While that may sound like a trick question, recent research has produced tangible, practical answers that can help firms make smarter marketing decisions. And a notable theme of these findings is that every professional services firm needs a digital content strategy to address the way modern buyers look for professional advice and services. 

Many traditional, “tried-and-true” marketing techniques (think sponsorships, face-to-face networking events, print advertising, trade shows) no longer generate sufficient results to sustain a growing practice. Even firms that embrace online marketing often do it wrong, wasting precious time and money.

So how should you market your firm? And where should you be spending your marketing budget?

Before we can tackle those questions, we need to understand how buyers behave in today’s market.

A Marketplace in Transition

The way people find and select professional services is changing quickly. And this transition has real implications on how firms like yours should approach marketing. 

For instance, today’s service buyers ask for referrals less often than in the past. In fact, referrals grew only 9% in the last two years when they had previously dropped 16% over the previous five year period. This means that the almighty referral—the holy grail of business development for so many decades—is starting to lose its primacy as the business world evolves. 

Today’s buyers also say they value professional services 33% more. However, the relevancy of these services has dropped by more than 10.5% since 2020. (Data from the Inside the Buyer’s Brain, Fourth Edition research report.)

What’s going on?

As a younger, more tech-comfortable generation moves into companies’ buyer and influencer roles, they bring different behaviors and expectations with them. Accustomed to using Google and social media tools at home, they arrive in the workplace expecting to find valuable, free advice online, as well as an array of easy-to-find buying options. They also use these tools to vet their buying options—reviewing potential vendors’ websites and asking peers in social media for their opinions and experiences. 

The data shows that buyers are increasingly searching online for business-related insights and help—and they do so at a higher rate than just a year before. As digital tools get even better at meeting buyers’ expectations, these trends are likely to continue into the future.

To address changing buyer behavior, firms need to adopt a thoughtful digital content strategy—one that reaches these tech-savvy people at every stage of their buyer journey.

But what exactly do we mean by “digital content strategy”?

What is a Digital Content Marketing Strategy?

A digital content marketing strategy is a plan that helps a business create and distribute digital content to reach new audiences, build greater credibility, generate more leads and achieve its overall strategic marketing objectives. This plan connects firms with the increasing number of potential buyers who are using digital tools and looking online to solve their business challenges. Often, it is part of a larger content marketing strategy, which also includes non-digital tactics, such as public speaking and writing books. 

Digital content can take a wide range of guises, such as blog posts, online articles, webinars, educational videos, online tutorials, courses and podcasts. Because content can be time-consuming to produce, many strategies include only a subset of these options.

A digital content strategy, however, is more than a collection of content pieces. A strategy also dictates what topics the pieces will address, how often they are produced, how they are exposed to the appropriate audiences and how each piece of content can potentially convert the consumer into a business lead.

Why is Digital Content Important?

Today’s buyers are increasingly going online to find their next professional services partner. While in some cases this means they searched online for their problem and Google returned a list of possible vendors, more often than not the path from problem to problem solved is longer and less direct. 

A professional services sale can take months or years to develop. When businesses have less urgent problems, they tend to allocate fewer resources to them—often going online to research the problem and potential solutions. In the process, they encounter websites, blogs and free educational materials that put their problem in context and describe various solutions. Some consumers will find a source of expertise they trust so much that they return again and again for more information and advice. This behavior is the reason a digital content strategy is so effective.

Over time, these returning consumers (we use the word “consumers” rather than “readers” because the content they consume could be text, video or audio) begin to rely on and trust their information source. When the business challenge eventually becomes urgent, one firm will jump immediately to their mind—the firm they have been following for months or years.

Studies by the Hinge Research Institute have shown that the most successful firms usually use a mix of digital and traditional tools in their marketing strategies. Increasingly, however, this mix favors digital techniques. Figure 1 shows that many of the most common traditional marketing techniques have digital equivalents. 

Figure 1. Digital tactics (green) often have traditional marketing counterparts (blue)

High-performing firms are moving toward digital because they understand their buyers. Today, almost 70 percent of buyers say they use digital channels to research their business problems (see Figure 2).

Figure 2. Likelihood buyers will use digital or traditional channels to research a business challenge

And they are using digital at similar proportions to evaluate professional services firms so they can make informed decisions (see Figure 3).

Figure 3. Likelihood buyers will use digital or traditional channels to evaluate service providers

The implications of these data are huge. An overwhelming percentage of professional services buyers are using digital channels and tools to find their vendor candidates, then using digital tools again to evaluate them. If your firm isn’t visible in these channels—and you aren’t delivering messaging that buyers want to hear—you are going to be at a severe competitive disadvantage.

Digital is the marketing medium of today and tomorrow. Established firms that think nothing has changed are in for a rude shock.

Now, you may be wondering what goes into a digital content strategy? And how do you create one? That’s what we’ll dive into next.

Components of a Digital Content Strategy

Define Your Business Goals

Every business strategy has to start with your goals, and your digital content strategy is no different. And if you don’t have clear goals today, you should ask yourself what you would like to change about your business. Here are a few questions to get you started:

• Do we need more quality leads? 
• Do we want to expand our reach into new geographic markets? Or do we want to build market share in our local area? 
• Is our reputation in need of a boost?
• Do we hope to move away from commodity pricing and charge premium fees for our services? 
• Do we want to evolve our business and become known for a different set of services?
• Are we trying to grow our business? Or do we focus on raising our margins?

Whatever your business goals are, you can use them to orient your strategy and help you decide if a particular decision, technique or tool is going to take you closer to your destination. With these goals in your sights, you’ll also have a better sense of what metrics and outcomes you will need to monitor.

Research Your Audience

To deliver an effective digital content strategy, you’ll need to produce content that your prospective clients actually care about. And aside from mindreading, there is only one reliable way to get inside their heads: conducting research on your audience.

At Hinge, we’ve learned that most firms have little real knowledge of their clients’ changing needs. By conducting research, however, they can learn what issues are important today, what clients are worrying about in the near future and what services they wish you offered. 

Now, not all research is alike. You will need to decide up front what type of research you will conduct to get useful insights. To understand your audience, we would recommend only two types of research:

1. Surveys. The king of quantitative market research. While the paper survey isn’t quite dead, most surveys today are conducted online. Online survey platforms give you the ability to branch your questions depending on how a subject responds, randomize the order of questions, send automated invitations and reminders, and other useful tools. 
2. Interviews. Live interviews are the gold standard of qualitative research for a good reason: they give the interviewer the latitude to ask follow up questions and dig deeper when there is more to learn. Interviewees tend to give more detailed and nuanced answers than they would in a standard text-based survey. While you could conduct interviews in person, it is far more practical to do them by phone (or video conference). 

If you can afford to go the interview route, we encourage you to do so. While more expensive than online surveys, personal interviews generate the highest quality information. But surveys can produce a wealth of useful data, too. For the best of both worlds, use both techniques—you can reach a large sample and extract deep qualitative insights.

Who should you research?

Who should you be talking to in the course of your research? Consider reaching out to these three key audiences:

1. Current clients. Within this group, think about what roles, industries or other segments you need to hear from.
2. Influencers. These are the folks who have critical input into the final selection decision but are not the final decision makers.
3. Referral Sources. These are people who recommend firms to prospective buyers. Keep in mind that they may work in a different industry from your clients (for instance, lawyers often recommend accountants to their clients, and vice versa).

Who should conduct the research?

While you may be tempted to reduce costs by conducting the research yourself, there are good reasons to hire an outside firm or professional researcher to do it for you. First, your clients don’t want to hurt your feelings, so they may be less than honest with you or try to tell you what they think you want to hear. Second, you probably don’t have the skills to get the most from your research. A skilled interviewer can coax a surprising amount of valuable information from a subject, and she knows how to probe for deeper insights when necessary. And third, it takes skill to design a statistically valid questionnaire and make sense of all the data you collect. It is very easy to generate misleading results.

What questions should you ask?

You may decide to cover a range of topics in your research, but there are a few specific topics you should include in your questionnaire:

• What challenges are your clients facing today? And what worries them about the future?
• When they need business-related information, where do they turn? What do they read? What do they watch? What events do they attend?
• What do they look for in a service provider? How do they choose one over another?

Identify the Issues You’ll Own

Producing high-quality content is hard, and you can’t afford to waste your precious time. Instead, you need a strategy to help you decide what to write about. The first place you should look for guidance is your audience research. If you’ve done it right, it should point you toward issues and challenges that interest your target audiences. 

We usually recommend that firms identify two to five big issues that they will write and speak about. The issues can’t be so broad that they lack a focus, but they can’t be so narrow that you will quickly run out of angles to explore, either. If some of your issues—or your take on them—are unconventional or controversial, so much the better. If possible, try to find subjects that aren’t already getting a lot of coverage so that your voice has a chance to be heard. And remember, your issues don’t have to be evergreen. For instance, you may decide to write for a few months on an emerging industry challenge. Once the challenge is resolved or fades from public view, you may decide to move on to other issues.

Here are a few sample issues:

For an architecture firm:

• New Trends in Higher Education Design

For a staffing firm:

• Attracting Top Executive Talent in a Contracting Job Market

For a management consulting firm:

• What Executives Can Learn from the Coronavirus

For an engineering firm:

• Engineering Against Catastrophe

These issues provide plenty of room for a firm to produce dozens of blog posts, articles, and webinars under each. At the same time, they are compact enough ideas that it would be easy for a person to associate them with a specific firm: “Oh, they are the experts in engineering buildings that can withstand hurricanes and earthquakes.”

Dive into Keyword Research and SEO

One of the central tenets of any digital content strategy is making your content findable in online search. To accomplish this, you need at least a basic knowledge of search engine optimization (SEO). (If you are interested, you can find an excellent SEO primer at Moz.) And you need to research a list of SEO keywords that relate to your expert issues (see previous section). You will use them to develop specific topics under each of your issues. In other words, you need to develop your content first for your target audiences, but you need to do this with Google firmly in mind. You will incorporate your keywords (or variations) into your blog post titles, for example, and use them in the body of your text. While keywords are only a small part of SEO, they are a critical component that directly influences what you write and talk about.

Decide How to Package Your Content

As I mentioned earlier, you can produce content in a wide range of formats. But which ones will be right for you? Content falls into two broad categories, and to attract new people and convert them into leads, you will need to address both of them:

1. Flow Content: Short, frequently published content (such as blog posts) is used to attract regular, ongoing traffic to your website. It is open to everyone.
2. Premium Content: More substantive, higher-value downloadable content (such as executive guides or research reports) is used to generate leads. This type of content is usually free but requires a form fill to access it.

Here is a list of some of the more popular content types. Note that some can fall into either content category, depending on their perceived value and how they are positioned.

Flow Content

• Blog Posts
• Webinars
• Podcasts
• eNewsletters
• Tutorials
• Videos

Premium Content

• Executive Guides
• Webinars
• Ebooks
• Research Reports
• White Papers
• Demos
• Videos
• Courses
• Tutorials

At the very least, you will need a blog and one piece of valuable content. That gives you a place to publish your flow content (blog posts) and a piece of premium content you can use to convert your most interested readers into leads (responding to an offer in your blog posts, readers fill out a form to download the content). 

What you do with those leads depends on your strategy. Most firms will follow up with emails promoting other relevant content, encouraging the consumer to stay engaged and return again for more expert content.

Develop a Content Calendar

The most common reason content strategies fail is that people get distracted and never fully implement them. I won’t lie: a digital content strategy takes commitment. And one way to keep yourself honest and stay on track is to lay out a detailed calendar specifying what you will do on any given day. Planning this way allows you to set a rhythm, so you can get in the habit of developing content on certain days, carrying out promotion activities on others, et cetera. 

A calendar also allows you to plan in advance what topics you are going to write or speak about. If you are blogging, for instance, you can plug the exact titles of your blog posts into your calendar—when the time comes to write, you are ready to go.

At Hinge, we use an Excel spreadsheet for our content calendar, but you could use a digital calendar (or even a paper one!) if that’s more convenient for you. Whatever tool you use, don’t skip this critical step. You can only hold yourself accountable if you have a detailed plan to measure your progress against.

Promote Your Content

Once you have produced a piece of content, it’s important to share it with the world. If you employ SEO, you can do this passively—waiting for Google to index your post and—eventually—deliver readers. But you are likely to have more success if you actively promote it, as well. Here are a few ways you can do that:

Email Marketing. Promote your latest post or piece of premium content to your email list. If you don’t have an email list, your digital content strategy will help you build one. Here’s an email marketing guide to get you started.

Social Media. LinkedIn and Twitter are ideal tools to share your latest content with your followers. You can also publish content on the LinkedIn platform to reach new audiences. Check out this LinkedIn guide for more information.

Guest publishing. Look for opportunities to write for outside publications and blogs. Not only can you expose your ideas to new audiences, but you may be able to link back to content on your blog or website. These so-called “backlinks” can give your content a powerful boost in Google.

Measure Your Results

Every strategy should specify how you will measure success. Which metrics you track will depend on what goals and techniques you chose in your strategy. If you are seeking more leads, for instance, you’ll want to track qualified and unqualified leads. You may also track premium content downloads and contact form fills.

If you are trying to build visibility and reach, you might track organic web traffic over time, how many keywords you are ranking for, which keywords rank on the first page of Google, where new prospects are located, how many visitors you get to your blog and other visibility-related metrics.

Your team should review your metrics on a regular basis—weekly or monthly are common cadences. Don’t forget to monitor how closely your team has followed the content calendar. This kind of social pressure is often the best way to keep everyone motivated and on track.

If you notice any problems—a particular tactic isn’t generating acceptable results—don’t hesitate to try something else. That is the ultimate reason you measure your results, after all. No strategy should ever be set in stone.

What’s Your Next Move?

Buyers of professional services are moving quickly and inexorably toward a less personal but more convenient digital marketplace. For many firms, making this transition is difficult and painful—and an alarming number of firms have hardly begun. 

But a digital content strategy can open up myriad new opportunities, too. Firms can use educational content to demonstrate their expertise and build a significant national or international following without ever leaving their hometown. In some cases, prospects will hire a firm based solely on the reputation they cultivated through their content. That’s true power!

If your firm hasn’t yet taken the digital content plunge, there is no better time than now. People are hungry for expertise like yours. And by giving away some of it for free, you can build a loyal following that will bear fruit for years to come.

The post Digital Content Marketing Strategy for Today’s Professional Services Firm appeared first on Hinge Marketing.

The greek goddess Atalanta plans to take a run to the end of a certain well-beaten path. Well before she can reach the end of the path she must make it to the halfway point. But before she makes it to the halfway point she must make it to the quarter of the way point! And before that, she needs to make it to the eighth of the way point. And before that the sixteenth of the way point…

Here we sink into the dilemma: How does the Atalanta ever reach her destination? How does she even begin?

Many B2B marketers find themselves in a predicament similar to Atalanta’s. They are fully aware that their firm ought to be producing relevant content as a marketing strategy, but they’re stuck on the starting line wondering how to even get started.

Fortunately, mathematics has an explanation for Zeno’s paradox. And the frustrated marketer can, too—by reframing and looking at it through the lens of content relevance.

But before we discuss some strategies to help you increase the relevance of your content, it’s important that we understand how the marketplace is changing and why it matters more than ever to focus on content relevance.

Relevancy is on the Rise

The trouble at hand is that competition is increasing for professional services firms. In fact, in the Hinge Research Institute’s last four High Growth Studies, increased competition in the marketplace has been named a leading threat faced by the fastest growing firms. 

And there is more data to back up this sentiment. According to Hinge Research Institute’s third edition of its Inside the Buyer’s Brain study:

• Visibility of professional services firms is up 41.7%
• Professional services firms have improved their reputations by 10.8
• Buyer loyalty has sunk to a historic low, down nearly 2%

But among these findings, one of the most staggering changes is in how the relevancy of services provided by professional services firms has increased. In Figure 1, we see that more than ever, today’s buyers are looking for firms that can solve their biggest problems—and they believe that professional services firms like yours can solve them.

The most successful, professional services firms are not only improving their marketing, they are improving the relevancy of their services. The question now becomes how can we demonstrate our relevant expertise to prospective clients through great content.

Prioritizing Content Relevance Is the Way Forward

Whether you are publishing a series of blog posts, conducting a new webinar, or creating a gated piece of content, you are now working in the most competitive content landscape of all time. 

Every day, thousands of marketers from around the world are releasing or republishing new content and striving to gain their prospects’ attention. With so much competition there are certainly strategies that will not work—chief among them the all too common practice of producing ad-hoc content. 

So what should be the northstar for marketers in charge of developing new content? If we are to believe the research (and we at Hinge, certainly fall into this category) it is content relevance.

As professional services firms strive to become ever more relevant in their service delivery, it is the marketer’s responsibility to maintain pace. By leveraging your firm’s differentiators, special expertise or marketing positioning in your content, you will only make you more credible to your readers. And in a world that is widely oversaturated with content, only the highly relevant content will last.

4 Strategies for Increasing Content Relevance

For marketers working together with their team and their firm’s experts, we’ve made the case that content relevance should be your top priority. So what strategies can you implement to increase the likelihood that your content will be perceived as relevant. Here we discuss four different strategies:

Strategy 1: Conduct custom research on your clients

Any longtime reader of Hinge’s work will know that researching your target audience is often our recommended starting place for setting your marketing strategy. Interviewing and surveying your current and past clients can be a way to authentically capture what is unique about your firm.

“How did the client find your firm?”

“What tipped the scale when the client selected you as their service provider?”

“How did your firm solve their issues?”

Analyzing the answers to questions like these can yield helpful insights that can be applied by your marketing team. From a strategic standpoint, client research is invaluable in the process of refining your positioning and messaging. When it comes to content relevance, understanding how your current clients found you, what they valued, and what additional problems you could solve for them can give you a baseline idea for the kinds of issues and topics you could write or speak about in your next content campaign. It’s likely other potential clients are out there looking for the same level of support you provided to the clients you’ve worked with. Now it’s time to prove it with some strong messaging and great content.

To learn more about conducting research on target audiences, download Hinge’s free Professional Services Guide to Research.

Strategy 2: Learn through keyword research

Another avenue you can use to increase content relevance is keyword research. According to Inside the Buyer’s Brain, three out of the top ways potential buyers search for work-related topics is by consuming digital content. The top option among these is of course conducting a general web search. 

While professionals are still willing to ask their peers and colleagues for a recommendation, the very next thing they’re likely to do is turn to Google. Will you be found when they do?

Regular keyword research that intersects with your content creation plan is a surefire way to increase the visibility of your content and improve the likelihood that it will be relevant. 

In keyword research one of the main pieces of information you’re looking for is the keyword volume. Low volume? Clearly less prospects are searching for that term. The sweet spot is when you can match a keyword opportunity with a keyword with higher volume. Find these keywords and center your written content around them to increase the volume of quality traffic to your website.

And do you want to hear something amusing? It was through keyword research that our team identified “content relevance” as a topic to write about! So we practice what we preach.

Read this article to learn more about B2B SEO best practices!

Strategy 3: Repurpose content across many mediums

Repurposing, repackaging, and rewriting content is one of the most efficient ways to increase content relevance. This all starts with what we accept to be common knowledge that different people learn in different ways.

If you have gone through the exercise of identifying and producing a piece of content that has proven to be relevant, it should be one of your top contenders for expansion or repurposing. What are some examples? Here are a few:

• Take a relevant blog post and rewrite it align with specific industries you serve
• Go deeper on a topic and create a downloadable guide
• Turn a popular topic and begin conducting original research on it
• Produce video blogs as companion pieces to your top performing written content
• Host a webinar on your most relevant topic

Even if a piece of content is relevant for a potential buyer, there’s a chance they may miss it. If you’re confident that a particular issue or topic is resonating with your audience, then double-down on that topic and ensure that it gets as wide a reach as possible.

Strategy 4: Use research as content

For our fourth strategy we see everything converge into a single powerful entity. Namely, leveraging the power of conducting your own original research and baking it into every layer of content you produce.

We mentioned above how fierce the competition is in the world of content marketing. So what’s one way to stand out and make sure that the relevancy of your content is indisputable? Conduct custom research, sponsor or license key research reports, or co-sponsor a webinar with a research firm based on a piece of research.

When you leverage research, you are staking a claim of expertise on a particular topic. From there, you can begin to fill out a diverse content calendar all sourced from that commissioned, sponsored, licensed or presented piece of research. See below in Figure 2 just how many ways one piece of research can be utilized in a single marketing campaign.

From live and on-demand webinars that engage attendees and drive conversions to a series of keyword optimized blog posts which highlight different angles of the study and bring more visibility to your firm, custom or licensed research studies can inspire your content creators more ammunition to make excellent content.

The Time to Take the First Step is Now

As more and more professional services firms increase the quality of their digital content, it will be the ones who are the most relevant to their buyers’ issues that come out on top. Researching your clients, understanding their problems, and introducing them to your expertise is the path forward. 

Your firm may need to implement new marketing techniques and strategies to accomplish this goal, such as market research, keyword research, and an exercise in repurposing content into different mediums. The key is to experiment and test new ideas. Avoid falling into the rhythms of how you’ve always done things. You can always become more relevant. 

The post 4 Strategies to Increase Content Relevance and Reignite Your B2B Content Marketing Plan appeared first on Hinge Marketing.

How is this relevant to B2B marketers?

When going through various stages of the buyer journey, purchasers of B2B and professional services have a list of criteria they use to evaluate service providers and vendors. Being confident that you will receive tangible business results is a logical reason to want to work with a company. On the other hand, working with a company that has a “good cultural fit” addresses the desire to feel a certain emotion when working with them. Some criteria are intended to satisfy one cerebral hemisphere more than the other.

According to a major study by Google, Gartner and Motista, B2B buyers are more emotionally connected to the brands they purchase than B2C consumers. On average, B2C brands had an emotional connection with between 10% and 40% of buyers. Contrast that with a majority of B2B brands had emotional connections with more than 50% of their customers.

I can attest to this from all the user conferences I have attended over the years for various platforms that I have used. At almost every one of these user conferences, there was a strong focus on customers and the innovative ways that they leveraged the platforms to get better performance, productivity, and return on investment. We have all been there. We hear great stories, and we can’t wait to get back to the office and try to do something similar for our own organizations. The peer connection is emotionally strong. Those speakers understood our pain. They had gone through it themselves. And they were willing to share their learnings and insights with us – saving us a lot of time and steps.

Relationships Between Research and Growth

The Hinge Research Institute (HRI) has been publishing original research for over a decade. With more than 30,000 buyers and sellers studied and nearly one hundred research reports published, there is no other place with more extensive research on professional services markets.

Early in HRI’s exploration of the professional services market, we uncovered different relationships between rapid annual revenue growth and a firm’s propensity to do research.

Companies who do frequent research on their target market tend to grow faster. This makes intuitive sense. If you know your audience, you can market to them better.

What’s interesting, though, is we uncovered a different relationship between research and high growth. Several years ago, we started to see that the fastest growing businesses in professional services were 3x more likely to use original research in their content marketing strategy. Marketers in these organizations use empirical evidence to reinforce their brand position and boost their appeal to their buyer’s left-hemisphere criteria. It is a winning formula.

This supercharged content marketing strategy helps to show the difference between high growth firms and no growth firms year after year. In 2022, our research showed that high growth firms grew almost six times as much as no growth firms. Six times as much. Now that is a compelling argument to boost your content marketing strategy with research!

But if you need more motivation, take a look at the chart below. High growth firms not only grow significantly more than no growth firms—they are more likely to be significantly more profitable than no growth firms according to our 2022 High Growth Study research.

The power of research as a marketing asset is hard to match. Not only can research help marketing, business development, and senior management teams develop more informed planning and strategies, it can also be used as premium content to generate more visibility, trust, engagement, and leads. Research can be used in its entirety or in pieces (charts, findings, insights, quotes) throughout your sales & marketing funnel. It works well as content for social media, events, videos, articles/blogs, speaking engagements, webinars, guides, demos, and consultations.

The diagram below shows where you might use research as premium content to move a prospect through your sales & marketing funnel.

Let’s say a prospect is stuck in the middle of your marketing funnel and you need a compelling piece of content to deepen the engagement and move the prospect further down the funnel. This would be a great place to promote a recording of a co-branded webinar with one of your subject-matter experts presenting alongside a credible third party about research on a relevant issue or topic.

By injecting research and data into key messages, you are validating your messaging, adding credibility, building trust, and differentiating your organization’s subject matter expertise–therefore strengthening all of your efforts with the prospect.

Hopefully, we have made the case that research can be a game changer for your content marketing strategy. Now let’s show you five proven ways you can supercharge your B2B content strategy with research.

1. Don’t tackle research on your own

Few marketing or business development folks have research expertise or experience. Yet, some feel compelled to purchase some on-line survey tool and play “researcher” in an effort to save money. Many of them come to us after they have gone through a research study creation project on their own and tell us, “never again!”

Why?

Because every stage of the process requires expertise and experience to get valid and meaningful results. In an effort to save a few dollars would you like to proceed blindly or rely on specialists who deal with research day in and day out. Let’s look at some of the key production milestone of a custom research report:

• Research Design — What questions would you ask? To what audience? What are the best questions to ask? How should these questions flow? How should each question be formatted (ranking, pick one, select all that apply, open ended, etc.) What do you expect to find? How will these findings support your market position?
• Data Collection — What methods will you use to collect data? Do you have the technology for a survey? What is a valid sample size? How long will it take you to collect your data? How will you ensure that you hit your target sample size?
• Analysis — Nice data… but what does it mean? How will you interpret the results? What findings are truly insightful? Which ones support existing research?
• Narrative Development — What stories does the data support? What’s the best way to tell that story and connect the dots? Do you have writing resources that understand research analysis, your target audience industry, and marketing writing—and can connect the dots across all of those disciplines to provide an insightful and compelling story?
• Report Design — How will you package the research findings and narrative? How will data be visualized? What themes or colors should you use?
• Publishing & Promotion — Where will the report live on your website? How will you bring visibility to the content in a multi-month campaign? What information will users need to give up to download your research report? Are you collecting enough information? Are you collecting too much information and scaring off download requests? Do you have the bandwidth and resources to generate a lot of buzz and engagement for your research? How big is your marketing database?

Each aspect of the research process presents different challenges. If you don’t have the budget to outsource all of the research process, make sure you conduct a gap analysis of your in-house skills and expertise and prioritize which aspects of the research process can be handled by your in-house resources and which ones really require outside research expertise. You don’t want to spend a lot of time, money, and resources on a research project using just your team only to end up not getting meaningful findings and insights.

Custom research is an extremely valuable asset for many departments in your organization. You can get specific answers to specific questions from specific audiences. That does not happen very often. Keep in mind that a quality, custom research study should be able to provide you with enough content for at least six to nine months and provide an attractive return on investment in terms of amount of visibility, leads, and sales opportunities.

2. License existing B2B research

If leveraging research as premium content is new to you, then you might want to consider licensing existing B2B research.

Institutions that publish research sometimes sell distribution licenses to companies looking to incorporate research into their content strategy without infringing on copyright intellectual property.

For example, let’s say your business sells software to a professional services industry and you need to show how your product can help users address a painful business challenge. By providing them with 3rd party statistics that validate your solution, you are positioned as credible.

Licensing existing B2B research enables you to use compelling research the same way you would use custom research—without the price tag or time commitment. Custom research gives you more topic control but typically takes months to produce and is labor intensive. When you license existing B2B research, you are limited on the topics you can choose, but the research is available immediately and is offered at a lower price than custom research.

Think of it in terms of buying a car. You could order a car with the specific features and equipment you want on it and wait a few months. Or, you could lease a similar car for a year (maybe it is a different color and has less features on it) and drive it off the lot today.

3. Sponsor a relevant research study

If a research firm is planning an upcoming study—or has recently published one—you might want to consider being a sponsor of that study. Typically, your corporate logo would be on the cover so your brand would be associated with the research—strengthening your organization’s visibility and credibility.

By sponsoring a research study, you are telling your target market you care about their business by arming them with the insights they need to grow and thrive. Your brand will also be associated with the study in perpetuity, making the sponsorship of an original research study a marketing initiative with a very long shelf life.

For companies targeting professional service industries — like accounting, engineering, or consulting — as growth markets, you may consider sponsoring one of Hinge Research Institute’s research studies:

• High Growth Study — For the last seven years, this annual research study focuses on understanding what high-growth professional services firms do differently than underperforming peers, and the differences between industries. Who is not interested in learning how to get greater growth and profitability?
• Culture Clash Employee Experience Study — This study explores the causes of the Great Resignation trend within professional services. Most people believe the drivers are lack of salary or paid time off but that is not the case. This is a great study to get conversations started within your target audiences.
• Inside the Buyer’s Brain — This study walks you through the psychology of professional services buyers and sellers. It explores how buyers evaluate and select service providers and their client experience. It also documents key firm brand metrics and trends over time. What marketer would not like insights from inside the buyer’s brain?

4. Collaborate on an annual or regular co-branded research study

On a co-branded study, you join forces with a credible organization to produce a research report on a specific industry topic, trend, or market. You have the ability to influence key questions and survey design to zero in on the issues and topics most relevant to your specific situation. With time, this type of study will be referenced by many in a specific industry so that they can benchmark their status and progress.

Doing a co-branded study provides your marketing organization with a source of content that can be repurposed in many different ways. Because you own this kind of original research, it acts as a well to go back to for multiple marketing campaigns. You could publish supplementary reports featuring new analyses and result breakdowns. Moreover, many sell their co-branded research studies to create a revenue stream and recover some of their investment.

An example of a co-branded research study would be the AAM Marketing Budget Benchmark Study that the Hinge Research Institute has conducted with the Association for Accounting Marketing (AAM) five times now. It has become the accounting industry’s most comprehensive study of accounting marketing budgets. Senior HRI analysts often walk through this research at various AAM events to provide even more credibility and insights.

5. Leverage the power of a co-branded webinar

You’ve made the investment in custom, licensed, or sponsored research. Now you want to see engagement and a return on investment. One of the fastest and best ways to see those outcomes is through a co-branded webinar. Co-branded is the key. Instead of your organization producing a webinar on its own, it is teaming up with the research publisher. These webinars are the best way to showcase the study’s data, findings, and insights and position your organization’s subject matter expertise in an interactive forum.

You’ve never done a webinar or are not set up to host a webinar? No worries. Research consulting firms such as the Hinge Research Institute will:

• Set up the registration page
• Provide you with a list of all registrants and attendees
• Build out the presentation deck
• Provide a senior research analyst as a presenter
• Host and moderate the webinar
• Give you a list of all questions asked
• Provide you with a recorded version of the webinar to use in future campaigns
• And even promote the webinar through email and social media

Make sure you integrate a co-branded webinar in with your research study investment to start seeing engagement and an ROI as soon as possible.

Conclusion

According to Demand Gen Report, “Research is the most valuable content format for reaching B2B buyers—and the most likely to be shared.”

You have a content marketing engine. How is it performing? Is now the time to supercharge it with one of the five proven ways discussed in this blog? Are you ready to accelerate ahead of the competition with a little bit of optimization?

As always, I invite you to connect with me on LinkedIn and Twitter, and contact me at kwaffle@hingemarketing.com.

The post 5 Ways to Supercharge Your B2B Content Strategy with Original Research appeared first on Hinge Marketing.

How do marketers, BD staff, or sales teams, generate the number of leads they need to grow their firms or companies?

One secret that is getting out is by leveraging B2B licensed content.

What is B2B Content Licensing?

B2B content licensing is the leasing of or renting of a specific piece of existing content – guide, research study, book, etc. — for a specific period of time. An example may be licensing Hinge Research Institute’s Inside the Buyer’s Brain – Accounting and Financial Services Edition for 12 months to help you reach and engage with accounting and financial services firms through various campaigns. (See Figure 1. Inside the Buyer’s Brain: Accounting & Financial Services Edition.)

Figure 1. Inside the Buyer’s Brain: Accounting & Financial Services Edition

Why Leverage B2B Content Licensing—Especially Research Licensing?

Here are four reasons.

1. As shown in Figure 2., our research consistently shows that companies and firms that leverage frequent research (at least quarterly) grow significantly more than other organizations.

Figure 2. Growth of organization by research frequency

2. As shown in Figure 3., our research consistently shows that companies and firms that leverage frequent research (at least quarterly) are more profitable than other organizations.

Figure 3. Profitability of organizations by research frequency

3. Licensing existing research is less expensive than commissioning custom research. Since research is proven to help organizations grow and be more profitable, licensed existing research may be a great way to “dip your toe in the water” and prove effectiveness. Moreover, you can start using the research right away — there is no waiting for results and analysis.
4. Licensed existing research generates leads. Like I mentioned before, face-to-face networking, conferences, and trade shows are somewhat sidelined right now, so techniques such as licensing existing research have to step up and fill the gaps. Licensed research is up for the task. It enables your firm or company’s reputation to be strengthened as a subject matter expert or thought leader by association. More importantly, it builds a bridge of trust. In these unsettling and unpredictable times, trust is at an all-time low. You used to be able to gain trust by speaking to people in person at conferences or events. Now it is harder to build trust through the written word. But since research is not buying, but rather educating, your audiences will accept it and lower defenses faster.

Interested in custom research? Take a look at this video:

How to Use B2B Content Licensing

Let’s say you license the High Growth Study: Consulting Services Edition from Hinge Research Institute (Figure 4.) for 12 months. It makes sense because your company sells to consulting and what consulting firm doesn’t want to grow more or faster? Now that you have the research study, how do you use it to generate visibility and leads?

Figure 4. High Growth Study 2022: Consulting Services Edition

First of all, you might want to come up with four themes that you can use over the next four quarters such as: Current marketing priorities of high-growth consulting firms, marketing and business development skills of high-growth consulting firms, digital transformation processes of high-growth consulting firms, and priorities of the future of high-growth consulting firms. Once you have those quarterly themes solidified, then you can start mapping out how to leverage the research study to support those themes.

Seven Ways to Maximize Your Licensed B2B Content or Research 

1. Host a co-branded webinar: This is one of the fastest ways to start showing a return from your licensed content. Team up with the provider that licensed your content and host a webinar. Make the licensed content the focus of the webinar. Both organizations will promote the event and you will get a list of registrants and attendees – new names to add to your database. Some of the attendees will ask follow-up questions, will want to meet with you, and will become leads and sales opportunities. You can also create an archived version of the webinar that you can use in future marketing campaigns. You could roll out a webinar every three months to support the new quarter’s theme.
2. Write a series of blogs: Take snippets of the content and create an on-going conversation. Better yet, tie the blogs to relevant keywords and develop a search engine optimization (SEO) campaign that will drive leads to you as you rise in Google rankings.
3. Take your blogs and convert them into a series of short videos: Videos get a lot of engagement on social media and are a great way of expanding your audience. Videos can be made with smart phones these days – you do not need high production video equipment.
4. Post on social media: LinkedIn and Twitter: Especially if you have licensed existing research, social media postings are a great way to build visibility, trust, and followers. Research study charts and graphs go a long way on LinkedIn, Twitter, and other social media platforms. Be sure to repost several times as the shelf life of social media posts is very short.
5. Incorporate in sales presentations and collateral: As mentioned earlier, trust is at an all-time low. By leveraging findings and insights from a given piece of research, you give your sales presentations and collateral more credibility and validation.
6. Leverage social influencers and journalists: Scale your efforts by getting social influencers and journalists to mention or use your licensed research in articles, podcasts, and other channels.
7. Use in client engagements: Licensed research in the form of validation points, analysis, and benchmarks can be very useful to move engagement forward or even obtain new business with existing clients.

A Challenge to You

If you have not licensed B2B content or research before, you owe it to yourself and your firm or company to try it. Licensing existing research may be the fastest way show a return on investment. Find research topics that are broad but are compelling and relevant. If you can then go deeper and find an interesting topic focused on one or more of your target audiences, all the better. I truly believe if you accept this challenge and apply some of the ways to maximize licensed research as content, you will be able to fill some of your lead generation voids.

The post B2B Content Licensing – Secret to Generating More Leads and Visibility appeared first on Hinge Marketing.

Co-branding is a marketing strategy where two or more brand names form a branding collaboration around a product, service, or topic. By blending the market strength and brand awareness of two or more companies, co-branding often improves customer bases, customer loyalty, brand image, and perceived value for all participants.

Shooting for the Stars

The secret is out. Content is king. Everyone is creating content. In fact, according to Hosting Tribunal.com, there are more than 500 million blogs out there in the world on 1.7 billion websites. There are over two million blog posts daily. According to LinkedIn, there are more than two million posts, articles, and videos added to that social media platform every day. I have also heard that there are over 500 million tweets sent each day.

Yet, content creation is still a top priority for most B2B marketers. In fact, in the Hinge Research Institute’s 2020 High Growth Study of Professional Services Firms, content creation is the top priority.

Source: Hinge Research Institute

Most companies, firms, associations, and other organizations are having to spend more money and time creating content to get lower results. Most can’t crack the code so just invest more time creating more content and hope their branding, social media, visible expertise, and pipeline goals are met.

So, how is your content doing? Does it rise above the noise? Do enough people read it to make it worth your while to create? Are you getting any sales engagement from it? Are more people following you as a trusted thought leader? Even if your content is fantastic and compelling, I would challenge you to push it further. Readers are overwhelmed and even the best content sometimes get overlooked. This is where co-branding, especially co-branding with research, can launch your content to new heights of readership and engagement.

One of the most memorable examples I can think of is the “Stratos Project” with skydiver Felix Baumgartner. On October 14, 2012, from Roswell, New Mexico, Baumgartner ascended in a stratospheric, helium balloon 24 miles up in the air to the edge of space. He then jumped from the balloon platform back to Earth in a supersonic freefall.

The project was co-branded between Red Bull and GoPro. The project team was able to collect a lot of scientific information and Baumgartner became the first human to break the sound barrier without engine power. He parachuted safely to the ground.

Source: Red Bull Stratos

Source: GoPro

Millions of people around the world watched this event. There were over three million tweets that discussed this event. Hundreds of articles were written. Red Bull and GoPro picked up thousands of social media followers. Talk about making content stand out.

But here is the really important part. While most would see this as a brilliant advertising or public relations campaign, Red Bull and GoPro saw it as a scientific mission that they were willing to sponsor. Public approval agreed with them. Most felt that the event was based on data and liked the fact that Red Bull and GoPro were willing to invest in improving society—and that drove a lot of the content. Most did not feel that it was a sales pitch. In the end, according to the research firm, IRI, Red Bull’s sales rose 7% to $1.6 billion dollar in the US.

Free Resource

Research as Content: A Guide for B2B Marketers

Download Now

Launching with Co-branding with Research

OK, hopefully you can see where co-branding makes sense. So, where does research fit it? For B2B marketers, research is a differentiator that can separate your content from the overwhelming good and bad content that we talked about earlier. Like the Stratos campaign, co-branding with research is based on data and does not come across as a sales pitch. In fact, it often influences or validates how buyers are thinking and helps to speed up the sales cycle.

Start Thinking of Research Differently

When most of us think about commissioning research, we think we need to learn about our competitors, help us gauge perception and awareness, and develop differentiators and messaging. These are all good ways to leverage research. But few of us think about using research in a variety of formats to support a content marketing strategy and enhance buyer engagement.

Five Ways to Make Your Content Stand Out with Co-branding and Research

1. Sponsor Original Research—Find an industry topic where the research can be revisited and refreshed on an annual or regular basis. This topic may be address salaries, industry priorities, emerging trends, etc. Once this core research is published, you can repurpose the insights in blogs, articles, social media posts, and more. By co-branding with a respected research firm, your thought leadership will be enhanced and you can penetrate aspects of an industry that you may have not been recognized for before. For example, you may be an accounting firm that wants to build up its advisory services so you come up with research around emerging trends in advisory services. You will be surprised at how buyers will look at your firm differently.

2. Leverage Research Analysts in Webinars—Another way to co-brand with research is to sponsor a webinar and have a research analyst be the primary presenter or at least be on a panel of presenters. Again, a tone is set where it is not a sales conversation, but an educational conversation. This webinar is a great way to extend the reach of the research you commissioned in suggestion #1. Most folks want to learn and are willing to give up an hour of time if they can walk away with one or two actionable insights.

Source: ON24, Hinge Research Institute

3. Sponsor a Local Live Event—This is a great way to co-brand with research. While emails and webinars are effective, you will reach an audience with live events that you won’t with other channels. If your messaging is compelling and you have good speakers, some folks would prefer to come out and meet face-to-face, ask questions, go deeper. If you co-brand this event with an establish research firm, you should be able to leverage that firm’s database and marketing staff to help promote the event and secure registrations. Again, the research angle will appeal to a target audience who will not respond to traditional marketing messaging. Leverage the research firm’s brand and reputation as much as you can to help you increase your database—and your success.
4. License Existing Research—You want to take advantage of co-branding with research but perhaps you don’t have the time or budget for original research. Many research firms have programs now where you can license some of their key industry pieces of research for a year. With some of these programs, you can distribute the research through email, social media, trade shows/conferences, websites, content syndication, and more. It is a fast and effective way to ensure that your campaign stands out and your company or firm is associated with a given topic.

On-Demand Webinar: How B2B Research Can Supercharge Your Content Strategy

5. Sponsor an Existing Research Report—For many, the best way to step into co-branding with research is to sponsor an existing research report. This approach is less costly than original research and typical the report is produced on an annual or regular basis and has a base of followers or subscribers. With this type of sponsorship, a company or firm normally has its logo on the cover along with the logos of any other sponsors, and the logo of the research firm. Sometimes the sponsors can supply one or two questions for the survey/interview process which may provide specific insights for them. Again, since the report is produced annually or on some regular cadence, the report has a good shelf life and the content can be repurposed or repackaged many different ways. This certainly enhances branding and lead generation efforts.

Content may be king, but I would offer up that data and research are the royal guard that ensures that content remains king. I don’t see a lot of B2B marketers leveraging research right now to drive content visibility and engagement. That should make it a strong consideration as you plan how much effort you and your team will put into creating content this year. Make it stand out. Make it compelling. Make it worthwhile.

Looking for a Respected Research Firm to Co-brand with?

I would like to throw in The Hinge Research Institute (HRI) for consideration. We have been publishing original research for over a decade. With over 26,000 buyers and sellers studied and nearly one hundred research reports published, I believe that there is no other place with more extensive research on professional services markets. Go ahead and do your Google keyword searches, but I found that our level of questioning in both online surveys and phone interviews enables us to provide actionable insights that may change the way your firm markets or grows itself. Please feel free to reach out to me via email, phone, or social media if you would like to discuss how research and the Hinge Research Institute can make your content stand out.

The post Co-branding with Research: Making Your B2B Content Stand Out appeared first on Hinge Marketing.

“Most of our leads have always come from conferences, trade shows, and speaking events. That is how our budget was set up and we don’t know how to adapt yet.”

I still hear comments like these from prospects and clients on a weekly basis. research from our own Hinge Research Institute shows that referrals are down and face-to-face conferences, trade shows, and speaking events have a way to go before people are comfortable attending them again. So how do marketers adapt and generate more visibility, leads, and trust in these unprecedented times?

Hinge Research Institute’s annual High Growth Study research tells us that one of the best pivots that marketers and others can make is to leverage research more (at least quarterly). It has proven to be highly impactful marketing technique. In our recent High Growth Study, we identified a small group of marketing techniques that provide exceptionally strong impact for the level of time and effort they take to implement. To identify these techniques, we subtracted the effort required from the impact realized. Think of them as high impact for the effort invested. While not all techniques apply to every audience, research gives you an effective and efficient way to fill the gap of leads that you are not getting from referrals, conferences, trade shows, and speaking events.

Most marketers and business professionals think of research as a tool to make better business decisions. It is a cost made for an inward function: learning more about competition, branding, messaging, pricing, etc. However, more and more folks are realizing that they can leverage research as an investment for an outward function: teaching target audiences about industry and peer behaviors, priorities, trends, and perceptions. By using “Research as Content,” you can take that one research study and repurpose its content dozens of different ways throughout the year. Suddenly you are in a position to measure the number of leads, meetings, sales opportunities, and dollars that were generated from campaigns leveraging all or part of the research content. It puts the value of research in a new and different light.

If that is not enough to sell you on using more research this year in your marketing initiatives, here are two very compelling reasons:

1. Firms that do frequent research grow faster.

2. Firms that do frequent research are more profitable.

Let that soak in for a minute.

How many other marketing tactics that you use can be documented as helping companies grow faster and be more profitable? Perhaps leveraging research should move up on your list of marketing priorities.

A Pivot You Must Make

Beyond research, one of the most important and impacting pivots you can make is to transition to digital marketing. This is a game changer. In fact, our latest High Growth Study research shows that high growth firms (defined as having a compound annual growth rate of 20% or greater over a three-year assessment period) get almost half of their leads from digital sources.

Even if your organization has begun digital marketing, it needs to take it further to truly benefit from it. Technology maturity is a key to success. Our research shows that high growth firms are significantly more mature in their technology skill sets and the more mature they are, the more digital leads they are harvesting.

When I talk about digital marketing, I am talking about a few specific areas that need to be addressed and prioritized. They include:

• A high-performance website that provides thought leadership, differentiation, and calls to action to continue engagement
• An email or marketing automation platform to stay in contact with prospects and clients not ready to buy
• A Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy that ties together content, keywords, and search rankings
• A social media visibility strategy

This is not an afterthought. It has to be a top priority for your organization. An effective digital marketing strategy will require a lot of investment of budget, resources, and times. There are new investment requirements for skills, technologies, programs, and more. Perhaps, that is why we found that high growth firms are spending significantly more on marketing than slow- or no-growth firms. What percentage of firm revenue is your marketing budget? Is it closer to the no growth firms or high growth firms?

Another Important Pivot: Blogging 

Blogging is a must when it comes to showcasing thought leadership. Thought leadership is important to differentiate, educate, and create trust. So, if you are not blogging, add it to your list of pivots for this year. If you are blogging, you are not off the hook yet. While blogging is a great tactic to showcase thought leadership and build followers, our research shows that some of most effective ways to promote thought leadership is through podcasts, video blogging, and marketing videos.

High growth firms have figured this out and use these tactics much more effectively than slow- or no-growth firms. Can you afford to go another year without showcasing your thought leadership in podcasts, video blogging, and marketing videos?

Finally, when I have this “need to pivot” conversation with folks, two questions always arise:

1. How do I approach my senior management about more marketing budget? 

My answer is always the same: measurement. Senior management wants to see that you took those extra dollars and spent them in ways to help your organization grow. Especially when it comes to digital marketing transformation, you will want to measure. In the beginning, your metrics may be simple: number of new followers, number of qualified leads, etc. You just want to show that the numbers are going up—you are making progress. As you become more sophisticated, those metrics will change to number of generated meetings, amount of revenue tied to generated sales opportunities, etc. You are not going to come out of the gate with the most effective campaigns. You will need to measure and test. Then you will get to the point where you can optimize.

Here’s another tip for you that has worked for me in the past. Keep your senior management informed of marketing performance with regular reporting and eventually on-demand dashboards. Keep in mind that most senior executives do not come from the world of marketing. You have the ability and duty to educate them on specific key performance indicators they should be tracking. They are always happier when they see those numbers going up—especially if they impact revenue.

A while back I worked at a large, SaaS-based company and one day was sitting in a meeting right next to our Chief Revenue Officer. I saw him open his laptop and look at a dashboard with speedometer type reporting. It was near the end of a quarter and he—and I—saw that Marketing performance was all in the green. So, when the subject came up on where to invest some extra money we had, his answer was Marketing. Marketing did not even have to make a case for the extra money. Give the CXOs or partners the visibility they need to help you. Most CFOs or VPs of Finance have to sign off on marketing expenditures week after week. They just see money going out the door. They rarely get to hear how that spent money actually turned into more money.

2. These are great pivots, but we have a small marketing department. What can we do?

Let’s go back to our research and the beginning of this article. In our High Growth Study research, we actually address high impact techniques for the time-crunched marketer or small marketing teams.

I would start with leveraging research and then getting your thought leadership out there through blogging, guest blogging, podcasts, video blogging, and public relations. Once that starts taking off and you can show a positive impact on your marketing and sales funnel, then I would make the digital marketing transformation. If you have a small marketing team, you might be able to do both pivots by leveraging outside resources with specialized experience.

If you have questions about how to use research as content, please feel free to reach out to me at kwaffle@hingemarketing.com

If you feel that you are leveraging research as content, have a solid, digital marketing framework in place, and are looking for other ways to pivot, I recommend that you download our guide, “Getting Back in the Game,”which is a playbook filled with plays and pivots that are sure to help you generate more visibility, leads, and prospect engagement. In either case, make your move and pivot today!

The post Research…and other smart pivots B2B marketers are making to generate more visibility and leads appeared first on Hinge Marketing.

I’m glad you asked.

Today, about 1 in 5 B2B companies are publishing primary research and using it to reach new audiences, generate leads, and as validation for their services. That figure has risen over the past few years (see the image below)

Wait… only one in five? Yup. With so few companies taking advantage, primary research can be the secret weapon in your content strategy.

But you have to make sure it’s distributed effectively.

Researching an issue or topic important to your target buyers gives you “seed” content to distribute on a variety of channels and platforms (see the image below). When used strategically, one research report can fuel an entire year’s worth of marketing campaigns.

Come on down and spin the wheel! Here are 27 different content distribution ideas to promote your primary research.

Social Media

1. Native Video — social media algorithms (especially LinkedIn’s) love native video. By uploading video focused on one or two key research findings, it creates content unique to that social platform.
2. Tweets — I love Twitter because it forces marketers to refine messages and get their point across in 280 characters. Research gives marketers valuable content to share and distribute. 20 statistics can easily turn into 20 scheduled Tweets. 
3. LinkedIn Pulse — Pulse articles are a great way to blog if your company doesn’t have one. This kind of content has a longer shelf-life than LinkedIn posts, and they show up as clickable links on your LinkedIn profile. Pulse articles can be used to post opinions or analysis of key research findings.
4. LinkedIn Posts — Like tweets, LinkedIn posts are unique to LinkedIn. But unlike Twitter, you have 1,300 characters to work with, giving you much more breathing room to write about each research statistic you choose to profile. Exhale!

Digital Advertisements

5. Creative Ad Copy — Calling Don Draper. When running visual advertisements like banner ads or ads on social, you could incorporate a research statistic into the creative. Just because it’s a statistic doesn’t mean it has to be dull…
6. Headlines — Using Statistics in Headlines Give you a 99% Better CTR… Ok, I made that stat up. But if you’re running PPC or other text-based ads, you could leverage research statistics to make your headlines jump out. 

Video

7. Whiteboard videos — So you wanna be Rand Fishkin, huh? Whiteboard videos have a presenter explaining a topic, using a white board and marker to illustrate their point. Research can provide good content for presenters to illustrate or as validation for their main point.
8. Video blogs — Grab that selfie stick and record your research-based ramblings right to your cell phone. This raw style of video has seen success in some industries like marketing and consulting.
9. Video courses — E-learning is becoming a popular way for business owners to learn new skils and for enterprise organizations to train their staff on specific topic areas. By incorporating research into your video courses, it adds credibility to your lesson. Class dismissed!

Webinars

10. Live webinar presentations — Webinars and primary research go together like peanut butter and jelly… or pineapple and pizza (yum). If you conducted the research, host a webinar to distribute the results with your audience. If you license research, you could co-present with an analyst from the publishing organization. 
11. On-demand webinars — Webinar binge and chill? Take the live webinar you presented in and offer it on-demand to your audience. This is a great way to build up an arsenal of valuable content that you can use to nurture leads and allow web visitors to find organically.
    
12. Webinar snippets — Take the on-demand webinar video file you have and isolate 1-3 minute clips to be promoted on social media, web pages, email and more. This is great fodder for social media, targeted email campaigns and specific web pages.

Live Events

13. Speaking engagements — Need a unique talk track? Talk about your primary research! Need I say more?
14. Printed reports to hand out — You download a digital research report, and then chances are it gets lost on your desktop or your downloads folder. Instead, have your report really stand out. Print copies of your research report, spiral bind it together, and hand them out to target accounts at live events. (BONUS — mail them to prospects with a handwritten note)

PDF Downloads

15. Playbooks — 2-minutes to go in the fourth quarter… What plays are you going to use to drive the ball downfield and win the game? Let’s hope those plays are founded in primary research… Playbooks are an effective tool, especially in Account Based Marketing (ABM) strategies. These are great ways to distribute research-based content internally.
16. How-to Guides — If your clients wanted to DIY the services they’re using you for, how would they do it? Here you can use primary research to illustrate why your process is effective, or leverage aggregate client results to demonstrate success.
17. Technical White Papers — By using primary research to help describe how a technology, product or service addresses a particular buyer challenge, you can reinforce your credibility and expertise on the subject. 

Podcasts

18. Interviews with research analysts — If you co branded a research study with another organization, you could interview one of their analysts on your podcast. This is a great way to add validity to the research, and best of all? You don’t run the risk of being seen as self-promotional.
19. Conversations about research findings — Our latest research suggests less than 13% of B2B and professional services firms have a podcast. If you don’t have one, that’s OK. Pitch your research as a topic to other podcasts and go on their shows as guests. Tailor your conversation and how you frame the research to resonate with that particular audience.

Outreach

20. Press releases — This is a tried and true way of promoting a research study. Sending out a press release about your research gives journalists an opportunity to pick up stats and use them in their articles, giving your research the chance of reaching far and wide.
21. Guest blogs — Pitch a topic supported by your research to external publications that overlap with your target audience. This is another great way of increasing the visibility of your primary research and expertise.
22. Influencers & journalists — Influencer marketing has taken over B2C, and there have been noted success stories in B2B. If you can get a notable Visible Expert within a given industry to start talking about your research, it adds credibility and boosts visibility. …And sorry, pet animal accounts don’t count as influencers.

Blog Posts

23. Analysis and interpretation — You may need to write up the formal research report one way, but blogging is a great way to add analysis in your own voice about the primary research study. This adds character and depth to the narrative around the research.
24. Supporting stories and case examples — Everyone loves a good story. That’s probably why storytelling has become a hot topic in marketing lately. But when you take a good story and add compelling empirical evidence? That’s a marketing move that packs a one-two punch.

Client Engagements

25. Benchmarks — So… how do I stack up against my competitors? Some research can act as benchmarks to which you can compare your clients. This is one way you can distribute research-based content to add value to your client engagements.
26. Reserved analysis — You don’t have to publish all of the results. Another way to add value to client engagements is to reserve some of your analysis to share exclusively with your clients. VIP! 
27. Validation points — If you are recommending a specific course of action to your clients, research can be a good way to validate your approach. This is what you should do, and here’s research 

Contact us to learn more about using research as content

Summary

If you are going to publish primary research, make sure you have a content distribution strategy that ensures you get maximum reach and visibility. Without good distribution, even the most insightful research study will collect digital dust sitting around only on your website.

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What do successful firms’ strategies look like? What kind of results are they seeing? Are other firms experiencing the same challenges?

The Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs recently published their year-in review of the B2B content marketing landscape. The study surveyed a range of firms about their content marketing strategies and success – then compared effective and ineffective firms. (In this case, the efficacy of the firms was determined based on self-evaluation.)

Several of their findings really stood out. While this overview isn’t as industry-specific as our research, the study includes a substantial sample of professional services, and I think it offers some relevant context, strong data points, and solid guidance on making content marketing more effective in 2014.

I found six key takeaways to the study:

1) Successful firms have a documented content marketing strategy

Overall, the study found that 44% of the surveyed B2B marketers had a documented content strategy. But here’s the kicker – 66% of the firms who considered themselves effective had that documented strategy, compared to only 11% of those who found their efforts ineffective. That’s a stark difference, and it’s not surprising.

When you have a formalized strategy documented and in place, you have a universally accessible reference point for evaluating your own success. Has each step been implemented appropriately? Which elements of the strategy are effective, which aren’t, and which may need some tweaking? It’s hard to ask or answer these questions without a documented strategy. Perhaps more importantly, it’s difficult for a team to share a consistent understanding and approach to the strategy if it’s not locked down in print. Different team members may have very different ideas about what the strategy actually is, and this problem will only be compounded when new team members leave or come onboard.

2) Most B2B marketers have someone overseeing content marketing strategy

There’s a similar divide between effective and ineffective firms on this point: a tremendous 86% of effective firms have put someone in place to oversee the content marketing strategy, while only 46% of the least effective firms have done so. But even the overall numbers here speak to a clear trend and a recognized need: 73% of all the firms surveyed had someone dedicated to this task.

The reasoning for this is quite similar to the reasoning behind a strategy document – clearly delineating strategy and responsibility, rather than allowing many different versions of a loose strategy to sit in many different heads, uncoordinated. More firms may have taken this step because it is simply easier to assign a role than to develop a full-fledged content strategy.

3) Content marketing strategies use an average of 13 distinct tactics

The study identified a wide variety of specific tactics and asked marketers to list the ones they utilized. The results showed that effective firms used an average of 15 tactics and ineffective firms used 10, while the overall average was 13. So what were those 13 tactics? Starting with the ones most commonly used:

• Social media (other than blogs)
• Articles on your website
• eNewsletters
• Blogs
• In-person events
• Case studies
• Videos
• Articles on other websites
• Whitepapers
• Online presentations
• Webinars/webcasts
• Infographics
• Research reports

There may be some redundancy or blurred lines between some of these categories, but they provide a pretty detailed portrait of the content tools firms are employing to share their knowledge.

4) Marketers are using more social media more often

Overall, the study found firms using an average of six social media platforms, noting that this was an increase of one platform from last year’s numbers. The most effective firms maintained a presence on an average of seven social media sites. In order of most common usage, the top seven sites were:

• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• Facebook
• YouTube
• Google+
• SlideShare
• Pinterest
   

This order is about what we’d expect, though I was a little surprised to find so many firms reporting Facebook usage – 81% of those surveyed. The trend in this data is clearly toward more…more platforms, more types of interaction and media, and more adoption across the industry.

5) Content marketing budgets are increasing

According to the study, 58% of B2B marketers are planning to allocate more of their budget to content marketing in the next 12 months, a modest jump from last year’s rate of 54%. The trend here didn’t differ according to efficacy, but instead demonstrated a pretty steady, consistent trend across the industry. One interesting distinction emerged, however: more small companies (with teams of around 10 to 99 people) planned to increase budgets than companies with 1000+ employees, at a rate of 60% compared to 52%.

6) More successful content marketers allocate more of the budget to content

Perhaps this seems like a no-brainer, but the numbers suggest a good deal about the state of content marketing today. On average, firms allocate 30% of their marketing budgets to content marketing. The most effective firms allocate 39%, while the least effective allocate only 16%.

Taken together, all of these numbers tell a story about what a successful content marketing strategy looks like today. Successful firms generally have a documented, formalized strategy in place, with someone in place to oversee its direction and implementation. This means evaluating tools and tactics, including the effectiveness of those currently in use and the opportunity in emerging platforms or types of content.

Behind these efforts, marketers need dedicated investment. This will mean different things for different firms, but it will always take a significant allocation of the budget and a commitment to seeing the strategy through to success. With these elements in place, firms tend to see fewer challenges – and find themselves much more able to move forward with confidence.

Check out the full research report, as well as our Content Marketing Guide for Professional Services for tips on developing a strategy.

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