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
CEO’s Agree: Marketers don’t show Marketing ROI. How to regain trust?
Are we blind for our own Marketing ROI?
(image source: lifehacker.com)
Showing Marketing ROI and the ability to contribute to the growth of the business is in many ways the biggest challenge of every marketer.
Every so often reports show that B2B marketers have problems showing Marketing ROI. And then marketers have to do ‘more with less’.
Why is this?
Why do we have problems in showing our Marketing ROI? What can we do to regain trust from our CEO?
What it takes to become a Digital Marketer
What does it take to become a digital marketer?
(image : http://conqueranycourse.wordpress.com/)
This is my story of what it took to become a digital marketer…
My story is not unique
My story is not unique. Hey, I’m sure if you Google a bit, you’ll find other people like me. Truckloads full of them.
But what I want to share with you is what it took for me personally to get to a level where I felt that I knew enough to start with digital, social and content marketing.
And then actually start doing that across the organization. And getting results.
A massive request for change
When I became convinced that digital, social and content was the way to go, the first step was to convince my management. Change was needed. Lots of change.
And that’s what we’ve gone through the last 2 years. And when looking back, the change that I was asking was massive: 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.
Digital Marketing Trends in 2013 – 5 trends you need take very seriously
Image source: http://blog.peerindex.com/
Last week I attended a marketing event which makes a descent attempt to provide insight into marketing trends of tomorrow.
Although many of these trends are relevant, sometimes they remain a bit fuzzy of what to do with these trends as a marketer…
What do you make of these as a marketer?
- Contact lenses with projections (similar, but more advanced than Google Glass)
- Lapka, your personal environment monitor
- Camera’s reading emotion
- Toilets seats with built in smartphone connectivity
- Nike visualizing a runners heat map in Manhattan Central park, providing data to advertisers
As usual, some of this stuff is hype, other stuff is over the top, other stuff is real.
But, if you ask me, these are the trends you DO must take VERY, VERY seriously in 2013: Read more
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.
