Tips and tricks for scientific content marketing
Struggling to find content for your marketing plans? Don’t panic, you often have more materials than you realise!
Suppliers to scientific and technology markets are often rife with rich, valuable content, from peer-reviewed papers, research studies, whitepapers and technical app notes to product data sheets, customer presentations and even videos and webinars. It’s likely that you already have enough content within your organisation for a whole year’s worth of external communication activity! We tease out the news stories and core content topics from our clients and build content-led marketing campaigns that are big on impact and low on client resource.
Excite, encourage and engage with content marketing
Bill Gates supposedly first said that ‘content is king’, and with 51% of B2B buyers relying more on content to make purchasing decisions than they did a year ago, it is becoming increasingly important. While traditional marketing talks at people, overwhelming them with product information, content marketing engages with an audience, providing a relevant, compelling story, encouraging conversation, and presenting your company as the font of all knowledge.
According to LinkedIn, the top three goals of content marketing are lead generation (59%), thought leadership/market education (43%) and brand awareness (40%).
The first step in creating content is understanding who your target audience is. You can then look at the benefits of your product or service and create interesting, relevant copy that can be placed on multiple platforms. By becoming less company-centric and more audience-focused, you can engage in more effective dialogue and get your message across.
Ultimately, relevancy is the most important factor for users when they are searching online. Providing relevant and engaging content improves your SEO and enables your company to be found more easily and more often, encouraging people to spread the word.
Creating engaging content in a highly regulated industry
With 47% of B2B buyers consuming 3-5 pieces of content prior to engaging with a salesperson, producing multiple marketing items from one core content piece is a great way to reinforce your message. But sometimes, trying to execute successful content marketing within a highly-regulated industry can feel like an uphill battle, as compliance and regulation teams reject ideas that take them out of their comfort zone. This makes it difficult to provide the content audiences need and want.
Here are some of our tips and tricks for overcoming these regulatory obstacles:
- Educate your colleagues – sometimes regulatory colleagues might not appreciate the goals of your content nor how targeted your channels are. If you can allay some of their concerns by explaining your goals and providing examples of other organisations doing similar things, it can make the process smoother
- Submit content for approval in bulk – plan your editorial calendar in advance and send your regulatory/compliance team a bulk of content for approval on a less frequent basis to save time
- Ask for a comprehensive feedback loop – if any of your content gets rejected, make it your business to understand why and how you can ensure it won’t happen next time.
Marketing to millennials
With 88% of B2B marketers using content marketing, and 51% indicating that they will increase their content marketing spend in the next 12 months, it is not surprising that creating more engaging content is the B2B marketer’s main aim. According to the Content Marketing Institute, having a documented content strategy nearly doubles the chance that of successfully tracking ROI.
With the millennial generation spending more time on social channels such as Snapchat and Instagram, attention spans are decreasing. Only 6% of millennials in the US consider online advertising to be credible, with 95% saying that friends are the most credible source of product information. Therefore, B2B marketers should expand into publishing shorter and sharper content, such as animated videos and interactive content that further engages modern audiences.
To find out how we can help you develop an exciting scientific content marketing plan, give us a call on +44 (0) 1477 539 539 or email business@scottpr.com.
