According to research published by Junta42, leading organizations spend nearly 26% of their annual marketing budget on content marketing.

To compete for online search visibility, leveraging content marketing techniques are a must! If your organization already has an established website, a blog or sends out regular email marketing messages to your prospects and/or customers, then you are already utilizing some of these available marketing techniques. But, without capitalizing on the larger picture, you may be missing valuable lead generation opportunities.

The following is a list of the most commonly utilized content marketing techniques:

• articles
• blogs
• ebooks
• email marketing
• newsletters
• social media
• case studies
• webinars/webcasts
• videos
• print magazines or fliers
• podcasts

When launching any of the above techniques, keep the following tips in mind:

1. Set a goal to engage in dialogue with prospects and current clients with any content marketing pieces released.
2. Engage with your audience. Spend time, or dedicate someone within your organization to spend the time, communicating online with your audience. Respond to blog comments, post relevant and interesting material, update your content and seek to feel the pulse of your target audience by reading online materials.
3. Be authentic. The best way to connect with your target audience is to be personable and authentic; after all, we all know that people do business with people they like and feel connected to.
4. Don’t Spam. With all of the techniques available, you can easily cross the line into seeming ‘spammy’. Post relevant and timely content, send appropriate offers and promotions/discounts and again, pay attention to the pulse of your audience; work to feel when your communication may be too much.
5. Appeal to all senses. Post videos, graphics, written content and host interactive meetings/webinars in order to appeal to the marketing preferences of your audience at-large.
6. As you create content, keep top-of-mind how you want the person receiving it to react. In B2B sales, there are always several key decision makers. Will your content be something that the recipient will likely share?

It doesn’t matter what business you are in or who your end customer is, content marketing works. Spend time developing an initial strategy that will appeal to YOUR end customer, track results and tweak as needed to cultivate the level of sales results desired.