2017 B2B Industry Content Marketing White Paper: How to Disseminate Content Effectively?

With good content, you are qualified to stand at the starting line, but the result of the subsequent competition is a communication battle that combines art and science: only when the content is spread and users notice it can it be considered a successful content marketing .

Doug Kessler wrote in Diary of a Content Pimp that “Quality, relevance, and timeliness account for only 42% to 67% of content success; the rest is getting your audience to notice it.” "Noticing" is exactly the problem that communication needs to solve.

Content communication is an activity in which humans communicate information through symbols and media in order to bring about corresponding changes. You can start from the following aspects:

• First, people. Communication is the exchange of information between people. Communicators must clearly define the goals and plans of communication, and the audience also has their own demands for acceptance.
• Second, channels . Content needs to exist on a certain carrier, and the carrier on which it exists becomes the channel for content dissemination.
• Third, purpose. Whether it is transmitting or receiving information, we hope that corresponding changes will occur.

How do you fill your content with rocket fuel and soar to the sky while your competitors are still striking matches?

This article takes communication channels as the main line and analyzes content dissemination from the following four parts.

Overview of communication channels: If WeChat is no longer popular, what other channels can companies choose? Channel overview, lists the channels that can be selected and gives corresponding strategies.

• Communication channel selection: Different channels have different requirements for content. How to synchronize channel combinations to achieve the effect of 1+1>2?
• Daily operations management: publish appropriate content at the most appropriate frequency and through appropriate media.
• Channel layout optimization: continuous feedback loop, evaluation of channel effectiveness, and continuous optimization.

This article is the content dissemination part of the content marketing series. In the next few weeks, we will continue to launch content to generate sales opportunities, content measurement and optimization.

I. Overview of Communication Channels

Find a suitable communication channel structure and spread the content widely through channel combination. The wider the product promotion information is spread, the more people will see it and convert . So what are the possible channels for dissemination? If WeChat is no longer popular, what other channels can companies choose?

(Source: 2017 China Mobile Social User Insight Report)

According to iResearch's "2017 China Mobile Social User Insight Report", in 2017, Chinese netizens' information acquisition media was mainly concentrated on search engines (74.1%), followed by news clients (73.9%), portals (69%), and social platforms, television, newspapers/magazines, and radio. Among them, news clients and social platforms had the fastest growth rates of 48.7% and 41.4% respectively, followed by search engines at 32.1%.

There are many media for obtaining information. Returning to the essence of media channels, from the perspective of enterprises, media channels can be divided into two categories: channels that require payment (paid media) and free channels (owned media, earned media).

Paid . That is paid media. Before the Internet , when companies did brand promotion , they would focus on print media, radio and television. Since the rise of the Internet, the forms of paid media have become increasingly diverse.

Not paying . There are two types of media: owned media and earned media.

Owned Media: A company’s own channels, which are managed by the brand itself. For example, Durex ’s Weibo, China Merchants Bank’s WeChat official account , etc. The relationship between consumers and brands depends on how consumers understand the brand and what they will do.

Earned Media: The brand itself does not say anything, but consumers say hello through word of mouth. It can be said that consumers are the creators of the brand. Consumer-oriented media channels are more reflected in the word-of-mouth they gain.

Paid channels increase awareness, while self-media and word-of-mouth channels build reputation. Only by developing a reasonable combination of promotion channels can the attention, repetition and complementary effects of advertising communication be maximized.

1. Paid Media

Paid media can be programmatic and scalable, and can cover a large number of customers. When you need to launch a new product or change your brand image, you need a broad channel to tell consumers. This is when you need paid media to amplify your voice.

As paid media, they have different focuses in brand promotion . Generally speaking, television and outdoor media play the role of "helping to enhance brand image" and "wide coverage", while the Internet mainly provides services to enterprises in terms of interactivity and accumulation of big data .

(The research is detailed and worth reading!)

2. Owned Media

Owned media can be divided into three categories: official channels, social channels, and personal channels.

Official channels: suitable for cold start , reaching users from multiple angles, using WeChat, Weibo, and official channels to maintain the company's voice in the market, which can help the company establish a good image and maintain a reasonable voice in the market.

Social media channels: suitable for soft marketing. Apple and Samsung both like to do this, carrying out various pre-launch activities and content marketing before their products go online. It is a common phenomenon to carry out social media marketing for automobiles , beauty products, maternal and child products, and electronic products. It can help enterprises conduct cluster bombing on core target user groups, create hot spots, and form phenomenal events.

Personal channels: mainly refers to employees and users. Employees are the people who know a company best and are more suitable brand spokespersons to endorse the company, with higher authenticity. Users are the most direct contacts of a company and have the most say in the company's services. The larger the user base, the greater the marketing value.

(The research is detailed and worth reading!)

2. Selection of Communication Channels

The target users of a product are often not all people. With the same amount of delivery, the more precise the target group, the better the effect. Different channels have different requirements for content. How can we synchronize channel combinations to achieve the effect of 1+1>2?

1. How to choose a communication channel suitable for the enterprise?

(1) Paid Media: Social media and paid search are a perfect match

Among paid media used by B2B marketers , social media accounts for 84% and search engines account for 67%, making them the perfect match for paid media.

(Source: B2B Content Marketing: 2017 Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends—North America)

Social media can increase brand awareness and engagement, while search advertising helps brands increase traffic , cultivate potential customers, and ultimately increase sales.

The report “Why Search + Social = Success for Brands” released by Forrester in May 2016 pointed out that 71% of users will search on search engines and 64% will search on social platforms;

At the same time, the survey found that young netizens are more willing to interact with brands on social media and like to search for product information on social media before consumption. A Salesforce survey of American Internet users in May 2016 showed that millennial respondents were more willing to stay connected with brands than baby boomers (25% vs. 5%). However, only 14% of respondents said they used social media as a search tool .

On the one hand, to optimize for search engines, good search engine optimization ( SEO ) principles should be applied when you start creating marketing content and infiltrate it into the metadata. Don't wait until you finish writing it to modify it.

On the other hand, we should pay attention to the social side, especially applications with social attributes such as WeChat and Zhihu. Together, they constitute the new ecology of social media in the mobile Internet era. When laying out the social ecological layout, we should pay attention to the differences and synergies between them.

(2) Own media: Develop an all-channel presence centered around the WeChat service account .

In China, WeChat is the best direct touchpoint between businesses and users. WeChat service accounts inherently have stronger interactive properties and shorter operation paths than mobile official websites. Unilever's B2B catering planning department has driven annual related sales to 10 digits through WeChat service accounts as a localized cross-border innovation in China.

WeChat + official website: connect the WeChat service account and the official website through Zhiqu Baichuan SCRM backend

For the overall content asset construction of WeChat service accounts and official websites, it is recommended to have unified data aggregation of the two channels. This is the role of the SCRM background, which unifies multi-channel data through SCRM.

WeChat + Live Broadcast : Connecting the WeChat platform with corporate online/offline live broadcasts

Live broadcasts can be directly embedded in WeChat public accounts, and user information can be deposited into the company's own platform.

Enterprise live streaming marketing uses Zhiqu Baichuan SCRM to establish high-quality live streaming on official accounts to acquire customers, establish interactions with users, and directly deposit user information into the company's own official account platform.

At the same time, it is necessary to use Zhiqu Baichuan SCRM automated marketing tools to achieve unified management of live broadcast event data, including H5 user registration data before the meeting, check-in interaction during the meeting, and live broadcast material download data after the meeting.

WeChat + employees/users: full-staff marketing

Utilize employees and users through crowdsourcing, and use points to encourage employees to share;

• First, build a marketing management platform to effectively track the marketing process of employee participation and information dissemination, so that the marketing effect and value can be quantified.
• Second, through technical integration capabilities, we can enter the marketing game access and control, build a game management platform, make functions reusable, and reduce development frequency and costs.
• Third, by building a fan management platform, we can accumulate fans, form fan assets, and form a marketing closed loop to achieve fan accumulation and conversion.

For B2B companies, sales is a very important channel for market content dissemination. How to leverage the sales team's social resources to increase content coverage of target potential customers. For sales teams of a certain size, a full-staff marketing system can be of great help in customer acquisition and branding.

WeChat + other self-media: content barbell strategy

The basic idea is to extract as much value as possible from a piece of content by breaking it down into smaller parts or different styles and publishing it on different channels.

On the one hand, content is updated synchronously on owned media.

The self-media camps are as described above. You can choose according to your actual situation. At the same time, please pay attention to:

Zhihu’s Baidu search weight has reached level 10 (the highest level). When you search on Baidu, you will see the Zhihu link at the first glance. Zhihu provides ample opportunities for brands to integrate into the community through advertising products, institutional accounts and other mechanisms.

Toutiao 's unique advantage is that it can provide users with personalized content and achieve accurate push based on data mining and engine recommendations through machine learning. It is particularly suitable for small brands and can help them obtain sales leads efficiently. Zhiqu Baichuan, the first edition will update Toutiao on weekends as a supplement to the posts.

When updating content, please note:

First, the same content can be replaced with different titles /formats and launched on different channels.

For example, you can excerpt sentences from a blog article and post it on Weibo, or attach it to a user subscription email you send out, synchronize it on Baidu Baike , and so on. However, each module should contain a clear narrative line. In a screenplay or novel, your narrative arc follows the story’s main character; in marketing content, you use your narrative arc to guide your buyers.

Second, long articles of more than 6,000 words can be divided into 6 articles of 6*1000 and published.

Lightweight and high-quality content may attract people who have the habit of fast reading. In order to build a coherent user experience , you need to make an overall plan from beginning to end and plan how to use each module to present the content. At the same time, the publication of the 6 articles must have internal logic.

On the other hand, we have our own cooperative media.

Your own media must exert its strength and also form a joint force.

• First, establish connections with well-known media and websites/WeChat accounts. Even better, let them know about your personal brand through publications and websites/WeChat accounts they trust.
• Second, join relevant communities or associations. Share your content with communities where people may be interested. Make choices based on relevance and value. Find communities where your ideas can play a role, arouse the interest of community users, and stimulate discussion.
• Third, get in touch with influential people in the market. Be mindful to build long-term relationships and don’t settle for a one-time content exchange promotion.

2. How to achieve the effect of channel 1+1>2?

The channel formats are rich and diverse, including not only text, but also pictures, Q&A, long and short videos , etc. How can we expand the coverage circle and make it more comprehensive and accurate at the same time?

Channel uncertainty increases, lightweight route can be adopted

Internet media updates and iterations are accelerating day by day. Brands spend long-term energy and financial resources to invest in channels, but it is difficult to control the loss and decline of resources in the channels themselves.

Therefore, the cooperation between brands and channels should tend to be lightweight, such as cooperating with ASO S and nice to release a brand-themed sticker, or Qiaoya Coffee and Zuji to launch an exclusive "imprint". The brand owner simply combined certain characteristics of the channel with brand attributes and carried out short-term and agile cooperation, but it accurately influenced the young user group and achieved ideal results.

Brand image promotion should be combined with the characteristics of vertical communities

Due to the emergence of new situations, celebrities and stars in the traditional sense are no longer the only choice for brands. For example, the travel community Qyer.com has produced many travel experts, such as "Mao Li", who has become the choice of many brands such as Air New Zealand and Airbnb when conducting influencer marketing.

Channels can also be a source of brand promotion content

On the Internet, when cooperating with channels, you can leverage the power of channels to create relevant topics, guide consumers to generate content, and conduct secondary dissemination. For example, when a brand cooperates with nice, it will launch brand stickers and brand theme activities to call on users to upload their own pictures, thereby further expanding the brand's influence through user participation and interaction.

3. Daily Operation Management

1. Content push schedule

By establishing a schedule for content push, you can avoid duplication of content releases and decide the specific time of release based on the user's reading habits.

Premise: stock content as the backing, traffic content as the pioneer

According to the life cycle of content, we can divide content into: stock content and traffic content.

Existing content serves as the backup and is responsible for SEO; traffic content serves as the pioneer and is responsible for PR. Whether it is existing content or traffic content, it must be valuable and relevant to users. The two feed each other and form a steady and solid strategy.

Here are some questions and suggestions to consider when developing a content planning schedule:

• Demand stimulation: Does the content spark the interest of the target audience? Which content is most likely to generate sales leads?
• Product & Market: Does the content adequately support the marketing needs of each product line?
• Public relations: Does the content align with press releases, official statements, brand communications?
• Socialization: What content can increase user activity on social media? What can form social communication?

2. How to ensure that the content can be carried out according to the plan?

• First, don’t promise to complete the task in the fastest estimated time. Leave yourself some wiggle room for unforeseen circumstances.
• Second, if you’re working with an external team (tech, design, writers, etc.), be sure to set a strict timeline in advance and make sure they stick to it.
• Third, review your schedule every few days to make sure everything is on track.
• Fourth, if you are unable to meet the deadline, let all stakeholders know immediately.

3. Send different content to different people

For enterprises, users are in different stages of the sales funnel and require different content. When sending, they need to push personalized and different content.

4. Channel layout optimization

The optimization of channel layout can be carried out from four aspects: analysis, improvement, implementation and evaluation.

1. Analysis

Commonly used channel analysis points mainly include channel capability, channel risk, and channel growth.

• Channel capabilities: driving, continuous, abandonment, improvement
• Channel growth: adolescence, adulthood, middle age, old age/childhood
• Channel risk: high contribution and low dependence, high contribution and high dependence, low contribution and high dependence, low contribution and low dependence

2. Improvements

• Brainstorming method: Gather the content team and brainstorm from the perspective of a product manager to maximize the creative proposal suggestions.
• Delphi method: expert opinion method, consult relevant professionals or industry experts, conduct feasibility analysis based on the suggestions, and formulate effective plans.
• Benchmark learning method: Find excellent corporate practice cases in the same industry or across industries, analyze, compare, and judge, and develop feasible plans needed by the company itself.

3. Implementation

• Team synchronization: The adjustment of communication channels should be carried out under the guidance of the entire content planning, and information should be shared with all members of the content team.
• Inspection and control: Conduct trial inspection and evaluation on the actual results, correct any unreasonable parts, even if they are too correct, and fix and normalize the reasonable parts.

4. Evaluation

• Periodic inspection: regular and irregular data feedback analysis and normalized evaluation.
• Study and research: Learn from industry leaders, evaluate your own company, and identify problems and deficiencies.
• Effect evaluation: Incorporate channels into the entire content evaluation system