleagues and all who they know somehow.
Isn’t it, a great victory for any business where customers themselves become voluntary advocates, actively spreading the word on behalf of the company and this is possible only when you deliver quality content, product, and services to your audience. High-quality content gives you a devoted audience.
Types of contents you can create in your niche business to which audiences get engaged the most.
- Important Business Tips and Motivational Videos for start-ups
- Pain points and solutions
- Explain the features of your products and services
- Brand Success and failure stories
- Photos and Testimonials-particularly videos
- FAQ-Frequently Asked Questions (Address them on Q&A forums like Quora)
- Live Videos
- Product Explainer Videos
- Webinars
- Live Interviews
Now that you know what is high-quality content, it is also important to understand the various content sharing channels because everything goes hand in hand to achieve your business goals and objectives hence you will be briefed about various channels further as we go through.
Let us understand closely each of the Content Sharing Channels pointed above
1. Email Marketing
Email marketing is very older and yet highly effective, efficient content sharing channels as it allows you to send emails directly to targeted customers. Effective marketing emails convert customers into loyal customers. It still tops as B2B marketers lead generation strategies.
Email plays a very important role in any business to better communicate with their targeted audience. Hence, having a quality email list helps you in achieving your business goals and objectives faster and smoother.
Email marketing also lets marketers segment subscribers into smaller groups based on specific criteria so that you can send them more customized, personalized and relevant emails. Segmentation lets you send certain email only to those subscribers you think will be the most interested in that content, resulting in higher conversions.
Segmenting your email list substantially increases your email open rates, click-through rates, and reduces your unsubscribe rates. That is why marketers use segmentation to drastically improve the effectiveness of their email campaigns.
Segmentation makes it easier to know what subject lines and messages to write that will trigger interest in the users to open and engage with your email campaigns.
Here are a few ways of segmenting your email list.
- New subscribers: send new subscribers a welcome email
- Preferences: subscribers who love to hear about the latest product and services
- Interests: The people interested in your business offerings
- Inactivity: reminder emails to those who haven’t engaged for a while of the next step you want them to take
- Shopping Cart Abandonment: remind subscribers who added items in their cart that they haven’t checked out yet.
As per the reports,
Every single dollar spent, the average return is $44.25 on email marketing investment
72% of B2B buyers are likely to share useful content through email.
2. Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing is a powerful way for all sizes of businesses to reach prospects and customers. Your prospects are already engaged and interacting with other brands via social media, and hence if you’re not communicating directly to your audience through social platforms you are missing out on great opportunities.
Social media marketing can drive remarkable success in your business. The users on social networking platforms have been actively increasing, and thus expected to continue to grow further. 71% of all internet audiences use social networking channels as of 2017 and the total number of social network users is expected to reach 3.02 billion by 2021.
It’s important that B2B companies use social media platforms to understand their potential prospects. Therefore, this can help them target the right audience at the right time.
However, each social media platform is different and serves different purposes. So you need to be very mindful and understand the best B2B social media platforms individually in order to grow and expand your business.
In this post, we’ll take a look at 6 of the best B2B social media platforms that help you to grow your business. Let’s start.
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LinkedIn
LinkedIn is the most popular and widely used B2B social networking platforms today. It provides professionals with an opportunity to connect with other professionals, companies all over the world in their industry to learn from others to educate others and to grow together.
LinkedIn allows sharing of content, engaging with audiences, and recruiting talent, it’s a handy platform for B2B companies.
As per LinkedIn there are over 610M members on LinkedIn, 4 of 5 MEMBERS drive business decisions this gives a huge opportunity and indicates the potential of this platform to positively impact your business.
LinkedIn has topped as the most used social media platform for B2B lead generation. Companies use LinkedIn for content marketing. Using LinkedIn as a marketing channel for acquiring quality b2b leads helps in engaging a group of professionals to drive desirable actions that are most relevant to your business.
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Twitter
With more than 330 million monthly active users and 500 million Tweets per day, it’s now one of the largest, round-the-clock news sources for just about anything and everything. Twitter is a place to “see what’s happening.” As per the CMI report, 87% of B2B marketers use Twitter for content marketing.
And so, Twitter makes its way as one of the best B2B social networking platforms for implementing content marketing strategies.
The biggest hurdle with Twitter is getting noticed by the right set of individuals or companies. By using relevant hashtags, you can encounter this hurdle and increase your brand awareness. The more frequently you tweet, the greater are your chances of increasing your brand’s visibility and awareness.
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Facebook
Since the time it has launched, Facebook has emerged excessively from introducing new languages to adding new exciting features. Facebook has come a long way in improvising their user experience and enabling opportunities for marketers to promote their businesses.
Facebook has more than 2.38 billion monthly active users. So it is not surprising that the B2C companies are successfully using Facebook for promoting their business. However, if you are under the impression that B2B companies don’t use Facebook for business, you are wrong.
42% of B2B marketers have admitted that Facebook is the most effective B2B social networking platform for their companies.
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Instagram
When it started out, Instagram was meant to be a medium to share photos with friends and family. However, it has rapidly emerged beyond personal use and is being widely used by businesses today.
Instagram has over 800 million monthly active users. As per the report by Simply Measured, 48% of brands have opted Instagram as their marketing channel. It is expected that in coming years brands will increase their budgets for Instagram marketing.
Instagram features like live video, location tagging, and hashtags, B2B companies can capitalize on and expand their businesses on Instagram. On Instagram, you can showcase your human side. With user-generated content, you can build long-lasting relationships with your followers.
Slide Share is a well-known platform which allows sharing documents and presentations. 19% of B2B marketers use Slide Share for their content marketing strategies. On Slide Share, you can share the Infographics, videos, documents, and presentations.
More than 80 million professionals are using Slide Share. With such a large user base, Slide Share is definitely a top resource for B2B companies. Let’s take a look at its benefits.
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YouTube
It’s a video-sharing platform where users watch a billion hours of videos every day. YouTube has a feature where you can create your own channel for your brand and upload videos for your subscribers to view, like, comment, and share.
Apart from being the biggest social media platform, YouTube (owned by Google) is also often known as the second largest search engine after Google. Furthermore, it also allows you to advertise on its platform to increase your reach on the platform.
3. SEM-Search Engine Marketing:
Is the process of acquiring traffic from search engines through both paid (PPC) and unpaid (SEO) results. Originally SEM was used as an umbrella term for both
SEO-Search Engine Optimization:
It is the activity of acquiring traffic from the free and organic search results on search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo.
Your B2B
- What are your people seeking for?
- How will you satisfy your audience?
- How will you convince Google that you can satisfy our audience?
Because B2B purchases are significant long-term investments, hence more people come into buying decision cycles like Practitioners, managers, and executives and each will approach the decision with unique different problems in mind, therefore you can expect them to be performing Google search for very different queries.
PPC-Pay Per Click:
It stands for pay-per-click, a model of internet marketing in which advertisers pay a fee each time one of their ads is clicked Typically, it’s a way of buying visits to your site,
Google Ads is the famous PPC advertising platform in the world and it operates on a pay-per-click method, in which users bid on relevant keywords and pay for each click on their advertisements. At any time users perform a search; Google looks into the pool of Ads advertisers and selects a bunch of Ads. The “Ads” will rank based on two key parameters
- CPC bid
- Quality Score
This method allows selected advertisers to reach potential customers at a cost that best suits their budget. It’s typically a kind of auction.
Search marketing is all about being visible in front of customers at the very moment they are searching for your products on Google and the other search engines.
4. Display Advertising:
Advertising on different websites, apps, and social media through banners or other ad formats made of text, images, video, and audio. The main aim of display advertising is to deliver a quick glimpse of the brand’s advertisement to site visitors.
5. Affiliate Marketing:
It is the process of earning money by promoting other business products. You find a product you love, promote it to others and earn a little piece of the profit for each sale that you make.
Closing Thoughts
Now that you are clear with quality content and content sharing channels and each of their benefits. Therefore you must have understood how each and every platform is equally important and therefore how it goes hand in hand to achieve your business goals. However, you need to make sure that you post the right type of content on the right platforms. Similarly, you must tweak your strategy according to the platform you are using or planning to use.
