Re-purposing your content across platforms — print, online, social media and tablet apps — maximizes its visibility and builds your audience. Make it a standard practice in your group.
Catering to the increasingly mobile content consumption habits of your customers and prospects builds your readership and drives visitors to your site. What you need to know is how your audience of readers is segmented: where and how they would want to consume the content you’re offering. As a technology marketer you are in the business of attracting and building a following; and as any publisher can attest, good editorial content in any form or medium creates strong readership no matter what platform it’s on.
At Write Angle, we think of “good” or “compelling” content as anything that would encourage a customer to share with associates. And we think that thoughts brought to our attention last week by
Folio Magazine blogger Kelley Damore should resonate among technology marketers responsible for publishing compelling content aimed at diverse purchasing decision-makers and buyers, from content management software to IT security to clean tech.
Creating the kind of content readers eagerly share is all about knowing their wants and needs. Offering it up on a variety of platforms conducive to wider consumption will always trump trying to game the search engines. (Which, we should note, is getting harder by the day.) Your content should strive to inform first and advocate second, but to inform anyone you must first engage them with subject matter most on their minds and described in page-turning terms and powerful anecdotes.
Two principles should guide your efforts:
1. It always begins with the customer/buyer, not with your offering.
2. You’re in the publishing business today as much as the business of your tech category.
What is it that makes, or is making, your web pages stand above and apart from the competition? How are you capturing and conveying your value prop? What is it that makes your audience (read: customers) want to share it with their associates? In the short-attention span world of technology customers, there’s no substitute for knowing how to hit and penetrate the target. Get this right, and where you designate the next destination for a re-purposed case study, white paper, video or slideshow can further amplify your presence.
It’s your job to reach readers in the location of their choice, whether it’s Facebook, Linked In, Google+ or wherever subsets of buyers might gather. Knowing what makes them tick is fundamental. Making the right content regularly visible in the right places is bound to grow site visitors and revenue-generating activity. And the way Damore sees it, there is a greater opportunity for B2B on the today’s new platforms than there was in the era of either online or print. “Apps allow your readers to become very sticky and access content anywhere, at any time. Social media allows your engaged readers to share content with networks that may not be in your database”.
How do you segment your audience of customers and prospects according to your Facebook friends looking for industry discussion forums, or Linked In groups looking for thought leadership, or other platforms and the particular interest associated with them? How would you monitor how much traffic mobile platforms are delivering to your site? Above all, what are you doing to ensure your content is worth sharing?
