Getting followers to interact, to give not only likes but also to comment and engage with the content is not easy. This is even more complicated if you do not show interest in the problems of your community, in their doubts, their concerns and even in their direct questions, which are often frequently asked by multiple consumers to which you could provide answers.
When faced with an intangible product, it is difficult to make consumers understand its usefulness and its advantages over other similar software. For this, it is essential to carry out a proper content strategy that can nurture and guide consumers, more specifically the buyer persona of the business, in its unique buying cycle, which can be long and complex on many occasions.
For this reason, it is essential to have a series of content pieces that can engage, facilitate the path to conversion and ultimately build customer loyalty. However, the difference in each of these pieces is their engagement capacity, their retention and conversion capacity in each phase, which depends on a number of factors that we will explain below:
1. Articles for your blog.
There are two reasons why the blog is a fundamental channel in your content strategy. First, it can solve a consumer’s doubts at every stage of the buying cycle, especially in the recognition and consideration phases. This content generated to answer the search terms of your potential customers can also be updated as needed and reused on other channels and in other format pieces.
But, secondly, this content, that is, each of the articles created for your blog can help you to better position your brand in search engines, especially Google, if you have previously conducted a research of what are the doubts, needs and inquiries that your potential consumers, your buyer persona, are making. This will give authority to your domain but also to your brand within your community. Now, what are the keys to generate articles with engagement?
– Know your buyer personas and their buying cycle. As we have already mentioned, it is essential to master the knowledge of your customers in order to generate the right content that can attract them. You don’t need just any type of user, but a more qualified one that is not only looking for information, but a solution that can lead them to your product.
– Keep the content educational but speak their language. The information you provide, the content you create is not for a few people to understand, it is to be clearly understood by using the right language, the language your consumers speak. If you know what search terms they will search for, this will also help you optimize your articles for search engines, that is, it will help you with branded SEO.
– Make content clusters. The articles not only have to respond to the buyer’s needs in each of their phases, but also be grouped by relevant content topics, leading to a pillar page where fundamental information is consolidated for the potential consumer. This is another way to send authority to certain pages, that is, to help the positioning of your website.
– Use visual elements. Here there is a clear design component, it is necessary to include visual elements that accompany and complement the text. Think that if you are looking for your potential consumers to digest well the information about an intangible product, not so easy to explain, it is possible that graphics and illustrations are necessary. Keep them corporate and don’t lose sight of your consumers’ preferences.
– Engage with other industry experts. Collaborative articles with other industry experts are critical to improving a site’s positioning and authority. Find those experts with whom you can exchange interesting articles and work to provide relevant, educational and entertaining information.
2. Postings on social networks.
On which social networks are your potential customers present: LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram? Whatever the priority social networks where your potential customers are most active, you should keep in mind that posting original content on them is important to keep your community engaged because of it:
– Do more than just share content from your blog. While the practice of sharing your latest and older posts on these platforms can lead you to get a higher number of visits, and is something you should do, don’t limit yourself to it. As we have already mentioned, as long as we are dealing with updated content, it is possible to create different pieces, reconvert articles into videos, infographics, gifs, etc., visual formats that are much more attractive on social networks.
– Invite participation. If you want to boost engagement on these platforms, invite your community of followers to participate in surveys or by asking direct questions. The answers you get will not only help you to get to know your buyers better, but will also improve the vision and repercussion of your brand among the community. It is interesting that they discover that you are interested in them and that you are an active listener.
– Participate in the conversation. In addition to inviting them to participate, you can also participate in debates and important conversations around topics directly and indirectly related to your sector. This way you can also discover what are the interests and concerns of your buyer personas and get ideas to continue publishing better content.
– Generate original content. It is possible that some of the content is recycled, but when publishing on social networks you can always reserve certain information, certain promotions that may be exclusive to these platforms. For example, something you can do on these networks is to announce the progress of an upcoming convention, which leads us to the following type of content
3. Collaborative Webinars.
When it comes to educating a specific audience and providing information of interest to solve widespread problems experienced by buyer personas, conferences and more recently the virtual versions known as webinars have become relevant in many industries.
Consumers want to learn more about some of the technological solutions available to them, while potential customers want to see what others in the same situation are doing, while finding out how to solve problems and needs they were considering or didn’t even know they had. But to do so:
– Collaborate with other developers. If there’s one thing we’ve learned from our clients, it’s that many of them don’t have a single solution to their own customers’ problems. For example, it is more than possible that some B2B technology companies dedicated to software development for tourism companies have a very good product and service to offer, but their customers have a major problem that needs to be solved from several perspectives. Whether it is this particular case, or simply similar, collaborating in these webinars with other technology companies that offer complementary products to yours can benefit you, since you would be presenting a more complete solution. The only thing you have to make sure in this case is that the values of the companies you are going to work with are aligned with yours.
– Study which topics are most current. It is possible that the topics you should cover in your webinars are related to how to solve current problems of your potential customers, those that you share with the other technology company or companies with which you are going to collaborate. An example would be how to provide technological solutions to consumers after the losses suffered in their businesses as a result of the pandemic. Not only would this be a current and interesting topic, but it would also delight a niche that wants to stay current in their industry.
– Take advantage of it to create conversion paths. On the other hand, no one has said that these webinars are completely altruistic. After all, the contents created for the different channels and events have certain objectives that must be set. On the one hand, webinars allow you to share communities and potential customers with your collaborators, but on the other hand, through different conversion channels such as the forms that can be enabled, you can obtain relevant contact information with which to work later if you have the all-important CRM. Obviously, this implies that the webinars are exclusive to those who subscribe.
– Use the most convenient streaming platform for participants. If you wish, you can conduct a survey on which one it is. Nowadays there are many options, so, depending on the requirements of the webinar and the preferences of the participants, you can choose one or the other.
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4. Interactive demos.
As we mentioned at the beginning, cold calls are no longer as effective as they were 20 years ago. Today, the product demonstrations that sales managers must work on need to be more interactive and visual to easily demonstrate something that is not really tangible.
– Research the buyer persona’s level of interest beforehand. If there is something that the sales manager should do before a demo is to investigate the degree of interest, that is, the previous engagement that the person who has requested the demo has had with the content and conversations. If, thanks to your CRM, you have seen the content they have visited and the steps they have taken in the buying cycle of this potential buyer, you can adapt the content and arguments more easily to encourage conversion. On the other hand, if you do not have a CRM with this capability, or if this user has requested a demo very quickly, ask a series of questions that allow you to know in what possible phase of the buying cycle he may be in so as not to overwhelm him with information.
– Take into account the pain points of these buyer personas. As we have already mentioned, the idea is not to overwhelm anyone with a 1-hour demo in which they end up with a headache. It is possible that they will not understand everything, so focus on their pain points one by one, dosing the information you offer.
– Reuse content that has worked. You can build on the articles and social media posts with visual materials that have had the best performance and engagement. Measurement is key, so you can take advantage of materials that you know in advance that work, that these potential customers have seen.
– Use interactive content formats. One of the best ways to work with demos, especially if you have to explain complex or simply lengthy processes or developments, is to transform this information into something entertaining, by creating a video, an infographic or an interactive development, for example. In many cases it will be important that these demos simulate the real experience that the person who is going to use the software will have.
– Show success stories. If your other customers allow you to do so, you may be able to show real success stories or graphs that demonstrate the growth of other customers. Nothing explains the benefits of an intangible product better than the success of other consumers using it.
5. Tutorials for VIPs.
There is nothing a customer likes better than feeling special and unique. While there are many ways to boost customer loyalty through customer service, the generation of visual, audiovisual or interactive content for current consumers of your product is, if anything, the most important.
– Instruct them in the best use of your software. If there were only one pain point in your potential customer’s buying decision process, it would be the inability to learn or instruct on how the software works. If you offer this exclusive information, not only to understand it, but to master it in an excellent way and get the most out of it according to your customer’s own objectives, you would be exponentially improving the LTV (life time value) of it, making him loyal in the process.
– Take advantage of the educational power of podcasts. In addition to video tutorials, it is possible that your customers (who usually do not have much time) may appreciate expanding their knowledge through podcasts. These are content formats that are easy to consume, anywhere, anytime. For this reason, they are a good idea to expand knowledge and keep your customers updated. This will generate greater trust in your brand.
– Dose the information. You may have already considered this from our previous comments, but remember that loyalty also has a cycle. It doesn’t end once you’ve already won the customer, so don’t overwhelm them with unnecessary content. Therefore, do not forget to dose the information so that it has a better engagement in each phase.
You have invested your time and resources in creating an interesting list of contacts for your business.
You have invested your time and resources in creating a list of interesting contacts for your business. These contacts are regular customers who rely on your products or services on a recurring basis, or leads who are interested in the information and education that you offer them thanks to your online marketing strategy. However, you realise that your sales numbers are not enough considering your number of contacts. Why is it that if you have so many leads it costs your company so much to convert them into customers?
Why is it so hard for your company to convert them into customers?
Why is it so hard for your company to convert them into customers?
(more…)
Colour plays a tremendous role in establishing a company’s overall feel. By developing a specific palette, you can create a consistent look whilst tapping into people’s subliminal thought processes. This can not only affect the way that people choose to interact with your business, but can also be used to attract attention, express meaning, drive conversions and earn the loyalty of your customers. Choosing colours can take careful planning, however when implemented correctly, they can optimise the results in your business.
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It is one of the most established tech blogs. Founded by Michael Arrington, it stands out for many reasons, but one of them is undoubtedly its ability to generate a large amount of up-to-date content. It publishes an average of 5 articles daily in each of its ten news categories. It follows the news up to the second and its publications are very dynamic.
It uses an extremely colloquial but very attractive language. So much so that at the end of December it published a post entitled WTF is Brexit? (WTF stands for “What The Fuck”).
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TechCrunch is committed to two-way communication. It always encourages collaboration from its followers and is not shy about asking for help to improve the information it offers.
The members of the team show an image of young people in their thirties, crazy and fun but who know what they’re talking about… And that’s how they greet the New Year.
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Mashable is a technology news blog founded by Scot Pete Cashmore in July 2005. It focuses mainly on social networks and innovative companies, although it also covers other current topics such as music, celebrities, videogames and films.
Mashable
Mashable is a blog that focuses on social networks and innovative companies.
Like TechCruch, Mashable also publishes a large number of articles on a daily basis. Even in its early days, it posted a minimum of seven posts a day. Today, this figure has almost tripled. Moreover, this portal does not “rehash”, i.e. it does not copy content previously published on another blog and reuses it. Mashable creates original content and has a peculiar way of writing: direct and concise.
Mashable has a unique way of writing: direct and concise.
ashmore said in an interview that he loves writers who can tell a complex story in just three paragraphs. This is something that should definitely be taken into account in the online environment, because of how easy it is for any reader to stop reading our content and enter a new search.
Mashable also attracts a lot of attention in the online environment.
Mashable also appeals for its clean, simple and intuitive design, and its fun and instructive videos, such as this one about the history of emoticons that you can’t miss.
Mashable’s Mashable is a great place to visit, and it’s also a great place to learn about the history of emoticons.
Xataka is a Spanish blog that is part of Weblogs SL, a group to which other tech-focused blogs belong. But Xataka is the leader, the number one. It publishes rigorously and passionately the new technological proposals offered by the market. It is a blog to which you should turn, at the very least, every time you have in mind the purchase of a new gadget. It publishes about the latest technologies in consumer electronics, reviews smartphones, tablets, consoles and videogames. It does in-depth market research and analyses one by one similar products on the market.
This blog was launched in 2004 and today it is the Spanish technology channel of reference, creating a community of influential and participative users. Xataka also celebrates awards since 2010 that give value to the best and most innovative technological devices. It takes advantage of the event to organise a meeting with followers in which the main consumer technology brands participate and in which the public has the opportunity to try out new devices that have not yet been launched on the market by the manufacturers in the so-called Tech Experiences. Xataka is, as they state on their website, passion for a future that has already become a reality.
Apple is one of the most important technology companies in the world today, as evidenced by the interest of the millions of technology fans who wait impatiently for its new products. For this reason, The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) dedicated its blog posts especially to news from this technology company.
The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW).
Although TUAW is now part of Engadget, it continues to blog successfully: every day they usually publish one or more posts about Apple. Not only do they focus on explaining new products or services, they also report on iOS system updates, and all in language suitable for ordinary users of Apple technology. The posts are short and to the point, demonstrating the blog’s focus on conveying information in a clear and concise manner.
The posts are short and to the point.
Google is known worldwide for being one of the technology companies with the strongest commitment to progress and innovation in new technologies. Among its different projects is the Google Cloud platform, where users can find multiple tools for the creation of online applications in a single online space, from computing resources to data storage.
In order to keep users up to date with the latest news, they have created an official blog. Its design is very simple and is equally accessible for computer users as for those who visit the blog via their mobile devices. Its entries are based on new developments within its platform and related events; although they are essentially publications about technology, they seek to expand this theme to other areas, such as the education sector.
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ExtremeTech is one of the longest-running technology portals, and is still going strong today. Founded in 2001, this weblog seeks to provide users with information about technology in different sectors: computers, mobile phones, cars, video games, science and more.
What’s the key? According to ExtremeTech, its team members are true technology lovers. Not only are they people who are passionate about new technological developments, they are also people who have developed their professional careers in these different technological sectors.
They are not only passionate about technological developments, they are also people who have developed their professional careers in these different technological sectors.
Their articles are more specialised in the technological field than other weblogs, however, they complement their entries with multimedia content such as photos and videos, which makes the reading very enjoyable.
Apart from being the weblog that hosts the previously named The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW), Engadget is another of the most up-to-date and interesting tech portals around. Like other blogs, it talks about tech news in computers, mobile phones, science, video games and more. What sets it apart from others?
There are two things that make Engadget different.
There are two points in which Engadget seeks to be different from other technology websites. Firstly, it devotes several of its entries to the world of entertainment, specifically Internet entertainment, such as YouTube or Netflix. In this way, they talk about content that interests their users without neglecting their main interest, technology. Secondly, several of the blog’s editors publish reviews with an informal and fun tone, and their posts are often accompanied by photos and videos, in order to keep users’ attention.
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This weblog belongs to Wired Magazine, an American magazine created in 1993, which now has a website to publish its contents. Although it focuses on current affairs in the world of technology, its publications seek to analyse the impact of technology on society and culture. In this way, it invites users to learn about the most important technological innovations and how they impact on our way of life.
In terms of design, WIRED divides all its publications into blocks of content, so that users can find articles about technology in relation to the content they are interested in, such as culture, business, science, etc.
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What better than to appeal to tech lovers with a modern and attractive design? This is probably what the designers of this website have asked themselves. Instead of opting for the classic structure that other portals may have, The Verge offers a different and modern design, precisely a design in relation to its articles on news in the technological field.
The Verge’s content is aimed at users young and old: its technology publications are distributed across other topics, including science, entertainment, business and automobiles, as well as reviews by the site’s editors. However, what defines The Verge is undoubtedly the use of multimedia content to transmit more content, specifically the creation of podcasts and the uploading of videos on its YouTube channel. Undoubtedly, these interactive methods are attractive to all kinds of users.
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The design of this website is very simple at first glance. And it is also easy to see that both the homepage and each of the articles have buttons for sharing on social networks. This is undoubtedly a very good decision, as it allows users to quickly share technology news on their personal profiles.
In terms of content, its publications combine technical information and an informal tone. Internet, videogames, science… their informative articles are mixed with more entertaining articles, such as articles about viral videos or articles about prominent people.
They are also very entertaining.
Through the link “Top10Tech Lists” users can visit the publications where the website writes lists of recommendations, such as information about the best music platforms or lists of interesting technological products that can be bought online. A very interesting decision, especially since the editors are technology enthusiasts or specialists, and users will be more than interested to know about their recommendations.
The Recommendation List is a very interesting decision.
The quality of the content and the quality of the content is very good.
Quality content and a high number of posts are the two pillars of a successful blog. If you don’t have one yet, develop a marketing plan to help you get organised. Don’t wait any longer!
More and more B2B companies, including SaaS business models, are including content marketing as part of their overall strategy and are seeing the benefits of creating quality content. And is that content, created with clear marketing objectives, can not only generate more visits, but attract more sales opportunities and end customers.