Content Marketing - The Fairy Godmother of New Business Opportunities

Consumers have become totally impassive to traditional marketing. Agile marketers understand that there has to be a better way to engage customers, since traditional marketing is becoming less and less effective.

In his Social media B2B blog post, Jeffrey L. Cohen stated that content marketing is the new technique on which B2B companies have started to rely for promoting their products and services. In an extensive 2010 B2B Content Marketing study from MarketingProfs and Junta24, marketers reported that they turned to content marketing for achieving multiple business goals such as:

Brand awareness (78%)
Customer retention (69%)
Customer recruitment (61%)
Lead generation (63%)
Website traffic (55%)
Leadership (52%)
Sales (51%)
Lead management (37%)

Your company can focus on several content marketing tactics to achieve marketing and sales goals. We recommend you engage your target market through:

Constant social media activity and article posting
In-person events
Newsletters
Case studies
Blogs
White papers
Webcasts/webinars

The Content Marketing Institute states that 93% of marketing professionals plan to spend more money on content marketing or to include it in their overall marketing programs for this year. Nine out of 10 B2B marketing professionals are already using it to grow their businesses.

The software development field is first in line when it comes to content marketing strategies adoption. In this industry, you can effectively use content marketing to support the sales cycle and to position your company as expert on specific technologies. Case studies and webinars are some of the most popular tactics in which you can engage.

To measure the effectiveness of content marketing, your company should rely on different criteria like website traffic, customer feedback, and sales lead quality.

These are our findings so far. But we're really interested in getting your direct feedback on these, in the poll bellow: