By John Lavey, CEO/President

When it comes to B2B content marketing, every dollar you spend must have a clear purpose. Your investment isn’t just about creating content for content’s sake—it’s about engaging customers, aligning with other marketing efforts and propelling your brand. Here is what you should expect from your investment in B2B content marketing:

1. Create and sustain conversations to engage and activate. You are investing in conversations. Conversations that start with engaging your customer, and eventually activate them. You can’t get people to take actions if they don’t know who you are. And you can’t engage them if the conversation isn’t needed and valuable to their doing their job better and helping them generate monetary value and achieve savings.
   
   
2. Align with and add a multiplier to other marketing efforts. Content is a growing critical part of how you reach customers and communicate how you can help them save money and grow their business. But it’s not the only tool. It should be aligned with all of your sales efforts, from event attendance to the nurture of relationships across long sales cycles.
   
   
3. Clearly communicate value and achieve market growth over time. It’s unrealistic for startup companies and new brands that haven’t invested in content marketing to drive leads immediately. There is an order of operations that you can’t reverse. You can’t skip steps. And success is a result of sustained effort.

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