More Work is Needed to Maximize the Potential of Content Marketing

Last month, the Content Marketing Institute (CMI) and MarketingProfs published B2B Content Marketing:  2012 Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends. This report is based on an August 2011 survey of almost 1,100 marketers, and it provides a great snapshot of the current state of B2B content marketing. CMI and MarketingProfs performed a similar survey in 2010, so some year-to-year comparisons can be made.

In many ways, this survey confirms what we already knew - that content marketing is now a core component of an effective B2B marketing program. Consider just a few of the major survey findings:

• Nine out of ten B2B marketers are using some form of content marketing.
• The top content marketing tactics (by usage) are articles (79% of respondents), social media other than blogs (74%), blogs (65%), eNewsletters (63%), and case studies (58%).
• Comparing 2011 to 2010, the use of blogs and videos both increased by 27% and the use of white papers grew by 19%.
• Companies are spending about 26% of their marketing budgets on content marketing efforts, and 60% of respondents said they will increase spending on content marketing in 2012.

Overall, the survey results show just how vital content marketing has become for B2B companies. But some of the survey findings also reveal that B2B marketers still have work to do to realize content marketing's full potential.

For example, when survey participants were asked to identify their business goals for content marketing, 68% cited both brand awareness and customer acquisition, and 66% selected lead generation. Only 39% of survey respondents identified lead management and lead nurturing as a primary content marketing goal. In fact, lead management/nurturing was the lowest ranking goal identified by respondents. This result may be due in part to the characteristics of the survey respondents, but I suspect it is primarily due to the fact that many companies have not implemented lead nurturing programs. Therefore, many marketers don't fully appreciate the essential role that content plays in effective lead nurturing.

The CMI/MarketingProfs survey also reveals that more work is needed to make marketing content relevant to potential buyers. When asked about how they segment or tailor their content, 57% of respondents said they use profiles (job titles, personas, etc.) of decision makers, and 51% said they use company characteristics (size, industry, etc.). However, only 39% of respondents said they tailor content for specific stages of the buying process, and 12% of respondents do not tailor their content in any way.

For content to be truly compelling, it must answer the questions that are most important to buyers at a specific point in the decision-making process. And, those questions change as buyers move through the buying process. So, the most compelling content is designed for specific buying stages.

The use of stage-specific content is one defining characteristic of an effective content marketing program. The CMI/MarketingProfs survey asked participants to rate the effectiveness of their content marketing efforts on a scale of 1 to 5. Forty-five percent of those respondents who rated their efforts as "effective" or "very effective" (4 or 5) said they tailor content for specific buying stages. Only 29% of the respondents who rated their efforts as ineffective (1 or 2) said they use stage-specific content.

If you're thinking about beginning a content marketing program, this survey is a great resource for learning about what is working. If you're already using content marketing, this is a great tool for benchmarking your efforts.

Five Ways to Improve Your Marketing in 2012

Bloggers love lists, and we're told that blog posts with titles like, "Five Secrets to. . ." or "Four Sure-Fire Tactics for. . ." are appealing to readers. Bloggers who write about business also seem to share another characteristic. About now, many feel compelled to make predictions about the new year. When you combine these inclinations, the results are lots of blog posts with titles like, "Six Game-Changing Marketing Trends for 2012,"

I'll leave the prognostications to others, but I will offer a list. I have five recommendations for improving your marketing efforts in 2012.

Before you do anything else, develop a marketing strategy.
You've heard this one before, so I won't repeat all of the reasons that strategy is necessary for success. At its most basic level, marketing strategy is a simple thing for most B2B companies. First, you need to identify all of the significant ways that your product or service can create value for customers and identify the kinds of companies that can obtain the greatest value by purchasing and using your product or service. Second, you need to determine the best ways for communicating your value propositions to potential buyers. This step includes the selection of marketing tactics and channels and the creation of marketing messages. Companies tend to spend most of their time and attention on step two, but step one is even more important. I discussed the "value identification" aspect of marketing strategy in an earlier post titled How to Make Difficult Marketing Questions Easier to Answer.

Shift primary responsibility for lead generation from sales to marketing.
I've explained my rationale for this recommendation in two earlier posts - Stop Depending on Your Salespeople to Generate Leads and Why Marketing Should Take the Lead in Lead Generation. I don't contend that traditional sales prospecting doesn't work at all or that you should completely abandon it. I do contend that traditional sales prospecting is an inefficient use of resources and that you should strive to become less dependent on it.

Increase the number of leads acquired via inbound marketing.
There is little doubt that inbound marketing has become the tactic of choice for lead acquisition. Buyers now control the buying process, and they are performing research and gathering information about products and services on their own, usually via the Web. Therefore, traditional outbound lead acquisition techniques such as direct mail and e-mail don't work as well as they once did. It's just good sense to make yourself easy to find when a prospect begins looking for the kind of solution you provide. Research firm SiriusDecisions says that 80% of new sales leads will come from inbound marketing by 2015. Your objective for 2012 should be to substantially increase the number of leads and the percentage of total leads acquired via inbound marketing.

Develop and implement a sound lead management process.
Consider these facts:  (1) Acquiring new leads is becoming increasingly difficult. (2) 50%-75% of new leads are qualified but not ready to buy. (3) Up to 70% of these lukewarm leads will eventually buy from someone. Put these facts together and one thing is clear - leads are valuable and must be managed with care. An effective lead management process will address several key issues, including lead nurturing, lead scoring, and marketing and sales alignment. A well-designed lead management process will enable you to maximize the sales you obtain from your pool of leads.

Implement a content marketing program.
Having and using the right kind of content is now essential for B2B marketing success. By "the right kind of content," I mean marketing content that is:

• Primarily educational and non-promotional
• Customized for the types of buyers you sell to
• Customized for where the potential buyer is in his or her buying process

I've discussed these requirements in a white paper titled, Two Powerful Ways to Make Your Marketing More Relevant. If you haven't already seen this paper and would like to get a copy, just send an e-mail to ddodd(at)pointbalance(dot)com.

That's my list. Do you have other plans to improve your marketing in 2012?

Four Tips for More Effective Business Blogging in 2012

With the end of 2011 less than three weeks away, most of you are probably well into planning your marketing programs for 2012. If you don't already have a blog, you should plan to begin one next year. If you already have a blog but you haven't been posting to it frequently, you should make that a priority in 2012.

As I wrote in an earlier post, a blog can be a highly effective marketing channel. It provides a great way to introduce prospects to your company and your content, and it can improve your organic search results. To maximize the benefits of your blog, you must post new content regularly and frequently. Therefore, publishing an effective blog requires a commitment of time and attention.

The suggestions I'm including in this post are the result of first-hand experience. I launched this blog in early 2010. For the first three months or so, I added new content frequently, but then I ran out of steam. By mid-August, I had stopped posting entirely. After a hiatus of about nine months, I "relaunched" the blog in May of this year. This time, I had a better plan, and the plan has worked well.

There are several keys to successful blogging, but these four are among the most important.

Create a schedule and stick to it. Writing a blog post is a task that's easy to put off. So, to be successful, create an "editorial calendar" for your blog that contains specific publication dates. Just saying "twice a month" isn't specific enough. Posting regularly is almost as important as posting frequently. So, start with a schedule that you feel comfortable with (as long as you are posting at least twice per month). You can increase the frequency as you get accustomed to writing posts.

Create and maintain a "reserve" of completed posts. Before launching your blog, write enough posts to fill your schedule for at least two months. This will give you some breathing room before you need to create additional posts. In addition, you should always maintain a "reserve account" that contains one or two months of completed posts. If you run into a "dry spell," this reserve will give you some time to work through it.

Always be looking for topics. One of the biggest challenges for any blogger is identifying enough topics to write about. This can be particularly intimidating when you're just getting started. I don't have a silver bullet for this challenge, but I can offer a few suggestions:

• Tap internal resources - Get all of the people in your company involved in suggesting topics.
• Use your experience and read - The inspiration for my posts comes from two primary sources - my work with clients and what I read. If you're involved in a major project for a client, use that experience to create one or more posts. It's also important to read other blogs in your field regularly. On several occasions, I've been inspired to write a post by one sentence I've read in another blog.
• Write down your ideas - Whenever you think of a topic for a post, take a moment to write a couple of sentences that capture the essence of your idea. Don't be judgmental, just get the idea down on paper. Some of these ideas won't work out, but some will.

Promote your blog. To attract readers to your blog, you'll want to use two basic strategies. First, you'll want to configure your blog so that readers can subscribe via both RSS and e-mail. You'll also want to configure your blog so that "social sharing" buttons are included in every post. Second, every time you publish a post, be sure to announce the new post in appropriate social media venues. Since I have relaunched this blog, I have followed this practice religiously. Every time I publish a post (including this one), I announce it in appropriate discussion groups at LinkedIn, and I tweet about it 4-6 times. Since following this process, the readership of this blog has increased by 400%-500%.

Effective blogging requires work, but the more organized you are, the easier the work becomes.

It's Time to Fix the Marketing Supply Chain

Improving the productivity of the marketing supply chain probably won't be near the top of most marketers' list of new year's resolutions for 2012. Marketers are facing extraordinary pressures to drive increased revenues and maximize the return produced by every dollar invested in marketing. So, it's understandable that they focus most of their attention on developing more effective marketing campaigns, creating more compelling content, and generating more qualified sales leads, rather than on "mundane" issues like the production and distribution of marketing consumables.

In reality, however, the marketing materials supply chain represents a large, and largely untapped, source of both cost savings and revenue-enhancing improvements. The marketing supply chain in most companies is highly fragmented and filled with manual, inefficient processes that result in excessive costs and a lack of both responsiveness and reliability. If not completely broken, the average marketing supply chain is dysfunctional and in serious need of repair.

Research by the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council and Forrester Consulting (part of Forrester Research) shows both the economic significance of the marketing materials supply chain and the opportunities for improvement.

• A majority of companies spend at least 20% of their marketing budget on marketing consumables, and almost a third of companies devote at least 30% of their marketing budget to such materials. (CMO Council)
• Four out of five companies distribute marketing collateral documents and similar materials to salespeople and other sales channel participants, and a majority of companies distribute such materials on at least a weekly basis. (22% distribute on at least a daily basis) (Forrester Research)
• Just 25% of marketers have performed a comprehensive analysis of the costs and process efficiencies in their marketing materials supply chain, and only 11% have implemented new workflow systems to reduce costs and inefficiencies. (CMO Council)
• Fifty-nine percent of salespeople and other sales channel participants still rely on e-mail to request marketing materials, and nearly half (47%) still rely on telephone requests. (CMO Council)
• Sixty-five percent of salespeople say they over-order and stockpile marketing materials because it takes too long to receive ordered materials. (CMO Council)
• Only 17% of companies are using eStores or sales portals to support their marketing fulfillment process. (Forrester Consulting)

The good news is that companies no longer need to tolerate an ineffective and inefficient marketing supply chain. Marketing asset management technologies, combined with on-demand manufacturing capabilities and state-of-the-art warehousing, inventory management, and fulfillment services, can eliminate waste from the marketing supply chain, while simultaneously improving responsiveness and reliability.

To determine how much your company would benefit from an improved marketing supply chain, you need to perform a comprehensive audit that identifies the strengths and weaknesses of your current supply chain. Such an analysis will also enable you to quantify the cost savings and other benefits that an optimized supply chain would provide. You'll probably be surprised by the results. Even in relatively small companies, we've seen benefit values that reach well into six figures.

We've developed a process for quantifying the major cost savings that a "marketing asset management solution" will produce. This doesn't take the place of a comprehensive supply chain audit, but it is a good way to begin your evaluation. If you'd like to see a sample version of our cost savings calculator, send an e-mail to ddodd(at)pointbalance(dot)com.

Why Customers Should Be the Heroes of Your Case Studies

Customer case studies are one of the most popular and influential kinds of marketing content used by B2B companies. New research by Eccolo Media shows that case studies are the fourth most widely consumed type of marketing collateral (behind product brochures, white papers, and video/multimedia files) and the second most influential type of marketing collateral (trailing only white papers).

Case studies are potent marketing tools because they're good at performing several jobs.

• They help establish your credibility.
• They educate prospects about the benefits of your product or service.
• Most importantly, they can lower a prospect's perception of the risk associated with purchasing your product or service.

The good news is that case studies can boost the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. The not-so-good news is that the use of case studies has exploded, and therefore your case studies are facing more competition for attention and mindshare. If they don't stand out from all the others your prospects see, they simply won't produce the maximum benefits.

I'm often asked by clients to review and comment on their customer case studies. All too often, what I read is self-promotional "brochureware" disguised as a case study.

The mistake that many companies make is to cast themselves, rather than their customers, as the heroes of their case studies. The storyline in many case studies resembles the old silent movie where the villian ties a helpless damsel (the customer) to the railroad tracks, and the hero (the selling company) rides in at the last minute to rescue the damsel in distress from an oncoming train.

A well-written case study will cause readers to identify with the customer. You want readers to empathize with the "pain" the customer was experiencing and the success the customer achieved. In essence, you want readers to finish the case study believing that they can achieve the same success, if they will just let you help. When you make yourself the hero of your case studies, you are asking readers to identify with your company, not the customer. And that's much more difficult to achieve.

It's easy to tell when the selling company has made itself the hero of a case study. Lots of sentences begin with "We" or "Our" and the story focuses on what the selling company (or its product or service) did rather than on what the customer was able to accomplish.

So, when you prepare a case study, you can give yourself a strong supporting role, but always let your customer be the star.

We've created a "mini-guide" to writing compelling customer case studies. If you'd like to get a copy of Seven Tips for Writing Customer Case Studies that Sell, send an e-mail to ddodd(at)pointbalance(dot)com.

What "The Challenger Sale" Can Teach Us About Content Marketing

The Challenger Sale by Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson is one of the most important books on selling that's appeared in the last several years. The book is based on an in-depth research project conducted by the Corporate Executive Board. The research involved an analysis of over 6,000 sales reps from all major industries and geographies.

The objective of the CEB research was to identify what skills, behaviors, knowledge, and attitudes separate top-performing sales reps from average performers. What the researchers found runs counter to much of the long-held conventional wisdom about what drives sales success.

The first major finding is that salespeople fall into one of five distinct profiles:

• The Hard Worker
• The Challenger
• The Relationship Builder
• The Lone Wolf
• The Reactive Problem Solver

The second important finding is that one type of sales rep - The Challenger - clearly outperforms all of the others. Thirty-nine percent of all "star" salespeople are Challengers. One of the major surprises in the research is that Relationship Builders are the big losers. Only 7% of all star reps fall into that category.

The Challenger Sale is written from a sales perspective, but it has a lot to say to marketers. The connection to marketing becomes clear when we look at what causes Challenger sales reps to be successful. Dixon and Adamson found that Challenger reps excel because they provide customers and prospects new, valuable, and unique insights that help them compete more effectively in their markets. Challengers pressure their prospects and customers to question their assumptions and think about their business in new and different ways.

It turns out (as shown by other Corporate Executive Board research) that this is what prospects and customers really want. Buyers say they highly value sales reps who:

• Offer unique and valuable perspectives on the market
• Help them navigate alternatives
• Provide ongoing advice or consultation
• Help them avoid potential land mines
• Educate them on new ideas and outcomes

These are exactly the things that Challenger sales reps do. Rather that just asking a bunch of questions to identify needs and then offering a solution, Challengers bring new insights (and therefore value) to the conversation with the buyer.

Today, marketing content must perform many of these same functions. Because business buyers are doing more research on their own, your marketing content must act as your "surrogate sales rep" early in the buying process. This research shows that your content needs to be a "surrogate Challenger sales rep."

Those of use who write about content marketing emphasize the importance of using content that is primarily educational, that is customized for specific buyer personas and that speaks to where a potential buyer is in his or her buying process. All those things are important, but what really separates great marketing content from content that is merely good is that great content also provokes new thinking. Great marketing content provides unique and valuable perspectives that prod potential buyers to consider new alternatives for improving their business.

How much of your marketing content would pass the "Challenger" test?

Why a Blog (Still) Matters in Marketing

B2B marketers have more ways than ever to publish and share marketing content. LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Slideshare, and Scribd are just some of the venues for disseminating your content to prospects and customers. With all of the options now available, it can be tempting to think that blogging is no longer important to your marketing efforts.

That's a mistake. A blog can still be a highly effective marketing tool. In the 2011 State of Inbound Marketing survey by HubSpot:

• 57% of companies that publish a blog said that they have acquired new customers from blog-generated leads
• 62% of companies with a blog said that it is "critical" or "important" to their business

Here are just a few of the benefits that a blog provides:

• A blog is an ideal vehicle for providing your prospects with bite-size pieces of your marketing content. Today's business buyers are incredibly busy, and many prefer content that can be consumed quickly. This can be particularly important when you are dealing with prospects who don't know you well. A blog provides a way for them to try out your content without investing a lot of their time.
• A blog is one of the best ways to improve your company's position in organic search. Google and other search engines place a big emphasis on how frequently content is updated. So, if you post to your blog regularly, you can improve your search results.
• Your blog can be used to point prospects to more substantial marketing content. For example, you can use a blog post to summarize a topic covered in one of your white papers and include a link to the paper in your post.
• Your blog can function as a hub for your content marketing effort. For example, when you publish a new blog post, you can use LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook to point to the post.

The catch is that just having a blog isn't enough. To reap the most benefits from your blog, you need to post new content on a frequent basis. The HubSpot survey shows that 72% of companies that post weekly have acquired new customers through their blog. That number increases to 78% for companies that post daily, but it falls to only 49% for companies that post monthly.

Posting on a weekly basis can be challenging for many companies, but there are a couple of ways to deal with the challenge. First, you can outsource some or all of the blog writing duties.  In this scenario, blog posts are prepared by an outside writer, but they are published under your "byline." The second approach is to use "guest bloggers" to write some of the posts for your blog. This approach can be effective, so long as it isn't overused. After all, one primary objective of your blog is to demonstrate your expertise, not someone else's.