Content marketing – the new PR?

In recent years content marketing has become increasingly popular in the B2B sector. The most effective types of content B2B marketers use for content marketing purposes are ebooks and white papers (50%), case studies (47%), and social media posts, excluding videos (41%) according to a Content Marketing Institute report.

Its definition states that “it is the marketing and business process for creating and distributing relevant and valuable content.”

This can be a hard concept to get to grips with for any company looking to develop an effective marketing strategy.

However, it’s not as complicated as it first seems. Even though many content marketing experts may attempt to distance themselves from more traditional forms of marketing the reality is the strategy has been around for a long time simply under a different guise – PR, and in more recent times, digital marketing.

Use it or lose it

A popular starting point for most content marketing strategies is to develop information and research relating to a business into a white paper or in-depth feature piece.

Even though this may seem a modern approach PR agencies are well experienced at developing, for example, white papers as a way to position clients as thought leaders in a specific field and understand how to repurpose the content within for different platforms and channel including, press releases, blogs/vlogs, social media posts, feature articles and even case studies.

Digital content

A content marketing plan also emphasises the need to produce digital content for owned platforms such as a company website.

PR agencies have been quick to pick up this trend and have been producing items such as blogs and infographics.

Some content marketers may wish to dismiss the importance of traditional B2B articles in magazines. However, in the digital age we live in, B2B trade publications are frequently posted and read online even if not in print.

Having an article in a journal can be a great marketing tool to help your company raise its profile which could lead to more website visits and ultimately sales.

Strategy

Creating engaging content is just the start, placing it with high Google ranking journals can make all the difference. Using key words related to your brand, business, products, solutions and sectors, can not only transform published content by driving traffic to your website, it can also improve SEO rankings.

Same message – different name

B2B PR and marketing agencies have been producing and circulating content on behalf of clients for many years.

This continues to be the case the only difference is that the content created is disseminated and used in new and exciting ways.