Lee Odden: How To Be The Best Answer Wherever Customers Are Looking
- Published in Content Strategies
Buyers are looking for answers everywhere — on social media, in conversations with their peers and plugging key words into a search engine.
“Integrated marketing means your brand is the best answer when and where your buyers need it,” Lee Odden, CEO of TopRank Online Marketing, told an audience at the recent 2014 Marketo Marketing Nation Summit.
Odden noted that having an omnichannel presence is just as important to B2B marketers as it is to B2C.
The key, Odden said, is finding out the channels potential buyers are using to gather information. He noted that LinkedIn, Twitter and YouTube were ranked most effective for B2B buyers in a Content Marketing Institute survey, but marketers still have make that determination for their brand. “LinkedIn works for B2B, but Facebook may be where your buyers are, and you owe it to yourself and your customers to find out.”
Odden discussed the content marketing maturity model, which he described as SEO plus social networks and Influencers. He explained that you want to create utility, tell stories and monetize.
Odden shared his five steps to “content marketing awesomeness”:
- Identify customer segments. “Understand who your major customer segments are and how they buy. And then optimize for discovery, consumption and action.”
- Map the buying journey.
- Uncover the questions they have during the sales cycle.
- Leverage those questions for your content plan. “Use Q&A to power your content marketing and flavor your content based on the responses.”
- Optimize for search, social and user experience.