Why You Should Market Like a Media Company

By Cara Sloman, Chief Executive Officer

The pandemic forced B2B marketers to pivot radically in their approach to finding and interacting with customers and prospects. Now, as stay-at-home orders are lifted, marketers are having to rethink the approach yet again. With some companies tackling remote work for the long-term and others taking a hybrid approach, marketers will need to be flexible and creative when it comes to campaign strategies, meeting Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and shifting techniques.   

We recently conducted research on this topic and found that about 60% of respondents shifted budget from in person activities to digital marketing – specifically to content marketing. With in-person events off the table and unlikely to return to business as usual in the near future, content marketing has become more important than ever before. And this is where marketing organizations can benefit by taking a page from their media colleagues’ book. For media organizations, the mission is to entertain, inform and influence – this isn’t unlike marketers’ ultimate goals.  When it comes to succeeding in today’s landscape, there’s a lot to be gleaned from operating more like a media organization.  

Read below for best practices marketers can learn from media organizations’ editorial strategies. 

What do buyers need? 

Organizations have had to find new ways to build relationships since face-to-face meetings have become unpredictable. Content marketing fills the bill. It’s beneficial to your brand to build trust by addressing customers’ and prospects’ problems. Content enables you to generate demand and nurture leads while safely and effectively interacting with them. 

In addition, your subject matter experts and executives enhance their thought leadership status. Consumers will keep coming back to your channels when they find relevant content from industry experts that meets their needs.  

Working together 

Develop content to support sales with these three elements in mind: 

• Buyer input – Marketers can get current, in-depth input from the sales team about the business challenges of prospects, questions about features, comments about products and other details. Marketers can use this to refine their messages.  
• Analytics – Marketers can use analytics tools to help close sales throughout the buyers journey. Learning precisely how buyers interacted with various types of content – like case studies, videos, webinars and blog posts – along the sales funnel enables marketers understand what digital assets are resonating the most. This will also help them find gaps in the sales process by knowing where more content resources would be helpful in the decision-making process.  
• KPIs – Find out which metrics are useful for the sales and marketing teams alike based on the kind of content and its distribution point. This could be the click-through rate of email campaigns or dwell time on your site – and on which pages. A best practice is to use dedicated links whenever possible so you can track results more accurately. 

Constant clarity 

Today’s buyers make the internet their first stop for gathering information about products and services. They want current content that addresses their pain points, and that’s what you must continually produce. These are the efforts that nurture leads and close sales. Create expert, high-quality content that isn’t complex or jargon-filled. When you do this, your customers and prospects will come to trust your brand. And by using tools like Google Analytics, you can quickly find out which content and which channels are delivering. 

Market like a media company 

Whatever might be going on in the world, you need to be on top of what’s keeping your customers and prospects up at night. As those pain points change, so too will your tactics. 

Media organizations check the weather and are agile in their response to what their customers need. This is the type of agility the marketing team needs, too. By creating high-quality content and paying close attention to where and how it’s received, you’ll learn what works and how to support your company’s business goals – both now and in the long run.