Product marketing can be simple; you showcase your shiny new object, and if the audience likes it, they'll buy it. This traditional sales pitch approach can be incredibly short-term with negligible impact on client conversions. To increase your product sale in such a competitive market, you should jump in with a strong content outreach strategy with high-quality content on social channels.
What if there was more to captivate the potential customer while building customer relationships, rather than just dangling the features and specifications in front of them? What if there was a narrative to portray the when, how, and why of the products on display to reach the appropriate target audience?
This is where content marketing comes into the picture. Successful product campaigns align all their content for product marketing. All this together is roughly known as a content outreach strategy.
Amid the anticipated debate of Product Marketing vs. Content Marketing, let’s understand how content marketing is very much a part of the process of marketing a product.
Is Content Marketing and Content Outreach Strategy the Same?
Forbes defines content marketing as "a marketing technique of creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and acquire a clearly defined audience - with the objective of driving profitable customer action."
All you have to do is make a solid content outreach strategy that should be talking about increasing the product sale and about brand image and brand awareness, like building relationships with the customers. It is about how you portray your brand on the social channels with the type of content you are uploading to attract the audience.
Content marketing is a part of content outreach strategy, as content strategy focuses on ‘which content should be shared considering various factors, and content outreach strategy talks about ‘how do you share your content?’
Unlike the outdated approaches of using sales support materials, content marketing is a sales enablement tool that helps you build context around the product and build relationships for brands. Effective content marketing highlights the problems the target audience faces, an effective solution for those problems, and most importantly the brand behind it all.
Ideally, B2B marketers should have a content and product marketing strategy that covers much more than a product launch. The content outreach strategy should be a brand awareness activity that explains the product in an accurate manner covering most of your potential audience.
According to a survey, 63% of the buyer personas in content outreach strategy for content marketing depicts that people would think more positively about a brand if it gave them content that was more valuable, interesting, or relevant. In short, quality content that serves new as well as existing customers.
Here are some B2B content marketing examples for a product or service that can give you an idea about gaining more content-driven sales. Along with that, content outreach campaigns for brands after a specific interval of time shall help too.
- In-depth blog posts
- Product tutorials
- FAQs
- Link building activities.
- Personalized email campaigns
- Social media competitions
- Targeted ads
- Guest Posting
Sending an email that is personalized for a specific person or brand will be more effective and efficient by using free tools available in the market. Even in an era when social media marketing is booming, and high-quality leads are generated through several platforms, sending emails proves to have a high conversion rate, at least for B2B markets.
Let's look at how two major brands used different social channels for content marketing to market their respective product campaigns.
Through its strategic global sponsoring and partnering with adventure and sport-related avenues, Redbull has strongly cemented its buyer persona content, famously using the tagline or the subject line "it gives you wings," conveying a message that it's more than just an energy drink. It's the fuel that will keep your body and mind going. This is an excellent example of how constant and creatively aligned valuable content can allow a product marketing strategy to thrive.
When done right, digital content ideas allow content-driven sales. Sharing an appealing piece of content to your existing audience and the targeted audience will help you bring more number on sales.
Take, for example, GoPro: the leader in action and lifestyle cameras. The modern world is now moving towards visual content, and Cisco is even reporting predictions that indicate that 84% of internet traffic by 2020 will be through video.
GoPro leveraged this information to center their product around quality visual content and products. This content outreach strategy had an extraordinarily successful and compounding effect where the consumers themselves created written content for them using their products. People were buying GoPros and posting adventure vlogs, which attracted even more people to buy their cameras. This ripple effect was possible as they fused their content and product marketing strategies.
In a way, this can helmed asone of the best content marketing strategies for a product.
Methods of Content outreach Strategy
There are multiple ways in which you can use the content for product marketing. Listed below are some of the top strategies that you should include in your content marketing plans.
Harness the Power of Social Media
In 2020, there were 3.81 billion people actively using social channels in the world. Even though social media content marketing sounds like a massive cliché, and it probably is. Still, in the current digital scenario there isn't a better way for a product marketer to put their product information out there than social media.
Conducting content marketing through social media educates the audience about the product features and answers their questions to construct an interested and engaged client base, unlike traditional marketing techniques. Marketing on social channels might seem time-consuming at first unless you create your audience base. However, it is undoubtedly the faster and easier way than traditional marketing.
Creating content for product marketing can serve and provide the necessary hand-holding to guide the customer to purchase. While you can take care of the product marketing side, encouraging an ideal customer to post reviews, suggest improvements, and engage with other users through mediums like Facebook, Twitter, other social media platforms and social channels can provide an ecosystem that influences prospects to purchase your products.
Invest in various brand-building marketing activities now to see compounded results in the future. Using social media for content marketing is one of the best ways to go about marketing your product.
Appeal to the Correct Market Niche
Knowing your audience is half the battle won. Building accurate buyer personas for content marketing will guide you through creating highly relevant product content. When content that is reflective of the product is marketed to the right audience, the situation becomes less convincing and more about addressing the consumers' concerns.
Using this content marketing hack gives results that you won't expect. Trying to maximize clicks and views through interactive content might gain short-term traction but will not result in any monetary benefits as there will be a failure to create a significant impact. Hence, conducting buyer persona content mapping will give you a better idea of what resonates with your audience and what doesn’t.
Research Keyword Trends and Phrases
A content marketer needs to keep search visibility in mind when putting content out on the internet and hoping to execute a successful content marketing campaign. Effective research on the keyword trends associated with your product is essential as they will work as lighthouses for potential clients to find you online, especially the ones in your marketing funnel. In some cases, the potential clients in your sales funnel too.
Apart from features and specifications, the content marketing keywords chosen should also include words relating to the problem that occurs and the solution that the product provides.
A trending hashtag or viral post can send your online visibility skyrocketing and aggressively boost your lead generation efforts. There are various keyword planning tools out there to help you find the right set of keywords. Google's Keyword Planner and Moz's keyword explorer are some of the useful tools for finding the essential keywords when creating a content marketing plan.
Influencer Marketing
Influencers—though this profession is known as a new trend in digital marketing, it's not! Advertisers have used celebrities to promote their products for decades. When planned correctly, brands can leverage their reach, salesmanship, and, most importantly, their credibility for creating successful product marketing content.
In 2019, 94% of marketers found influencer marketing to be effective. As a result, influencer marketing budgets are set to double in the coming years. Nord VPN was one of the many affiliated companies with YouTube giants like PewDiePie and Linus Tech Tips. They used the influencers’ massive popularity on the platform to get their services out to the masses, making them one of the top players in the growing VPN market.
One for the Future
Allison Wert, content marketing manager for Frontline Education, predicts
"I think a growing number of businesses will stop thinking about content marketing as a separate discipline and instead realize that all good marketing involves content marketing."
To gain a competitive edge, marketing strategies can only get more and more personalized with the advancement of AI technology, voice search, and SEO. Having a strong digital presence will be even more crucial to sustain a profitable business. Immersive storytelling and personal experiences will surely draw customers to the product and the brand as well.
Traditional door-to-door marketing has been replaced by various content marketing services for SaaS products. As attention spans lower and people are flooded with information, there will be an increasing need to create content for unique product marketing. To remain relevantly admissible in the market, audience engagement will be crucial, even more so in beyond 2020. Product marketing strategies will have to infuse themselves with reliable and contextual content around their products as companies try to expand their reach even further. Even though there are numerous content marketing platforms to market a product, using them effectively is the real challenge that most marketers have to unravel.
Frequently Asked Questions
How can marketing improve products?
- Seize the opportunity as the market will keep changing
- Have a few new ideas
- Find the pain points & work on them
- Get customers involved early in the process
- Dedicate a specific team to the job
What is content outreach?
Content Outreach is developing a network and getting your network to promote and share your content. It includes the following things:
- Collaborating with popular Pub sites
- Sending Emails
- Make use of social channels
- Link building
How do you write a content outreach strategy?
- Prospect the correct contact
- Use a catchy subject line for emails
- Create personalized emails
- Demonstrate the value
- Don't forget to add CTA
- Follow up as and when required
- Track your campaign thoroughly
- Include as many social channels are possible