Content marketing is among the most nebulous parts of digital strategy, especially for B2B companies. Most savvy brands invest time, money, and energy to fine-tune their product pages, white papers, case studies, and blog posts by squishing together SEO and paid advertising to fabricate conversion opportunities. <\/p>\n
If the stars align, those marketing efforts succeed and it feels glorious. But when the cosmos sneer at your goals and nothing<\/em> seems to work, even a paltry ROI feels unattainable. <\/p>\n Fortunately, a user-centric content strategy can keep conversions churning when your normal marketing efforts fall flat. This strategy is called “self-sustainable content marketing.” <\/p>\n Self-sustainable B2B content marketing helps your brand market its services by tapping into how people learn and share information within their organization. Compared to lead-generation content marketing, which trots customers down a classic awareness-through-conversion funnel, a self-sustaining strategy provides users with the information they need when they need it to make them reliant on your brand. <\/p>\n This strategy relies on targeting individual contributors with content that teaches them how to solve day-to-day problems, answers their questions, or resolves internal arguments. These contributors then pass the information “up” to a manager, or laterally to colleagues, until the content — and the brand that made it — gets in front of a decision-maker. <\/p>\n At Portent, we call this technique “upwardly mobile content,” and it’s among the best ways to avoid common pitfalls in B2B content marketing while growing your brand awareness and influence.<\/p>\n Upwardly mobile content isn’t a magical elixir that repairs every content marketing issue you encounter, but the strategy comes close if you execute it well.<\/p>\n The downside is that creating truly upwardly mobile content requires a lot of work, often from multiple stakeholders, and tracking the strategy’s success often comes down to word-of-mouth or assisted conversions. <\/p>\n With that caveat in mind, there are three tenets to self-sustainable, upwardly mobile content that you can use to set yourself up for success. <\/p>\n Your first objective is to research common questions or arguments individual contributors or managers face when talking to their colleagues or superiors, and then provide a clear, definitive answer that they can use to resolve their struggles. <\/p>\n These contributors and their problems should be crafted as a persona of your brand’s ideal customer. <\/p>\n To build this persona and determine what questions or arguments you must answer, you’ll need to perform user research. Here are five types of research to consider: <\/p>\n After you know what problems your target users have in their day-to-day work life, the next step is to create relevant content that helps them solve those issues. The trick here is to make sure your content always has at least one tactical takeaway that can be executed by the intended audience.<\/p>\n For example, let’s say your brand offers video conferencing and collaboration technology to healthcare professionals. Through your user research, you discovered that users are struggling to share files through similar platforms without violating Electronic Medical Records or HIPAA policies. Fortunately, you know the solution and write a blog post about it. You ensure all of the content in the blog post is relevant to your target user’s problem. Plus, in your content, you also give users step-by-step directions to ensure they can execute on your recommendation. <\/p>\n This effort sears your brand into the user’s mind as a reputable resource for similar problems. When users share the solution with colleagues, your brand’s recognition increases. If decision-makers decide to change platforms, your brand may naturally join the RFP candidates. <\/p>\n The most frustrating part of trying to solve a problem is when you need to explore multiple websites or pages to cobble together a solution. Don’t make your users do more work than absolutely necessary. The actionable answer you provide to their problem must include all necessary information. This empowers the individual contributor to act or deliver that answer to their superiors without additional research. <\/p>\n While you’re making content, a good test to determine if you need to add more resources is ask yourself if the reader can act on your advice without using Google. If the answer is no, then consider expanding on the ideas you present or providing additional resources to the user, like an embedded video or links to a white paper on the topic. <\/p>\nHow to Create Upwardly Mobile Content<\/h2>\n
1. Answer User Questions and Resolve Their Arguments\n<\/h3>
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2. Provide Prescriptive, Tactically Actionable Content<\/h3>\n
3. Be Self-Contained: Don’t Force Users Back to SERPs<\/h3>\n