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B2B Content Marketing in 2017: The Good, the Bad and the Awesome
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SEPTEMBER 2017
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If you’ve been paying attention to marketing trends in the last several years, you know that as of 2017, content marketing has become a central focus to many businesses. As a result, content is everywhere, but not all content is created equal. If you learn that your content isn’t performing the same way your competitors’ content seems to be, that can be disheartening and daunting.
Here at Iris Content, we dedicate ourselves to helping our customers develop and publish excellent content that isn’t just informative and well-written, but also carefully crafted to generate engagement. When you develop content for your own business, it isn’t always easy to look at that content with the critical eye that you need. That’s why today, we’re bringing you some of our best tips on the good, the bad, and the awesome of content marketing in 2017.
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Content Marketing in 2017: The Good
In order to succeed at content marketing, we need to make sure our content marketing isn’t just accurate or informative – it needs to be strategic and carefully planned. Here at Iris Content, we can help you with a strategic approach to your content. Looking to increase traffic? Embed links to outside reputable sources. Looking to drive people down the sales funnel, link key terms to deeper pages on your own website. Here are a few of our tips for content marketing best practices in 2017:
Be Customer Focused: Always begin from the standpoint of what your customers need, and work to meet it.
Tell a Compelling Story: Your brand can tell a story! Communicating the facts is important, but it can get boring. Study storytelling techniques and incorporate them into your content.
Make It Useful: Don’t write content just because you’re cramming keywords. Instead, think of why those keywords are so often searched for. What are those people looking for? Figure that out, and give it to them, in an actionable format.
Be Different: Always try to make your content different. If you’ve looked around some of your competitors’ blog content, sometimes you notice that all their content begins to sound the same. In addition, since they’re all eyeing each other’s blogs too, they can begin to rewrite and parrot each other’s content. Notice the trends among your competition, and then find ways to buck those trends.
Content Marketing in 2017: The Bad
As you navigate the landscape of content marketing, you’ll find a lot of bad content. You’ll see typos and grammatical errors, you’ll find articles which were clearly written by robots, and you’ll find information which is just wrong. Even more insidious, however, is content that is just written for the wrong reasons. Content that is self-serving, content that covers topics that have already been talked about ad nauseam, highly technical content and walls-of-text spanning thousands of words without a single call-to-action or link to be seen. Clearly, these are topics the writers were passionate about, but do they connect with customers, tell a good story, or inspire action? Not likely.
It’s easy to spot bad content when you see it – however, when your own company produces the content, sometimes you’re too close to recognize it. Looming deadlines mean corners get cut. You quickly hammer out an “its-been-done-before” top ten list of tips and hit the “Publish” button. It may be accurate and well-written, but is it worth reading?
The answer to this problem is to change your content production process, and Iris Content can help you break out of the mold, refreshing your content marketing strategy in 2017.
Content Marketing in 2017: The Awesome
What’s awesome about content marketing in 2017? Well, first of all, the ubiquity of content marketing is making it a whole lot easier to think about your marketing in general, because content marketing has become the central building block of all marketing.
Think about it: you generate fresh, engaging, informative, and useful content regularly and publish it to your website. This boosts your website’s SEO and gives your customers valuable information, sure, but it doesn’t end there. As a result, you can now take that same content and develop it into a series of social media content posts. Use it as a script for a quick 1-minute video, for either your YouTube channel or a social media video ad. Use it as the basis for an email campaign. You can even bring they key ideas from it into more traditional advertising channels like radio and print.
Here’s the bottom line: no marketing or advertising channel works without content.
Once you start to look at content marketing in 2017 as the starting point from which all your other marketing efforts spring, you begin to see how a solid content strategy builds a solid marketing strategy almost on its own.
Trust Iris Content for Your Content Marketing Strategies in 2017
Are you overwhelmed, frustrated, or confused by your content marketing efforts? Want to bring all your marketing into focus with excellent content as its foundation? At Iris Content, we create engaging, unique content that speaks to your audience in your brand’s voice. To find out more about how we can help you with content marketing in 2017, contact us online.
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Like what you see? Over the next few days, Iris Content will offer each industry its own specific report in a short blog and starting October 1, a series of larger state of the industry reports will be available for all relevant industries that have an online presence. If you are interested in trends in content marketing and what your specific industry should publish to stay relevant and improve ROI, come back for more professional reports from our team of expert writers.
[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][et_pb_row][et_pb_column type=”4_4″][et_pb_divider color=”#cc4315″ show_divider=”on” divider_style=”groove” divider_position=”top” hide_on_mobile=”on” /][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][/et_pb_section][et_pb_section bb_built=”1″ admin_label=”Blog post main Section” fullwidth=”off” specialty=”off” transparent_background=”off” background_color=”FDF3E7″ allow_player_pause=”off” inner_shadow=”off” parallax=”off” parallax_method=”off” padding_mobile=”off” make_fullwidth=”off” use_custom_width=”off” width_unit=”on” make_equal=”off” use_custom_gutter=”off”][et_pb_row make_fullwidth=”off” use_custom_width=”off” width_unit=”on” use_custom_gutter=”off” padding_mobile=”off” allow_player_pause=”off” parallax=”off” parallax_method=”off” make_equal=”off” parallax_1=”off” parallax_method_1=”off” parallax_2=”off” parallax_method_2=”off” column_padding_mobile=”on”][et_pb_column type=”1_3″][et_pb_image src=”https://iriscontent.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Annie-Iankogg.jpg” show_in_lightbox=”off” url_new_window=”off” use_overlay=”off” animation=”left” sticky=”off” align=”right” force_fullwidth=”off” always_center_on_mobile=”on” border_style=”solid” _builder_version=”3.0.74″ show_bottom_space=”on” /][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=”2_3″][et_pb_team_member name=”Annie Ianko” position=”Chief Content Officer” background_layout=”light” facebook_url=”https://www.facebook.com/IrisWebContent/” twitter_url=”https://twitter.com/Iris_Content” border_style=”solid” custom_css_main_element=”box-shadow: 0 0 20px rgba(0,0,0,.1);||” _builder_version=”3.0.74″]
Annie has 20 years of experience as an editor and content creator and manager. With work in television and written media, she has dedicated her past 10 years to learning the ropes of online content creation, from writing to editing, from SEO to content management.
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