The Ultimate Content Marketing Implementation Plan: Pragmatic, Powerful, and Guaranteed Success
Atomium in Brussel by night, or at 5 am…
(picture soure : http://www.lightcatch.nl/)
If you are interested in a Content Marketing, implementing it, thinking about it, or living it, then this is for you. I can tell you, this is for you because I’ve been pondering about this post for a long time.
Ever when I started this blog, I wanted it to be a blog which give my fellow marketeers information, education and advice coming from real life experiences. That’s why this blog is called B2B marketing experiences in the first place. No bullshit, just usable stuff. I don’t need to see my blog post on Huffington, Financial Times or whatever other big and famous website. I don’t want to use high level talk and difficult concepts or difficult words. No bullshit, just usable stuff.
Imagine what happened this morning when I woke up at 5am.
Yes indeed, ^é#@!, too early. I could not sleep anymore. My mind was spinning like hell, thinking about this blog post. And here I am sitting behind my computer writing this blog post. It’s exactly 7 am. I never thought I would be doing this, because I am usually not an ‘early bird, rise-n-shine’ kind of guy.
I need to get this out of my head, this is powerful stuff.
How to Implement Your Content Marketing in a pragmatic, do-able way, which is acceptable to your organization, which educates your organization on how to do it, which delivers quick win’s and is built to be embedded for ever in your organization? Now that’s a mouthful.
So this is what kept me awake. But I think I’ve cracked it. And I-me-personally, I think it’s powerful. Maybe arrogant, yes, but if it’s useful to you, you probably don’t care.
Ready? I am sorry, this is what you call a #longread…
So here it goes… Read more 
Content Marketing is not the task of Marketing
Advertisement overload and content overload are causing buyers to be blind for outbound marketing. Marketers these days are turning to content marketing as a way to break through the blindness and information clutter.
Because of the abundance of information out there, buyer behavior is changing. As Michael Brenner, @B2BMKTGInsider, one of my favorite marketers likes to put it :
“Buyers wait until they have completed 60-80% of their research before reaching out to vendors”.
Buyers turn to their “circles of trust”, on and off-line. Vendor information, social Media and word of mouth remain the major sources of influence to buyers according to the Buyersphere 2012 report.
Source : Buyersphere 2012
The millennial effect, which describes the way the generation born after 1980 who never knew a time without internet and mobile phones, turn to social media networks for information and advice. People from this generation are slowly becoming the decision-makers of the future.
The shift of power to buyers
All these changes are causing a major shift of power:
- from site centric to user centric: buyers where informed where they go, today buyers have access to information on-line and through their networks, where-ever they are.
- from brand image to transparency: companies can no longer hide imperfections or bad behavior. They need to be open, authentic and transparent. If not they get heavily punished by the public opinion (see this Toyota case).
- from the sales guy to the buyer: buyers these days often know more then the sales guy, because they have lots of sources of information before they buy. Buyers have very detailed and specific questions, which sales people or organizations will need to able to answer.
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5 Dangerous Threats to Your Content Marketing Success
Source : Flickr, by papilly
Lately there has been a lot of attention going to Content Marketing. Although it’s one of my favorite subjects, blindly going for a content marketing strategy can be dangerous.
Forgetting the core reason for a content marketing strategy
When developing your content marketing strategy, you start developing a process to position content along the buying cycle, or even better: along the complete customer life cycle.
Every piece of content needs to drive the buyer further down the buying cycle, or increase the satisfaction level of existing customers. Having a good content creation process that inherently has checks built-in to make sure the right Call-To-Action (CTA) is assigned to each piece of content.
These CTA’s are developed to progress your buyer through the buying cycle. Marketing automation techniques like the ones I described in this post can be used to automate some of your work.
So when implementing content marketing: don’t forget what you want to do with your content. In the end, you are doing this to do business!
How to listen, and show thought leadership in your industry?
After 2 weeks of publishing a thought leadership presentation on Slideshare, I was blown away with the effect it had.
In only 2 weeks, it had 1000 views. Today, it has close to 4500 views after 3 months. Although for some companies these numbers might not be impressive, for the company I work for and the market we are in, this is great.
Why is this presentation more successful than others?
I believe the real reason to this success is that it is valuable content for buyers because it fulfills a need. B2B companies want to see opinions, and companies that think about the future for them.
Why do you need thought leadership?
Providing thought leadership to your customers doesn’t make sense if they don’t consider it relevant to their business. Customers are faced with lots of questions during the complete buying cycle that need to be answered.
As I wrote before, first customers find answers “in the cloud”, before they turn to you as a vendor for the remaining answers: they visit reviewing sites, read whitepapers of several vendors, and go to conferences or tradeshow to find answers. Based on that they create their shortlist. If you are not giving the answers ‘in the cloud’, you are not going to be on their shortlist!
It is my strong believe that in order to create thought leadership, you first need to incorporate a process within your organisation that listens to the issues and information needs of your customers.
The process should not only allow listening during the buying cycle, but also during the customer life cycle.
Do you have a listening process ?
Photo by Melvin Gaal / Flickr
Yes I admit. Even in my personal life I pay attention to good and bad marketing. When I see a great advertisement, I think about how they did that. Or when I get a direct mailer, I pay attention to how they have written that text.
Some of these messages really give a reflection of great customer understanding.
Why is that ? Why do some brands seem to perfectly understand your needs, before you became a customer, and more impressive, they know what you want during your time as a customer of these brands ?
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How to convince your CEO of Content Marketing?
So you got convinced of Content Marketing or Inbound Marketing, but you have no clue how to convince your CEO of its value?
This post describes a practical plan on how to do that.
As a marketer, there is so much to take care of to drive the business forward. Not only do we need to create a brand, make sure our brand reaches our target audience through the best communication channels, we need to engage and interact with buyers, generate sales ready leads… the list is endless.
Marketers lack credibility
Many of these marketing efforts cost money, which need to be defended towards the CEO or the management board of the company. Back in 2011, @BrennerMichael posted an article about how marketers have little credibility towards CEO’s. The post pulled numbers from a study reporting that 73% of CEO’s say marketers lack credibility due to an inability to translate the results of marketing campaigns into outcomes that improve business performance such as new demand, sales, customers, or market share.
This is compounded by the study’s result that 69% of the marketers actually agree that they cannot translate the result of their marketing efforts into quantifiable business value. Solving this issue is another debate, but my point is that sometimes you do not have the CEO behind you.
Do you believe in content marketing ?
But if your are reading this post, it might just happen to be that you got so much convinced about content marketing or inbound marketing, like I did, because it touches the very foundations how we do marketing.
And you believe that you should change the way your company is doing marketing in general. You believe that you finally found a way as marketing to grow the business and stand out, but more importantly, keep up with the changing world around us.
Why do your press releases look like cheap Chinese replicas ?
Do you wonder why your target audience is not reading your press releases? Are your press releases filled with company jargon and brand names?
Are you writing about how good your products and your company are?
With some simple tips your can easily make them really impactful to your business…
As I mentioned in a previous post, your buyers want to hear how we solve their problems, in their own words. And whenever you write, yes also in official PR, you should try to avoid industry jargon or company jargon. Some examples of words that are overused are groundbreaking, industry-standard, cutting-edge, flexible, revolutionary, market leader, cutting edge, state-of-the-art… This is commonly known as the “gobbelybook” as first touted by David Meerman Scott.
Other classics are:
- Streamline your business processes
- Achieve your business objectives
Let’s test your press releases
I realized this when I was comparing a press release of 2 competitors both active in the same industry and going for the same market: you can easily replace the names of your own products with products of the competitor, and the name of your company by the name of the competitor, and there you have it: you now have a press release from your competitor. Do not get me wrong, the press release of your competitors are not better. They are most probably worse ;-).
Let me test something with you: just stop reading this document for a moment, and check your website for some of your own press releases.
If advertising is ineffective, how do I reach my buyers?
Photo by srboisvert via Flickr Creative Commons
This post is about how traditional advertising has become ineffective in B2B and social media marketing is no answer to this problem. But there is a solution.
What does advertising mean in your life? Do you read industry magazines in which B2B companies advertise? Probably. Usually I flip through them, scan for titles and interesting images that link back to our business, and occasionally I will read an article.
How many times did you notice the advertisements? And I am not talking about us marketing people, who are naturally inclined to pay attention to advertisements, but put yourself in the shoes of your buyers.
Maybe your buyers are not paying attention to your advertisements because they are boring, but that’s another story ;-)
Traditional advertising has become ineffective
It might seem that I am the advocate to stop all our advertisement efforts. Now that is for sure not the case: advertising still has its place to put out important news, and reflect our brand in general. People still see these advertisements, consciously or subconsciously. And as with everything, they cannot “not” be influenced by it, so in that sense it does have its purpose.
But traditional advertising is generally so wide that it has become increasingly ineffective. And I do not distinguish between on or offline advertising.
One-way interruption marketing has become ineffective because everybody is “over advertised”: you receive 1000’s of advertising per day (!) trying to interrupt you. Just to give you an idea: in 1971 the average American was exposed to 560 advertising messages per day. By 1997, that number had increased to more than 3.000 per day. In 2009, it was more than 13.000 per day. And in 2012 you can bet it will be many more than that.
So in effect, people become agnostic to advertising. Just think about it: on signs along your way to work, in supermarkets, in elevators, even in toilets. Because it is just too much, it has become noise.
