Tag : content marketing

Content Segmentation

Carlton Hoyt 12:52 pm , November 10, 2014

A common strategic issue involves trying to be all things to all people. In general, it doesn’t work. You need some degree of specialization in order to effectively create comparative value to your audience. Even if you have a very broad product or service offering, you need to be able to segment your audiences in order to effectively differentiate and avoid commoditization. You need to cut your market into segments.

The same is true for your content (which, after all, behaves like a product). Put simply: if your content is for everybody, it’s for nobody.

Is My Content Insufficiently Segmented?

Broad, unsegmented content has many weaknesses. It tends to be repeat already familiar themes. It is easily replaced. It is undifferentiated. It is low-value. Because of these problems, it simply won’t perform.

How can you tell if poor performance is due to poor segmentation or some other problem? Here are some key warning signs:

You have multiple distinct audiences or markets, but you send all your content to all of them.
You have a link on your website that says “blog” or “news” and most of your content is hosted there, regardless of topic.
When creating content, you rarely think about who will be consuming it
Most of the information within the content that you’re publishing can be readily found elsewhere
Your content could be described as superficial or lacking depth
Your audience wouldn’t care or notice if your content didn’t exist.

Any of the first three are very clear signs of poor content segmentation. The last three can also indicate segmentation problems, but could signal other content-related problems as well.

How to Properly Segment Content

Step 1: Determine your target markets, if you haven’t already done so. If you have a positioning statement, great! If not, you at least need to define and document your target customer and statement of need. Note that unless your company is laser-focused, these will likely change for each product line or service offering that you have, and you’ll want to have different content for each.

Step 2: Create audience / customer personas. If you’ve already done this for your product offerings, then you can use those as a solid starting point. They should include demographic information as well as behavioral information. Demographic information includes industry, job title, function, location, etc. Behavioral information may include what their goals and needs are, what their expectations may be, what concerns or problems might they have, what role they play in the purchasing process, how influential they are, etc.

Step 3: Determine what the purpose of your content is and, relatedly, what stage of the buying journey your content is targeting. Are you trying to stoke interest among people with a nascent need? Are you trying to persuade people who are actively considering options? These determinations will inform you what kind of content (educational, persuasive, etc.) that you should create. Dont try to do everything at once! Just as you shouldn’t try to speak to all of your audiences at once, you also shouldn’t try to say everything to a particular audience in a single piece of content or expect them to go from naive to purchasing in one shot.

Step 4: Determine what benefit you are offering the reader that holds special value for the audience you’ve just defined. This is key! It’s entirely possible to define a very specific audience but then go on to create non-specific, poorly targeted content. If you fail to create well-targeted and value-creating content, your efforts in directing it at a well-defined audience will be wasted.

Most life science companies need to speak to multiple audiences. That’s completely normal. It can become a problem, however, if you try to speak to them all at once. If your content isn’t properly segmented, it becomes watered down and less effective at influencing the audiences and affecting their behavior. By properly segmenting your content to specific audiences and needs, you’ll be a much more effective influencer.

"The rise in the importance of content is a natural result of customers taking more control of their buying journeys. As customers have less contact with sales, they look to other sources of information to educate them and validate their decisions. Unless you have a strong content program, you’ll simply be left behind by changing customer behavior. If you want to ensure that you thrive in this new reality, contact BioBM. Our content marketing expertise will help you increase your reach, influence your customers, and dominate your market."

Differentiation Through Content

Carlton Hoyt 5:36 pm , October 23, 2014

Your content is a product. Differentiate it. All of us life science marketers know that we need to differentiate our products and services. Nothing new there. It’s critical to demonstrate a unique value and avoid commoditization. But how often do you think about how well differentiated your content is? My experience has shown me that for most of you the answer will be: never.

Marketers often think of their content as something which is a carrot for the customer; something that is of benefit to them and for their own good. You’re providing them with knowledge so they should just eat it up and be grateful for it. Unfortunately that viewpoint is completely misaligned with reality.

Your Content is a Product

Your audiences are customers of your content. They are paying for your content with their time and, if you require them to fill out a form, paying for it with their contact information as well. All the same rules apply to your content as apply to your products. Your content has to be worth the “price”. You need to effectively “sell” it.

Your content also needs to be differentiated. Without differentiation, your content will be just one in a never-ending stream of content pieces being continuously created. And unlike with products, your content can’t compete on price. Your content either provides unique value or it won’t be consumed by your audience. Even worse, they might consume then resent you for wasting their time.

Ways to Differentiate Content

The best and most obvious way to differentiate your content is to say something different from what everyone else is saying. Take a stance on a topic and deliver content that has particular value for your target market segment. Demonstrate your existing position(s) through content. Not only will you be reinforcing your positioning, but so long as your position is unique your content will be inherently unique as well. Content which is differentiated in this manner will help drive your target market segment towards you while driving away the off-target audiences which would eat up time and resources but ultimately not become customers.

Some other ways to differentiate content include:

Find an area where you have knowledge that can’t readily be found elsewhere and share it. This can also help reinforce your positioning.
Forego traditional content and instead develop resources that help solve customer problems. There’s huge brand and customer experience advantages to be claimed in doing so.
Create content in different formats. If your competition are flooding the space with white papers, do a video or a webinar. Different people have different preferences for content.
Drill down or add a twist. If something has already been said, get even more specific or put a spin on it in order to tailor it to a particular market segment.

Never forget that your content is a product, and like any product it risks commoditization if it is not differentiated. By differentiating your content, not only will you increase its effective audience and create more engagement with it, but you can reinforce your positioning and branding as well. Differentiated content is better for both you and your audience.

"Content marketing is a resource-intensive, time-consuming endeavor. Don’t let all that go to waste. Ensure your content is as effective as possible. Content marketing from BioBM can provide your company with the influence and reputation you need to turn purchasing decisions in your favor. Provide meaningful value to your customers, and they’ll provide value to you. It’s a virtuous cycle. Start yours."

The Power of Print

Carlton Hoyt 11:54 am , October 16, 2014

If the forecast calls for rain, followed by ever-increasing amounts of rain thereafter, what is the end result? Assuming the forecasts are correct, you would have one heck of a flood.

That’s what the state of content marketing currently is. It’s a constantly-increasing deluge. We’re flooding our audiences with it, and they don’t have the attention spans to pay attention to even a small fraction anymore. As a result, content is becoming less effective, and marketers need ways to ensure their content stands out and successfully captures that scarce customer resource: attention.

Oddly enough, one of the most valuable ways to do so is to use a rapidly-forgotten tool.

Put Your Content in Print

Which of the following are you more likely to read: A) An email newsletter with links to a bunch of different articles, or B) A magazine that you’ve subscribed to which contains those same articles? Which of those is easier to ignore? Which is easier to unsubscribe to?

The fact of the matter is that if you put something in print it is more likely to get attention. There are other benefits as well. Long-form printed materials (for example magazines or books) convey more authority than do digital content. They also have more perceived value. This means that customers will give more up to obtain it, and you can use that to collect more information from them. At minimum, they expect to have to give up their address since the content will be physically mailed to them.

Some tips for life science marketers considering printed content:

Not all content is suitable for print. You need to ensure that the bulk of the content is of high value to the audience, or else your mailing will simply end up in the trash. Product- or service-specific content should be avoided as it will come off as pitchy.
If you want to use your printed content to more directly generate demand, place “advertisements” for your products and services within your printed materials.
To convey authority, try to adopt a magazine-style format. This requires a significant amount of content. If necessary, publish less often to ensure both the perceived and actual value is high
Get creative. Simply reprinting your blog posts is boring. Do something different. If the creative juices aren’t flowing, you can always do an interview or highlight some recent industry news just to mix things up.

There have been a lot of people who have given the advice: “look at what everyone else is doing, then do the exact opposite.” While that’s not exactly a principle to live by, it can help find opportunities. Content is overwhelming the digital realm, but if anything it is retreating from print. As print becomes less and less common, it may become easier and easier to use that medium to get your audience’s attention.

"Stop following trends and start creating them. BioBM has helped dozens of life science clients across the globe build their brands and win business through innovative marketing. Is it your turn? If so, contact us."

Blog / Content Marketing / Marketing Communications 11:54 am , October 16, 2014

Organize Your Content

Carlton Hoyt 8:49 am , August 21, 2014

So you have a really good content marketing program up and running. You and / or your team are routinely publishing high-value content for your target scientists – blog posts, white papers, webinars, and maybe even podcasts and other forms. Your content is getting a lot of views out of the gate, and it’s helping to generate leads for your organization. Sounds great, right?

The problem is, for most organizations, the value that any particular piece of content provides diminishes rapidly over time. Content is most often organized chronologically, and even for the content that isn’t, pieces of content have a habit of fading from view over time for one reason or another. This is true even for content that doesn’t become outdated. Blog posts get buried in archives. Webinar recordings get taken down with site updates and never reused. Etc. Much of the long-term value and potential of this content is being lost. So what can we do about it?

The answer is simple: Get organized. Instead of the traditional content repositories where content goes to die, create repositories that act as genuine resources for your customers. In building a repository, not only will you continue to derive value from your content over a much longer time frame, but you’ll also provide more value to customers by enabling them to find more content which provides the information or experience they’re seeking.

Creating a Valuable Content Repository

When creating a content repository, start with taking an inventory of your content. Secondly, organize that content into topics, ensuing that the topics are customer-centric and not solely company-centric or product/service-centric. These first two steps are relatively simple. The last is far more complex: create a well-designed repository for your content. What does a repository need to be “well-designed?” It needs to:

Have intuitive navigation. If people can’t find what they’re looking for, the repository is useless.
Focus on a central theme. If, for instance, you have two business units that are fairly disparate, it may make sense to have two content repositories rather than one.
Encourage exploration. You know you have a good repository if users are organically immersing themselves in it to find multiple pieces of content which interest them.
Bring together disparate forms of content around similar topics. If a customer is interested in single-cell RNA-seq and you have a video, two blog posts, and a white paper about it, that customer should be able to find all of those pieces of content as easily as finding any one of them.

So much good content fails to meet its potential due to the simple fact that it effectively disappears over time. You spent valuable time, effort, and money creating great content, so organize your content to ensure that it can continue to provide value, to both your company and your customers, over a long time horizon. In doing so, you may just be creating a genuine resource for your customers as well.

"Effective content marketing requires a serious effort. Ensure that effort is one that your customers will reward you for. To create content – and content strategies – which will drive customers to you and provide superior value for your company, contact BioBM."

Blog / Content Marketing 8:49 am , August 21, 2014

SEO Isn’t Dead, It’s Just Changed

Carlton Hoyt 12:10 pm , August 4, 2014

It’s no secret that the SEO world has changed. Ever since Google’s Panda and Penguin algorithm changes, and the subsequent updates to them, prior best practices fell apart. There’s no doubt about that. Things that were once highly effective tools of SEO, like link wheels, are no longer relevant. Because of the ever-decreasing ways in which a marketer can manipulate search engine ranks, there has been an increasing chorus of people proclaiming the “death” of SEO.

Some Self-Serving Claims

It’s been a long-running trend to proclaim the death of SEO. Here’s a nice little article from 2007 which lists other, older articles proclaiming the death of SEO. The claim that SEO is dead is not a new one.

These claims tend to come from two kinds of people: SEO-ers who’ve jumped ship and are trying to get people to follow them, or from people who work on elements of marketing that could be considered strategic alternatives to SEO. Once upon a time, a lot of these voices were from people doing search advertising. Now they’re mostly from content marketers.

Is content marketing important for SEO? Sure it is. Is it more important for SEO than it used to be? In most cases, yes. Is it a replacement for SEO? Not a chance.

The New Age of SEO

Let’s be clear on something: SEO is not dead. SEO will quite possibly never be dead so long as search engines as we know them remain widely used tools.

SEO has been an ever-changing field since the beginning. Remember “keyword jamming”? Remember those websites that were padded with “invisible” text at the bottom of the pages back in the 90s? Remember the link farms of the 2000s? … The most effective tactics have always changed as Google and other search engines have evolved, and I would be very surprised if that fact doesn’t remain true for a long time to come. The only thing about SEO that is infallibly true is the value of those highly coveted top organic search ranks.

The job of the SEOer has not changed. The SEOer is not suddenly a content marketer. The SEOer’s toolbox, however, has changed.

Many technical factors surrounding SEO are still important. Site performance is still very important and something that can be directly controlled. Clickthrough is still very important and is something which is readily influenced. Ensure that any page that you would want to use as a landing page has the appropriate metadata such that your site’s appearance in search results attracts searchers. Making use of Google Authorship and tagging content accordingly can have a profound effect, especially for companies which generate a lot of high-quality content. Additionally, SEOers need to ensure the website’s entry points should be controlled.

Keyword research is still important. The results of this keyword research are then fed to content development teams to help guide the content focus towards things that people are looking for. SEOers then need to ensure that the content is appropriately optimized, or that the content development teams know enough about SEO to create well-optimized content themselves.

Content marketing is very important for most organizations, but it’s still just one piece of SEO. Having an SEO strategy which focuses solely on content will put you at a strategic disadvantage versus those companies with a more holistic approach.

"Looking to improve your inbound marketing? BioBM’s marketing team doesn’t evangelize any aspect of marketing; we take a holistic approach to identify and execute on the areas of greatest potential impact for your life science organization. Want to learn more? Contact us today."

Blog / Search Marketing 12:10 pm , August 4, 2014

Content is for Your Customers

Carlton Hoyt 9:59 am , July 24, 2014

Your content isn't for you - it's for your customers. One of the biggest pitfalls of content creation – and by far the biggest content mistake by amateur life science marketers – is forgetting that your content isn’t just directed AT your target audience, but is FOR your target audience. Many content creators focus too heavily on what they want their customers to hear rather than sincerely addressing customers’ needs through content and, in doing so, providing customer value.

To illustrate the point, here are some types of content which I frequently see and which have the wrong focus:

Generic event-promoting blog posts (“We’ll be at the XYZ meeting in booth 2000!”)
“White papers” which don’t do anything but restate the value claims for a product or service.
Frequent social media posts about ongoing promotions.
Blog posts which are little more than product overviews.
Posting just about any overt promotional message to a LinkedIn group.

All of the above are company-centric or product-centric promotions. They do not properly address the customers’ needs. Even if a prospect has a potential but unrealized need for the product, these kinds of “content spam” will simply drive them away by trying to create an opportunity to purchase when most of your audience is likely not actively in a relevant buying journey. It’s the wrong message at the wrong time, and they’ll filter it out along with the mountains of other promotional content which they get bombarded with.

Instead of company-centric and product-centric messages, use your content channels to provide value-added, customer-centric content. Creating valuable customer-centric content, as well as matching each piece of content to the appropriate channels, requires three things:

Understanding what information your customers are looking for.
Understanding your customers’ preferences for consuming content.
Ensuring that your content distribution is properly targeted such that any given piece of content is provided to the most relevant audiences

To do these things effectively, you need to remove your own mindset from the equation. You need to stop thinking about your customers and start thinking like your customers. If you can effectively do that when you’re planning content, you’ll end up with content which is more valuable to your customers.

"Most life science companies are creating content, but in a world where more and more content is being generated, is your content valuable enough to rise above the clutter and get your audience’s attention? If you’re looking to improve the value of your content marketing efforts, turn to BioBM. Whether you need help defining content strategies or need someone to put words to paper, we can create high-quality content that earns you the respect – and the business – of your customers. Contact us today."

Blog / Content Marketing 9:59 am , July 24, 2014

Content First, SEO Second

Carlton Hoyt 12:03 pm , June 24, 2014

By now, any decent SEO-er knows that the old way of performing SEO – basically, manipulating ranks through inorganic backlinks – is worthless. Google caught on and killed it. As of Panda 4.0, there are extremely limited ways in which someone can fool the rankings system, and doing so will only hurt you in the long run. That being the case, more SEO experts are turning to content development to improve SEO. In a sense, this is good – content development is a legitimate way of trying to improve rankings. However, as SEO-ers start to think about content, we need to remember that the content itself needs to be prioritized above SEO at all times. In other words, life science marketers cannot let the quality of their content slip due to the desire to focus on SEO.

Remember that the purpose of using content for SEO is to have your content seen by your target audience. Your audience, when consuming that content, is going to judge you by its quality. If you’re churning out low-quality content for SEO purposes you may get a lot of eyeballs, but you’re going to be turning off your audience due to the low value of the content which they’re landing on. This can be especially damaging if the audience doesn’t have prior experience with your company. Instead of trying to develop content strictly for SEO, take the high-quality content that’s being developed as part of your content marketing strategy and optimize it!

There are a number of things that you can do to improve the SEO of your high-quality content. For example:

Think about how your audience would ask questions related to the topic at hand. Is there any particular phrasing that they would use? If so, try to incorporate that phrasing into your content to improve the match for relevant “long-tail” search terms.
Make appropriate use of heading tags.
Ensure your page titles and URLs are optimized and relevant. Some content management systems default to generic nomenclature for URLs and titles, using things like an arbitrary numbering system or the date instead of a rich description. Ensure your settings use the title of your content (or at least part of it) in the page title and URL.
Improve the clickthrough rate of digital content by using a descriptive meta description tag
Improve the CTR of your digital content even more by using Google Authorship and ensuring you have a good headshot in your linked Google+ account. This can have a huge impact – I’ve seen various case studies claiming that pages with authorship attribution and a headshot displayed in the search results see between 20% and 150% increases in clickthrough. Eye-tracking data is just as compelling: searchers will pay more attention to author-attributed pages than higher-ranking videos with larger images.

If necessity dictates that you need to create content strictly for SEO purposes, especially if it would fall outside the bounds of your content strategy, ask yourself the following questions to ensure that you don’t churn out junk content:

Does our target audience have a need to know about this topic?
Can we create content which would genuinely fill that knowledge gap?
Would our target audience expect us to provide this type of content? If not, would they find it odd that we are? … I think of this as the realtor / lawnmower conundrum. Your realtor, knowing that you just bought a house, would be in a great position to sell you a lawnmower. They even know what kind of lawn you have. However, you would likely be put off if your realtor tried to sell you a lawnmower.

While the tools at one’s disposal to positively affect search engine ranks are more limited than they used to be, SEO is still important. As SEO tactics take a more content-centric approach, it’s important you don’t churn out low-value content. Your content strategy should be focused on the content. Working SEO into your content strategy will have a far more positive long-term effect than trying to take to shape content around an SEO strategy.

"In their quest to determine who to give their business to, your customers are judging you every step of the way. Providing value to them through great content is a critical way to earn their trust and respect, giving your life science company an edge on the competition. If you are looking for superior content strategies which will create competitive advantage for your company, contact BioBM. We’ll ensure your company is providing value to your customers which pays you back in increased business. And we’ll make sure it gets seen while we’re at it."

Blog / Content Marketing / Search Marketing 12:03 pm , June 24, 2014

Maximizing the Value of Content

Carlton Hoyt 9:40 am , May 8, 2014

Creating quality content takes a good deal of effort. When marketers endeavor to create marketing content, it is generally created for a particular purpose. That’s usually out of necessity – marketers identify a need for content then design the content to fill that specific need. There’s nothing wrong with that. However, to increase the returns on your hard work creating it, marketers should try to maximize the value derived from any piece of quality content. There are a number of ways to extract more value from your content, and here are a few ideas:

Think about different ways your audience might want to consume content. Just because you packaged a great idea into a compelling article or paper, for instance, doesn’t mean that everyone wants to read it. Perhaps you could package it into a short, instructional video. (Videos are more frequently engaged with than documents anyway.) Perhaps you could host a webinar when you’ll discuss the idea but also allow for Q&A with the audience. Or, if your paper is fairly long, perhaps you could cover some of the same content across a number of blog posts. By repackaging content, not only are you creating more opportunities for your audience to be presented with the underlying idea, but you’re accommodating more of your target audience’s preferred content consumption methods as well.

Don’t publicize it only once. Pushing your content more than once is perfectly okay, especially if you can safely assume that a large portion of the audience is not seeing any particular post and / or the method of promotion is non-intrusive. With social media, for instance, and especially with Twitter, most people only see a small percentage of what gets posted. If you post the same content a few times, chances are that few people will actually see the post more than once. In interruptive formats such as email, you can get more mileage from your content by using it in different ways. For instance, you might promote a piece of content in a newsletter, but also send it out as a follow-up in a drip campaign to leads who have shown interest in the topic. Or perhaps a topic that was a headline in one newsletter would be a footnote in a later newsletter on a similar topic.

Consider using media publishers to reach a larger audience. Publishers understand the value of content, and many welcome contributions to their publications. If you have content that would be relevant to certain publications, and those publishers have an audience which would be relevant for your company, then reach out to those publishers. Contact the editor and see if they would print your content. Many times they will, since this is a win-win scenario. They get free content and you get free publicity. Just note one thing: if you have already published your content elsewhere (for instance, in a white paper or your blog) then be sure to tell the editor that. Some publishers won’t accept content which has been published elsewhere, and failing to disclose that can ruin your relationship (or worse).

If you’re generating quality marketing content, you’re almost guaranteed to be putting lot of effort into it. See that your efforts are better-rewarded by getting more value from the every piece of quality content that you create.

"Looking to improve your content marketing practices? Contact BioBM. Our expert life science marketers will help you create high quality content and maximize its life span to deliver more brand value and more demand for your company."

Blog / Content Marketing 9:40 am , May 8, 2014

Content Is Not Enough

Carlton Hoyt 11:51 am , April 23, 2014

Very few things are immune to the law of diminishing returns. Content marketing is certainly not one of them. As content marketing has surged in the life sciences over the past few years, we’ve seen a very predictable trend: it’s become less effective. Customers are swarmed with efforts to grab their attention with low-value, shallow content. Given their inherently limited time, they can only be the “customer” of so much content. As with anything, if you have increasing demands for a limited resource (in this case, the customers’ attention) the cost goes up.

That’s exactly what we see happening with content marketing. The cost of getting your target market’s attention is increasing. It requires richer, denser, higher-value content. As the cost of scientists’ attention continues to increase, we are coming to a point where content, as it is traditionally defined, is no longer enough.

Content itself is not enough. Even relatively high-value content.

As the ever-growing tidal wave of content amasses and the demand for scientists’ attention increases, companies must begin to look for new, unique ways of creating value. After all, the purpose of content is not simply to be read, but to demonstrate or provide value in a manner which is untethered to the actual usage of a product or service (we call this “product-unrelated value“). Companies must move from delivering solely content to creating and delivering resources.

So what’s the difference between content and resources? Theoretically, content can certainly be viewed as a resource and in many cases resources may take the form of content in one way or another. They are both broad terms and they do overlap, so it’s important to distinguish between the concepts. The key difference is that content can address any question. Resources specifically ask: what are the needs of our target audience and how can we address them in a way that creates value for our brand? In doing so, they circumvent the problem of limited attention by addressing customer needs that would need to be dealt with anyway.

One of our favorite examples is the numerous protocols found in the New England Biolabs catalog. We’ve heard this valuable, long-standing resource referred to as the “molecular biology bible” and it has led to a steady stream of requests for their catalog for many years. This would be an example of a resource in the form of content, but there could be many resources which are not content. For example, digital tools can be resources. Andrew Alliance, a manufacturer of an automated pipetting robot, provides free software which easily creates pipetting protocols which can be readily edited, saved, shared, and viewed in order to help reduce errors in both protocol design and actual pipetting. This provides product-unrelated value (it doesn’t require any purchase or use of an Andrew robot) in a way that is still relevant to them (pipetting / liquid handling). There are certainly other examples as well, but not all that many. Life science companies have, as a whole, not yet become creative with regards to the resources that they provide to scientists.

As more companies become content developers and more content competes for scientists’ limited time and attention, the standards for content become much higher. While high-value content can still be very effective, a shift in thinking is required for companies to provide high-value resources which circumvent the problem of limited attention. The companies which successfully do so will be greatly rewarded in brand value.

"Stuck in the old paradigms of content, where white papers, blog posts, social media, and other “traditional” content forms dominate? If you’re looking to break free in order to stand out from the noise and generate lasting brand value, contact BioBM. Our life science content marketing expertise goes beyond traditions and tired paradigms, to more creative approaches for resource development which will act as longstanding value-added assets for your brand by being powerful creators of value for your audiences."

Blog / Content Marketing 11:51 am , April 23, 2014

Preferences for Content

Carlton Hoyt 5:06 pm , January 21, 2014

Pay attention to your customers preferences for content consumption. We talk so much about content on a conceptual level that I thought it might be helpful to offer some more practical advice. Luckily for me, there’s a lot of knowledge out there to work with. In this post, we’ll look at two studies that surveyed B2B buyers on their preferences for content.

A study published by the CMO council this past summer asked a lot of useful questions. I’ve summarized some key insights below:

The 5 most trusted types of content:

Research reports or white papers from professional associations – 67%
Research reports or white papers from industry groups – 50%
Customer case studies – 48%
Reports and whitepapers from analysts – 44%
Independent product reviews – 40%

The 5 most valuable sources of content in purchasing decisions:

Professional associations and online communities – 47%
Industry groups – 46%
Online trade publications – 41%
Seminars and workshops – 41%
Trade shows – 35%

(These results hint at who can help you amplify your voice most effectively)

The 3 most valued characteristics of content:

Breadth and depth of information – 47%
Ease of access, understanding and readability – 44%
Originality of thinking and ideas – 39%

The 3 most disliked characteristics of content:

Too many requirements for download – 50%
Blatantly promotional and self-serving – 43%
Non-substantive / uninformed – 34%

The above data is largely self-explanatory so I’ll save a long-winded explanation.

Salesforce Pardot also had some interesting information in its “State of Demand Generation 2013” study, most notably on the legnth of content. They asked B2B buyers how long content should be and gave three choices: under 5 pages, over 5 pages, or as long as it takes to inform them. 70% stated that they prefer content to be under 5 pages and only 2% stated that they prefer content to be over 5 pages (the remaining 28% said “as long as it takes”). We generally advise to make your content as long as it takes, and I certainly wouldn’t recommend sacrificing quality for brevity, but given these results it may be worthwhile to re-evaluate long pieces of content to see if you could either be more concise or break the content up into multiple discrete units.

The Salesforce Pardot study also found that about 3 in 4 B2B buyers prefer different content at each stage of the research process. That’s not particularly surprising, considering that informational needs change over the course of the buying journey. However, it is a good reminder not to keep dangling the same piece of content in front of your prospects.

Take all of this data with a grain of salt, as every industry is different. However, the information can serve as general guidance in the creation and / or publishing of content.

"For small life science companies, great products often aren’t enough. No one will try your products if they don’t trust you, but if they don’t try your products you can’t demonstrate their value. Content solves that chicken-and-egg problem by demonstrating and sharing your company’s valuable knowledge and experience. If you need help creating content which will speed your market penetration, contact BioBM."

Blog / Content Marketing 5:06 pm , January 21, 2014

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