Creating content is a constant battle, especially for smaller B2B companies with few resources. How do you develop and maximize your marketing messages? Collaborating effectively, curating content (discovering and sharing pre-existing material), and repurposing your own content are efficient methods to address this issue swiftly. Let’s take a closer look at how you can benefit from these tactics.
Collaborating with Influencers to Grow Your Audience
Collaborating with influencers allows you to access a wider audience, leverage the credibility and trust of influencers, and create unique content opportunities. This effort helps you increase your social and general brand following.
Here are a few tips to maximize this potential:
- Identify the right influencers: Research and identify the key influencers in your industry with a strong social media presence, credibility, and an engaged audience. Look for those whose values and content align with your brand and target audience.
- Build relationships: Engage with influencers by sharing, commenting, and liking their content. Connect with them on various social media platforms, attend industry events, or even collaborate on projects. Networking with influencers can lead to long-term partnerships and mutual support.
- Share their content: Incorporate relevant and valuable influencer content into your messaging. Share their blog posts, articles, videos, or podcasts with your audience, ensuring you provide proper attribution and credit. This adds variety to your content and positions your brand alongside industry leaders.
- Influencer endorsements: Reach out to influencers and request their insights or opinions on a particular topic. Feature their quotes or contributions in your own content, such as blog posts, whitepapers, or webinars. This boosts your credibility and increases the chances of an influencer sharing your content with their audience.
- Guest posting: Invite influencers to contribute guest posts or articles to your blog, or offer to create content for their platforms. This mutually beneficial arrangement allows both parties to reach new audiences and expand their network.
- Co-create content: Collaborate with influencers on creating unique content, such as webinars, podcasts, or video series. This joint effort can help you tap into the influencer's audience, generate buzz around your brand, and showcase your expertise.
- Promote influencer content: Run paid social media campaigns that promote the influencer content you share. This reinforces your association with the influencer.
By strategically collaborating with influencers in your industry, you significantly boost your social media presence, develop messages more frequently that help keep you top of mind to prospects and customers, and reach new audiences.
The Power of Sharing
Content curation involves sharing and re-using content created by someone else. This means you can leverage other people’s knowledge about topics relevant to your industry, customers, and prospects. You can also use tactic to showcase your team’s expertise and perspective on various issues. By resharing others' content, you also tap into their audience, which will helps broaden yours.
One way to achieve this is by following subject matter experts in your field who either themselves or through the companies they work for have a significant following. You can share their blog posts or social media comments on your own blog or social media with your company's perspective and commentary.
There are some tools on social media platforms that make this really easy, such as Twitter's "quote tweet" feature, where you can readily share a tweet from another user while also adding your thoughts above it. LinkedIn offers a similar feature called "Repost with your thoughts," where you can do the same thing - share a post from another LinkedIn user and add something of your own above it.
How to make the most of curated content
Curated content should complement the original piece, not merely repost it. Enhance your audience's experience by adding thought-out perspectives and additional sources. The added value will encourage followers to seek your opinions.
One practical approach is to compile curated content from various sources on a single topic, creating a unique collection of powerful insights supported by your perspective.
Involving users in content curation is another excellent strategy. Encourage user-generated content (UGC) through submissions, hashtags, or surveys to gather diverse perspectives in one place, piquing the interest of your audience.
The Life of Your Blog Posts – From Creation To Repurposing
Publishing a fresh and engaging blog post is just the beginning of that post's life! Each post should be shared multiple times across all your "channels" (blog post page, newsletter, social platforms). And you can update old content and repost it, or repurpose content into different formats like videos or podcasts. Experiment with different ideas to bolster your repurposed content.
If you have downloadables like ebooks, templates, or checklists, you can group things by topic and offer "content bundles". An example of this can be seen with our Case Study Bundle, where we grouped a case study workflow, sample questions, and a progress tracker all created at different times for separate blog posts, and bundled them together to make one enticing download for prospects.
A Little Thing About Timing
Remember, not all posts have the same lifespan – some "last longer" than others, depending on their subject matter or current relevance. Opinion pieces may have a shorter life than evergreen topics like "how-to" guides. Plan your sharing frequency effectively and maximize your content's impact.
Bonus HubSpot Tip: HubSpot is excellent for scheduling social posts in advance, ensuring consistent content rotation across your pages.
Test, Test, and Retest
These tactics above are all effective ways for B2B companies to maximize their marketing messaging with the least cost and effort—and they're proven to work in varying degrees. You must be dedicated to continuously refining what works in your industry and with your particular customers and prospects and discarding what doesn't deliver results. And you must stay open to new trends and possibilities. This marketing game is not fixed. To thrive, you need to be nimble and maintain a connection to your audience with relevance that can change week by week!
If you feel like your marketing efforts could use a pick-me-up, get in touch with us! We'd be happy to hop on a call and discuss your unique needs and how we can help you succeed!
