Media Convergence as Inbound Marketing Acceleration

Lizette Louw | 3 October 2016

Have you ever found yourself backtracking through your online history searching for the source of that mind-blowing tech update you read about a week ago? Are you struggling to find inspiration to differentiate your tech company?

“That conductive pen that lets you draw electrical circuits directly on paper... was that a Kickstarter project in need of funding, or did I see a video on YouTube linking back to their online store?” you ask yourself.

If you traced your steps through your browser history, social media feeds, and email newsletters, you’d likely find a series of brief introductions that lead to the one breakthrough interaction.

There’s method behind this madness, and here it is: 

In an increasingly crowded online realm, B2B buyers’ attention is divided between everything from staying on top of daily admin to the upcoming IPO. Top B2B tech firms know, if you want your marketing message to compete with the noise, you have to keep your story at the top of their minds… wherever they go.

You’ve seen it implemented throughout your online wanderings, and you’ve experienced its effectivity. Today we’ll be talking about the theory that underlies this comprehensive content distribution program, the theory of Media Convergence, and how you can apply this strategy as a path to accelerating your Inbound Marketing.

Are you Convergence ready?

In its essence, media convergence refers to the blending of multiple communication and distribution methods, all integrated to work together and deliver a dynamic, well-targeted campaign. Tech owners looking to use media convergence in their approaches to marketing have the task, no, the opportunity of taking an in-depth look at their business and website, and go back to basics to answer a few fundamental questions:

Revisiting your list of Buyer Personas and your brand voice will be the core component of your new approach. Are you targeting the right personas – and are they served the optimal content?

The next step is to align that list with your SEO and SEM efforts to cast out a wide net across all your collective media. This vital research will form the basis of which keywords to target based on your market/business and your targeted personas. Are your keywords and content optimised to reflect these?

Very importantly, your data should be collected, interpreted and analysed. With the use of your specialised SEM and SEO once again, this data is then refined to use across the appropriate and most suitable media channels.

Social media is the glue that ties all of these efforts together – deciding where your tailored content will be featured and which persona to target across which platform is key. 

The importance of convergence stems from a necessity to get the most response from your outreach. The convergence approach aims to integrate all your channels to amplify that outreach, and also to determine where the most response is received. The process of then refining and filtering this data is a direct result of finding out where your target market is, what channel/s they're most prolific on, and where you should allocate budget and intensity.

Media Convergence within Inbound Marketing

The Objective: The inbound marketing methodology entails attracting your ideal buyers and nurturing your leads with content stories, which guide them as they search for solutions to their problems and means to realise their opportunities.

The Crisis: The digitally native modern B2B buyer is preoccupied with professional responsibilities. And when they step out into the media they are overwhelmed by a force of vendors vying for their attention. In the mayhem, there’s little time for buyers to go searching for information on your firm’s offering.

The Solution: Deliver your message to your buyers in the comfort of their favourite online channels. By distributing your content beyond the confines of your website, blog and social media accounts, you can generate more leads to nurture along their buyer’s journey, effectively enhancing your inbound marketing results.

The Parts that make up a Media Convergence Plan

http://cdn2.hubspot.net/hubfs/165931/Struto_Media_Convergence_Visible-1.png

For the purpose of online content distribution, the media spectrum can be sub-divided into three distinct, yet overlapping spheres: Owned media, paid media and earned media.

Owned Media

Starting off with the distribution channel B2B companies are most familiar with, the category of owned media includes all publications where your firm calls the editorial shots. Digitally speaking it would include:

  • Your company’s official website
  • Your company blog
  • In-house publications such as newsletters, eBooks, and whitepapers
  • Your company’s social media pages
  • Email campaigns and workflows

The factor that characterises these channels beyond editorial control is the fact that its reach is limited to buyers who are already aware of your brand, or actively searching for a business such as yours.

Paid Media

Generally speaking, paid media refers to paying a website, influencer, channel or publication for the opportunity to display your content to their audience. In the digital realm this includes:

  • PPC ads on search engines (Google AdWords)
  • PPC ads on social networks (Facebook Advertising)
  • Display ads on industry related sites such as banner ads (Google’s display network)
  • Sponsored content such as a guest post or press release published within an external publication (PR Web, BuzzFeed)
  • Influencer shares or mentions (Twitter) 

While paid media tactics are more commonly utilised within an outbound, or push marketing approach, it can be repurposed within an inbound marketing methodology to extend your reach far beyond your owned media channels.

Earned Media

Earned media is the tip of the hat from your audience where they attribute enough value to your content to share it with their followers, on their media channels and beyond. Examples of earned media include:

  • Social media shares by consumers
  • Company and product reviews on external channels or their personal social media feed
  • Video tutorials and demos of your products, created and distributed by consumers
  • Discussions of your brand, products, and solutions in online communities

Earned media does not only grant you additional exposure, but also the highly prized credibility that only social proof can deliver.

Hitting the Trifecta

It all comes together with the POEM Trifecta – where all three of your media forms integrate with your targeted marketing. The lines may become blurred, but it's all positive as you've cast a wide-enough, albeit tailored net, "ensuring that no lead goes unconverted". Media Convergence continues to affect your lead nurturing and client delighting as your personas are accurately uncovered and placed in the correct position in the buyer's journey to be properly suitably moved along as MQLs or SQLs.

Media convergence has become more and more prevalent in online and Inbound Marketing where the need for more efficient reach in an ever-evolving, technology-driven marketplace is crucial. Your clients consume content (in the form of your media) on different devices and through various channels interchangeably, and very often, simultaneously. With this in mind, your site should be fully optimised to include media convergence as your 'go-to' media campaign for securing new leads and nurturing existing contacts to close as customers and delight as brand ambassadors.

Create Your Own Converged Media Strategy

Time to get practical! To help you to get started, today’s post takes you through a three-stage process you can follow to create a media convergence strategy that capitalises on your strengths and the high-value opportunities waiting to be noticed. Ready to get practical?

Stage 1: Analyse Available Resources

  • Analyse your team members’ strengths and core competencies in the field of content creation. Do you have any budding bloggers or social media influencers on board? Does your marketing team have any experience of executing paid advertising campaigns? Perhaps you have contact or favour with a thought leader or an industry publication.
  • Initiate a content audit to discover and table the content resources and media channels at your disposal and analyse the results that each of these assets have delivered. Gather high-value assets into a folder marked for repurposing and make a note of content and channels that are missing from your portfolio.
  • Analyse your industry’s media channels for untapped potential. Are there any upcoming industry events or conferences that relate to your messaging and buyer personas? Is there a breaking news story that relates to your company’s solutions?
  • Analyse your buyers. Ask your existing customers about the publications they read and the events they attend when you meet with them, or scour their social feed for evidence of the influencers they follow, and the type of content they share.
  • Analyse your competitors. Which channels are your competitors using to distribute their messaging? On which social channels are the top brands having most success in generating followers, shares, and comments?

 

Stage 2: Identifying Strategic Opportunities

  • Hold a brainstorm session with your team to explore opportunities for integrating owned media with paid and earned media channels. Have you written an insightful or challenging article on a topic that is of interest to a major industry influencer? Then, find a way to connect the two. Have you published an eBook on a topic that is currently making waves in your industry? Newsjack the breaking news by promoting your content through display ads, sponsored content, and in online chat forums.
  • Examine threats. Within inbound marketing, not all publicity is good publicity, and when it comes to earned media and unreliable paid media resources, it’s critical to plan for the worst. Make sure you have a reputation management plan in place for responding to negative media, and have a backup plan in place for delayed publication on external channels.
  • Employ a 10X mind-set! When competing with the top brands, catching up with the crowd is not good enough. Differentiate your B2B firm (link: new eBook) by coming up with strategies that outperform the margin ten times!

 

Stage 3: Prioritise, Implement, Measure, Adapt

  • Don’t get overwhelmed, prioritise! Rank your ideas in order of their assumed impact and reach, and give them a score for the resources that execution will require.
  • Apply the 80/20 rule. Identify those ideas that would deliver an 80 per cent impact by applying only 20 per cent of your effort and resources, and start implementing these low-hanging fruit first.
  • Implement, measure, and adapt. In the fast changing online world it is wise not to settle for assumptions of what works, but instead to keep measuring your results and adapting accordingly. Track your referral traffic and double-down your focus to capitalise on the media channels that have proven to deliver the best results. 

 

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