When Content Marketers Lose Contact With Customers
Content marketers behind bars, locked away from customer contact…
When Tammy Cannizzaro, Director of Marketing at IBM, wrote about “The Content Wars“, she talked how increasingly difficult it will become to ignite and connect with your buyers:
- She talked about how people consume content in a different way. Only the best brands are finding ways to engage prospects by creating exceptional online experiences.
- Prospects are jaded about marketing, she says. They are target of too much messaging. Only when your content mimics a conversation with your customers you will create meaningful engagement.
- Only the exceptional will stand out. Your content needs to be relevant, differentiated and compelling.
Although she touches the very basic foundations of what modern marketing is all about, I couldn’t keep thinking about what’s going to happen when everyone is fighting for the attention of that same customer, all with these same tactics. Read more 
When Content Marketing lost its Edge, You Need Something Better
There are only so many ways to design an email. So many ways to optimize a landing page. So many tactics to exploit and improve conversion.
Books and blogs each day full of teaching, learn us how to create content. It seems everyone discovered the holy grail which is called content. And thy shall promote aggressively: a zillion of tips-n-trick to ‘aggressively promote’ and ‘amplify on social’ are available behind your mother of content search Google.
What’s the square root of epic content?
We are urged to create ever more epic and great content to break through the conversation clutter. Read more
The Art and Science of Online Content Creation
da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, a diagram of the ideal proportions of a man’s body.
Knowing how to write for the online world is of strategic importance these days. If you know how to write for the web, your content will be found, and it will be read.
Your content might be fantastic, but if it is not written for the online world, you might as well not create that content.
But how do you create online content that actually gets read?
Read more
Killer Content along the Buyer’s Journey: A Practical Guide to Monetize Your Content
The Mafia at Cleveland’s Hotel Statler. Photo: http://markwadestone.wordpress.com
Content can be actively used to move buyers through the buyer’s journey. Organizations need to visualize this journey. Visualizing this journey allows them to better understand which content they have and which content they are missing. Visualizing the content along the buyer’s journey also allows you to actively move buyers to the next stage in their journey.
Not so long ago Eric Wittlake (@wittlake) wrote an article why you should stop mapping content formats to the buyer’s Journey. He explains how marketers tend to map formats to certain stages in the buying cycle.
This post will learn you how you can:
- use a practical method to create the right content along the buyer’s journey
- how you can actively drive buyer’ss through the buying cycle, with content
- how you can link content with marketing automation
- understand which data the method produces to show real marketing ROI
To understand the role of content in this, you first need to understand the difference between content formats and content itself. Read more
From Theory to Practice: How to become a “digital, social, and content” driven B2B company ?
Training your organization on digital, content and social media marketing
Most marketers in B2B today have a project to introduce or expand digital, content and social media marketing into their companies.
In the last few years these types of marketing have become extremely important.
I believe it is the solution to the B2B marketing challenges of today, where companies can transcend from fulfilling the basic marketing needs of their customers.
Transcend towards connecting with their audience by creating experiences that lasts. These experiences that provides your customers with the desire to share their experiences, and become your brand advocates.
But how do you move from theory to practice ?
Read more
How to build Epic Content as an Organization? 5 Key Tactics Explained
Image: courtesy of Intelsat.
Successful organizations take on a content strategy as a centrepiece of their activities. It’s not an add-on. It’s strategic. Getting buy-in from the organization can be difficult, but doable. More difficult is getting people motivated to build that strategic content.
How do you get an organization to take on content as a strategic part of the business? Here are 5 key tactics that help building a culture of content.
How do you create a culture of content creation and education, internally and externally?
1. Find out what your colleagues care about?
When people do their job well, they get praised. Or get a raise. Or get promoted.
That’s what drives people.
A great way to make content creation a company wide activity is to embed it into what they care about.
- Service engineers care about solving a customers’ problem
- Project managers care about delivering a project on time, within budget, above customer expectations
- Training managers care about good feedback from trainees
- Customer support care about how they excelled in helping customers
- …
Find out what makes these people ‘tick’, and let them write it down. Let them know that you expect this from them. Help them in “airing” their personal success stories, insights and helpful stories. And if they do, praise them in public. Read more
Your inbound marketing can be copied. Unless you understand your Company DNA
Image source: @bredanieuwsnl
Ever since I became ravingly enthusiastic and truly convinced that traditional marketing is dying, and replaced by a new type of marketing, I have been following Hubspot.
This company acts on this new type of marketing.
This new type of marketing throws away manipulation, spin-wizzards, and interruption in its marketing strategy. This new type of marketing is about authenticity, being human and open, and being relevant to your audience. They embrace and understand the digital and social world that companies and people live in today.
Although the company was founded only a few years ago, they are already seen as one of the thought leaders in this area of new marketing. Their marketing is impressive, educating a whole new fleet of young, and not so young anymore, marketers of today.
They preach inbound marketing, or content marketing if you will.
“You must do inbound marketing to survive”
More and more marketers I meet start seeing this as the answer to their problems. They see it as a solution to problems like:
- advertising is not working anymore, or not as it used to do.
- buyers become very informed and lead the buying process.
- search engines and social media are changing the way companies buy.
And Hubspot keeps on pushing out and impressive array of content, which keeps building on these thoughts:
- YOU NEED TO BUILD EPIC CONTENT
- YOU NEED TO DO DIGITAL PERFECTLY
- YOU NEED TO DO SOCIAL PERFECTLY
- IF YOU DON’T DO THESE THINGS, YOU WON’T SURVIVE
This inbound model is about attracting and converting buyers further into the buying cycle. And to be honest, the model really makes sense. I myself am a big believer and defender of this type of marketing. And I really admire Hubspot for what they are doing, and what they mean to B2B companies. Every B2B marketer should check them out.
In essence, you are building content that creates trust from your buyers. Trust that cannot be overthrown by competitors.
But what happens if all B2B companies start following this model?
Imagine that all companies go through this learning cycle, and become great in building content, spreading content digitally, and engage with their audience on social media.
- They all listen to their buyers’ needs.
- They all answer the content needs of their buyers along the customer life-cycle.
- They all have “conversations”.
- They all build trust through “giving”.
What happens then?
If Content Marketing is about being open, how do I hide my imperfections?
Image Source : http://commons.wikimedia.org/
If content marketing and social media is all about being open, how do I act when some parts of my business are not perfect ?
Isn’t content marketing about showing that you understand the business of your customers, and helping them to better understand what your products or services mean to their business ?
But if you are fully open and honest about your offering, doesn’t that show your imperfections?
Won’t that show your weaknesses?
The chance is high that at a certain moment you bump into a weak point in your offering.
What do you do ? You try to hide it ? Or do you try to “bend the truth” ?
The effect of hiding imperfections
If you hide your imperfections or weaknesses, 2 things can happen :
- Customers buy your products, and because you didn’t inform them enough, they are disappointed about what they’ve bought. You’ve just harmed your brand.
- Customers see your weaknesses, and assume you don’t have an answer to the competition. This weakens your position, and as such it weakens your brand.
How to act?
Competitor attacks, product weaknesses, product issues, customer service issues, … all these can be your imperfections.
The Concept of INTERNAL Content Marketing for Employees
Image source: http://workasone.wordpress.com/2011/04/18/delete-dilemma/
This post explores the idea of using Content Marketing to increase internal efficiency of employees.
Employees of B2B companies are under pressure. Everyday everyone of us must consume a massive amount of content. We need to interpret that content, rework the content, and deliver output to others.
The number of information channels we need to manage is increasing every day. Not only the classic channels like e-mail, phone calls, or paper mailings are putting us under pressure.
Society itself drives us to join the social media networks around us, for private use, but increasingly employees need to be active on professional social networks.
The effect of this to many is an overflow of information, where employees are missing crucial pieces of information which they need to function within the organization, project or strategy.
The concept of INTERNAL content marketing
The basic principle of content marketing is to have methodic approach to understanding the business issues of buyers. It is also about providing insight and answers to their business issues through creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to a clearly defined target audience, with the objective of driving sales.
OK, let’s cut that sentence short : understand buyers, provide answers that help them through content, to sell more.
Everyone in your company has special needs when it comes to content.
They have different interests, and will only listen to what helps them in their daily work. They might see the general broadcast messages of the management that tries to get them aligned with special programs or strategies. But as in many companies, there are so many programs and strategies being communicated that they’ll only listen with “one ear”, or miss it all together.
What if we would apply the principles of content marketing to the benefit of an internal organization?
Failproof Listening method for Laser-sharp Content Marketing
Image source: Flicker @digitalmoneyworld
A turkish proverb says “If speaking is silver, then listening is gold”. We all know that proverb.
We have so much to say, because it’s important, isn’t it ? No-it-is-not.
But I am in marketing, so my objective is that my customers listen to me? No-it-is-not.
But I want to speak since I have lot’s of stuff to tell my customers on how to make their business better, more efficient, lower costs, if they buy our products or services !
Our customers would be foolish to “not” listen to us, right? No-it-is-not.
How do we marry these 2 principles of listening and wanting to speak ? Yes you can!
First you listen
Recently Brian Solis posted this image on Flickr.
The intersection between listening to what buyers want, and talk about what they want, that’s exactly what you need to do to have him listen to you and start engaging with you.
Before buyers want to listen to you, as anyone in sales knows, you need to understand what makes your buyer ‘tick’: what is currently a top of mind issue today that you can solve?
Only when you can speak to him using the exact same words that he would use to describe his issues, then he will be listening.
So the trick is knowing what to talk about. And the only way to find out is to listen to “his world”. Now often, customers know their issues, or at least feel that somethings not right, but even more often than not, they don’t have a solution. In many cases it’s already hard for them to describe their problem.
So if it’s already hard for them to describe it, how on earth are you going to speak to him?
The answer, my friend, is by UNDERSTANDING HIS WORLD.
