Content marketing continues to be a top priority for B2B (and B2C) marketers. However, with often limited resources and subject matter, and experts to develop original content and repurpose it across multiple channels, many content marketing programs remained stalled.
Indeed, according to the “2016 B2B Content Marketing Trends – North America” survey report from the Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs, the top challenges B2B content marketers face include producing engaging content, producing content consistently, and producing a variety of content.
If a company is limited in the internal resources it can dedicate full-time to content marketing initiatives, a viable option is to leverage your PR agency team to drive content development and repurpose that content for a variety of audiences.
The benefits of working with your PR agency to draft and develop content are manifold. As columnist Rachel Lindteigen writes in MarketingLand (“Who should create your content?”), agencies can often scale production and have multiple resources working on your account. Further, agency personnel frequently have the backgrounds in PR, journalism and English to get the job done efficiently and without requiring extensive training. “It’s this combination of the number of team members and the educational/background mix that can make your agency a great asset for content development,” writes Lindteigen.
For example, Communiqué PR is assisting our client EMC Isilon by conducting a number of interviews with business unit CTOs to get their perspective about industry trends and issues facing their target audiences. From there, we draft content that is utilized on the company’s blogs (EMC Emerging Tech and EMC Pulse). We also use the information from these CTO interviews and blog posts to pitch and develop contributed articles, proactive pitches, speaker proposals and award submissions. In one case, we were able to take a series of blog posts that weren’t yet published and pitch them as an exclusive three-part contributed series to TV Technology magazine for EMC Isilon’s CTO of Media and Entertainment Tom “T.V.” Burns.
Below are some suggestions for PR agency teams to help support content marketing programs:
Utilize in-house experts. Work with your primary client contact to identify subject matter experts and conduct one-on-one interviews with them about their roles and their experiences interacting with customers, partners and other key stakeholders. For example, who better to talk about the challenges that customers are facing than a customer service executive who speaks with them every day? In just an hour or so, interviewers can access valuable insight and perspective for blog posts, social media channels, infographics, case studies and more.
Consider briefings with C-level executives to get a view from the top, but also try and meet with contacts across all levels, including engineers involved with product development, customer service representatives, or those contacts involved with partners or strategic alliances.
Put your journalist hat on. When conducting interviews, think like a journalist and make sure you get the right information you need for the content. Don’t let them rely too heavily on acronyms or jargon– ask for details and specifics. Recording the call is highly recommended since conversations can easily go off track and it can be difficult to remember details several weeks following the interview.
Here are five sample questions to consider:
- Is there a common pain point you hear about frequently from customers or partners?
- What are the biggest changes coming in your industry over the next 2-5 years?
- What issues/trends are your customers not paying enough attention to? What needs more noise?
- Other than your company, is there someone whose approach in this space you really like and respect? Why?
- What publications/websites/blogs do you read?
Banking on content development and repurposing. So you’ve got your PR agency involved with drafting content and supporting your content marketing initiatives – great! The next step is to get the whole company to access and leverage that content. In a column for Forbes (“60% Of B2B Content Sits Unused, Here’s the Fix”), contributor John Hall discusses the importance of corporate knowledge banks, which are centralized content hubs where sales, social media, recruiting, employee training and other team members can pull content and incorporate them into their own initiatives. As Hall writes in an article for the Content Marketing Institute, these hubs create a single location for employees to find internal knowledge, industry knowledge and data and opinions. The key is making sure it’s updated frequently and accessible to all employees.
Does your company have a content marketing program? Have you used a PR agency or other contributors to develop content? If so, what were the results? We’d love to hear about your experience in our comments section.