Are the roles of B2B vs. B2C different in Social Media?
Do certain platforms work better for B2C?
Curious about what kinds of obstacles other marketers are up against?
Every marketer faces different challenges. Although we typically share similar goals, some teams are stuck on producing the right content, while others are having trouble finding the right mix of content and timing to meet other business needs. While some lack budgets.
According to Forrester Research B2C eCommerce will be a 500 Billion Industry By 2020.
The web has provided a critical medium for the delivery of relevant content and information designed to educate prospects and generate demand, rather than simply promote brands. Branded content is increasingly part of consumers’ shopping process;
In terms of content marketing, B2C marketers have found success with blogs written specifically to appeal to consumers who may be interested in unique products. Developing personas that can appeal to subsets of prospects and writing content from these perspectives to engage a wide array of audience members is gaining traction as a B2C content marketing practice.
A report from Technorati found that nearly 80 percent of entrepreneurs who maintain blogs said that their content has improved business. Meanwhile, corporate bloggers are finding similar benefits, with nearly 70 percent expressing their companies have greater visibility as a direct result of blog marketing.
Whatever the case may be, there’s always at least one area that you can stand to improve. In other words, there’s always room to optimize the various components of your strategy and turn your marketing into an even more effective revenue generator.
THE CONFIDENCE GAP
Few marketers have found a way to fully manage and react to the massive explosion of data, tactics, devices and channels that have emerged over the past few years.
Gone are the days of developing a scheduled monthly campaign involving an email, a web page and a piece of direct mail. With today’s connected customer interacting with your brand across multiple channels and devices, companies are under tremendous pressure to constantly develop and deliver new and engaging content.
Consequently, business owners are continually asking marketers to develop new campaigns and assets to satiate the consumer’s never-ending hunger for information. And often, those projects snowball into new projects. The initial request may be for an email campaign, but at a later date, that business owner may want to support that initiative with a social or mobile campaign, and later a visual search campaign, and later a request to replicate the information on the website, and lastly, they may want to go back and localize all of those efforts for different regions.
CHALLENGES & PRIORITIES
What are your organization’s top five content marketing challenges? We will take a look at three different survey’s to compare and contrast what their findings reveal.
According to the 2016 Content Marketing Institute Survey.
#1 – 56% SAID ENGAGING CONTENT
When one looks at that it makes many ponder. Why? Content is all around us, we are bombarded daily with content, and yet we have numerous resources at our fingertips to summon up content with a CLICK.
B2C marketers to select their top five challenges from a list that also included:
• Understanding/choosing technology that we need (31%)
• Implementing the technology that we already have in place (24%)
• Lack of buy-in/vision from higher-ups (23%)
• Lack of integration across marketing (22%)
• Gaps in knowledge and skills of internal team (21%)
• Finding or training skilled content marketing professionals/content creators (18%)
• Other (6%)
• No challenges (1%)
B2C marketers’ challenges are similar to those faced by B2B marketers; however, B2C marketers are more challenged with understanding/choosing technology (31% B2C vs. 24% B2B) and implementing the technology they currently have in place (24% B2C vs. 18% B2B).
B2C Content Marketing Report: 94% Of Marketers Use Facebook, But Only 66% Rate It Effective.
IMPROVING AND INVESTING IN CONTENT
Proving the value is a vital first step to increasing or jump starting your content marketing budget. You can outline how many companies have a blog or number of social channels, but what will really get your executives to care?
Your competition. Here are some ways to pair competitor data with marketing stats:
“OUR COMPETITOR’S CONTENT IS VALUED AT X. WE SHOULD BUILD THAT.”
Using SEMrush, you can examine competitor sites, traffic value and backlinks—but our new favorite method is looking at specific content that is ranking and evaluating the potential value for our clients.
For example, premium coffee manufacturer Clive Coffee sells high end espresso machines, coffee makers and grinders. Prima Coffee ranks for a lot of related search terms, including their popular guide to pour over coffee. Instead of typing in a coffee-related keyword into SEMrush, paste the URL of that piece of content.
In the example above, this post has an organic traffic value of $5.4k and ranks first for “how to make pour over coffee”. The $5.4k number is based on what people would be willing to bid on that traffic according to the CPC of the keywords the page ranks for.
For Clive Coffee, it may be valuable to start building beginner-level, top-of-funnel content and relate it back to their grinders. By showing this data to executives, we have a much more compelling argument as to why it should be created.
Supporting stats:
- Our competitor X has Y more search traffic than we do.
- Our competitor’s content has also been shared X times on social media. (BuzzSumo)
TOP 5 PRIORITIES TO FOCUS ON
What are the top five priorities that organization’s B2C content creators will focus on this year?
• Better understanding of audience (38%)
• Becoming better storytellers (37%)
• Content personalization (29%)
• Becoming stronger writers (20%)
• Content curation (20%)
• Other (2%)
• No priorities this year (2%)
Creating more engaging content was also the top priority last year, no matter how effective the marketer or what size the company.
B2C marketers’ priorities are similar to those of B2B marketers. The biggest gap is in finding more/better ways to repurpose content (44% of B2C marketers said it was a priority vs. 57% of B2B marketers).
BEST-IN-CLASS B2C CONTENT MARKETER
IMPLEMENTING NEW PROCESSES
So what would that strategy look like?
Marketers—and executives and business owners—need to be thinking about their projects from a more integrated perspective. Rather than initiating one-off pieces of content, they should have a long-term plan, like an editorial calendar, that maps out what projects will be developed, how and when they will be distributed, and if there are localization needs.
That map should also provide a clear understanding of how those different projects are connected, if at all.
Increase the number of tactics and social media platforms targeted. Another best practice for improving your content marketing is to leverage more tactics and social media platforms.
The content marketing challenge will only continue to escalate with the evolution of new devices, channels and tactics. But with the right B2C strategy, process and technology in place, marketing managers can turn that challenge into an unprecedented opportunity to reach more customers with relevant, timely and engaging content.
60% of the most effective B2C marketers have a documented content strategy. (Source: CMI)
Earlier we saw how a documented strategy helps small businesses replicate proven strategies and win. It’s the same for B2C marketers.
With a documented content strategy, producing a variety of engaging content for customers will be easier.
Marketers who struggle to create these types of content ultimately either haven’t documented their strategy, aren’t executing on their written strategy or have a significant flaw in the assumptions they used to build their strategy.
About Blair
Blair Evan Ball is a Social Media Coach and founder of Prepare1, a company that works with businesses, individuals and non-profits. He is a former executive with a Fortune 50 company, and his national division did $1Billion+ in sales annually.
Blair has written three e-books: Facebook for Business Made Easy, Facebook Pages for Business Made Easy, and WordPress Blog Setup Made Easy.
Blair also educates, trains entrepreneurs and business professionals how to amplify their brand, increase revenues, and raise more funds.
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