Content marketing continues to flourish. M/C/C, our agency peers, clients and prospects all understand its value to the buying process. Marketers continue to make content marketing one of their top priorities, and B2B and B2C companies alike are leveraging it for brand awareness, engagement and leads.

It’s been a while, but I previously wrote about how to get the most out of your content marketing. The post, based on the concept of “stop selling and start helping,” encouraged marketers to develop content that their customers and prospects want to read, not what they want them to read. I went on to suggest that regardless of the form or distribution, the most successful content should help customers and prospects solve problems and put them on the path to meeting their business goals.

What my previous post did not do, is discuss how you put yourself in position to create such content.  That’s what I hope to accomplish here. 

Since its inception almost 30 years ago, M/C/C’s approach has always begun and ended with the customer. Content marketing should be no different. Through research, marketers can understand their customers’ and prospects’ priorities, providing valuable insight for all of their content. If 90 percent of companies have or are planning to have active content marketing programs, your company is going to have to make itself relevant and compelling to be heard among them. Research accomplishes this. With third-party support straight from customers and prospects, marketers can create a story based on their hot buttons.

I get that everybody in every industry is doing more at a faster rate than ever before, but too many marketers don’t have the patience to undergo a research study. That’s unfortunate. Key research findings drive relevant, compelling and actionable content marketing.

In a recent study, M/C/C and Harris CapRock Communications, a long-time client confirmed customers’ top priorities and decision-making factors. These key findings became the foundational messaging for several deliverables including an interactive trade show demo, white papers, advertising, public relations and more. In addition to shaping the overall brand positioning and messaging, the research also informed the launch of a game-changing off-shore communications service that had never been seen in the industry before called Harris CapRock One.

Take the interactive demo for example (screenshots below). By understanding customers’ priorities, M/C/C and Harris CapRock infused them into the demo to introduce and drive interest for the new solution. M/C/C leveraged “simplicity” as the core theme to promote the service and related it to cell roaming, a concept familiar to the target audiences in their everyday lives.

At a recent trade show, this interactive demo was used for the first time. It was well-received by show-goers and should become a valuable tool to spark impactful conversations with customer and prospect influencers and decision-makers.

For more examples of research-driven content from Harris CapRock and other M/C/C clients, jump on over to our portfolio!