The Recipe for Content That Creates Mental Availability

 

Key Takeaways

• If your company isn't in a potential buyer's initial consideration set, your odds of making a sale are no greater than 17%.*

• To improve your chances of being included in buyers' initial consideration sets, you must increase your company's mental availability with prospective buyers.

• Boosting mental availability requires marketing messaging and content that links your company to buyer needs and is memorable and easy to consume.

Why Initial Consideration Sets Matter

Creating an initial consideration set is an integral part of most B2B buying decisions, but most popular models of the B2B buying process ignore this pivotal step.

When a business person perceives a need to address an issue that may require a purchase, about 80% of potential buyers will create a mental list of companies they feel are worth considering before they do any research. And 90% of those buyers who purchase will ultimately buy from a company in their initial consideration set. (Bain & Co. and Google, 2022)

A potential buyer's initial consideration set is based on mental impressions that he or she has formed through touchpoints such as previous experience with a company, marketing messages, news reports, and conversations with colleagues and friends.

So, the perceptions that determine which companies will be included in the initial consideration set exist in the buyer's mind before he or she starts an active buying process.

What Is Mental Availability?

To increase the odds that your company will be included in your buyers' initial consideration sets, you must reach those buyers with the right messaging and content before they become active, in-market buyers.

More specifically, your objective is to increase your company's mental availability with your potential buyers.

The mental availability concept has been popularized by Byron Sharp and his colleagues at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science. In his landmark book, How Brands Grow, Sharp provided a simple definition of mental availability:  "Mental availability/brand salience is the propensity for a brand to be noticed or thought of in buying situations."

Mental availability is different from general brand awareness. It describes the likelihood that a potential buyer will think of your company in the context of a specific buying situation.

Many marketing thought leaders argue that effective brand marketing is the key to creating mental availability. While this is generally true, it doesn't provide specific guidance about what kinds of messages and content will be effective for increasing mental availability.

Messaging and content must meet three requirements to boost mental availability.

Link Content to Buyer Needs

First, the messaging and content must clearly link your company to specific buyer needs. As noted earlier, when a potential buyer perceives a need that may require a purchase, the buyer will create an initial consideration set of companies that he or she believes may be able to address the need.

The initial consideration set will include companies the potential buyer mentally associates with the specific need he or she is experiencing. It's these associations that create mental availability. Therefore, your job is to build and refresh the memory structures that connect your company to the specific needs your potential buyers are most likely to experience.

You can't predict what specific need will prompt a particular buyer to move into the market. Therefore, to increase mental availability, you need to build and refresh memory links that will connect your company to all the important buyer needs your company can address.

With broader mental availability, you increase the likelihood that your company will be included in the initial consideration sets of a larger number of potential buyers.

Make Content Memorable

Marketing messaging and content must also be memorable to increase mental availability. When your goal is to boost mental availability, most of the potential buyers you are targeting won't be ready to begin a buying process.

You communicate with those potential buyers at a given point in time, and you hope they will remember your message at a future point in time when they perceive a need and are ready to start a serious buying process.

As discussed earlier, your messaging and content must clearly link your company to the needs your potential buyers are likely to experience, but how you express those associations is critical to making your messaging and content memorable. 

In B2B, we tend to describe the benefits of doing business with our company in rational, "businesslike" terms - and sometimes in technical, quantitative, or economic terms.

To make your messaging and content more memorable, you need to capture in a visceral way what a potential buyer with a particular problem is experiencing, and you need to describe how your company can make that problem "go away."

Make Content Easy to Consume

The third important requirement for content that will effectively increase mental availability is that it must be easy to consume. By "easy to consume," I mean that the content doesn't require potential buyers to expend much cognitive energy.

This attribute is important because most members of your target audience are not actively engaged in a buying process and therefore won't be inclined to spend much time and effort consuming content that (at the moment) isn't a high priority.

As a practical matter, this means that most mental availability messages and content should be relatively short. That's why the 30-second or one-minute TV ad has been a staple of brand marketing for decades.

In B2B, we have the leeway to use somewhat longer content to build mental availability because most business people believe that keeping current on industry trends and innovative business practices is important for their career progression. Therefore, many business people will be willing to invest more time and effort to consume content if it's relevant to their work or career objectives.

The Bottom Line

If you want to drive revenue growth, you need to get your company into the initial consideration sets of more potential buyers. To accomplish this goal, you must boost your company's mental availability with potential buyers, and that requires the right kind of marketing messaging and content.

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*Research has shown that between 40% and 60% of prospective B2B deals do not result in a purchase. (Dixon and McKenna, 2022) Research has also found that about 80% of B2B buyers have a set of prospective vendors in mind before they do any research. And 90% of those buyers ultimately buy from a vendor in their initial consideration set. (Bain & Co. and Google, 2022)

Let's be optimistic and say that only 40% of prospective deals do not result in a purchase. Of the 60% that do result in a purchase, 48% of the prospects will create an initial consideration set (60% x 80%), and 43% will ultimately buy from a company in the initial consideration set (48% x 90%). That leaves only 17% of prospects that will buy from a company that was not in the initial consideration set. (60% - 43%).

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Image courtesy of Affen Ajlfe (www.modup.net) via Flickr (PD).

Unveiling the Mechanics of B2B Buying Triggers

A recent LinkedIn post by Dale W. Harrison ignited a lively debate about whether marketing can "create demand." The post has received nearly 500 comments, and there are thoughtful views on both sides of the issue.

Harrison observed that there's an "almost universal" belief that marketers can create demand "out of thin air." This belief, he wrote, is based on the assumption that everyone is always "in-market" and will buy if persuaded "hard enough."

Harrison forcefully argued that this belief and its underlying assumption are flat-out wrong. He contended that people in B2B buy something when changes in their organization surface an "urgent, high-value, and widely recognized need" that didn't previously exist.

The reality, Harrison wrote, is that most prospective customers ". . . are NOT in-market and represent future buyers who will only bring THEMSELVES in-market once a need emerges." Therefore, he concluded, marketers simply can't create demand.

Reframing the Issue

Whether marketing alone can or can't create demand is an important, but usually underappreciated, issue. It should affect the shape of marketing strategy, the allocation of marketing resources, and the substance of marketing messages and other content.

Unfortunately, how you resolve this issue depends on how you define "create" and "demand." And, because those terms can be defined in several ways, conversations about the issue can easily become unproductive.

There's a way to frame the issue that's more useful for B2B marketers. The practical question is:  Can marketing activities alone cause a business decision-maker* to begin considering options that may involve a purchase, i.e. a buying process.

With rare exceptions, the answer to this question is "No." In almost all cases, a "trigger" is required to ignite a serious buying process.

What Is a Buying Trigger?

In B2B, a buying trigger is an event that causes a business decision-maker to perceive a need or desire to change something in order to solve a problem or take advantage of an opportunity.

A trigger can be a single event, or it can result from the cumulative impact of several events, and triggers can arise from events inside or outside of the decision-maker's organization.

Trigger events can take many forms, but there's little research about what specific kinds of events most frequently act as buying triggers. One study that directly addressed this issue was a 2021 survey of business decision-makers by WSJ Intelligence and B2B International.

This survey asked participants what kinds of events triggered their decision to search for a new supplier. The following table shows the percentage of respondents who selected each of twelve trigger events.

These survey results show that events involving the consumption of marketing/sales/news content (shown in red in the table) were ranked near the bottom of the list. This indicates that marketing content alone won't be sufficient to trigger a buying process in most cases.

The Psychology of B2B Buying Triggers

For an event to act as a trigger, it must produce a particular psychological impact. This impact results from the interplay of three factors - rewards, goals, and motivation.

Humans are programmed to seek rewards. Neuroscience research has shown that the human brain has a "reward center" that is activated when our brain processes information that signals a reward we value. So, for an event to function as a trigger, the decision-maker must perceive that satisfying the need or desire evoked by the event will produce a reward.

If the potential reward is valuable enough, the decision-maker will make satisfying the need or desire a goal, and he or she will be motivated to achieve the goal. 

Recent advances in decision science have established that motivation is the primary driving force behind all human behavior, including buying behavior. 

The American Psychological Association defines motivation as, "a person's willingness to exert physical or mental effort in pursuit of a goal or outcome." The existence of motivation is what causes a decision-maker to begin a process that may result in a purchase. So, what ultimately transforms an event into a buying trigger is its ability to evoke motivation in the mind of the potential buyer.

Implications for B2B Marketers

So, what does this mean for B2B marketers? The key lesson here is that you need to use different marketing messaging with potential buyers who have yet to experience a triggering event.

If you were using messaging to prompt a buying process, you should focus on the "pain" created by the buyer's issue or challenge and emphasize the need for change. Your objective would be to cause potential buyers to feel the pain of their current state sufficiently to provoke a willingness to consider change.

However, since marketing messaging alone isn't sufficient to provoke a buying process in most cases, the better strategy with potential buyers who haven't experienced a triggering event is to use messaging that emphasizes how an issue or challenge can be successfully addressed and describes the benefits such a change will produce for the buyer's organization and for the individual buyer.

This type of messaging will make it more likely potential buyers will remember your company when they experience a triggering event.

*I'm using the term "decision-maker" to mean anyone who is involved in making or can influence a business purchase decision.

Top image courtesy of Thomas Quine via Flickr.com (CC).

[Research Round-Up] The Latest From NetLine On B2B Content Consumption

(This Research Round-Up discusses the 2024 B2B content consumption report from NetLine Corporation. NetLine publishes this report annually, and it consistently provides a wealth of real-world insights about how business professionals actually consume marketing content.)

Source:  NetLine Corporation

Virtually all B2B companies are now using content marketing in several forms, and therefore understanding how business professionals consume content is now critical to marketing success. The 2024 State of B2B Content Consumption & Demand Report by NetLine Corporation provides valuable insights on this vital issue.

NetLine operates a content syndication platform, and this report is based on data from 6.2 million content registrations on the platform in 2023. The NetLine research is particularly valuable for two reasons.

First, it captures the real-world consumption behaviors of business professionals. The data used for the report was not derived from surveys or interviews but from actual engagements with B2B content.

And second, the report is based on first-party data. The business professionals who use the NetLine platform voluntarily share information about themselves and the organizations they work for in exchange for access to the content resources available on the platform.

For these reasons, the report contains a wealth of detailed information about content consumption behaviors, and I encourage you to review the full 38-page report.

Here are a few highlights from the report.

Content Consumption Continues Rising

As measured by registrations on the NetLine platform, overall B2B content consumption in 2023 increased by 14.3% compared to 2022 levels. NetLine's data shows that the total demand for B2B content has grown by 77% since the 2019 edition of the research. Content consumption by C-level executives is also still on the rise, growing by 7% year-over-year.

It's not surprising that demand for content about artificial intelligence exploded in 2023. The consumption of content relating to AI by NetLine registrants increased 5.5x year-over-year, and NetLine expects demand for AI content in 2024 will increase 1.9x over last year.

Most Popular Content Formats

The ten most requested content formats in 2023 were:

1. eBooks
2. Guides
3. Cheat Sheets
4. White Papers
5. Research Reports
6. Tips & Tricks Guides
7. Articles
8. Book Summaries
9. On-Demand Webinars
10. Live Webinars 

Collectively, these ten content formats accounted for 87% of all content registrations last year, and eBooks alone were 39.5% of total registrations. 

The Consumption Gap Widens

One of the more useful insights provided by the report relates to the consumption gap, which NetLine defines as the time between the moment content is requested and the moment it's opened for consumption. This data point is important because it provides a guide for timing follow-up contacts with potential buyers. After all, it makes little sense to contact a potential buyer about a content resource before he or she has reviewed the content.

In 2023, the average consumption gap was 31.2 hours, up from 28.7 hours in 2022. The consumption gap has varied over the past several years. The largest gap ever recorded by NetLine was 33.3 hours in 2021, while the smallest was 27.1 hours in 2018. The lesson here is that you should wait at least two days before you try to follow up with people who have viewed, listened to, or downloaded your content.

Content Consumption and Buyer Intent

For the past few years, NetLine's research has suggested that the content format a potential buyer chooses to consume is a good indicator of readiness to buy. In the latest analysis, NetLine identified six content formats that are more likely to be associated with a buying decision over the next year - playbooks, case studies, trend reports, analyst reports, white papers, and live webinars.

One format that is notably absent from this list is eBooks. Despite being the most frequently requested type of content last year, eBooks were not strongly associated with shorter-term purchase intention. This shouldn't be surprising because most eBooks are designed to appeal primarily to potential buyers who are in the early stages of the buying process.

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The NetLine report contains several other valuable findings, and I recommend you take the time to read the full report.

Decoding the Critical Components of Buyer Trust

B2B buyers are conditioned to view vendor-provided information with a healthy dose of skepticism, and this lack of trust can weaken the impact of all marketing efforts. Marketing alone can't create buyer trust, but the right marketing approach can make it more likely trust will develop.

Trust has always been a vital component of business relationships, but it has become a critical issue over the past several years largely because of growing concerns about the collection and use of personal information by business organizations. Trust is likely to become an even more important issue as companies increasingly use various forms of artificial intelligence.

Business Is More Trusted Than Other Societal Institutions

Recent research has shown that people trust businesses more than other societal institutions. One of the largest studies of trust is the annual "Trust Barometer" survey by the global communication firm Edelman. 

Edelman's research focuses on trust in four societal institutions - government, business, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and media. The 2024 Edelman Trust Barometer polled over 32,000 people in 28 countries. 

The 2024 survey found that survey respondents trust business organizations slightly more than NGOs and substantially more than government and media. Based on the 2024 "Trust Index" scores, business organizations are "trusted" in 15 of the 28 countries included in the survey and "distrusted" in only two countries. In the 11 remaining countries (including the U.S.), business earned a "neutral" score.

Respondents in the Edelman survey also rated business organizations as somewhat more competent than NGOs and far more competent than government and media.

On the other hand, public perceptions regarding the honesty and ethics of people working in advertising aren't great. In Gallup's 2023 Honesty and Ethics poll, 49% of the respondents rated the honesty and ethical standards of advertising practitioners as low or very low.

The Foundations of Buyer Trust

Trust can't be manufactured; it must be earned from potential buyers. While marketers can't unilaterally create buyer trust, they can take steps to create an environment that makes potential buyers more likely to extend their trust. The starting point is to understand what leads to the development of buyer trust.

In a business context, the decision to trust a prospective vendor depends on buyers' perceptions of three vendor attributes.

• Ability - Does the prospective vendor possess the requisite knowledge, skill, and competence to perform in a way that will meet my organization's needs and expectations?

• Integrity - Will the prospective vendor fulfill its promises? Will the vendor's actions match its words and claims? Does the vendor adhere to ethical principles that I find acceptable?

• Benevolence - Will the prospective vendor be sufficiently concerned about my organization's welfare to put our interests at least on par with its own?

Specific Factors That Drive the Decision to Trust

The three vendor attributes just discussed provide a sound foundation for understanding the fundamental drivers of trust. However, recent research has also identified several specific factors that will influence the development of buyer trust.

A 2023 study by PwC surveyed 2,508 U.S. consumers and asked survey participants to rate the importance of several factors when deciding how much to trust a company. The following table shows the percentage of survey respondents who rated each factor as very important.

These findings are remarkably similar to the results of a 2019 survey of 2,200 U.S. adults by Morning Consult. In that research, Morning Consult asked survey participants what factors are very important when considering whether to trust a company. The following table shows the 11 factors identified by more than 50% of the survey respondents.

What is noteworthy about the findings of both surveys is that when U.S. consumers are deciding whether or how much to trust a specific company, they place the greatest importance on factors that directly impact their experience as a customer.

The findings of these surveys are also important for marketers because they reveal issues that are important to potential buyers.

Obviously, marketing alone can't ensure that buyer trust will develop, but marketers can influence buyer perceptions about ability, integrity, and benevolence, and about the issues revealed by the PwC and Morning Consult surveys through the content and messaging they produce.

Top image courtesy of Terry Johnston via Flickr (CC).

Halos, Horns, and Content Marketing

Source:  Shutterstock

If you've ever bought or sold a house, you're probably familiar with the concept of curb appeal. Curb appeal is the visual attractiveness of a house as seen from the street, and it's what creates a potential buyer's first impression of the house. Real estate professionals know curb appeal plays a big role in determining how quickly a house will sell and what the selling price will be.

Good first impressions are also important for successful B2B marketing. Today, most potential buyers will form their first impression of your company based on the content you produce. If your content doesn't create a good first impression, potential buyers will quickly turn elsewhere, and you may not get another chance to connect with those buyers. 

In the words attributed to Will Rogers, "You never get a second chance to make a first impression."

When your content creates a good first impression, potential buyers are more likely to come back for more, and they will be more inclined to view the rest of your content - and your company - favorably.

Enter the Halo Effect

This inclination results from a cognitive phenomenon known as the halo effect. The American Psychological Association defines a halo effect as, "a rating bias in which a general evaluation (usually positive) of a person, or an evaluation of a person on a specific dimension, influences judgments of that person on other specific dimensions."

Put more plainly, a halo effect exists when we transfer our perceptions about one attribute of a person or an organization to other attributes of that person or organization without having a rational basis for the transfer. In other words, if we perceive that a company is good at "A," we will tend to think the company is also good at "B," even though we actually know nothing about the company's capabilities at "B." 

The halo effect was first identified by psychologist Edward Thorndike in 1920, and it's been widely studied since that time. Although the halo effect was first applied to the evaluation of people, we now know that halo effects influence how we evaluate inanimate objects including products, services, brands, and companies.

The most important thing to remember about the halo effect is that it magnifies the influence of first impressions beyond what would be justified on a purely rational basis.

Halos Are Everywhere

The halo effect can be found in a wide range of human judgments. For example:

• If I meet a likable person, I will be inclined to believe he or she is also generous and ethical, even though I know nothing about the person's generosity or ethics.

• If I have a good experience with a Honda automobile, I'll be inclined to believe I will also be happy with a Honda lawnmower, even though I know nothing about the quality of Honda lawnmowers.

• If I find one of your company's white papers to be valuable, I'll be inclined to believe other content produced by your company is likely to be valuable. I'll also be inclined to believe your company is probably good at what it does even if I know little about your company.

Halo Effect's Evil Twin

The halo effect is most frequently discussed in the context of irrational positive evaluations, but the same cognitive mechanism can also produce irrational negative judgments.

If I attend a webinar hosted by your company and find the content to be poor, I'll be inclined to think the other content produced by your company probably isn't very good. In addition, my webinar experience may lead me to form a negative overall impression of your company.

This negative manifestation of the halo effect is called, appropriately, the horn effect. 

Implications for Marketing

As a B2B marketer, it's important to recognize that almost every content resource you publish has the potential to trigger (or contribute to) a halo effect or a horn effect. Therefore, one obvious lesson is that you can benefit from halo effects (and avoid horn effects) if you consistently produce content that will create a good first impression with potential buyers.

I would also argue that the potential benefits of halo effects should influence how you think about content distribution. Marketers have been debating the use of gated vs. ungated content for the past several years. While opinions vary, the conventional view is that it's appropriate to gate very-high-value content resources, while keeping other resources ungated.

I contend this is the wrong approach. Suppose you have created a content resource that is truly outstanding, one that is likely to make a good impression on potential buyers. In that case, you should want that resource to reach (and be consumed by) as many potential buyers as possible. The last thing you want is to put any hurdles between your content resource and your target audience.

If a potential buyer is impressed with your content, he or she is likely to seek out other content you've produced. And when the potential buyer is ready to begin an active buying process, your company will likely be included in his or her initial consideration set of potential vendors.

The benefits of halo effects aren't always immediate, but they can be powerful.

Decision Science Explains the Power of Strong Brands

Marketers have long argued that a strong brand can induce customers to pay premium prices, increase customer loyalty, and drive growth. But until recently, it's been difficult for marketers to explain exactly why and how a strong brand produces these results. Read on to learn why established principles of decision science can explain the power of a strong brand.

Numerous studies conducted over many years have demonstrated that strong brands produce significant benefits for their owners. A strong brand can make customers more willing to pay premium prices, increase customer loyalty, and drive revenue and market share growth.

While the benefits of strong brands are well established, we haven't had a clear understanding of why or how they produce these proven benefits. But thanks to advances in the decision sciences, this mystery has now been solved.

Last fall, I reviewed and strongly recommended Phil Barden's book, Decoded:  The Science Behind Why We Buy. In Chapter 1 of his book, Barden discusses several decision-making principles derived from cognitive and social psychology, behavioral economics, and neuroscience. Then, he uses these principles to explain how people make buying decisions and how brands influence those decisions.

The Science of Human Decision-Making

Barden's explanation of how brands influence buying decisions is grounded in the model of human decision-making developed by psychologist Daniel Kahneman, who won the 2002 Nobel Prize in economics.

Kahneman's model posits that people use two types of cognitive processes to make decisions.

• System 1 (which Barden calls the "autopilot") is fast, intuitive thinking that operates automatically, quickly, and with little or no conscious effort. System  1 essentially integrates perception and intuition.

• System 2 (which Barden calls the "pilot") is slow thinking that consists of processes that are reflective, deliberative, and analytical.

Together, these two cognitive systems determine all the purchase decisions that people make.

The human autopilot is "always on." It automatically processes all the information that is perceived by our senses, even if we aren't consciously focusing on those sensory inputs. And all of those sensory inputs have the potential to influence our decision-making and behavior.

The human brain uses sensory information to learn through a process called associative learning. Our brain builds neural connections between sensory inputs that occur repeatedly in the same context, creating associative memory. Or, to put it more informally, "What fires together wires together."

These associative memories (many of which we aren't consciously aware of) are the basis of human intuition, which can be described as our ability to "know" something without knowing exactly why or how we know it.

Associative memories also exert a major influence on what we buy, and this largely explains the power of strong brands.

How Brands Influence Purchase Decisions

In Decoded, Phil Barden argued that brands influence buying decisions because they provide "frames" that affect how we perceive products and services. Barden doesn't provide a definition of "brand," but it's clear that he means more than just a product or service. In Barden's model, "brand" refers to all of the perceptions and linkages relating to a product or service (or the business that provides it) that a person has stored in his or her associative memory.

To demonstrate the impact of framing, Barden used the illustration that I've reproduced below.

In this illustration, two large squares frame two smaller squares. When people see this drawing, most will immediately say the two small squares are different shades of gray. In fact, they are exactly the same color.

Our perception that the two small squares are different shades of gray is due to the differences in the color of the two large squares. So, the color of the frame changes how we perceive the color of each small square.

Barden argues that this is how brands work. He writes:

"The framing effect is crucial for marketing . . . We know that they [brands] have an impact, but how brands work is hard to grasp . . . Framing explains how brands influence purchase decisions:  brands operate in the background, framing the perceptions and, with it, the experience of the product."

It's important to note that many of the associative memories that are linked to a brand aren't about the functional attributes of the product or service. More often, the most powerful perceptions stored in our associative memory are about psychological goals (e.g. security, autonomy, excitement) or past emotional experiences.

Barden's explanation of how brands influence purchase decisions is compelling, and it provides two lessons for marketers. First, it reinforces the importance of effective branding and brand marketing. And second, it should remind us that most significant purchase decisions involve both deliberative/rational and intuitive/non-rational thinking.

Top image courtesy of Affen Ajlfe (www.modup.net) via Flickr (PD).

Four Steps to Creating Stronger Customer Case Studies

Customer case studies have been a core part of the B2B content marketing mix for years. In the latest content marketing survey by the Content Marketing Institute and Marketing Profs, 61% of the B2B respondents said they are using case studies in their content marketing program. 

But recent research also indicates that the value business buyers ascribe to case studies has declined. For example, in the 2022 Content Preferences Survey by Demand Gen Report, 40% of the surveyed business buyers identified case studies as one of the most valuable types of content they use when researching potential purchases. That was down from 72% of the respondents in the 2016 edition of the survey.

There are, I would argue, two main reasons for this decline. First, buyer expectations for all types of content have risen sharply in recent years, and case studies haven't kept pace with these rising expectations. I'm frequently asked by clients to evaluate their customer case studies, and many of those I've recently reviewed look much like the case studies I was reviewing ten or fifteen years ago.

The perceived value of case studies has also declined because business buyers have become more skeptical of all forms of vendor-produced content, and in many business sectors, they now have easy access to information they perceive to be more objective.

Building Better Case Studies

It's clear, therefore, that many B2B companies need to improve the quality of the customer case studies they create. A recent episode of Marketing Prof's Marketing Smarts podcast contains several valuable suggestions for making case studies more compelling and effective.

This episode features Bob Wiesner, a partner at the Artemis Partnership and the author of Winning Is Better:  The Journey to New Business Success. Artemis Partnership is a business development consulting firm, and Bob Wiesner has consulted on several billion dollars worth of business development projects in the advertising, audit, management consulting, law, pharmaceuticals, high tech and investment banking spaces.

In the podcast, Wiesner emphasized that a good case study is a story. He said, "Like any good story, they should have a plot, they should have a problem, a challenge, they should have a method for resolving it, they should have an outcome, they should have heroes and even villains."

Wiesner then discussed a four-step process for building stronger B2B case studies.

Step 1 - The starting point of a good case study is a clear articulation of the problem the customer was facing or the opportunity the customer wanted or needed to exploit. It's important to describe the problem or opportunity in some detail. How difficult or complex was it? What was the context it was occurring in? The objective is to describe the problem or opportunity in a way that a reader in a similar type of company can relate to it.

Step 2 - Describe the insights that your organization possesses that enabled you to understand the customer's problem or opportunity and design the right solution.

Step 3 - Describe the solution you provided to the customer. What did you do that solved the problem or took advantage of the opportunity?

Step 4 - Describe the actual business results or outcomes your solution produced for the customer in quantitative terms. In other words, use actual customer data to describe the results. Acquiring this type of data will be much easier if you and the customer agree on how the success of your solution will be measured at the beginning of the project.

My Take

The Marketing Profs podcast contains valuable information, and I encourage you to listen to the podcast and/or read the accompanying transcript. However, I disagree somewhat with one of Wiesner's points.

In the second step of Wiesner's case study development process, he argues that companies should describe their expertise. He said, "What you want to do instead is write a case study that says we understood the nature of this villain, of this problem in this way, we had this wisdom, this insight, this experience. We were able to apply that insight to the problem so that we (and only we) could actually find the right solution to it."

In my view, this isn't the right approach in most circumstances. The mistake many companies make when creating case studies is to cast themselves, rather than their customer, as the "hero" of their case studies.

The story line of many case studies resembles the plot of an old silent movie where the villain ties a helpless damsel (the customer) to railroad tracks, and the hero (the selling company) rides in at the last minute to rescue the damsel in distress from an oncoming train.

An effective case study will lead readers to identify with the customer. You want readers to vicariously experience the pain the customer was feeling - which Wiesner also advocates - and with the success the customer achieved. In essence, you want readers to finish the case study believing they can achieve similar success. When you make your company the hero of your case studies, you're asking readers to identify with your company, not with the customer.

An outstanding case study will speak from the customer's perspective. It will tell the customer's story and describe what the customer was able to accomplish with, of course, help from your solution. So, when you're preparing a case study, you can give your company a strong supporting role, but always let your customer be the star.

One final word about case studies. When I began preparing case studies for clients two decades ago, the conventional wisdom was that case studies should be short, usually no more than 1-2 pages. But most buyers want to use case studies to validate their purchase decision. And this means that a case study needs to include enough detail to describe the customer's business situation and experience with your product or service in a meaningful way.

So, B2B marketers should ignore the old rules about case study length. A case study should be as long as it needs to be to tell the customer's story in a compelling way.

Image courtesy of Jernej Furman via Flickr (CC).

Where to Find Topics for Thought Leadership Content

Consistently producing content that connects with potential buyers remains one of the greatest challenges facing B2B marketers. The need to create content that is relevant for individual business decision makers at every stage of their buying process, to publish content in multiple formats across multiple channels, and to publish new content frequently have combined to strain the creativity and resources of B2B marketers.

This challenge applies to all types of content, but it is magnified for thought leadership content because of the higher standards that effective thought leadership content must meet.

Numerous studies have identified the characteristics that make thought leadership content persuasive. While the descriptions used in these studies vary somewhat, the research consistently shows that three attributes define real thought leadership and distinguish it from other types of marketing content.

Relevant - Real thought leadership content addresses topics and provides insights that are highly relevant for the target audience. Of course, all good marketing content will be relevant for its audience, but what sets real thought leadership apart is that it addresses issues that can have a major impact on the business or professional success of the target audience.

Novel - Real thought leadership content provides information and insights that are genuinely novel. Therefore, to qualify as real thought leadership, a content resource must provide information or insights that add something new to the body of knowledge about a topic. In other words, real thought leadership provides the audience something they cannot find elsewhere.

Authoritative - All types of marketing content must be credible, but thought leadership content needs to be particularly authoritative. Because thought leadership content introduces new and novel ideas, it's essential for content developers to support those ideas with sound evidence.

These higher standards make it more difficult for marketers to find topics that can be used for thought leadership content. They must identify issues that are having or will have a significant impact on their target buyers. They must find topics about which they can offer new information or insights. And, they must be able to develop sound evidence to support their new insights.

Four Sources of Thought Leadership Topics

To address these challenges, marketers need to take a broad view of the topics or categories of topics that can be appropriate for thought leadership. From a subject matter perspective, there are four basic types of content (shown in the following diagram).

Product/Service Content - This is just what it sounds like - content that describes the capabilities, features and functionality of a product or group of related products. For a service, it would describe the nature and features of the service.

Having good product/service content is essential for marketing success, but this category is not usually a fertile source of thought leadership content.

Category Content - This type of content discusses issues or needs that a type of product or service can address. When a provider of account-based marketing software creates content that explains why ABM is a more effective approach to marketing or describes the capabilities prospective buyers should look for in an ABM solution, that's category content. Good category content doesn't promote a specific company's product or service, but it often will "evangelize" the product/service category. 

Most of the thought leadership content created by B2B companies is category-based content, and this is the content category that most B2B marketers will focus on first. This is a valid approach, but category content will provide only a finite number of appropriate topics for thought leadership content.

There are, however, two additional types of content that can be good sources of topics for thought leadership content.

Job Function Content - This content category includes topics that address issues relating to the job responsibilities of the individuals who will make or influence the decision to buy a company's product or service - i.e. the members of the buying group. 

For example, if the buying group for your company's product or service includes senior marketing and sales leaders working for companies that manufacture industrial equipment, your thought leadership content could address topics such as:

• The communication preferences and buying behaviors of industrial buyers
• The growth of online third-party marketplaces for industrial equipment

Industry-Related Content - This type of content addresses topics that relate to the industry or industries in which a company's prospective customers operate. For example, thought leadership content based on this category could discuss how new or pending environment laws or regulations will impact the target industry or industries.

Cast a Wide Net for Thought Leadership Topics

Some marketers may question the value of creating thought leadership content that isn't closely related to their company's product or service. One of the primary reasons to produce thought leadership content is to demonstrate awareness and understanding of the issues and challenges prospective customers - and the individual members of their buying groups - are facing.

From a marketing perspective, the objective of thought leadership is to engender feelings of trust and confidence in your company by potential buyers. High-quality thought leadership content from any of these content categories can help you achieve this objective.

Developing a sufficient volume of great thought leadership content will always be challenging, but you can make the task a little easier by expanding where you look for thought leadership topics.

Top image courtesy of Grand Teton via Flickr (Public Domain).

How Business Professionals Actually Consume Content

Over the past fifteen years, content marketing has become one of the most widely-used techniques in B2B marketing. Today, virtually all B2B companies are using content marketing in some form.

Ironically, the popularity of content marketing has made successful content marketing more difficult to achieve. As companies produce more and more content, the total volume of content available to potential buyers increases exponentially. And so does competition for buyer attention.

In these circumstances, understanding how business buyers actually consume content is critical to success. The 2021 State of B2B Content Consumption & Demand Report by NetLine Corporation provides several valuable insights on this vital issue.

NetLine operates a content syndication platform, and this report is based on data about millions of content downloads that occurred on the NetLine platform in 2020. This research is particularly valuable for two reasons:

1. It captures the real-world content consumption behaviors of business professionals. The data used for the NetLine report was not derived from a survey or interviews, but from actual engagements with B2B content.
2. The report is based on first party data. The business professionals who use the NetLine platform voluntarily share information about themselves and the organizations they work for in exchange for access to the content resources available on the NetLine's platform.

The NetLine study produced a wealth of information about content consumption behaviors, and I encourage you to review the full report. Here are a few of the report's highlights.

The COVID Effect

As might be expected, the COVID-19 pandemic affected content consumption behaviors is several significant ways. NetLine's analysis found that overall B2B content consumption increased more than 22% in 2020. In fact, the volume of content consumed between February 1st and September 30th of last year equaled 83% of the volume of content consumed in all of 2019.

COVID-19 also affected the topics that business professionals were interested in. The NetLine report states:  "The events of the past year led to a surge in content consumption related to remote work, collaboration software, IT bandwidth, security, and the ripple effects on HR and the like."

Most Popular Content Formats

The ten most popular content formats in 2020 were:

1. eBooks
2. Guides
3. White papers
4. Cheat sheets
5. Tips and tricks
6. Research reports
7. Kits
8. Webinars
9. Magazines
10. Subscriptions

Collectively, these ten content formats accounted for 82% of all downloads from the NetLine platform last year. The three most popular formats - eBooks, guides and white papers - accounted for more than 63% of the total downloads in 2020.

Webinars were the eighth most frequently requested type of content on the NetLine platform in 2020, but this ranking doesn't accurately reflect how important webinars and other virtual events became last year. The pandemic forced the cancellation of essentially all trade shows, conferences and other in-person B2B marketing events, and this drove a tremendous increase in the use of webinars and other virtual events.

The number of webinars uploaded to the NetLine platform increased 103% in 2020, and the number of registrations for webinars increased 49%. Registrations for live virtual events grew by a staggering 2,660%.

Measuring the Consumption Gap

One of the most useful insights provided by the NetLine report relates to the consumption gap, which NetLine defines as the time between the moment content is requested and the moment it's opened for consumption. This data point is important because it should be used to guide the timing of follow-up contacts with potential buyers. After all, it makes little sense to contact a potential buyer about a content resource before he or she has actually reviewed the resource.

In 2020, the average consumption gap across all job categories was 29.7 hours, up from 28.5 hours in 2019. The authors of the report attribute this increase at least in part to the distractions and disruptions caused by the pandemic.

More Data Points

The NetLine report provides numerous other data points, including what job categories most actively requested content in 2020. It also breaks down some data by industry vertical. As I indicated earlier, this analysis provides a wealth of valuable insights, and I recommend that you review the full report.

Image Source:  NetLine Corporation

Marketing to Millennial B2B Buyers - The Rise of Micro-Moments

 

In my last post, I reviewed the findings of a recent research report that examined the attitudes and behaviors of millennial B2B buyers.

Work in BETA:  The Rising B2B Decision Makers ("Work in BETA") was published by The B2B Institute, a think tank funded by LinkedIn, and GWI, a market research company. The report was based on surveys of over 17,000 business professionals, and it focused on the attitudes and behaviors of those between the ages of 21 and 40. The surveys were conducted in 2020 and included respondents from ten countries.

Numerous earlier studies have shown that millennials are playing increasingly important roles in B2B purchase decisions, and the Work in BETA surveys confirmed that millennials have become major players in B2B buying. Forty percent or more of the millennial survey respondents said they have influence at each stage of the buying process, including identifying the business need (57%), researching potential vendors (41%), evaluating vendors (40%), and approving the final purchase (47%).

Many of the attitudes and behaviors identified by the Work in BETA research aren't new, nor do they exist exclusively among millennials. But they matter more now because millennials have become key decision makers for many B2B purchases.

The findings of the Work in BETA surveys are interesting in themselves, but they also have important implications for B2B marketers. I'll be discussing three of these implications in this post and the following two.

The Ubiquitous Smartphone

Millennials have been linked to smartphones for years, but the Work in BETA research showed that smartphones have become millennials' go-to device for both personal and professional purposes. Among millennials, smartphones have surpassed laptops and desktops to become the most widely-used device for work-related activities. Over 70% of the millennial survey respondents said their smartphone is the most important device in their day-to-day life.

It's also clear that millennials use smartphones for a wide variety of activities. GWI's research tracks 35 online activities, and the firm found that millennials are more likely than older business professionals to do all of them via a smartphone. And on average, millennials perform 14 of the 35 activities exclusively with a smartphone.

Implications for Marketers

In light of the Work in BETA findings, B2B marketers should assume that many (perhaps most) interactions with millennial business buyers will occur via smartphones. Obviously therefore, marketers need to ensure that their content can be easily viewed on these devices. 

The more significant implication for marketers, however, is that always-available, always-on smartphones have enabled people - including B2B decision makers - to access and consume information differently than in the pre-smartphone world.

Nearly six years ago, Google introduced the concept of micro-moments to the marketing world. Google argued that the customer buying journey has become fragmented and composed largely of many brief interactions that usually involve a smartphone. Google contended that people increasingly use smartphones in spare moments of time to engage in brief, spur-of-the-moment interactions for specific purposes - i.e. micro-moments.

Sridhar Ramaswamy, who was then Google's Senior Vice president of Ads & Commerce, described micro-moments as follows:  "Micro-moments occur when people reflexively turn to a device - increasingly a smartphone - to act on a need to learn something, do something, discover something, watch something, or buy something." Therefore, Google says, companies must win at those micro-moments in order to maximize marketing success.

Micro-moments impose stringent demands on marketers. The Google research found that when people interact in a micro-moment, they have high expectations for immediacy and relevance. So marketers need to have content resources that will work effectively in these brief encounters. In addition to having resources that can be easily viewed on smartphones, marketers need to develop and deploy "bite-sized" content resources that can be easily and quickly consumed.

Google's initial discussion of micro-moments focused on the behaviors of consumers. The Work in BETA research shows that the pervasive use and reliance on smartphones by millennial business decision makers have made micro-moments a prominent feature of the B2B marketing landscape.

Illustration courtesy of Aaron Yoo via Flickr CC.

Using Ungated Content to Drive Outstanding Marketing Performance

One of the long-running debates among B2B marketers is whether companies should require registration to get access to content resources, or whether they should make such resources freely available. Gating content enables companies to capture new sales leads and track the content consumption behaviors of existing leads.

Over the past few years, I've seen the views on this issue change. Six or seven years ago, I think most marketers believed that most content resources should be gated, although a few marketing experts like David Meerman Scott have been arguing for some time that most content should be freely available. Today, I think most marketing experts believe that companies should make a significant amount of content available without requiring registration.

In my view, competitive pressures will soon require companies to make most of their content available without registration. A growing number of companies are now making at least some of their content freely available, and as this practice becomes more prevalent, potential buyers will increasingly expect to get access to content without registration.

This expectation will make buyers more selective about the content they are willing to "pay for" with personal information. They will still be willing to register if they believe that a content resource is particularly valuable, but if the resource looks or sounds like others that are freely available, they will be more likely to ignore it.

I now firmly believe that companies should make most of their content freely available, and I am recommending that approach to my clients. This is particularly important for content that is primarily intended for potential buyers who are in the early stages of the buying process and those who are engaged in what I have called casual learning.

Many forward-thinking marketers are already using ungated content to drive highly successful marketing programs. One great example is Health Catalyst, and healthcare IT company that serves integrated health systems and hospitals. At this year's MarketingSherpa Summit, Chris Keller, the Vice President of Marketing at Health Catalyst, gave a presentation that described how the company uses non-gated content to drive outstanding marketing performance.

In his presentation, Mr. Keller said that the leadership of Health Catalyst made a fundamental decision to build market leadership by providing valuable educational content and to make almost all of that content freely available. The only time that Health Catalyst requires registration to access content is if the consumption requires a second step that has value for the prospect. So for example, Health Catalyst requires registration for webinars because it wants to send the registrant e-mail reminders regarding the webinar.

The marketing team at Health Catalyst trusts prospects to step forward when they are ready to have a meaningful conversation about the company's products and services. Mr. Keller said that he and his team operate on the guiding principle that "prospects worth follow-up will ask."

The strategy has enabled Mr. Keller and his team to produce impressive results - a 300% increase in leads, a 550% increase in clients, and a 33% decrease in the length of the sales cycle.

Mr. Keller's presentation provides several valuable insights. A video of his presentation is available here, and I encourage you to watch it. The video runs for about 30 minutes, but it is well worth your time.

Image courtesy of Vince via Flickr CC.

Does Personalization Undermine Consensus Buying?

In an earlier post, I discussed some of the findings of a recent research study by Demand Metric that focused on the state of content personalization in B2B companies. Demand Metric found that the use of personalized content was widespread among its study participants. Sixty-eight percent of survey respondents said they personalize content for industry verticals or other market segments, and 61% said they personalize content for specific buyer personas.

Marketing experts have long argued that personalized messages and content improve marketing effectiveness, and the participants in the Demand Metric study overwhelmingly agree with this view. Eighty percent of the survey respondents who use personalized content said that it is "more effective" or "much more effective" than content that isn't personalized.

Not everyone, however, believes that personalization is always beneficial. For the past several months, CEB has been arguing that personalization can actually make prospective customers less (not more) likely to buy. The essence of CEB's argument goes like this:

• B2B products and services are usually purchased by groups of people, not individuals.
• These buying groups must usually reach a consensus before a purchase decision will be made.
• Personalization strategies can make the individuals in the buying group believe more strongly in their own point of view and less willing to compromise, thus making consensus more difficult to achieve.

In an article for the Harvard Business Review, Karl Schmidt, Brent Adamson, and Anna Bird (all with CEB) wrote:

"Conventional wisdom holds that the more personalized a message is, the more effectively it will drive a sale. And indeed, CEB's surveys found that individual customer stakeholders who perceived supplier content to be tailored to their specific needs were 40% more willing to buy from that supplier than stakeholders who didn't . . . But personalization has a dark side. When individuals in a buying group receive different messages, each one stressing that an offering meets his or her narrow needs, it can highlight the diverging goals and priorities in the group, driving a wedge between members and hindering consensus."

CEB goes on to argue that selling companies need tactics and resources that are specifically designed to help buying groups reach a consensus. In addition, CEB contends that selling companies will usually need the help of a champion inside the prospect organization to drive the consensus-building process. CEB calls these internal advocates "mobilizers" and describes the best mobilizers as people who (a) are motivated to improve their organization, and (b) have the organizational clout to bring decision makers together.

To effectively use mobilizers, companies need to identify the right people and then motivate those individuals to play the mobilizer role. Just as important, companies need to provide mobilizers the resources they need to effectively drive the consensus-building process.

What do you think? Can too much personalization hinder rather than help? If so, how much personalization is too much? I'd like to get your ideas on this issue. Please comment on this post, and share your thoughts about whether personalization can actually undermine the consensus-building process. 

Image courtesy of HORANCapitalAdv via Flickr CC.

Yes, You Still Need Product Content

Understanding what types of content will resonate with potential buyers is a core part of every content marketer's job, but a recent study by LinkedIn indicates that B2B marketers and salespeople don't always provide potential buyers the kinds of content they want and need. This research suggests that we may not understand our buyers' needs and preferences as well as we'd like to believe. Or does it?

The LinkedIn study consisted of a survey of 6,375 B2B buyers, marketers, and salespeople at mid-sized to enterprise companies. Survey respondents were from the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, France, Germany, Australia, and India. Almost nine out of ten respondents were manager level and above.

LinkedIn addressed several issues in this study, and I recommend that you read the full research report. In this post, I'm focusing on what types of marketing and sales content B2B buyers, marketers, and salespeople perceive to be most useful and effective.

In the LinkedIn survey, participants were provided a list of seven types of marketing/sales content and asked to choose the three types of content they thought are most effective. The following table shows the percentage of B2B buyers, salespeople, and marketers who included each type of content in their top three choices.

These results provide several important insights for B2B marketers. First, they indicate that B2B buyers have a strong preference for product-related content. When buyers identified the three types of content they preferred, the two most popular choices were product information, features, functions (35%) and demos (31%). There was a drop of eleven percentage points between the second most popular choice - demos - and the third most popular choice - best practices.

The LinkedIn study also reveals that B2B buyers and marketers don't agree on what types of content are most effective. For example, only 24% of marketers rated product information as effective, which is eleven percentage points lower than the opinion of buyers. And, there is a thirteen percentage point gap between buyers and marketers regarding the effectiveness of demos.

Do these findings indicate that thought leadership and educational content is less important than we have come to believe? I don't think so. In this survey, LinkedIn also asked buyers:  "What are the important factors in your willingness to engage with a vendor?" The top four answers were:

• Understands by company's business model
• Is a subject matter expert/thought leader
• Provides valuable consultation, education, or tools
• Knows my company's products/services

These choices strongly suggest that B2B buyers place a high value of receiving insights from their prospective vendors that will make them smarter and help them improve their business.

What the LinkedIn research really confirms is that B2B marketers and sales reps must have content that's relevant for every part of the buyer's journey. And, it serves as a reminder to marketers that product-related content still matters.

Top image courtesy of Andrea Balzano via Flickr CC.

B2B Buyers Prefer Cold, Hard Facts

Last fall, the Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs published the findings of their latest annual B2B content marketing survey. This eagerly-awaited research covers a wide range of issues pertaining to content marketing, including content marketing usage, the overall effectiveness of content marketing, what specific tactics and channels marketers are using for content marketing, and how marketers rate the effectiveness of each channel or tactic.

The 2016 edition of the survey generated 1,521 responses from B2B marketers in North America. By design, therefore, the CMI/MarketingProfs survey addresses content marketing from the marketer's perspective, and it does not attempt to capture the attitudes or behaviors of B2B buyers regarding content consumption or content preferences. There are, however, several other firms that provide buyer-focused research. Three of the resources that I particularly like are the annual content preferences survey and the annual B2B buyer's survey by DemandGen Report, and the annual B2B technology content survey by Eccolo Media.

Research like the survey by CMI/MarketingProfs is important because it provides insights on the "state of content marketing" from the perspective of B2B marketers. But it's equally vital for marketers to understand how business buyers are using content to research purchase decisions and what types of content they prefer.

A new study by Blue Nile Research provides some interesting data points regarding the behaviors and content preferences of B2B buyers. The Blue Nile study is based on an online survey that produced 528 responses from individuals located in the United States. The survey respondents included both consumers and business buyers, but I'm focusing only on the findings that relate to B2B buyers.

Here are three of the major findings of the Blue Nile survey:

B2B Buyers Prefer "Hard" Information

When researching purchases, B2B buyers strongly prefer content that features data and statistics. When survey participants were asked what types of content in search results would make them most likely to click on a link, 46% of respondents said data and statistics, 18% said a blog post, 18% said video content, and 10% selected infographics. While this survey question specifically referred to content in search results, other research has shown that B2B buyers find content that includes strong supporting evidence to be particularly persuasive.

B2B Buyers are Multi-Channel Creatures

Seventy-six percent of B2B survey respondents said they use three or more channels to interact with a brand before making a purchase decision, and 26% of B2B respondents said they use five or more channels. This finding demonstrates the importance of providing high-quality content via multiple communication channels.

Search and Brand Websites are Preferred Research Channels

When survey participants were asked what channels they use when researching a purchase, eight out of ten B2B respondents chose online search and the brand's website. These two channels were much more popular with respondents that the other choices included in the survey - customer reviews/case studies (54%), blog posts (25%), social (20%), and mobile (14%).

This finding suggests that social and mobile are still playing a relatively limited role in B2B buying. However, the authors of the Blue Nile study report point out that this question relates specifically to the research phase of the buying process and that the responses may not reflect how much social and mobile channels are used earlier in the buying process.

Image courtesy of Jorge Franganillo via Flickr CC.

More Evidence on the Need to Improve Content Marketing Efficiency

Earlier this fall, I published a post that focused on the need to make content marketing more efficient. The impetus for that post was a recent research study by Gleanster and Kapost that demonstrated the economic importance of improving the efficiency of content marketing activities and processes. Here are three of the major findings of the Gleanster/Kapost research:

• Large and mid-size B2B firms in the US collectively spend over $5.2 billion annually on content creation efforts.
• Poorly managed and/or cumbersome content management processes lead to an estimated $958 million each year in excessive spending on content marketing by large and mid-size B2B companies.
• $0.25 of every $1.00 spent on content marketing in an average large/mid-size B2B company is wasted on inefficient content marketing operations.

This month, I attended a webinar sponsored by SAVO that provided more confirmation of the importance of content marketing efficiency. The webinar included a presentation by Erin Provey, Service Director of the Strategic Communications Management practice at SiriusDecisions. Ms. Provey's presentation was based on data from the SiriusDecisions 2015 Cost of Content Survey and the SiriusDecisions Cost of Content Benchmark Model.

The SiriusDecisions research and analysis focused on how much B2B companies are spending on content development and on how much of that content is "productive." For this analysis, SiriusDecisions divided B2B companies into three size cohorts. Small companies were defined as those having less than $100 million in annual revenues. Medium-size companies have between $100 million and $1 billion in revenues, and large companies have more than $1 billion in revenues.

SiriusDecisions estimates that small companies invest about $900,000 per year in content development, medium-size companies spend about $10.8 million, and large B2B enterprises spend about $17.5 million. These spending amounts are averages, and they include both external and internal costs.

SiriusDecisions defined productive content as content that is "activated" by internal audiences and consumed by external audiences. Unproductive content is content that isn't used because it cannot be activated "as is" or because it can't be located. Across B2B companies of all sizes, SiriusDecisions estimates that 65% of all the content "owned" by companies goes unused. More specifically, SiriusDecisions says that 28% of content isn't used because it is "unfindable," and 37% is unusable due to low quality or lack of relevance.

Because of unproductive content, SiriusDecisions estimates that between 11% and 19% of the annual investment in content is wasted. In small B2B companies, this annual wasted spending amounts to about $100,000. Medium-size companies waste about $2 million, and large B2B enterprises waste about $2.3 million. As with the total cost figures, these waste amounts are averages.

The SiriusDecisions research provides a sobering dose of reality and more compelling evidence that virtually all B2B companies can realize significant financial benefits by improving the efficiency of their content marketing efforts.

Image courtesy of Carolyn Coles via Flickr CC.