[Book Review] A First-Rate Guide to Optimizing the Value and Performance of Content

Source:  Content Science

Effective content has become critical to business success, as companies have faced successive waves of disruptive digital technologies. Therefore, the planning, creation, and management of content needs to be a core business competency.

This is the central message of Colleen Jones' new book, The Content Advantage, Third Edition:  Succeed at Digital Business With Effective Content (Content Science Publications, 2024).

The Content Advantage provides a detailed, evidence-based roadmap that business leaders and their teams can use to formulate a compelling content vision and strategy, design and implement efficient content operations, and optimize the performance of their organization's content.

Colleen Jones can speak with authority about content-related topics. She is the founder and president of Content Science, a professional services firm that works with companies in diverse industries to successfully implement content-dependent initiatives such as AI-enabled digital transformation, marketing automation and content technology selection and implementation, and customer experience improvement.

Before founding Content Science, Jones served as the fractional head of content and Mailchimp, and she has also led teams at Cingular Wireless and AT&T to improve customer experience across various touchpoints.

What's In the Book

The Content Advantage is about planning, creating, and managing all forms of content, or at least all forms of customer-facing content. It's not a book that focuses on content marketing per se, nor does it focus on specific types of functional content - e.g. marketing content, sales content, or customer success content.

Colleen Jones forcefully argues that content needs to be a core business competency and that content management should be a distinct business function.

Jones makes her views on this subject absolutely clear when she writes:

"This point bears repeating:  every company will need content as a core competency. And that competency will frequently cut across business functions . . . I now believe strongly in content as its own competency and that, at ideal maturity, it does not belong in other competencies or functions. Content is not design. Content is not marketing. Content is not product. Content is not information technology or engineering. Content is not support. Content is not public or media relations. Content is important to such competencies and functions, but content ultimately belongs in content." (Emphasis in original)

The topics covered in The Content Advantage will be familiar to readers with extensive content experience, but Jones brings a fresh perspective to many of these topics. Here's a brief overview of the major topics covered in the book.

Chapters 1-2 - How digital technologies are continually changing the requirements for business success, why many traditional approaches to content don't work, and why effective content is essential if a company wants to survive and thrive in a digital world.

Chapters 3-5 - Why having a vision for your content is important, and how to construct a compelling content vision and effective content strategies and tactics.

Chapters 6-7 - Understanding and leveraging the five dimensions of content effectiveness, and how to use principles of rhetoric and psychology to make your content more influential.

Chapters 8-9 - Why "content intelligence" is important, how to set up a content intelligence system, and how to use your content intelligence system effectively.

Chapters 10-11 - How to model the maturity of your content operations, and how to take your content operations to the next level.

Chapters 12-13 - What a "content system" is, why content systems matter, the three content systems that are critical for all companies, and how to successfully start an end-to-end ("E2E") content initiative.

Chapter 14 - An overview of the types of artificial intelligence, and a review of the important issues to consider when incorporating AI into your content operations.

My Take

The Content Advantage is an excellent book that will be a valuable resource for anyone involved in planning, creating, or managing content for their company.

Colleen Jones speaks authoritatively about content, and the book includes several graphics and tables that contain findings from research conducted by her firm, Content Science.

The book is well-organized and clearly written. It isn't exactly "light reading," but Jones' writing style makes the material approachable and easy to understand. She also includes several real-world examples in the book, which makes the material more engaging and relatable.

Jones makes a strong argument for placing content management in a separate organizational function with dedicated leadership and resources. However, this approach will create some challenges.

The most significant challenge is determining how the relationships between the "content department" and other functional business units will be structured and managed. For example, how can company leaders ensure that their content strategy is aligned with their marketing strategy? Who ultimately decides what types of content will be developed, and what messaging will be embodied in those content assets?

These types of issues are critically important, and they aren't easy to resolve. If anything, this reveals the vital role that content plays in business success. And that is the core message of The Content Advantage.

Why We Need a New Model of B2B Marketing

The marketing model currently used by most B2B companies has significant flaws, and most of the tactics used to improve B2B marketing performance have been only modestly successful. What's really needed is a different paradigm of B2B marketing, one that is grounded in a clear, evidence-based understanding of how business buyers actually make purchase decisions.

Embracing a new marketing model will be difficult for some B2B marketers. To understand why, consider the following thought experiment.

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Suppose you've recently been hired to be the CMO of a B2B company, and you've been tasked to reinvigorate the company's marketing efforts. Through market research, you've identified several attributes of the potential buyers in your company's target market.

• Most of your company's potential buyers are not actively evaluating products or services like your company offers at any given time.

• A trigger of some kind is almost always required to motivate the potential buyers to begin a buying process. In this context, a trigger is an event that causes a potential buyer to feel a need or desire to fix a problem or seize an opportunity.

• Except in rare cases, marketing messages or content alone will not cause potential buyers to begin a buying process.

• When a trigger event occurs, most of your company's potential buyers quickly create a mental list of companies, products, or services that they believe are worth considering, i.e. an initial consideration set.

• This initial consideration set is created before most potential buyers have conducted any research and is based on the mental impressions they've formed from a variety of touchpoints, such as their past experiences with companies, products or services, marketing messages, news reports, and conversations with colleagues and friends.

• Almost all of your company's potential buyers make almost all of their purchases from companies that were in their initial consideration set.

Given these buyer attributes, what marketing strategy would you use?

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The buyer decision-making attributes described in this thought experiment make two strategic decisions rather clear. First, it would make no sense to emphasize marketing programs designed to persuade potential buyers to initiate a buying process because such programs would be largely ineffective.

Second, it's clear that a primary focus of your marketing strategy should be to increase the likelihood that your company will be included in the initial consideration sets of as many potential buyers as possible because that greatly increases your odds of success.

These strategies differ significantly from what most B2B companies are currently doing. Today, most spend a lot of money on marketing programs designed to entice potential buyers to start a buying process, while they spend far less on programs to get their company into buyer initial consideration sets.

This disconnect is important because research has shown that the buyer decision-making patterns used in our thought experiment accurately describe how many business buyers actually make purchase decisions.

What Really Triggers a Buying Process?

For example, in a 2021 survey of business decision-makers by WSJ Intelligence and B2B International, researchers asked survey participants what kinds of events triggered their decision to search for a new vendor/solution provider. The following table shows the percentage of respondents who selected each of 12 trigger events.

These survey results illustrate that a wide variety of events can trigger a B2B buying process, but they also show that events involving the consumption of marketing/sales/news content (shown in red in the table) won't be sufficient to trigger a buying process in most cases.

Why Being On the "Day-One List" Matters

Research has also confirmed the importance of being included in a potential buyer's initial consideration set.

In 2022, Bain & Co. and Goggle surveyed 1,208 people at U.S. companies who had been involved in buying several kinds of business products and services. From 80% to 90% of the respondents said they had a set of vendors in mind before they did any research. And 90% of those respondents said they ultimately chose a vendor that was on their day-one list.

The military concept of "decisive point" is a good analogy for the role and importance of the initial consideration set. A decisive point in a military operation is "a geographic place, key event, critical factor, or function that, when acted on, allows commanders to gain a marked advantage over an adversary on contribute materially to achieving success." [Joint Publication 5-0, Joint Operation Planning (Washington, D.C.:  U.S. GPO, 2011), GL-8.]

Being included in a potential buyer's initial consideration set is a decisive point in B2B marketing because companies that are in the initial consideration set have a significant advantage over those that aren't.

Two Critical Changes

The findings of these research studies (and others) make it clear that we need to change some long-standing and widely-held beliefs about how B2B marketing can effectively drive strategic business outcomes.

First, we need to recognize that marketing's ability to persuade potential buyers to begin a serious buying process is limited at best.

And second, we need to focus more of our efforts on ensuring that our company is included in our potential buyers' initial consideration sets. After all, you've got to be invited to the party before you can be asked to dance.

Top image courtesy of R/DV/RS via Flickr (CC).

Looking Back, Looking Forward - 2025 Edition

Source:  Shutterstock

The beginning of a new year is what behavioral scientists call a temporal landmark, a date that is more meaningful than others. Temporal landmarks often prompt us to make significant life changes or commit to pursuing new goals. 

If you doubt the power of temporal landmarks, just consider how often we make "New Year's resolutions" to lose weight or begin a regular exercise program.

Like many marketers, I used the final few weeks of 2024 to reflect on what happened during the year and plan for 2025. My objective for this blog has always been to provide information and insights that are timely, thought-provoking, and useful. To achieve this goal, the content of this blog needs to evolve to account for the always-changing landscape of B2B marketing.

Another Year Dominated By AI

Artificial intelligence, specifically generative AI, was the hottest topic in marketing in 2024, as it had been in 2023. OpenAI's release of ChatGPT in November 2022 triggered an arm's race among technology companies to develop generative AI capabilities.

Spending on AI exploded in 2023 and continued at a blistering pace last year. In a November Forbes article, Beth Kindig, the CEO and Lead Tech Analyst of I/O Fund, wrote that AI-driven capital spending by four tech industry behemoths - Microsoft, Meta, Alphabet, and Amazon - will total about $240 billion in 2024, an increase of more than 50% compared to 2023.

Ms. Kindig's article also noted that AI-related capital spending will likely continue at these nosebleed levels into 2025 as the big tech companies build out AI infrastructure to meet demand that currently exceeds supply.

The capabilities of the large language models that power generative AI also improved exponentially in 2024. For a great overview of these technological advances, I recommend you watch this video by Christopher Penn, the Chief Data Scientist of Trust Insights.

Generative AI is already having an impact on many aspects of business including marketing, even though we are still in the fairly early stages of AI adoption. AI will have an even greater impact on marketing this year as more AI-enabled software applications become available, the adoption of AI increases, and marketers become more adept at leveraging AI's capabilities.

How This Blog Will Change in 2025

I plan to make a few changes in my approach to this blog in 2025. Most of these changes are based on my decision to apply greater selectivity to the content I publish here. This means I will probably publish fewer posts in 2025 than in previous years.

Since 2023, I've published three types of posts here - research round-ups, book reviews, and general information/opinion posts. Here's what I'm planning for each of these types of posts in 2025.

Research Round-Ups

These posts typically include brief descriptions of two to four research studies. In 2024, my three most popular posts were research round-ups.

Most of the generally available research about B2B marketing consists of surveys of marketers. While this kind of research can be useful, research that focuses on the thinking and behaviors of business buyers is even more valuable.

This year, I'll be looking for surveys of business buyers, and I'll also be looking for studies based on research methodologies other than surveys, such as the study I discussed in my most popular post of 2024.

Book Reviews

I published eight book reviews in 2024, and while no book reviews made the 2024 "top 10" list, I believe books remain an important knowledge resource for marketers. I'll continue to publish book reviews this year, but I plan to be more selective when choosing books to review. Therefore, I'll probably publish fewer book reviews in 2025 than in 2024.

General Information/Opinion Posts

In January 2023, I published a post that made the following argument:

"Marketing success in 2023 and beyond will depend on marketers' ability to leverage the capabilities of technology and data science and to effectively apply the principles of behavioral science that describe how people make decisions. These two distinct, but complementary, abilities now constitute the yin and yang of high-performance marketing."

This argument is even more true today than it was two years ago. The smart use of artificial intelligence has the potential to drive remarkable gains in marketing productivity, but those gains won't be realized unless marketers also design and implement strategies that reflect how business buyers actually make purchase decisions.

I've published several posts discussing the cognitive aspects of B2B buying over the past few years, and I'll continue to address those topics in 2025.

Leveraging behavioral science principles in marketing is necessary, but some marketers believe more is needed. A relatively small but growing cadre of B2B marketers are arguing that the current paradigm of B2B marketing is out-of-step with how most B2B buying decisions are actually made.

These marketers contend that we need a fundamentally different approach to B2B marketing, one that is grounded in an accurate understanding of real-world market dynamics and buyer decision-making.

I largely agree with this point of view so I'll be discussing this topic in several posts over the next few months.

Here's to a year of successful marketing in 2025!