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.
Read more
SEO and Search are useless
Image source: Flickr, @anthonylkdking
Imagine you are perfectly happy with your solution. Imagine that you have a business in which the solution is providing you with a descent return on investment.
There’s no need for you to change.
Now imagine that you are a vendor with a solution that will provide more return than any other existing solution on the market.
You are creating comparisons, providing ROI tools, and doing all the right things to attract buyers with your content.
They are not searching
SEO will not help you, because they are not searching.
When they do search, you are there. But unfortunately, they don’t search, because they don’t need you. They are happy with what they have.
He/She’ll be blind for everything you have to say.
So what do you do?
The perfect world
If they are not searching, they are exploiting their current situation.
They are not aware that there’s something better out there, because basically they don’t have a problem.
But then the day comes.
The day they start being slightly unhappy, and realize that the world they are in, is not perfect. That the solution they have is not perfect.
That day they become receptive. They are willing to listen. And when they are ready to listen, you must be speaking.
When the day has come
Your buyer realizes that there is more out there. He want’s to know more. That’s the day he starts being receptive to e-mails, conference invites, whitepapers and webinars. Read more
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!
A practical “power guide” to Video in B2B
image source : http://socialmediab2b.com
Sometimes all it takes is to have a little idea that solves a problem. For a while now I realized that video in B2B should become an integral part of the marketing mix of B2B companies.
Out of experience I know that creating video is time consuming, expensive, and usually little people actually view these videos because as soon as they see it is an ultra-polished video they abandon. Yet another advertisement video…
And that’s where this little idea comes into play: creating video in B2B is not expensive, difficult or cumbersome ;-)
That little idea
Which video’s have the biggest effect on people ? Often marketers look at themselves when they need answers, and although that’s not always a good idea, in this case I think the answer is pretty straightforward:
- Unique videos: because of the graphical style, scenery or unique setting, they become special.
- Authentic videos: because of the setting, the people, and the topic, it is overly clear that the contents is special.
- Funny videos: we all know the effect of those.
Now each of these 3 video’s can be produced expensively, can consume a lot of time, and might have not enough effect. Unique video’s are viewed and shared, just because they are unique. But that does not mean the video will position you as a thought leader, or that it will bring you leads. The same goes for funny videos: people might even not get what you are trying to communicate, it’s just funny and they’ll view and share.
But what really resonates with people is AUTHENTICITY. Videos that help them solve their business issues, or provide them with information they need to make better business decisions.
What would happen if you start producing videos about customers that are actually using our products, in which you interview them and let them tell how they are actually using your products, and how it is helping their business? These videos are simple, non-glossy and little polished recordings.
How to avoid your marketing automation failure?
Many marketing organizations are looking into marketing automation.
Why? Because year after year they need to do more, with less.
By automating tasks, and by adding a number of intelligent marketing techniques, they think that their marketing operations will be easier to manage, and in the end their lead generation will run better.
But one should not jump into this technology too quickly.
What is the promise of marketing automation?
The promise of marketing automation sounds great.
- integrate your website with your e-mail engine
- automate the registration, confirmation and post-processing of webinars
- set-up lead nurturing campaigns
- get to know your prospects better and better through progressive profiling
- automation of e-mails (website, webinars, events, …)
- decrease manual segmentation, manual lead input, manual lead management, etc…
It cannot go wrong, or can it?
When considering marketing automation you should not jump into this technology without being ready, because you can fail at it.
In a great blog post on BrightCarbon, Joby Blume talks about what he considers the lessons learned after “his” marketing automation failure.
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.
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.
Have you ever wondered why marketing professionals start blogging ?
Have you ever wondered why professionals start blogging ? Well, me too, until recently.
Somehow on blogs, bloggers need to have their first post, and this happens to be my first post. Some start immediately with providing their thoughts on a topic an post it straight away, which is just fine. Now, I went through a different process.
Blogs where not new to me, and I had used them to find information before, but I never really quite understood why people actually would spend time on doing research, and put their thoughts in text, videos, podcast or photos on-line. And then start tweeting, put status updates in LinkedIn, Facebook or Google+, and have conversations with people who react to their blog posts. And this on top of their already busy lives.
For me the “switch” was last summer when I was on holiday in Italy. I read books when I am on holiday, so I started reading a book on social media which started confirming to me that I was doing marketing totally wrong:
- I knew that I had to focus on the needs of the customer, their pains, but somehow I consistently doubted if my understanding of marketing was effective.
- I knew how to spend spend thousands of euros on great looking advertising, massive trade-show booths and great looking customer cases and other marketing collateral.
- I knew how to run webinars, push out press releases, and do mailings to customers and prospects.
Well, let me rephrase that : I thought I knew.
