Influential B2B Tech Collateral
Eccolo Media
- 65% of tech decision-makers rated white papers as “very” to “extremely influential” over their purchase decision.
- 68% rated case studies the same way.
- 67% rated podcasts as influential.
- 62% cited video.
- And 61% said brochures/data sheets were “very” to “extremely influential.”
THOUGHT: Among those forms of B2B content, however, only podcasts increased in consumption from last year while video remained the same. Seventy-seven percent said that visuals such as charts are extremely to moderately important to include in white papers. Six pages was often cited as the ideal length of a white paper.
Add it all up and what I think this says fairly clearly is that people are increasingly crunched for time. Podcasts can listened to while working or driving and people often treat video as audio, listening to a video play in one browser tab while doing research on another tab. The importance of charts and graphs in white papers is indicative of the preference of consuming information at a glance.
If you’ve got multimedia content on your website or if you share a full range of content on Facebook or Twitter or LinkedIn–from video and audio to blog posts and simple documents–take a look at your analytics and see which types of content is more appealing. Then use those channels to direct people to further information.
If you’ve got a white paper, consider recording a video and/or audio version of it with the highlights and then direct viewers/listeners to the actual white paper for more information (might be of use for video walls at trade shows too). That way, you can provide content in the form people prefer it while also tracking the effectiveness of your various content types.
One last finding from the report: Of the 52% who recalled encountering social network sharing buttons, 77% perceived collateral as “much more influential” or “somewhat more influential” if they were given the option to share the content on a social networking site.
My instinct tells me that the reason sharable content is perceived as influential is because by doing so, the sharer will appear more authoritative by doing so. That, of course, assumes the content in question itself is valuable enough to share.
FOLLOW FRIDAY: Tunheim media relations/online communications/event planning wunderkind, Natalie Wires.
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