Month: January 2018

Whenever we think of content marketing, the easy and regular industries come to mind. From fashion to beauty, health to entertainment, it is easy to fit in content with such industries. But what happens when it comes to tech companies? Creating products and services for a very specific set of individuals, does content marketing become too niche or difficult for them? On the contrary, Content Marketing is one of the best tools tech companies can use to connect with their target audience. It allows them to stop pushing sales for products and services and instead concentrate on the audience using them. Your audiences are real people who have businesses to run and problems to solve. Your product may be just one cog in the wheel but you if tell them that you understand and support them, they are more likely to lean on you for a tech solution. The other advantage of content for tech companies is that it allows you to break through the clutter. You and a few other competitors may be selling the exact same product at nearly the same price. What you say, how you say it and how you weave the stories of those benefited using your product will make all the difference. Here are five tech companies doing a great job with content.   1. Intuit India Intuit’s accounting software has been a favourite around the world. In India, it is currently targeting small businesses. By allowing businesses to create GST invoices and cloud tracking of all accounting, it has literally allowed people to manage their accounting in a few clicks. The exciting on-going offers of 70% discount and a free trial was just the push needed to get people to try Intuit. If everything is in place, does Intuit need still pull marketing with content? One of the key things Intuit realized early on was that accounting was just one of the many problems faced by their target audience. New entrepreneurs faced common startup challenges. Intuit decided to address these through its blog. From HR policies for startups to applying for a TIN, the blog covered interesting topics from a finance perspective which brought users closer to solving their problems. It improved brand recall, imbibed trust and gave an entry for entrepreneurs to give their software a try! From traffic to leads to conversions, the content ran the length of the sales cycle.   2. SAP Labs India The SAP Labs in India is their biggest research centre outside their German headquarters. Founded in 1998, it has one the earliest R&D centres in Bangalore. It continues to be a leading provider of business software solutions. It was also declared “Hub of the year in the Asia Pacific and Japan” in 2007. It has seen a 100% increase in both revenue and customer acquisition from when it started. SAP has taken a community-centric and inclusive approach towards content. It created an official Community Blogging Channel that allowed members to share theories, strategies, and opinions related to SAP. The community blogging has been structured effectively and guest bloggers who are truly interested need to ‘earn’ their way inside. You start out as a subscriber, become a contributor and once you publish two or more blogs, you get to become an author.   3. Adobe India If you love graphics and colours, you can’t do without Adobe in your professional kit. The company was recently voted among the top IT companies in India for its policies towards reintegrating moms returning after maternity leave with a buddy program. Such actions go a long way in building the company’s reputation. From a content perspective, Adobe India leaves out any hard sell from its blog. Instead, it is a place where the community can go to find solutions to their design problems. From immersive VR experiences to visual trend forecasts, the blog keeps you updated on the future of design. In addition to this, Adobe puts out content on several of its other community platforms like Create Magazine, Behance, and 99u. Each of these addresses a specific community within the design industry and talk to them about creating a better design. The fact that they can do so with Adobe doesn’t need to be said explicitly.   4. Netapp India Netapp is one of India’s leading companies helping clients gain insight, access, and control over their data. Their amazing array of products and solutions for data management and cloud services is effectively helping transform business technology. Netapp’s clients are primarily the tech heads of leading companies so the content they put out on their blog isn’t the fluffy kind but full of technical knowledge. The content completely showcases their core expertise acting as a sales support too. Netapp also nurtures a community of bloggers via the Netapp Community Forum. The authors get ranked by the kudos they receive. This gamification of content ensures that people remain motivated to continually post to quality content to the forum.   5. Teleperformance India Teleperformance is a name synonymous with customer experience. Several companies rely on them to give a seamless customer service experience for their brand. As a company, Teleperformance is raising the bar for employee engagement. They ditched the traditional annual appraisal a couple of years back and started a monthly, real-time score card. With constant feedback, the employees now have a chance to improve their performance on an ongoing basis rather than wait the entire year. Their website has a “Think with us” section, where they not only publish their own insights but of external experts too. This mix of internal and external thought leadership articles not only helps them engage with their clients but also builds strong relationships based on authoritative content.   Conclusion The common thread among leading tech companies in India is that they are all very focused on nurturing the community around their products. The realise that the end users are passionate about such products and services. You don’t need a hard sell for such

There is a lot of hype and plenty of statistics that suggest that if you aren’t doing content marketing, you are losing out on a big chunk of business. A lot of it is true too. To find out, examine your own online behaviour. How many times have you searched Google to find out answers to your most pressing personal and professional questions? Daily? More than twice daily? We bet. We’ve all gone on to use the information we gather online to make purchase decisions too. In 2016 alone, an estimated 1.61 billion people worldwide purchase goods online. Did you know that content plays a sizable role in pushing up those sales numbers? A report titled ‘How Educational Content Impacts Purchase Power, Brand Affinity and Trust’ gave three important statistics: Consumers who read a brand’s educational content are 131% more likely to purchase from that brand. One week after reading content, customers were still 48% more likely to buy. Reading content greatly increases consumer trust and brand affinity, which increases as time passes. Combine this with the fact that over 80% B2B marketers have planned to use content as a part of their strategic mix this year. If you don’t have content in your 2018 marketing plan, be ready to answer your boss when he asks  “Were you living under a rock?”. Content marketing isn’t rocket science (not all of it). Some parts can be implemented swiftly and easily once you set your mind to it. This guide will help you get started.   Before you start… There is already a lot of content out there. We neither have the time or the inclination to skim through it all for a particular topic. Instead, we only go for the crème. The average lifespan of a human is 672,000 hours. More than 4x that number of hours worth videos are uploaded to YouTube every day! The one that grabs our attention is the content that is most relevant and easily ‘findable’. This fact gives us the first understanding towards content marketing that if your content isn’t optimized, you’ll be missing out on the results of the marketing campaign. This will form the crux of all content you write including your blogs and website content writing.   Step 1: What are your marketing goals? How do you create your content goals out of your marketing goals? Marketing is an overarching term of which content forms a subset. You could be setting your marketing goals on both a quarterly or annual basis. Most marketing goals revolve around generating leads for your business. Other goals like strengthening your brand identity, launching new products and optimizing company communication. Each of these goals can translate into a content goal. Gathering leads: Writing content with a great call-to-action that works as a traffic magnet and aids in generating leads. Brand identity: Using content to ensure more people hear about your brand and engage with you in the long run. Launching new product: Understanding market needs, creating an excitement around the launch and ensuring that your target audience knows about the product. Optimizing company communication: Undertaking customer surveys for feedback, queries, satisfaction ratios, replying to reviews and maintaining online reputation.   Step 2: Brainstorming ideas It is one thing to Google topics and starts writing. But the real content game players plan out a strategic campaign with the goal and metrics in mind. This is, by far, the most difficult part of content marketing. The idea of the content should not be to sell your product but around a problem you solve or a way to engage and excite your audience. The fact that your product gets visibility which eventually leads to conversion becomes the high point. Here is an example of three brands that chose the off-beat path for a content campaign that gave them great results.   Step 3: Create a content calendar Once you have the overall campaign idea, you’ll need to plan out how it’ll all come together. What info will go on your website? How often will you need to push content and what you can expect from each content piece? Which media will you use to engage with your customers? How long will you run the campaign? How will you capture the leads? And finally, how will you measure the success of campaign at the end of it all.   Step 4: Develop your content This can either be super easy or super difficult based on how you handle it. The first option is that you can add this as a task for your in-house team. Depending on their level of expertise, you can map out the content as per your plan. This may not be as simple as it looks it requires both time and expertise to craft content. The second option is to hire someone who does content for their bread, butter and some jam on the side. With the right brief and timeline, the execution of your content plan will go on an auto-pilot, allowing you to only pay attention to the success analytics.   Step 5: Measure and iterate The fact that content is good or bad can be very subjective. Sometimes the most well-written content does not deliver what a click-bait can. You’ll need to experiment with different facets of content like video, infographics, white papers and case studies in your content marketing mix to see how each of them fares against the goals you’ve set. If you see a quarter on quarter increase in the goals you’ve set, you are most likely to be on the path to success. If not, you’ll have to iterate to your plan B for the quarter. Either way, you’ll need to quick and agile to be a step ahead of your competition.   Conclusion Content marketing does deliver results. There are several success stories on the web on the innovative use of content. See an example of how we used content marketing for Alliance Fintech and increased their traffic