Many people only view B2B content marketing as creating more website traffic and generating more leads.
Lead generation alone is a somewhat myopic view of the positive impacts of producing helpful content on an ongoing basis.
Here are eight other beneficial outcomes of a successful content marketing initiative. While it’s always better if results are measurable, only some of these outcomes can be measured.
1. Increased brand awareness
Content marketing is more than just creating awareness of products and services. It’s also about building and reinforcing a company’s brand.
A customer’s CEO recently said he was surprised that a senior-level executive at a multi-billion dollar vendor-partner he spoke to knew his company existed. The senior exec’s awareness was due to our customer’s prolific website content, some of which covered that vendor’s solutions.
2. Elevated brand reputation
Content that genuinely demonstrates experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (E-E-A-T) can improve a brand’s reputation with people who are already aware of the brand.
This type of content conveys the message, “these guys know what they’re talking about.” When a prospect evaluates your company by checking out your website, expert and authoritative blog content can positively impact them.
3. Improved customer engagement
A content marketing initiative isn’t for only attracting the “unknowns.” Sharing new and helpful content with existing customers helps maintain strong relationships with those customers.
People, including customer contacts, don’t want to be sold—they want to be informed.
4. Shorter sales cycles
One-to-one email templates and video scripts are content salespeople use to speed up the sales process. Another tactic is to share links to specific blog content with prospects.
These types of sales enablement content can shorten sales cycles.
5. Differentiation in competitive deals
Several years ago, we recorded a tongue-in-cheek slide narration video for one of our customers. Since we made the recording, our customer’s salespeople have often shared the video with prospects.
A salesperson told us that one prospect, in particular, got quite a laugh out of the video. That prospect later became one of the highest-value customers in the company’s history.
The video content didn’t close the deal, but it played a part in the salesperson’s relationship with the prospect.
6. More referrals
Content marketing helps B2B companies stay top of mind with referral sources.
Rather than just asking for referrals, salespeople and business development reps can share new content with their referral sources.
7. Attract & convert qualified job candidates
You may have created content that gets traffic from people within your industry.
If so, adding calls-to-action that direct these visitors to your Jobs page can result in more qualified applicants for open positions.
8. Source material for social media posts
Long-form content can be summarized or atomized on platforms like LinkedIn, Google Business Profile, and Twitter.
You can also use the points on a blog post for a YouTube video. A tool like Lumen5 can help with this.
