How to Make Your B2B Marketing Breakthrough during the Holidays

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Guest Post by: Maria Pergolino

For many, the holiday season translates to shopping, socializing and stress. Research shows we spend more time socializing and shopping in December at the expense of exercising.

While many B2C connections are made during this month, B2B marketing professionals are challenged to get their content noticed, since the bottom line is their target audience doesn’t have the time, bandwidth or desire to pay attention.

Holiday Breakthrough Content

Here are five suggestions to create break through information to get your marketing content read and used.

To maximize the utility of this marketing, create evergreen content that can be used on a regular basis. Also, use this opportunity to test new ways to extend your content offering, like how-to’s and patterns that provide other entryways to your website.

When creating marketing content for the holidays, don’t forget the following five elements.

    * 1.    Incorporate your branding. While this sounds like a no brainer, it’s important to adapt your branding so that it’s appropriate to the content. Further branding encompasses more than just a logo. It’s the presentation, typeface, voice and other attributes.

    * 2.    Optimize content for your search keywords. Don’t stuff your content with keywords. Make sure people, as well as search engines, can read your marketing content.

    * 3.    Include a contextually relevant call-to-action. Remember customers may not take any action if you don’t ask them to do anything, especially in this harried time of year.

    * 4.    Encourage social sharing. Supply the appropriate social sharing buttons for your target market. Don’t assume that they’ll distribute your content if it isn’t made easy for them. Also, ensure that it’s easy to print out and use in the real world.

    * 5.    Incorporate a unique trackable promotional code. It’s difficult to determine if content was effective without any way of measuring it.

Even though your prospects and customers are busy with the holidays, knowing how they spend their time can help you to develop targeted content marketing that gets their attention. Once you’ve created useful information, don’t stop there: It’s important to maximize your content’s effectiveness with branding, search optimization, call-to-action, social sharing and unique promotional codes. With these tips in mind, you will be well on your way to breaking through the “holiday barrier” with content marketing.

Do you have any other types of content marketing that you’d add to this list? If so, what would you suggest?

Original Post: http://blog.marketo.com/blog/2011/12/how-to-make-your-b2b-marketing-breakthrough-during-the-holidays.html