Two Keys to More Effective Marketing in 2014 - How Marketing Content Must Change

With 2014 now less than a month away, most B2B marketers are well into their planning for next year. For most marketers, the ultimate question is:  What can we do to boost the effectiveness of our marketing efforts in 2014?

This is the second of two posts that are describing two key actions that marketers can take to improve marketing effectiveness in 2014. In my last post, I discussed why most B2B companies need to implement marketing automation and CRM technologies. In this post, I'll describe how marketing content needs to change in 2014.

More than nine out of ten B2B marketers now say they are using some form of content marketing, according to research by the Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs. The irony is that the popularity of content marketing is creating a new challenge for marketers. As more companies implement content marketing and publish more content, it's becoming more difficult to make your content stand out.

The key to content marketing success in 2014 will be to make your content useful. The concept of utilitarian marketing - marketing that is truly useful to the recipient - has gained increased attention in recent months largely due to the publication of two books - Youtility by Jay Baer, and Ctrl Alt Delete by Mitch Joel.

In Youtility, Jay Baer argues that there are only two ways for companies to break through the marketing and advertising clutter that engulfs today's consumers and business buyers. They can be amazing or they can be useful. Being amazing works, Baer says, but it is more difficult to do and provides less predictable results than being useful.

Being useful is what Baer means by "Youtility," which he defines as follows:

"Youtility is marketing upside down. Instead of marketing that's needed by companies, Youtility is marketing that's wanted by customers. Youtility is massively useful information, provided for free, that creates long-term trust and kinship between your company and your customers."

In Ctrl Alt Delete, Mitch Joel contends that what he calls utilitarianism marketing will be the "next great business disrupter." Joel describes utilitarianism marketing as follows:

"What is utilitarianism marketing? It's not about advertising, it's not about messaging, and it's not about immediate conversations. It's about providing a true value and utility:  something consumers not only would want to use - constantly and consistently - but would derive so much value from it that it would be given front-and-center attention in their lives."
 
In the CMI/MarketingProfs study mentioned earlier, 73% of B2B marketers surveyed said they are currently producing more content than they were twelve months earlier. There is every reason to think that companies will produce more content in 2014 than they did in 2013. With so much content available, potential buyers have little patience for content that doesn't provide real value and utility. If they don't see value in your content, they'll simply move on to someone else's.

There are several actions you can take to improve the effectiveness of your marketing in 2014, but nothing is more important than producing content that is truly useful to your customers and prospects.

Read Part 1 of the series here.

Is Account-Based Marketing Right for Your Business?

One of the hot topics in B2B marketing circles today is account-based marketing (ABM). ITSMA (the Information Technology Services Marketing Association) led the development of account-based marketing about a decade ago. Although it started in the technology sector, ABM is now used by many kinds of B2B companies.

ITSMA defines account-based marketing as:  "A structured approach to developing and implementing highly customized marketing campaigns to markets of one, i.e. accounts, partners, or prospects." (emphasis added) By this definition, the distinguishing characteristic of account-based marketing is that it entails the development of a unique marketing strategy and communications program for each target account.

Recently, some marketing consultants and software companies have been arguing for a broader view of account-based marketing. For example, SiriusDecisions has identified four varieties of ABM - large-account marketing, named-account marketing, industry-account marketing, and customer marketing. For a description of these four varieties of ABM, read this post at the SiriusDecisions blog.

Firms that advocate the broader view use the term account-based marketing to describe marketing programs that focus on a specific group of named accounts, but do not necessarily involve the implementation of a unique marketing program for each target account. While these programs are often based on solid marketing principles and can be very effective, they are not true account-based marketing, at least in the original sense of the concept. In this post, I'm using the term account-based marketing as it was defined by ITSMA.

It's now clear that account-based marketing can be highly effective in the right circumstances, but is ABM right for your business?

Your answer to this question largely depends on the attributes of your universe of existing and potential customers. True account-based marketing is typically used only for very high-value customers and prospects because it's expensive to execute. For example:

• ABM requires both marketing and sales personnel to be deeply involved in the development and execution of each account plan.
• Many of the activities involved in ABM cannot be automated because they require the exercise of human judgment.
• Account-based marketing will usually require the development of unique marketing and sales content resources for each target account.

Because of the costs associated with account-based marketing, most companies that use ABM do so selectively. The diagram below illustrates how account value and the diversity of account needs influence which approach to marketing is most appropriate.

The lower left corner of the diagram represents accounts (existing customers and prospects) with relatively low value and relatively homogeneous needs. A mass marketing approach (i.e. "one size fits all") is probably most appropriate for this group of accounts. Note, however, that this group represents a small part of the total universe of accounts.

The top portion of the diagram represents very high-value accounts. These are the types of accounts that are suitable for account based marketing, even when their needs are fairly homogeneous. In most companies, these accounts also represent a fairly small portion of the total account universe.

As the diagram illustrates, targeted marketing (which may, in fact, focus on a specific group or set of named accounts) is the most appropriate marketing approach to use for most accounts. As I'm using the term, targeted marketing refers to the use of customized marketing messages for market segments and buyer personas, but not for individual accounts. When targeted marketing is done correctly, it enables a company to obtain many of the benefits of account-based marketing at a significantly lower cost.

So what's the bottom line? If you're a B2B company with a few existing customers who are "too big to lose," and/or if you can identify a small number of potential customers who would provide exceptionally high value to your company, then consider implementing account-based marketing for those selected accounts, and use targeted marketing programs for the rest.

Why There's Still So Much Bad Content

In a recent article at LinkedIn, Joe Pulizzi, the Founder and Executive Director of the Content Marketing Institute, observed that most of the marketing content produced by companies is "flat out awful." He wrote, "In many cases, the content is self-serving, not useful and, maybe the worst, pointless."

Pulizzi argues that companies produce bad content for three reasons.

• The vast majority of companies do not have a formal content strategy.
• The content marketing efforts at most companies lack focus. Many marketers feel compelled to develop content around all of the products and services they offer. The result is often content that is too broad (and too shallow) to be effective.
• In many companies, no one is accountable for the overall content marketing program.

I agree that the lack of strategy, focus, and/or accountability can result in "awful" marketing content. I also believe, however, that there's a more fundamental problem contributing to the continuing use of bad content.

We now know that most effective B2B marketing content is primarily educational and non-promotional. The goal of content marketing is to provide potential buyers information that is insightful, useful, and valuable, and thereby demonstrate your company's expertise, credibility, and trustworthiness.

The problem is, this approach runs counter to the basic paradigm of marketing that's existed for decades. For years, we've been trained to think that the best way to sell more stuff is to effectively promote our brand and our products or services. In the traditional paradigm of marketing, content is primarily about us - our company or our products or services.

Shifting from promotional content to content that's primarily educational and non-promotional is a difficult and counterintuitive change to make for most marketers.

In his new book, Ctrl Alt Delete, Mitch Joel provides an example that illustrates just how entrenched the traditional marketing mindset still is. Joel writes:

"Last year, I was in a business meeting when the idea for an iPhone app came up. It was a smart idea (you know, the kind of idea that you wish you had thought of). The chief marketing officer smiled during the presentation, put his hand up to ask a question, removed the glasses from his eyes and placed them on his notebook, folded his hands, leaned forward, and said, 'It's genius. . . but can we put our four key brand messages in there as well, because if we don't force people to look at them, what's the point of this app?'"

Companies are still producing "awful" content primarily because many marketers can't resist the urge to "always be promoting." Strategy, focus, and accountability are all important to building an effective content marketing program, but the starting point is adopting a different mindset about what constitutes good content and what role content plays in the marketing function.

What Content Marketers Can Learn from French Cooking

Research shows that producing enough content is now the greatest challenge facing B2B content marketers. (B2B Content Marketing:  2013 Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends - North America) More than producing engaging content. More than lack of budget.

The volume of content that's required to fuel effective marketing programs is growing exponentially for several reasons, including:

• The need to make content relevant for individual buyers at every stage of the buying process
• The short lifespan of content resources (particularly social media content)
• The need to publish content on a frequent basis

To create enough content on a timely basis, you need an approach to content development that will  maximize the results you get from your content creation efforts. Believe it or not, B2B content marketers can boost the efficiency of content development by taking a lesson from French cooking.

In classic French cuisine, there are five mother sauces - Béchamel, Veloute, Espagnole, Hollandaise, and Tomate (tomato). These five mother sauces provide the foundation for virtually all the sauces used in traditional French cooking. To create other sauces, you simply add the appropriate ingredients to one of the mother sauces. For example, you make Mornay sauce by adding Gruyere and Parmesan cheese to a Béchamel sauce, and you make Bearnaise sauce by adding white wine, shallots, tarragon, and peppercorns to a Hollandaise sauce.

The same concept can be used to manage B2B content development. Here's how the "mother sauce" approach to content development works.

Identify Value Propositions

As with most important marketing issues, the process starts with identifying the value propositions that are essential to your company's go-to-market strategy. Value propositions describe how your products or services create value for customers, and they provide the foundation for your content marketing efforts. Most of the content resources you develop should be based on the value propositions you offer. If you work for a small or mid-size company, you should be able to identify four to eight value propositions that encompass the significant ways that your solutions create value.

Develop the "Mother" Resources

Once you have identified your critical go-to-market value propositions, the next step is to develop one or two substantial content resources for each value proposition. These core resources are the content equivalent of the mother sauces. They will usually be longer-form resources such as white papers or e-books, and they will provide a thorough description of each critical value proposition. In some cases, these mother resources may be more like "working papers" than finished content assets. For example, you may decide to create versions of your mother resources for specific industries or buyer personas, and if you do, you may never actually publish the mother resources in their original form.

Make Each Mother Resource the Matriarch of a Large Content Family

Each mother resource should provide a fertile source for many "child" content assets. For example, with a little creativity, you should be able to use a mother white paper or e-book as the basis for:

• A full-length webinar or 2 to 3 shorter webcasts or videos
• 2 to 3 (or more) articles for online or offline publications
• 3 to 6 (or more) posts for your blog
• A dozen or more social media updates (Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.)

This approach won't eliminate all of the work relating to content development. It doesn't constitute an "Easy" button. However, it will focus your work and enable you to get the biggest possible "bang" from your content development efforts.

Image By:  Dinner Series (www.flickr.com)

Why Third-Party Content Should Be Part of Your Content Marketing Mix

Two recent research studies have caused me to rethink my views regarding the role and value of third-party content in the marketing efforts of B2B companies. I have always argued that most of the marketing content resources used by a company should be developed internally or with the assistance of outside professional content developers. Either way, the "authorship" of the content is attributed to the company or to an executive or other internal expert. With third-party content, another person or firm creates the content and is shown as the author.

The ultimate objective of content marketing is to cause potential customers to view your company as a trusted resource for valuable information and insights and as a capable and reliable business partner. To accomplish this objective, most of the content you publish should be "yours." It must communicate your company's expertise and capabilities. As a general rule, third-party content just isn't as effective for those purposes.

While I still say that companies should rely primarily on content they create, I also now believe that many companies can benefit from using third-party content on a selective basis. My reasoning is based on two recent research studies that provide important insights regarding the types of content that B2B buyers trust.

The CMO Council recently published a white paper - Better Lead Yield in the Content Marketing Field - that is based on a survey of more than 400 B2B content consumers. When survey participants were asked what types of content they most value and trust, vendor-created content came in last.

As the table below shows, survey respondents said they value and trust professional association research reports and white papers, research reports and white papers created by industry groups, customer case studies, reports and white papers written by analysts, and independent product reviews more than vendor-created content.

The 2013 B2B Content Preferences Survey by DemandGen Report showed similar results. In this survey, B2B buyers were asked which of four types of content they give more credence to. The table below shows that vendor-branded content doesn't fare as well as third-party content.

It seems clear that potential buyers are inclined to trust third-party content more than content created by potential vendors, and B2B marketers should take advantage of this inclination. Content authored by a third-party expert and sponsored by your company can be particularly effective for persuading a potential buyer to begin a relationship with your company. This type of sponsored content can include white papers, eBooks, and research/analytical reports. It could also include a webinar sponsored by your company and presented by a third-party expert.

Content that you develop should always play the predominant role in your content marketing efforts. There are several ways to make your content more trustworthy and credible to potential buyers, and I discussed this topic in an earlier post. However, the right third-party content used in the right ways can be a powerful addition to your content marketing program.

Stop Wasting Your Time on Superficial Personalization

For more than two decades, experts have urged marketers to use personalized messages to boost the effectiveness of marketing communications. Many marketers have heeded this advice, and they are now using various technology tools to create personalized marketing messages in a variety of media and formats, including web pages, e-mail messages, and printed materials such as direct mail documents.

The most common way to personalize a marketing message is to include specific facts about the recipient in the message. Some examples would include the recipient's name, her job title, company affiliation, the industry in which she works, or information about a recent purchase.

The reality is, this type of explicit personalization no longer has much impact with potential buyers, largely because so many marketers are using similar personalization tactics. Two recent research projects have confirmed that explicit personalization alone has become an anemic tool for improving the effectiveness of marketing communications.

Earlier this year, the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) conducted two concurrent surveys sponsored by Lyris. One of the surveys was directed at consumers, and it asked survey participants about the effectiveness of various marketing channels and tactics, how they prefer to engage with brands, and what influences their purchase decisions. You can obtain an executive summary of the EIU survey report here.

The major findings from the EIU consumer survey regarding personalization include the following:

• More than 70% of survey respondents said that the volume of personalized messages they receive has increased over the past five years.
• Seventy percent of the respondents said that many of the personalized messages they receive are annoying because the attempts at personalization are superficial.
• Sixty-three percent of respondents said that personalization is now so common that they have grown numb to it.
• Only 22% of respondents said that personalized offers are more likely to meet their needs than mass market offers.

Research by the CEB Marketing Leadership Council also shows that explicit personalization has lost much of its impact. In July of this year, CEB surveyed 1,500 consumers from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia regarding how, why, and what they buy, and about their attitudes regarding the tactics brands use to engage them. One of the survey questions asked participants how they felt about some of the more common forms of explicit personalization. The table below shows how the survey participants responded.

The lesson here is that explicit personalization alone is not sufficient to make marketing messages more effective. The real key to improving the effectiveness of your marketing messages is to use what you know about your potential buyers to craft messages that will be more relevant and useful to those buyers. Relevance and usefulness (what Jay Baer calls "Youtility"), not mere personalization, are the real drivers of better marketing results.

This doesn't mean that you should stop personalizing marketing messages. It does mean that the personalization should be contextually appropriate (not just a gimmick) and that personalization shouldn't be the core component of your messaging strategy.

Why You Need Customer Success Content

In my last post, I discussed why most B2B companies need content marketing programs that are specifically designed for existing customers, and I described three specific business situations that make marketing after the initial sale particularly important.

The ultimate objective of marketing to existing customers is to retain and, where possible, expand the business you do with profitable customers. The most direct and effective way to achieve this goal is to help your customers successfully implement and use your solutions. Therefore, most of the content you use with existing customers should be focused on providing information and insights that will help them maximize the value they derive from your solutions and from their relationship with your company. A number of thought leaders are beginning to call this kind of content "customer success content," and it plays a vital role in the emerging field of customer success management.

Obviously, existing customers have different content needs than prospects, but many content marketing principles are the same for both audiences. Suppose, for example, that you sell a complex product such as an enterprise software solution or some kinds of industrial equipment. In these circumstances, your new customers will likely face a significant learning curve to become proficient with your product. Most of your customers will progress through multiple stages in the process of learning how to use your product, as illustrated by the following diagram.

We now know that when we're marketing to potential buyers, it's critical to have content resources that are specifically designed for each stage of the buying process. That's because the issues that are important to prospects change as they move through the process. The same principle applies when developing content for existing customers. The information needs of a power user are different from those of a new user, and the same content won't be equally effective for both.

Another similarity is the need to provide content in a variety of formats. For example, "how-to" content for existing customers is usually presented in written form (online help articles, answers to FAQ's, etc.). Today, many companies are using instructional videos to convey the same information and provide customers an alternative way to access the information.

Finally, while it's true that you usually need different content for prospects and existing customers, there are important exceptions. Some content that is designed for customers can be very effective with late-stage prospects. For example, a case study that provides a detailed description of how one of your customers used specific features of your product to accomplish an important business objective would be useful and valuable to other customers and to late-stage prospects.

So far in this post, I've haven't discussed the issue of using content to sell new, related, or ancillary products to an existing customer. Content can play a valuable role in expanding your relationships with existing customers, but you need to use the right approach. As with new prospects, the best approach is to start with content that focuses on the business issues that your new, related, or ancillary products can address. Once the foundation is in place, you can move to more product-focused content.

Content marketing shouldn't stop when the initial sale is closed. For many companies, marketing to existing customers is just as important as marketing to potential buyers, and content is critical to your success with both audiences.

When Marketing to Existing Customers Really Matters

Most of the conversation about content marketing has focused on its role in acquiring new customers. For example, we often hear or read about the use of content to attract new prospects and about how content provides the "fuel" for lead nurturing programs.

What is discussed less frequently is the critical role that content plays in building and sustaining relationships with existing customers. Marketing to existing customers is part of what is often called customer lifecycle marketing, and it is also a major component of most account-based marketing strategies. Although the principle isn't new, a growing number of companies are recognizing the value of maximizing their relationships with existing customers.

This is the first of two posts that will discuss content marketing for existing customers. In this post, I'll describe three circumstances that make marketing after the initial sale particularly important. My next post will describe the type of content that helps build strong relationships with existing customers.

Creating and maintaining strong relationships with existing customers will produce major benefits for virtually all kinds of companies. Research going back to the early 1980's has shown that it's usually much more expensive to acquire a new customer than it is to retain and grow an existing customer. In most companies, existing customers account for a large percentage of total company revenues (up to 80% in some companies), and those revenues tend to be more stable than revenues from new customers. Highly satisfied customers are also more likely to recommend your company to other potential customers.

These broad benefits are important for most B2B companies, but there are three circumstances that elevate the importance of building strong customer relationships, particularly with newly-acquired customers.

When Customer Profitability Requires Multiple Purchases

In several types of businesses, most customers make multiple, relatively small purchases over time. For example, some commercial printing companies and firms that sell MRO supplies have this type of business model. From an economic perspective, software companies that provide their products on a subscription (or SaaS) basis have the same model.

In this situation, the first sale to a customer is rarely sufficient to make that customer profitable because of the marketing and sales costs that must be incurred to acquire the customer. If your company has this model, it's obviously critical to persuade newly-acquired customers to make several purchases.

When the Purchase of Ancillary Products are a Major Component of Customer Profitability

In this situation, the first sale to a customer may be sufficient to make the customer marginally profitable, but over the lifetime of the relationship, most of the profits will result from the customer's purchase of ancillary products. For example, Epson probably earned some profit when I purchased my new printer about a year ago, but they've almost certainly realized even more profits from the several ink purchases I've made over the past year.

When the Potential to Expand "Share of Wallet" is High

In some cases, your first sale to a customer may cover only a portion of the customer's actual requirements for the product or products that your company can provide. Perhaps the customer is "testing" your company or is reluctant to move all of their category spend to a single supplier. Whatever the cause, you may have the opportunity to significantly increase the revenues and profits you earn from the customer by increasing your "share of wallet," and that will require you to entice the customer to move more of its business to your company.

All three of these circumstances elevate the importance of having marketing programs for existing customers. In most cases, content marketing will be the most effective way to nurture relationships with your existing customers. In my next post, I'll describe the kind of content that you need for this purpose.

Alice, the Red Queen, and Content Marketing

In Lewis Carroll's classic, Through the Looking Glass, the Red Queen takes Alice on a run in a forest. Alice and the Queen run very fast, but they never seem to leave the place where they started. When Alice wonders why, the Queen explains, "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place."

I suspect that many marketers today feel like they're running alongside Alice and the Red Queen. The pace of change in marketing has accelerated dramatically over the past few years, and the watchword in marketing today is more - more tactics to use and master, more channels to incorporate in the marketing mix, more demanding prospects and customers, and more marketing content to create and distribute. So even if you're working as hard as possible, you can find yourself just barely keeping up with ever-increasing demands.

The "Red Queen effect" can be found in all aspects of marketing, but it's particularly potent in content marketing. Marketers are now tasked to create more marketing content than ever before, and it's not an easy job. In the B2B Content Marketing:  2013 Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends - North America study by the Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs, producing enough content surpassed producing engaging content as the greatest challenge facing B2B content marketers.

The volume of content that's required to fuel effective marketing programs is growing exponentially for several reasons.

An Increased Need for Relevance

To create engagement with today's potential buyers, marketing content must be relevant to the interests and concerns of individual buyers, and it must be aligned to where the buyer is in his or her decision-making process. In the B2B world, most significant purchases will involve several buyers, and it's often necessary to develop content for each type of buyer. The need to have content for multiple types of buyers for each stage of the buying process multiplies the number of content assets that marketers must create.

The Lifespan of Content is Getting Shorter

The half life of content, particularly social media content, is shorter than ever. For example, the effective lifespan of a tweet or a Facebook or LinkedIn update is measured in hours. This means that marketers must constantly be adding new content to replace what falls off the radar screen.

Frequency Still Matters

The third reason that the need for content is exploding is that frequency indisputably drives increased results. Seth Godin recently wrote a blog post titled The curse of frequency, and he stated the principle very clearly:  "If you promote something twice to one hundred people it will lead to more sales than it you promote it once to two hundred people."

Marketers have long understood the value of frequency for traditional advertising and marketing programs. It now appears that frequency also improves the results you get from "new" marketing channels such as blogs and social media. So, with more marketing channels than ever, you need more content than ever to achieve the desired level of frequency.

Dealing with the Red Queen Effect

So, what can marketers do to combat the Red Queen effect in content marketing? I'm planning to deal with this question in a future post, but here's a sneak preview.

Start by identifying the value propositions that are essential to your company's go-to-market strategy. If you work in a small or mid-size company, you should be able to identify four to eight core value propositions.

Then, develop one or two substantial content resources for each core value proposition. By substantial, I mean longer-form resources such as white papers or e-books.

Finally, use these "base" content resources as the "parents" of multiple other pieces of content. For example, with a little creativity, you should be able to use a white paper as the basis for:

• A full-length webinar or 2 to 3 shorter webcasts
• 2 to 3 articles for online or offline publications
• 3 to 6 posts for your blog
• A dozen or more social media updates (Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.)

This approach won't completely eliminate the Red Queen effect, but it will help make it manageable.

Image by:  Playing Futures:  Applied Nomadology (www.flickr.com)

Can Your Marketing Content Meet the Burden of Proof?

The CMO Council recently published a white paper - Better Lead Yield in the Content Marketing Field - that contains both good news and bad news for B2B content marketers. The white paper is based on a survey of more than 400 B2B content consumers conducted by the CMO Council's Content ROI Center and NetLine Corporation. Forty-one percent of the respondents were from companies with more than $100 million in revenues, and half held titles of director and above.

First, the good news. Online content plays a big role in B2B purchase decisions. Eighty-seven percent of survey respondents said that online content had either a moderate or a major impact on vendor preference and selection. This finding demonstrates why good content has become essential to effective B2B marketing.

Now for the not-so-good news. When survey participants were asked what types of content they most value and trust, vendor-created content came in last. As the table below shows, B2B buyers value and trust professional association research reports and white papers, research reports and white papers created by industry groups, customer case studies, analyst reports and white papers, and independent product reviews more than vendor-created content.

 

While these survey findings should concern B2B marketers, they are also understandable, at least to some extent. Business buyers have been conditioned to treat the information they receive from vendors with a healthy degree of skepticism. They recognize that vendors have an agenda, and they perceive that this agenda can cause most vendor-supplied information to be somewhat less than completely objective. The survey findings show that B2B buyers believe they will get more objective information from professional associations, industry groups, and independent analysts and product reviewers.

In our criminal justice system, there is a presumption of innocence. An individual is presumed to be innocent until the state proves guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. In the B2B marketing world, most business buyers presume that vendor content is usually biased, probably not always accurate, and therefore not completely trustworthy. The burden of proof is on B2B marketers to develop content that can overcome this presumption.

Meeting this burden of proof is particularly critical for content that is designed for early-stage buyers. That's because early-stage buyers will often form their first impression of your company based on your content. If you can establish credibility early, you'll take a big step forward with potential buyers.

Many adjectives can be used to describe content that will build credibility with early-stage buyers, but I contend that two stand out in importance. First, credible content is authoritative. Marketing content doesn't need to read like an academic journal or a legal brief, but the main points you make should be supported by sound evidence, preferably from third-party sources.

The second essential attribute of credible early-stage content is that it is non-promotional. For many early-stage buyers, even a hint of self-serving promotion will taint their view of the content. When I prepare a new early-stage content resource, I use a simple test to determine if it is sufficiently non-promotional. I ask myself this question:  If I created a version of the resource without any obvious brand identifiers and gave that version to a reader, would the reader be able to determine who prepared the resource? If the answer to this question is "yes," the resource may be too promotional.

 

Recent research by DemandGen Report has shown that B2B buyers are more reliant on content than ever. The same research also shows that buyers are becoming more selective when it comes to content. They will only spend their time with content that they deem to be valuable and trustworthy. Therefore, it's more important than ever to develop content that potential buyers will see as credible.

 

Create Content that Helps Sales Reps Sell - Sales Enablement, Part 2

Business buyers do not distinguish between marketing and sales activities. From the buyer's perspective, there is one problem-solving process that may result in a purchase. As they work through their decision-making process, what really matters to buyers is the relevance, quality, and credibility of the information they receive from prospective vendors. They couldn't care less about whether the information comes from the marketing department or a salesperson.

To maximize results, what B2B companies need is a demand generation process/system that can address buyers' needs at every stage of their decision-making journey. I call it managing demand generation "from curiosity to close."

Marketing and sales play distinct roles in the demand generation process, but marketing is well-suited to help make the selling process more effective. This role of marketing is usually called sales enablement, and marketing has two major sales enablement responsibilities.

• Content - Marketers must provide the content resources that will enable sales reps to advance sales opportunities.
• Information - When a lead is passed from marketing to sales, marketing must provide the information that will enable sales reps to continue prospect relationships without loss of momentum.

This is the second of three posts dealing with sales enablement. In the first post, I discussed why sales enablement is important for B2B companies. In this post, I'll discuss the content aspect of marketing's sales enablement responsibility. My next post will cover the information component.

Sales Enablement Content Needs Improvement

Recent research by Richardson, a sales training firm, paints a mixed picture of marketing's performance on the sales enablement content front. The Richardson research consisted of a survey of over 400 sales representatives and sales managers. Here are a few of the significant findings.

• 54% of sales reps and 65% of sales managers say they understand their company's content marketing strategy.
• 65% of sales reps and 74% of sales managers say that the content their company publishes is valuable to their customers.
• Only 52% of sales reps and 43% of managers say that the content their company publishes helps improve sales effectiveness.
• When asked how their company's content could be improved to better support sales efforts, 59% of sales reps and 57% of managers said "improve content relevance to our customers." Fifty-one percent of sales reps and 65% of managers said "create a stronger link between the content and the solutions we sell."

Two Flavors of Sales Enablement Content

There are two basic types of sales enablement content. The first consists of "normal" marketing content resources that are distributed to prospects directly by sales reps. Marketing is responsible for developing content resources for all buyer personas for all stages of the buying process. This will necessarily include those stages that occur after marketing has passed a lead over to sales.

These later-stage resources are designed for prospects who are actively considering a purchase. To borrow the terminology used by SiriusDecisions, these are prospects who are "exploring possible solutions," "committing to a solution," and "justifying the decision." When late-stage marketing content resources are distributed by sales reps, they become sales enablement content.

The second category of sales enablement content consists of various "tools" that are specifically designed for use by salespeople. This category includes, but is not limited to:

• E-mail message templates
• Sales presentation slides (with accompanying scripts or notes)
• ROI calculators
• Total cost of ownership calculators
• Sales proposal templates

While I contend that marketing should take the lead in creating these kinds of content resources, marketers need to involve sales reps at every stage of the development process, and they need to pay close attention to the "real-world" intelligence and insights that sales reps can bring to the process. Getting salespeople to buy into these resources is critical because they will have no value if they aren't used.

In my next post, I'll discuss the kinds of information that marketing should provide to salespeople as part of the lead hand-off process.

Read Part 1 of the sales enablement series here.

Read Part 3 of the sales enablement series here.

Kill the Friction Gremlins to Accelerate Buying Decisions

In a recent survey by CSO Insights, almost three out of four respondents (73%) said that their average sales cycle for new customers requires four or more months to complete. B2B marketing and sales professionals know that reducing the length of the buying/sales cycle will produce substantial benefits, but this is not an easy task. The only truly effective way to accelerate the buying process is to reduce the friction that slows prospects
down.

When it comes to accelerating the buying process, B2B marketing and sales resemble the sport of curling. Curling is a little like shuffleboard, but it's played on ice and involves sliding a large polished granite stone toward a target painted on the ice. The playing surface is prepared by spraying water droplets (called "pebble") on the ice. Because of the friction between the stone and the pebble, the moving stone will turn or "curl" to one side or the other.

After one team member "throws" the stone toward the target, two other team members accompany the stone as it moves down the ice and guide it toward the target. The catch is, these players aren't
allowed to actually touch the moving stone. Instead, they use brooms to sweep the ice in front of the stone. Sweeping temporarily melts the pebble and reduces the friction between the stone and the ice, and this changes both the speed and the direction of the stone. Therefore, sweepers affect where the stone stops, but they do so indirectly.

In B2B demand generation terms, friction is anything that slows a potential buyer's progression through the buying process. Like the sweepers in a curling match, one your primary jobs as a marketer or a salesperson is to reduce friction. You would like to be able to directly lead your prospects through the buying process, but in today's B2B buying environment, attempting to push prospects through the buying process on your schedule just doesn't work - at least not very often.



The friction gremlins live everywhere in the buying process, and some of the causes of friction are beyond your control. For example, a change in the prospect's business or financial condition, or a change in the composition of the prospect's senior management team can delay or stall the buying process.

The good news is, you can address many causes of friction with the right marketing content and selling skills. Most causes of friction fall into one of two categories - friction that relates directly to your solution or the problem or challenge it addresses, or friction that accompanies any significant organizational change.

Friction Related to Your Solution

This type of friction usually results from a lack of information. To keep moving through the buying process, potential buyers need the right information at the right time, and if they don't get that information, the buying process can stall. For example, a potential buyer's progression can be slowed or stopped if he or she:

• Doesn't understand or appreciate the costs or negative ramifications of the status quo
• Doesn't fully understand how your solution will improve the status quo
• Perceives that the purchase of your solution will entail substantial risks
• Doesn't have an accurate picture of the ROI that your solution will produce

Change-Related Friction

Change-related friction is usually caused by internal prospect issues, and most of those issues have little to do with the selling company or its products or services. Every prospect organization will have a unique mix of change management issues, but there are four causes of change-related friction that arise in most organizations. The buying process is likely to stall if the principal buyer:

• Doesn't understand how the proposed change will affect the existing organizational "system" (people, processes, and technology)
• Hasn't identified who must be involved in the decision to change
• Believes (or other stakeholders believe) that the problem or need driving the consideration of change can be addressed using internal resources
• Hasn't identified the issues or concerns that must be addressed to get buy-in from all necessary stakeholders

How to Reduce Friction

Both marketing and sales are responsible for reducing friction in the buying process, but marketing's share of the job has grown because of changes in buyer behavior. With business buyers delaying interactions with salespeople until later in the buying process, marketing content must be a primary tool for reducing solution-related friction. In fact, marketing content is often the only effective tool for dealing with the solution-related friction that arises in the early stages of the buying process.

Because change-related friction is unique to each prospect, sales must assume a large part of the responsibility for reducing it. Even here, however, marketing content can play an important role. For example, a white paper or ebook that describes how to build a business case for your type of solution can help your potential buyer identify all of the stakeholders who must be involved in the decision to change. A white paper or ebook can also be used to discuss why an internal "home-grown" solution isn't the best alternative for most companies.

You can't completely eliminate friction from the buying process, but the best way to speed up buying decisions is to kill as many friction gremlins as possible.

Photo Credit:  pop culture geek via Flickr cc

How to Win the Content Marketing Arms Race

Research by the Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs indicates that nine out of ten B2B companies are now using content marketing in some form. While I don't believe that 90% of all B2B companies have full-blown content marketing programs in place, there's no longer any doubt that content marketing is becoming a core marketing tactic for many organizations.

The irony is that the popularity of content marketing is creating a new challenge for marketers. As more and more companies implement content marketing and create more and more content, it's becoming more difficult to make your content stand out.

Velocity Partners, a B2B content marketing agency based in the UK, addressed this challenge in a recent slide presentation. In Velocity's view, we're about to experience a deluge of marketing content, and most of this content will be, in their words, "crap." Velocity argues that this flood of bad content will cause people to raise their "marketing defense systems" and be less willing to trust any content.

I would argue that the greatest "threat" to effective content marketing is not a flood of content that is truly bad, but rather a growing volume of content that is just average - not good enough or different enough to stand out in a crowded field.

So, what can marketers do to win the content "arms race?" Velocity Partners says the answer is to develop consistently great content - content that will capture and hold the attention of your audience and differentiate your company from your competitors. In an earlier post, I called this blue ocean content, and this is the kind of content we should always aspire to create.

It's not realistic, however, to expect that every content resource we develop will be a masterpiece. As marketers, what we can do is demand that all our content resources provide real value to the people who consume them. To gauge the value of your content, ask yourself a few questions about each new content resource.

• Does the resource identify and describe the causes and effects of an important, but previously unrecognized or under-appreciated problem or challenge?
• Does the resource make the full ramifications of a known problem or challenge visible and understandable?
• Does the resource provide new or distinctive perspectives regarding known problems or challenges?
• Does the resource discuss a new or innovative solution for a problem or challenge?
• Does the length of the resource match the importance of the topic addressed? Have I stretched a 300-word blog post into a 1,200-word article? Have I stretched a 2-page article into an 8-page white paper?

Three Questions Your Content Marketing Plan Must Answer

It's now abundantly clear that content marketing is a core marketing tactic for many companies. Research by the Content Marketing Institute suggests that nine out of ten B2B companies are using content marketing in some form.

Developing a content marketing program is a significant undertaking for any company. Not only does it require the creation of new content resources and the implementation of new marketing tactics, it also involves a fundamental shift in the philosophical approach to marketing.

When I'm talking with clients about implementing a content marketing program, one question that always comes up early in the conversation is: "How do I get started?" I always answer this question by saying that the first step is to develop a content marketing strategy and plan for the business. That answer usually leads to a second question:  "What should be included in a content strategy/plan?"

A complete content marketing plan will address numerous issues and contain significant detail, but at the most basic level, a content plan must answer three fundamental questions:

• What issues or topics will the content resources address, and how will the resources be made relevant for potential buyers?
• What digital and/or physical formats will be used for marketing content resources?
• When and how will content resources be published, distributed, or otherwise brought to the market, and how will they be promoted?

Like the proverbial three-legged stool, the answers to these three questions define the core elements of your content marketing strategy and plan. What makes these three questions particularly critical is that they apply both to the overall content marketing plan and to individual content resources. In other words, every time you contemplate the creation of a new content resource, you need to determine what issues it will address and how it will be tailored for a specific target audience, what format will be used for the resource, and how the resource will be published, distributed, and promoted.

Of these three questions, the first is by far the most important. One of the biggest content marketing mistakes that I see companies make is allowing format, rather than message, to drive the content development process. Marketers sometimes say, "We need a white paper [or an eBook or a Webinar]," rather than, "We need a content resource that communicates message X to audience Y." If you want to create an effective content marketing program, think messaging first, and then format and distribution.

I've published several posts here that discuss how to make content messaging more effective. In case you missed those posts, here are the links:

• Content Marketing Basics for 2013 - Compelling Value Propositions
• Content Marketing Basics for 2013 - Buyer Personas
• Content Marketing Basics for 2013 - The Content Audit
• Why Provocative Content Works Best for Acquiring Leads
• What It Takes to Make Marketing Content More Compelling

Why Content Marketing is the Best Way to Build the Brand

Howard Sewell with Spear Marketing recently published a blog post titled, "Has Content Marketing Made Branding Obsolete?" He argues that most B2B companies don't need "branding." Sewell writes, "If generating leads depended even in small part on how consumers felt about your company, branding might still have a role to play. But successful demand generation today has little to do with your company, and much more to do with your content."

I agree that content marketing is now an essential component of B2B marketing, perhaps the single most important component. However, I disagree with the argument that content marketing makes branding obsolete. Here's why.

Branding is one of those marketing terms that is used in a variety of ways. In one sense, branding refers to the process of creating the name and symbols (logos, etc.) that will be used to identify a company, product, or service offering. Branding can also refer to several kinds of advertising and marketing programs that are primarily intended to (a) raise public awareness of a company, product, or service, or (b) create and maintain a positive perception of a company, product, or service in the minds of prospective customers. When marketers engage in these types of advertising and marketing activities, they often say they are building the brand.

Building the brand is a marketing objective that can be pursued using a variety of marketing tactics and methods. Traditionally, the most prevalent brand building tactics were "mass advertising" activities such as TV/radio/print ads and various kinds of public relations activities.

In the B2B world, content marketing is a marketing tactic or method that emphasizes the use of educational and primarily non-promotional content to capture the attention and interest of prospective customers. Content marketing can be used to achieve multiple marketing objectives, including both lead generation and brand building.

The important point here is that a marketing tactic or method will never render a legitimate marketing objective obsolete. To say that content marketing makes brand building obsolete is like saying that charcoal grilling makes dinner obsolete.

Building the brand is still an essential marketing function for B2B companies. No sale will occur until the prospective buyer accepts and "believes in" both the relevance and credibility of your brand promise. What has changed is that traditional brand building methods and tactics are far less effective today than they once were. Business buyers are quick to tune out promotional marketing messages so what companies need is a more effective method for building the brand and communicating the brand promise. For most B2B companies, content marketing is now the best way to build the brand.

It's true, as Mr. Sewell writes, that most good demand generation content is not usually about a company or its products or services. Today, the best content focuses on business issues or challenges that are relevant and important to a company's potential buyers. But, even when a content resource is not about a company or its products or services, prospects will inevitably associate the content with the company that produced it. After all, the resource itself will be branded. If the resource is a white paper or an e-book or a case study, the company name and logo will almost certainly appear somewhere in the document. If the resource is a webinar, the company name and logo will probably be on every slide.

The point here is that your company, your brand, will be closely associated with the content you publish. The relevance and quality of that content (good or bad) will have a major impact on how prospects view and define your brand.

Why Marketing Content Must Both Convince and Persuade

In a blog post last November, Seth Godin described something that occurred in connection with the publication of his new book. It seems that a copyeditor changed each usage of persuade in the book to convince. Godin says he had to change all of them back.

Godin explained why he thought this was necessary:  "Marketers don't convince. Engineers convince. Marketers persuade. Persuasion appeals to the emotions and to fear and to the imagination. Convincing requires a spreadsheet or some other rational device. It's much easier to persuade someone if they're already convinced, if they already know the facts. But it's impossible to change someone's mind merely by convincing them of your point."

Seth Godin is one of the most insightful marketing thought leaders around, but I disagree with him slightly on this point. In the B2B world, marketers must be prepared to both convince and persuade. Let's look first at the need to convince.

The Need to Convince

Survey results by IDC have revealed that, on average:

• Ninety percent of companies require quantifiable proof of economic/financial benefits for most potential investments.
• Almost two-thirds of business buyers (65%) say that they do not have the knowledge or tools they need to perform business value assessments and calculations.
• More than four out of five business buyers (81%) expect prospective vendors to quantify the business value of proposed solutions.

These research results clearly show that B2B companies must be able to demonstrate and prove the value that their products or services will create for customers. In essence, you need to be prepared to help your buyer build a compelling business case for investing in your solution. Several kinds of marketing content can be used to perform this function.

• White papers or eBooks that describe how your solution creates value and explains how to calculate the value delivered
• Online assessment tools that enable prospects to obtain a preliminary estimate of the financial benefits your solution will provide
• ROI calculators that your sales reps can use to provide credible proof of the value your solution will deliver

The Need to Persuade

Marketers have traditionally believed that B2B buying decisions follow a rational, step-by-step process and that emotion has little effect on the process. We now know that this view is, at best, incomplete and that B2B buying decisions are far less rational that we like to think.

The reality is that emotions - particularly fear, uncertainty, and doubt - are part of every significant B2B buying decision. In The Buyersphere Project, Gord Hotchkiss wrote, "B2B buying decisions are usually driven by one emotion - fear. Specifically, B2B buying is all about minimizing fear by eliminating risk."

In an earlier post, I discussed why it's important for marketers to have content that directly and intentionally addresses fear, uncertainty, and doubt. The main point I want to make in this post is that B2B marketers must be ready to address both rational and emotional issues.

The bottom line? To succeed at B2B demand generation, you need marketing content and sales enablement tools that will both convince and persuade.

Why Hasn't Traditional Marketing Died?

In marketing circles, it's been fashionable for several years to proclaim the impending demise of traditional advertising and marketing tactics. Marketing thought leaders have advanced this view in many of the best known and most influential marketing books published during the past two decades. For example:

• 1993 - Don Peppers and Martha Rogers, The One To One Future - "We are facing a paradigm shift of epic proportions - from the industrial era to the Information Age. As a result, we are witnessing a meltdown of the mass-marketing paradigm that has governed business competition throughout the twentieth century."
• 1999 - Seth Godin, Permission Marketing - In this book, Godin argued that all forms of "interruption marketing" have become ineffective, primarily due to the amount of advertising and marketing clutter that fills the environment. Godin wrote, "Is mass marketing due for a cataclysmic shakeout? Absolutely."
• 2007 - David Meerman Scott, The New Rules of Marketing and PR - Scott argued that the Internet enables organizations to "disintermediate" traditional advertising and marketing methods and reach potential customers directly with low-cost, informative, and interactive online content. He called traditional advertising "A Money Pit of Wasted Resources."
• 2010 - Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah, Inbound Marketing - "For the last 50 years, companies such as Procter & Gamble, IBM, and Coca-Cola used large amounts of money to efficiently interrupt their way into businesses and consumer's wallets using outbound marketing techniques. The outbound marketing era is over. The next 50 years will be the era of inbound marketing."

Based on these predictions (and many others like them), we would expect to see the use of traditional advertising and marketing methods in a free fall. But that isn't happening. According to a forecast published by ZenithOptimedia in December 2012, worldwide advertising spending will grow from about $482 billion in 2011 to almost $574 billion by the end of 2015. In North America, the firm expects advertising spending to grow from $165 billion in 2011 to $195 billion in 2015.

These estimates cover spending in seven types of media - newspapers, magazines, television, radio, cinema, outdoor, and Internet. Except for the Internet, all of this spending relates to traditional advertising and marketing tactics. According to ZenithOptimedia, the Internet will be second largest category of advertising spending by 2013, but it will still lag behind television by a significant margin (19.8% of total spending for the Internet vs. 40.1% of total spending for TV).

In addition, Winterberry Group has estimated that spending on direct mail (another traditional marketing method) has enjoyed modest annual growth since 2009.

So, what's going on? Were Don Peppers, Martha Rogers, Seth Godin, David Meerman Scott, Brian Halligan, Dharmesh Shah, and many others simply wrong? I don't think so, at least not completely. The projections by ZenithOptimedia and research by Forrester and other firms clearly show that digital marketing, content marketing, social media marketing, and inbound marketing are the fastest growing segments of the marketing industry. And to some extent anyway, they are growing at the expense of more traditional marketing methods and tactics.

It's also clear, however, that many companies - particularly consumer products companies and large B2B firms - are not close to abandoning traditional advertising and marketing methods, even if the effectiveness of those methods is questionable.

I suspect that the relative slowness of change results from a combination of factors.

• Inertia - There's a lot of inertia in human organizations, especially in large companies. Even when company leaders believe change is needed, it is often implemented gradually and incrementally.
• Fear - Probably the primary cause of inertia. Even when company leaders recognize the need for change, the fear of the unknown and/or the fear of making a mistake can deter them from implementing change. ("Better the devil you know . . .")
• Traditional advertising/marketing still works (sort of) - Some marketers may perceive that traditional advertising and marketing methods are still at least somewhat effective, and perhaps they actually are for some companies.

Whatever the cause, traditional advertising and marketing tactics and methods are likely to be with us for quite some time.

Should Marketing or Sales Lead Demand Generation?

Over the past few years, two distinct approaches to B2B demand generation have emerged. Both of these models have evolved in response to profound changes in the B2B marketing and sales environment, the most significant of which has been the appearance of empowered buyers.

Business buyers now have access to a wealth of online information, and they are using that information to perform research on their own. As a result, they are much less dependent on sellers than in the past, and they're avoiding interactions with sales reps until later in the buying process. Research by the Corporate Executive Board, SiriusDecisions and others has shown that prospects are often 50% to 60% through the buying process before they engage with a salesperson.

One approach to dealing with empowered buyers is to expand the role of marketing in B2B demand generation. Not surprisingly, the strongest early advocates of this model were providers of B2B marketing automation software like Marketo, Eloqua, Hubspot, and several others. The second approach argues that what is needed is a new sales methodology. The Corporate Executive Board is a strong advocate of this model, and two CEB executives, Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson, provided a detailed description of this model in their best-selling book, The Challenger Sale.

The marketing-centric model accepts that most potential buyers prefer to access information about business issues and potential solutions on their own, especially in the early stages of the buying process. Instead of fighting this preference, the marketing-centric model seeks to support the "self-directed buyer" as he or she goes through the learning process. The marketing-centric model relies heavily on content marketing principles and techniques (because it assumes that most early-stage interactions need to be content based), and it leverages technology to manage and execute activities such as lead nurturing and lead qualification.

The "new sales methodology" model emphasizes the continued importance of sales reps in the demand generation process. What CEB and others argue is that salespeople should engage with early-stage buyers and use disruptive insights to change how they think about their business. To use CEB's teminology, these disruptive insights enable sales reps to shape emerging demand rather than simply react to established demand. More importantly, these insights provide value that buyers can't get anywhere else and thus make it necessary (or at least very worthwhile) for buyers to engage with the sales rep.

Which of these demand generation models will ultimately prevail? My answer is neither and both. Neither model will completely win because both will (and should) be used.

Many proponents of both models now recognize the value of the other approach. Advocates of the marketing-centric model now acknowledge that human involvement with early-stage buyers can be very valuable, and CEB is expanding its concept of disruptive insights to include marketing content as well as sales messaging.

The bottom line is that neither marketing nor sales should "own" B2B demand generation. Effective demand generation requires marketing and sales to function as an integrated team.

Will Your Marketing Content Help You "Make the Cut?"

I'm not a big fan of professional golf, although I do watch at least part of the four "major" tournaments that are held each year. As I was watching last year's US Open, it occurred to me that B2B demand generation and professional golf have something in common.

As most of you probably know, professional golf tournaments typically consist of 72 holes, with contestants playing four 18-hole rounds over four days. After 36 holes (two rounds) are completed, the tournament field is reduced by eliminating the players with the worst scores. The "cut," as it's called, can sometimes eliminate almost half of the players. To have a chance to win a tournament, the first thing a player must do is "make the cut."

One of the truisms in golf is that you can't win a tournament on the first day, but you can lose it. Because the scores are cumulative, a bad performance on the first day can put you so far behind that it's all but impossible to catch up. A really bad performance on Day 1 may cause you to "miss the cut" and not even have a chance to play in the final two rounds.

For B2B companies that have complex and lengthy sales cycles, demand generation resembles a professional golf tournament. The buying process can extend for several weeks to several months and typically includes multiple buying stages. At several points along the purchase journey, prospects make decisions about which potential suppliers to consider. If your company doesn't "make the cut" at any of these decision points, you won't be in the game when the final buying decision is made.

The critical point here is that prospects are increasingly making these decisions before they've had a person-to-person interaction with anyone in your company. According to research by the Corporate Executive Board, SiriusDecisions, DemandGen Report, and others, the average prospect is 50% to 60% through the buying process before he or she meets with a sales rep.

So how do prospects decide which potential sellers to consider? To a great extent, these decisions are based on what prospects learn about and from a potential seller when they take initial steps to get information about the products or services they may be interested in purchasing. This is what Google has called the Zero Moment of Truth.

Most of this early research is performed online, via web searches, anonymous visits to company websites, reading or viewing online content resources provided by prospective sellers, reading online user reviews, and, increasingly, interacting with peers via social media.

This new buyer behavior means that what is said about and by your company online plays a critical role in your demand generation success. While you can't control what others say about your company, you can control the quality of the content you publish. If the content you provide demonstrates that you understand your prospects' problems and that you have the requisite expertise to help solve those problems, your odds of beginning a meaningful sales conversation with those prospects will be a lot higher.

What about your marketing content? Will it help you "make the cut" and stay in the game as your prospects move closer to a buying decision?

Content Marketing Basics for 2013 - The Content Audit

Starting a content marketing program from scratch can feel like an overwhelming task. Content marketing differs from traditional marketing in several fundamental ways, and it will require you to develop and field a very different portfolio of marketing assets.

In this series of posts, I'm describing three preliminary steps that will make the content development process more manageable. The first step is to identify your core customer value propositions because they define the central messages that your content resources need to communicate. The second step is to develop buyer personas because they provide the information you need to make your content resources relevant to your potential buyers.

The third preliminary step is to audit your existing inventory of content resources. A thorough content audit serves two important functions. First, it enables you to create a complete and accurate record of your existing content resources. In my experience, most marketers don't have a complete picture of what content resources they already have. Second, a content audit can be used to identify where gaps exist in your content portfolio, which helps you determine where to focus your content development efforts.

There are three basic steps involved in performing a comprehensive content audit. The first is to document basic information about each of your content assets. The second step is to associate or "map" each content resource to one or more of your identified buyer personas. In the final step, you map each content resource to one or more buying process stages on a per buyer persona basis.

To collect and organize this information, I use three spreadsheets, and I've provided example versions below.

Basic Resource Information

The spreadsheet below shows the basic information that I collect about each content asset. Most of the information required for this spreadsheet is self-explanatory, but I've included an "Instructions" row in the example.

 

Buyer Persona Map

The spreadsheet below is the tool I use to associate specific content resources with buyer personas. When mapping resources to buyer personas, the basic question you ask is whether a resource contains content that will appeal to a given buyer persona. Does the resource focus on the specific problems and challenges facing the buyer persona? Is the resource targeted for the persona's job function and industry.

 



You should be able to associate most content resources with at least one buyer persona, but there may be some resources that are so generic that it's just not reasonable to link them to any buyer persona. If you complete your buyer persona map and have any buyer personas with no (or very few) assigned resources, you obviously have a significant gap in your content portfolio.

Buying Stage Map

The final step in the content audit process is to associate your content resources with specific stages of the buying process. When mapping content resources to buying stages, the basic test is whether the resource contains answers for the major questions that a potential buyer will have at that stage of the buying process. The spreadsheet below is the tool I use to perform this step.

In this step, I find it easier to create a separate spreadsheet for each buyer persona. For illustration purposes, I've used a buying process that contains three stages - Discovery, Consideration, and Decision. To create a buying stage map, first select a buyer persona, then go to your buyer persona map and identify all of the content resources that you have assigned to that persona. List these resources in your buying stage map and link each resource to one or more buying stages. Repeat this process until you have a buying stage map for each of your buyer personas. If you don't have content resources for each buying stage for each buyer persona, then you've identified gaps in your content portfolio.

A content audit won't eliminate the work required to develop the content you need, but it will help you prioritize your content development projects.

Read Part 1 of the content marketing series here.

Read Part 2 of the content marketing series here.

Read Part 3 of the content marketing series here.