Cheat Sheets Charge Up Your B2B Content
Posted on 25. Oct, 2011 by twanless in B2B Marketing, Content, sales strategies
Cheat sheets can help B2B marketers break through the content clutter that’s increasingly being sent to prospects. They’re informative, yet still different in that they’re easy to digest and use over and over again.
It’s hardly a secret that content marketing has become THE new marketing — a way for B2B marketers to avoid the “push” marketing that was the only real method available to them before the age of Internet search and social networks.
But the downside of content marketing is that it has unleashed a flood of content on to the Web, most of it aimed at consumers. Using advanced SEO techniques provided by professional SEO services, as well as strategic social media marketing, B2C marketers pump out an endless stream of easily digestible and keyword-stuffed content.
Problem is this kind of simple content is also often superficial, shallow, inconsequential and drowns the substantive content that is so important in B2B marketing.
B2B Content Should Be Deeper
B2B clients want to go deeper into content. They have an expertise and they want to know how a B2B product can help them sell it, whether in the form of a product or a service. Therefore, any web marketing strategy that doesn’t contribute to brand recognition, lead generation and conversion, or direct sales is ineffective.
Traditionally, this has been addressed by more complex content such as blogs, white papers, and case studies. But a new kind of content — cheat sheets — is now available to meeting the demand for complex, yet easily digestible, content in the B2B marketing area.
Cheat sheets are similar to infographics in that they compile a lot of information into relatively short, easily read, and more visual information assimilation.
Cheat Sheets Can Be Elaborate — Or Simple.
They can be elaborate, looking very much like the plastic- covered training guides you used to see in many book stores a decade ago. Or they can be relatively simple and convey basic information.
Cheat sheets are very popular among technologists who use them as guides. For example, here is a cheat sheet to help people navigate the new Google + social networking platform.
But cheat sheets don’t have to be confined to geeks. Here on the Knowpreneur site is a simple visual cheat sheet (in mindmap form) that illustrates how we approach a content marketing project. It may not be pretty, but it is effective in that it gives a site visitor a flavor of how we work.
If you’re struggling with how to provide cogent information that generates leads and queries from visitors in a short format, engage them with a cheat sheet. They’ll keep it around, and better yet, share it with colleagues.
