5. Conferences, Coverage, & Realtime Journalism
Out of all the B2B content creation strategy hacks, industry specific event coverage is one of our total favorites. We built AIMCLEARBlog covering SMX, SES, PubCon, and numerous other online marketing conferences. When you write blog posts covering conferences, you cite the thought-leaders who speak. They find out and check out the posts, sometimes promoting them on your behalf, because it makes them look cool to be quoted. Same principle as the previous tactic, mapped to real life events.
Conference and event coverage are also link magnates. Conf organizers tend to round up the blogs that covered their sessions. Other bloggers covering the same conferences also tend to link. It’s such a powerful tactic that you don’t even need to actually attend the conference. Our friend, master link builder Lyndon Antcliff (CornwallSEO) earned a coveted link from Lee Odden (Online Marketing Blog) for his SMX Social recap in 2007. Lyndon was 3,000 miles away and did not attend SMX Social. Brilliant! Doing link roundups of conference coverage, whether you attend or not, is a deadeye tactic… just killer. It works in any industry. Don’t forget to reach out to conference organizers and attending bloggers to let ’em know you’re also covering!
So much of social media is realtime journalism, from tweets to Facebook posts. Check out this tweet roundup: #AZIMA Keynote In Living Tweets Via Whip Smart @JoinAzima Crew.
In the blog post, we aggregated what attendees were tweeting as I gave the keynote. This tactic works on so many levels. Those who tweeted found out and tweeted the blog post, proud of their contribution. The hashtag and @ sign for the conference were in the title of the post, so when others tweeted even more people found out. Win, win, win, and win!
6. Partial White Paper Excerpts
Many B2B companies sell via the intermediate step of marketing white paper downloads. This is especially true for big-ticket items that require a lot of presale information. The reason it’s a white paper is because it’s too dense to be a blog post, too rich with data. Due, it’s perfectly cool to grab 600 words and a few images from the white paper you’re marketing and serve a portion of the white paper up as a blog post.
It’s not uncommon for marketers to use expensive PPC to market white papers, sometimes with CPAs (cost per actions) that are pretty pricey. Extract sections of them for your content strategy, serialize them as a series and offer the full white paper download at the end of each post. You’ll literally save money by diluting the PPC expenses with organic downloads. Get creative and repurpose. Have a scientist narrate the white paper excerpt in a video.
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