A Resource Guide to Marketing Content Success

Do you want to sharpen your skills in marketing content but aren’t really sure where to start? We’ve compiled some of the best assets in content marketing: everything from white papers, educational videos, and podcasts to other written content.

Learning from others is often the shortest and easiest way to creating successful content marketing campaigns. In addition, reading about what has worked for others isn’t a one-time process. It’s something that you can do throughout your career to continue to grow and produce results in all your marketing campaigns. A marketing campaign can be tricky. You need to know about the chosen subject before you dive in to marketing. So for example, if you want to do dental marketing you obviously first need to know a thing or two about the dentist industry.

By looking at the data and actionable advice these guides give you, you’ll be able to better distribute, brainstorm, develop, and promote your B2B marketing content.

White Papers and E-Books

White papers and e-books are generally 5-75 pages long and expand greatly on one specific topic. Many white papers also include exclusive data and survey results that aren’t found anywhere else, based on the publisher’s own research and experience. This detail is what gives white papers and e-books the ability to showcase knowledge about a niche topic.

When looking for marketing content help, look for resources that tackle a specific angle—this will likely give you the most actionable advice. For instance, an e-book on link building isn’t probably going to give you as much insight as one on link building for e-commerce retailers (if that’s your industry).

Below are some detailed content marketing white papers and e-books:

Getting Insight From Content Marketing Experts

E-books are a great source of information from proven experts who have years of experience in the field. This white paper from Sprinklr has insight from known experts like Joe Pulizzi, Jason Miller, and Michael Brenner and focuses on Content Marketing Best Practices.

Additionally, LinkedIn put together The Sophisticated Marketer’s Guide to Content Marketing, which tackles the difficult issue of content over-saturation online. More and more brands are creating content, but how can you ensure that yours is actually being read? Insight from experts like Lee Odden, Ann Handley, and Andy Crestodina can help you figure out how to make your content stand out.

Content Marketing in Specific Industries

Content Marketing Institute has a wide variety of content resources for most industries, and their white paper about how to use content to help decision-makers in IT make purchasing choices contains lots of valuable data. If your company is in SaaS or some other data or IT industry, Content Connects: How to Deliver the Right Messages at the Right Time is extremely helpful.

If you’re looking for a B2B viewpoint of content marketing, be sure to check out Content That Converts by Laura Hanly, which talks content strategy specifically in the realm of B2B.

There is also the option here to market your content, products and services to native readers of other languages. By utilising a translating company such as Jonckers, you’ll be able to translate your English content directly to other languages, and enter completely new markets.

Tackling Content Process and Technology Challenges

In past annual surveys, many B2B marketers have reported struggling most with having a documented content marketing strategy and realistically plotting goals and ROI. If your organization is struggling with getting a good content marketing process going, check out this white paper from IBM titled The Content Marketing Challenge.

If you’re looking for a detailed approach to building a content marketing roadmap and process, Contently’s e-book bundle covers everything from strategy to measuring the content you’ve produced and promoted. The Content Marketing Toolkit has three parts, which is helpful if you want to tackle each part bit-by-bit and don’t want to get overwhelmed.

Adding Infographics to Your Marketing Content

If you already have a strategy and process in place for your written content, consider stepping up your game with new types of content, like videos, audio, or images. The Ultimate Guide to Marketing With Infographics by Unbounce is a good e-book that covers how infographics can help your content get more engagement and how to promote it once it’s published (which includes tips on what code to use to foster social media sharing).

How do I Measure Our Content Marketing Efforts?

Proving ROI of content is one of the biggest challenges B2B marketers face today. Because a user may come into contact with several different types of content from an organization before they directly content a company, it can be difficult to prove that your content is creating more interest and leads. Convince and Convert’s e-book on 4 Types of Content Marketing Metrics can help you identify what metrics you should be monitoring and how they can prove campaign success.

Measuring campaigns also comes from identifying where in the purchasing funnel customers are consuming content, as well as what types of content more drive customers to make a purchase or fill out a contact form. Outbrain produced an e-book titled Content Marketing Throughout The Customer Journey that can help B2B marketers identify where their content is being seen and what content works best through each step of the sales funnel.

Books About Content Marketing

If you are looking for something even more in-depth that will provide more examples, tutorials, and insight, hard copy or digital books can be a good way to mix up the shorter forms of content you may be learning from. The following books focus on specific areas of content marketing to help you sharpen your skills in the areas where you need it most.

How to Tie in Social Media to Blogging

Creating content is only one part of the puzzle in a successful marketing content strategy. The second piece is promoting it and getting it in front of the right audience. Blogging expert Jeff Bullas goes over what he’s learned from creating a website that brings in millions of visitors annually in his book, Blogging the Smart Way.

How Does Content Marketing Fit Into Your Existing Marketing Strategy?

If you are looking for advice on how different types of content can fit into what you’re already doing in marketing and advertising, Andreas Ramos’ The Big Book of Content Marketing can give you some valuable insight into leveraging your existing efforts and making it better with content.

Back to Basics: Sharpen Your Writing Skills

Marketers can know all there is to content marketing, but if they aren’t good writers, then even the best promoters won’t find their efforts successful in the long-term. Go back to basics with resources that highlight copywriting and how to actually write the content you want to promote. Ann Handley’s Everybody Writes is a good primer for writing from a marketing and business slant.

Another expert in business writing is Robert W. Bly, who has authors several books on successful copywriting. Much of his advice can help marketers use copy to produce better e-books, blog posts, and video. The Copywriter’s Handbook is one of his most popular books.

Writing is an art form and talent that gets better with experience. Books like Words That Sell by Richard Bayan can provide you with the resources you need to use more compelling words that make your content’s call-to-action hard to resist.

Content marketing online may seem young, but the act of using content and copy to compel customers to buy is nothing new. Indispensable books from decades ago that speak to what makes customers buy can still hold actionable advice we can use today. Ogilvy on Advertising, published in 1985, is one such work.

Want a Wider View of Content Marketing?

Even though we tried to pull books that focus on a specific area of content, many marketers are also looking for a “big picture” view of how content marketing can be developed to help them meet their goals. Joe Pulizzi’s two books on content marketing help you see how you can actionably scale content for any size business in almost any industry. Epic Content Marketing was published in 2013 and Content Inc. came out in 2015.

Furthermore, Content Rules by Ann Handley and C.C. Chapman is a great primer that goes beyond written content. It gives valuable insight into successful marketing content campaigns with webinars, videos, podcasts, and more.

Videos and Podcasts

If reading pages of data and insight on your phone or computer sounds daunting, you might learn better through a multimedia format. More companies are spending the time and resources needed to create great podcasts and videos on content marketing, and below are some of our favorite picks on specific, actionable ideas for your B2B content.

How Content Plays Into The Sales Funnel

If your executive leadership is wanting proof that content marketing is generating actual revenue or leads, check out this video from DigitalMarketer on how content marketing can produce results during any step in the sales process.

 

What Tools Are Helpful in Marketing and Promoting Content?

There are thousands of tools available today that promise to help our content get more exposure, traffic, and leads. But it’s often overwhelming to figure out which tool is going to work best for your business. Growth Tribe put together this round-up video that lists some of their favorite tools and what they do. The links to each tool are included in the video description.

 

How to You Know When to Repurpose Content?

Neil Patel and Eric Siu are well-known for his content marketing savvy, and his newer podcast called Marketing School covers topics that range from what types of content would work best for your business to how to hire the right team. One episode goes into detail on the benefits of repurposing content and how you can decide if it’s the right thing for your team to focus on.

A Primer on The Benefits of Video Content

Whether your content includes tutorials, reviews, interviews, or lectures, producing video versions of the content you are already developing can be a great way to get exposure with a new format. Creating corporate videos may seem overwhelming, but this Social Pros podcast episode from Jay Baer and Amy Schmittauer shows that video can help you maximize engagement and grow brand awareness on different platforms.

How Can Content Foster Brand Loyalty?

B2B marketing content creation can help you develop your stronghold as a thought leader in your industry and to build trust and loyalty in your brand. But just how does it do that? An episode from We Study Billionaires focuses on how online content assets can foster trust in a brand and keep customers coming back for more.

How to a Content Marketing Strategy

As mentioned in the white paper and e-book section, many B2B marketers know they need content (and have even spent the time and resources to develop it) but aren’t getting the results they want from what they are publishing. The issue is often that there’s not a set purpose behind the content that is being created. In this two–part video series from SEMrush, a panel of experts goes over why a content strategy is important and what concrete steps can be taken to create one.

 

Blog Posts and Other Resources

Even though they are usually much shorter, actionable blog posts offer great advice for marketing content. These bite-sized snippets of content often hold interesting stats and examples that we can put to work in our own marketing content campaigns.

Some of our current favorites include:

• Why White Papers Still Matter on Content Marketing Institute
• The Skyscraper Technique by Backlinko
• The Ultimate White Paper Template by Curata
• How to Use Ebooks to Improve Your Content Marketing Strategy by CIO
• The Advanced Content Marketing Guide on Quicksprout
• The Beginner’s Guide to Content Marketing by Moz
• The 2016 Content Marketing Toolkit: 23 Checklists, Templates, and Guides on Content Marketing Institute

Do you have another content marketing resource that has helped you create and promote your content better? We’d love to hear about it on Twitter!

Both KoMarketing and the author have no direct, known affiliations with any of the resources mentioned.