7 Tips for Fueling Marketing Campaigns with Content: Insights from Joe Chernov, Mike Volpe, and Dave Balter

A car without gas is a useless hunk of metal. Likewise, a marketing platform – whether it’s a blog, marketing automation software, or a Facebook page – won’t drive your brand anywhere without killer content.

With that in mind, we caught up with Joe Chernov of Kinvey, Mike Volpe of HubSpot, and David Balter of BzzAgent to find out how content can be used to fuel an effective marketing strategy. Check out their 7 tips below:

Tailor Content to Your Business’s Needs

Joe Chernov: As Adam Singer of Google says, “All marketing should be modern.” The role of content needs to be derived from the business’s needs. There’s no single formula. If the company needs to “close the buzz gap” with a competitor, then that’s the role content should play. If the company needs to squeeze revenue out of existing leads, then the content should focus on that. Content is only as valuable as its ability to help the business achieve its goals, and goals vary depending on the company’s size, industry, and maturity.

Consider Context

Mike Volpe: Think about how to use context along with your content to attract more leads. The same piece of content can work great with a certain person at a certain time but be a turn off to another person at another time. Inbound marketing is about attracting more people down the funnel by using the right content in the right engagement channels. Consider not only who your content is directed towards, but also when it’s reaching them and what channels it’s coming from.

Dave Balter, CEO of BzzAgent

Choose Distribution Channels Wisely

Dave Balter: For many platforms today, content must be limited to “soundbyte” length: 140 characters for tweets; simple, quick-hit blog posts; highly visual infographics. The key is to recognize the form and frequency that fits the platform – and create a media (content) strategy that delivers on that.

As with many things, good strategy is deciding what not to do. With content, the right strategy is focusing on a few platforms and executing there incredibly well.

Mike Volpe, Chief Marketing Officer at HubSpot

Create Content That Converts

Mike Volpe: The key [to creating content that coverts visitors into leads] is to have an inbound conversion path. The idea is that the content attracts people through SEO and social media. But then you have calls to action that link people to landing pages and offers that convert people into leads. Lead generation is about more than producing lots of content, it’s about the entire inbound marketing process.

Create Memorable, Engaging Content

Dave Balter: We’ve entered an era where there is no marketing strategy without content. In order to capture the attention of distracted and channel disparate consumers, you must deliver content in multiple forms across many channels.

However, the concept of content has evolved incredibly in the past decade. No longer is it about writing full-length books or delivering paragraph-form blog posts. It’s about creating memorable ideas that can be shared via multiple channels.

Joe Chernov, VP of Marketing at Kinvey

Get the Most Out of Your Content

Joe Chernov: Remember that just because you may have tired of a piece of your content and moved on to the next shiny thing, it doesn’t mean that piece has run its course. Even before you think about re-purposing the content, you should stop and ask yourself, “Has this asset, in its current form, been exposed to the entire population of people who may be interested in us?” If the answer is not an absolute “yes,” think about ways you can derive more value out of that particular piece of content without having to re-purpose it prematurely.

Measure the Right Metrics

Mike Volpe: Customers and revenue are the most important things to measure. You should have a way to measure the leads and customers you get from each inbound channel like SEO, social media, and referral links. You should also have a way to measure the impact of each piece of content on the sales and marketing process. For instance, at HubSpot for each blog post we measure how many visits to the article, how many visitors went from the post to the landing page, and how many leads and customers the post generated.

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Remember, marketing platforms are just that: platforms. What matters most is what you do with them. The killer content you showcase with your marketing platform is what fuels modern marketing success.

Interested in learning more? Joe Chernov, Dave Balter, and Mike Volpe along with Erin Estep of SiriusDecisions will be speaking on these topics and more during a panel at Content Marketing Bootcamp Boston. This one-day free event open to B2B marketers will be held at the Westin Copley Place in Boston on June 6. Space is limited, so register today.

Photo Credit: Kirsty Hall