As 2010 comes to a close, you’ve no doubt been reading all sorts of “Year in Review” features, highlighting the top stories and trends from the last 12 months. (Did you know that the Apple iPad was the most tweeted about technology trend in 2010?) Here at Eccolo, we thought it’d be fun to do something similar by revisiting the Top Five “Must-Have” Content Strategy Guide that we released back in January to see how our content strategy predictions panned out this year. Using our 2010 B2B Technology Collateral Survey Report to cross-check our recommendations, we found the following noteworthy validations:
We said: “Create white papers… and then leverage the hell out of them.”
What we found: Time and time again, white papers continue to rank as the most influential among all collateral types. This year, the vast majority of our survey respondents (83 percent) felt that white papers were moderately to extremely influential in the purchasing decision. So the key takeaway here is not only to keep producing them, but to keep repackaging them into as many other formats as you can—the goal here is to bring your thought leadership front and center.
We said: “Make the leap to interactive collateral.”
What we found: Based on the growing interest we’ve seen for embedded audio and video files in written documents this year, we think it’s safe to say that we were on the right track with this one. In 2010, a significant portion (45 percent) of our survey respondents stated that they had consumed written collateral with embedded media files. But more importantly, not only did a whopping 93 percent click through these files, 80 percent felt that the inclusion of these audio and video files either “positively” or “very positively” affected the overall influence of the document.
We said: “Translate your best ideas into video.”
What we found: For the past couple years now, video continues to rise as an influential collateral type amongst technology purchasers. In 2010, the number of survey respondents who watched a video in the past six months increased eight points to 59 percent. And when it comes to what types of videos they’re watching, we found that product tutorials/demos were by far consumed the most (76 percent). Vendor marketing videos were second most popular (61 percent), followed by customer testimonials (37 percent), and on-demand webinars (33 percent).
Although time and distance separate us, we still remember the purest friendship and blessing.
Posted by: Chanel J12 | January 25, 2011 at 07:09 PM