Create your very own Auto Publish News/Blog Site and Earn Passive Income in Just 4 Easy Steps
If I were prone to using clichés in my blog posts, I might be tempted to say that email and content marketing go together like peanut butter and jelly. But in the more grown-up world of B2B marketing, I prefer to think of these complementary marketing channels as rum and coke (insert your favorite drink). As a combined marketing strategy, they create something that is easy to consume – but packs a real kick.
Email and B2B content help marketers do exactly what they are paid to do: get the right message in front of the right person at the right time. Add social media and you have a solid foundation for building your entire marketing strategy, which I call the “holy trinity of content marketing.”
But don't just take my word for it. The Content Marketing Institute (CMI) recently released its 12th annual B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends report for 2022, highlighting the benefits of combining the efforts of your company's email and content marketing teams to maximize engagement.
So let’s take a deep look at the CMI report to understand how leading B2B email marketing and content marketing organizations work together to achieve their goals.
Email and B2B content distribution
According to the report, 75% of B2B marketers use email marketing software to support their content marketing efforts.
Courtesy: CMI
We believe the reason for this is simple. Without incorporating email marketing, your content marketing efforts may never reach the intended audience.
While content marketers invest a lot of time and effort into creating content that is optimized for the major search engines, there is absolutely no guarantee that content will rank well compared to its competitors or even be found. While search engine optimization (SEO) is a much-needed skill, it is also something of a dark art and inexact science.
Social media also presents a bleak picture for many content marketers. The various social media network algorithms intent on driving paid advertising can result in very few followers getting their content presented to them in an organic way.
For example, the average organic reach on Facebook is only 5.2%. This means that almost 95% of them will never see every post unless you pay for the privilege of engaging your followers.
The average lifespan of a tweet is now 18 minutes. So even if you post three or four tweets a day, you won't be seen by the vast majority of your followers.
Posts on LinkedIn, the most popular social media channel for B2B marketers, have a much longer shelf life of 48 hours. However, when you consider that only 22% of users access the professional network daily, it's easy to see why your content stays on the shelf.
Email is the only marketing technology that guarantees delivery in an environment that is checked multiple times a day. The average person checks their email more than 15 times per day.
Email marketers can also tailor their campaigns to the needs of individual subscribers. This means that content is only sent to people who have opted in and expressed a preference for viewing a particular type of content. That's right – your email marketing subscribers actually value your content and actually want to read it.
Email and your own B2B content
Content distributed via email is typically perceived by recipients as “own content”. This means that it comes from an organic and trusted source and is generally better received than “earned content” which is usually distributed through third parties.
The success of your own content is, in turn, based on the solid relationship that marketers have with their opt-in subscribers. This allows marketers to become publishers and effectively bypass traditional media partners. This means that marketers do not have to coexist in the same marketing landscape as their competitors by distributing their own content. This also means they don’t have to fight to be heard above all the other “marketing noise” from online publishers or risk being blocked by ad blockers.
According to the CMI report, the most popular content marketing assets for B2B marketers include virtual events and online training programs, research reports, short articles (less than 3,000 words), and e-books and white papers.
Courtesy: CMI
Given the significant investment required to create many of these content marketing assets, it seems illogical not to consider email marketing to distribute and amplify this content.
Email and B2B content metrics
The success of email and content marketing can only be truly understood when you set goals and analyze your results. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that 75% of B2B marketing organizations accurately measure their content marketing metrics.
Email marketing engagement is a priority metric for many content marketers. 64% believe it provides valuable insights into the success of their campaigns. Only website engagement, conversions and website traffic are valued more highly – and it's easy to see how all four metrics are connected.
Courtesy: CMI
The CMI report suggests that 32% of marketers look to subscriptions to measure content marketing success. Email subscribers are another good metric by which to measure your content marketing success. As a simple rule of thumb, if your email subscribers are increasing, your content is hitting the mark. On the other hand, if your subscribers are declining, you may need to optimize your content to meet their expectations.
The real question I would have to ask is for the 25% of marketers who either don't measure the performance of their content or don't know if it is being measured. How can they ever know whether their activities are successful or not? Even if their campaigns are getting seen, driving traffic, and converting into sales, how do they know if they could be doing so much better?
The waste potential here is enormous. If you're not currently measuring your marketing efforts, I recommend you stop until you can.
As with any marketing strategy, understanding your email marketing metrics and optimizing them using a consistent approach to testing, measuring opens, click-through rates, and unsubscribes is critical to maximizing your success.
Email and the B2B Martech Stack
If email is so important to your content marketing team, they need to have access to the right technology in their martech stack to work smarter.
Email on Acid is part of the Pathwire family, a one-stop shop for all the email marketing technology every content marketing team needs. These include Mailjet, an email marketing service provider (ESP) that offers a robust and easy-to-use WYSWYG email design builder, and Mailgun, a powerful API solution for transactional emails and delivery services.
Since email marketing is critical to the success of your content marketing campaign, you don't want it to be the weakest link. This is where Email on Acid comes into play.
Email on Acid's pre-deployment technology ensures your emails arrive in your inbox as intended, regardless of how they are viewed. Additionally, the service checks hundreds of different email clients and devices for compatibility issues and scans email content for embarrassing spelling and grammatical errors, broken image links, and catastrophically broken links.
If your B2B audience is thirsty for more great, insightful content, a dash of email marketing can go a long way.
Book a demo here for more information about how Email on Acid can help your content reach a wider audience.
Author: John W. Hayes (freelance writer)
John W. Hayes is a marketing strategist and author who has been helping companies develop their online marketing strategies for more than 20 years. Working with some of the biggest names in e-commerce and online marketing, he has dedicated much of his career to demystifying the internet and highlighting growth opportunities for businesses. He is the author of five books and is widely recognized as an influential thought leader in content, email and social media marketing.
Create your very own Auto Publish News/Blog Site and Earn Passive Income in Just 4 Easy Steps
