“Content is king.” Anyone familiar with B2B marketing knows this mantra, which has continued to gain significance over the past few years. Content marketing is one of the fastest, if not the fastest, growing sectors of the marketing industry today. According to a study conducted last year by the Content Marketing Institute, “90% of B2B marketers do some form of content marketing, with 60% reporting a plan to increase their content marketing spending in 2012.”
Earlier this year, Google actually tweaked their search algorithm in response to the millions and millions of content generating websites being launched every day. The “Panda” update was instituted to filter out “content farm” aggregator websites and low-quality content, among other factors.
The number one challenge cited by respondents in the CMI study? “Producing the kind of content that engages prospects and customers.” Now more than ever, marketers need to take every advantage of every resource they can in order to stand out amongst their peers. Two young companies you may not have heard of, Visual.ly and Percolate, could be able to help your B2B marketing team set your business apart from the pack with relevant, shareable content.
Visual.ly is a website centered on infographics. According to co-founder Stew Langille, the idea for Visual.ly came out of the corporate blog at Mint, the personal finance company he previously worked at. While at Mint, Langille noticed that posts including infographics “garnered 30 to 40 times the page views of a comparable article.”
Visual.ly serves as one-stop-shop for infographic enthusiasts; users can view, share, and create. Last week, the site launched, “Visual.ly Create for Brands, allowing brands to tell themed visual stories to support any campaign with automatically generated infographics that can be shared easily through social networks.”
Percolate’s mission is “to help brands create content on a social scale.” They carry out this mission by providing inspiration from the content creators that your brand follows, with help from an algorithm that tracks your business’ blogs and social media accounts, recommending trending topics and ideas that will hopefully fuel awareness. It even optimizes the content you create for whichever platform it is being posted on. For example, an image posted on Facebook would be re-sized and reformatted for Instagram. Overall, Percolate is somewhat hard to explain, a fact not lost on co-founder James Gross, “Just like Twitter, until you start to follow other people, it doesn’t make any sense.”
With the content marketing landscape as it is, growing each and every day, marketers need to take advantage of any and all opportunities to stand out amongst the “white noise.”