This Week in Marketing: Superlative Content Marketing

What superlative best describes your content marketing? Is it “most likely to succeed” or “most likely to gather dust”? This week’s edition of our marketing trends newsletter focuses on how to identify the real potential in your B2B content marketing — and even better, how to actually achieve it.

What to Read

How to Create Your B2B Content Marketing Strategy in 6 steps (Convince & Convert): Even the most seasoned content marketer can stand to brush up on the fundamentals. This post from Jessica La is a start-to-finish primer on content marketing, with enough detail to be useful for marketers of any experience level. 

4 Elements of Good Content, According to Google Research (Search Engine Land): None of the elements on this list are revolutionary in their own right: We should all strive for content that is relevant, intellectual, sensorial and emotional. But it’s worth reading how Danny Goodwin digs into these concepts to show how you can level up on each one. 

The Ultimate Guide to Paid Marketing in B2B (PPC Hero): Of course, there’s more to a successful content marketing campaign than creating great content. You also have to make sure the right people see it. Khyati Hooda offers a quick but thorough guide to boosting content through paid amplification.

The Best Time to Post on Social Media: A Research-Based Approach (Social Media Examiner): The good folks at SME are known for data-heavy, deep-dive guides, and this one is no different. Anna Sonnenberg presents the key takeaways. Refreshingly, however, she points out that no single strategy will work for every business, and offers tips by channel for determining the best times to post for your business.

What to Watch

There’s been plenty of commentary about what B2B marketers should (and shouldn’t) borrow from B2C. This video from Sam Dunning is a nifty roundup of what we’ve heard before, along with a few new ideas to noodle on. Well worth a watch (despite his affinity for random sound effects).

What to Know

One part of a successful B2B content strategy that is frequently overlooked: video. The boom in video content consumption is not a purely B2C phenomenon; B2B buyers are looking for video content to inform, and even entertain. KoMarketing presents the results of a survey from Brightcove and Ascend2: