How To Turn Your Digital Thought Leadership Into Business Development.
You made the move. You invested heavily to put your thought leadership online. Now you’re wondering what happened to all of the cost savings and audience growth you were promised.
Don’t blame digital. For B2B firms that view their online journals as a forum to host an open exchange with readers, the rewards are there. What’s more, the very tools used to create the exchange can be a rich source of data to help guide ongoing marketing efforts.
A more engaged audience–one that is able to interact with a firm through its content–provides a significant, new advantage that few are exploiting. Online interaction provides unprecedented data on exactly which content is most appealing, data that B2B firms can use to rapidly redirect their thought-leadership marketing activities to those with the best chance of attracting client interest. This enables a B2B firm to continuously recalibrate its marketing mix and focus subsequent content-based marketing efforts, including webinars, seminars, microsites, press outreach, and even paid media.
The stakes are significant. According to MarketingProfs 2012 report on B2B content marketing, 90 percent of organizations are using content as part of their marketing, spending more than a quarter of their marketing budgets on content. And yet B2B firms struggle to tie that effort directly to the business development channel.
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