By John Lavey, CEO/President

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By John Lavey, CEO/President

When it comes to B2B content marketing, every dollar you spend must have a clear purpose. Your investment isn’t just about creating content for content’s sake—it’s about engaging customers, aligning with other marketing efforts and propelling your brand. Here is what you should expect from your investment in B2B content marketing:

1. Create and sustain conversations to engage and activate. You are investing in conversations. Conversations that start with engaging your customer, and eventually activate them. You can’t get people to take actions if they don’t know who you are. And you can’t engage them if the conversation isn’t needed and valuable to their doing their job better and helping them generate monetary value and achieve savings.
   
   
2. Align with and add a multiplier to other marketing efforts. Content is a growing critical part of how you reach customers and communicate how you can help them save money and grow their business. But it’s not the only tool. It should be aligned with all of your sales efforts, from event attendance to the nurture of relationships across long sales cycles.
   
   
3. Clearly communicate value and achieve market growth over time. It’s unrealistic for startup companies and new brands that haven’t invested in content marketing to drive leads immediately. There is an order of operations that you can’t reverse. You can’t skip steps. And success is a result of sustained effort.

 

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By John Lavey, CEO/President

Going to conferences in your industry can be an incredible opportunity, but what content assets and what kind of approach for using this content might help you derive the most value from your investment for in-person events?

Here are five tips to supercharge your event attendance with content that works. If you are at an event to present and/or attend as an exhibitor, here’s how to enhance your team’s expertise with sales enablement content:

1. Create an e-book that helps tell your story in a highly relevant way that addresses your customers and what they are facing right now. Hitting some of the themes of the show is an outstanding way to frame this content. 
   
   
2. Ensure the content specifically addresses pain points and show examples of how you’ve solved that pain for customers like those in attendance.
     
3. Distribute in print form (yes, that’s still relevant to some) and provide access to a landing page for attendees to access the content you’ve created, with an opportunity to provide a way for them to learn more about your solution.
   
   
4. If you are presenting, you also want to specifically address the pain points faced by your audience and show what a solution looks like. You would marry up your presentation with the same content you are sharing on the exhibit floor. 
   
   
5. Presentations, any collateral and signage at your booth should have a QR code to drive them to your site for a personalized experience.

Don’t think about the content you are sharing as a leave-behind. Think about it as helping your customers with their pain points, showing examples of what success looks like, and making it easy for them to continue in their journey to a solution, with you by their side.

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By Jeff Walter, Senior Editor and Writer

Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary defines evergreen, in the non-botanical sense, as “retaining freshness or interest: perennial” and “universally and continually relevant: not limited in applicability to a particular event or date.” As a noun, an evergreen can be “something that retains its freshness, interest, or popularity.”

You probably have a lot of evergreens in your marketing arsenal … or forest (to stick with the metaphor). Time-tested wisdom never goes out of style, and it’s always in demand.

If you’re continually struggling to generate fresh new content, maybe you’re putting too much pressure on yourself. Consider whether it might make sense to revisit some of the information, observations and insights your organization has shared in the past. If it has been a while, it might be time to dust them off, update or otherwise adapt them if appropriate, and share them again with a receptive audience.

Your newer customers, and potential ones, might never have been exposed to these ideas and would benefit from them—especially if they fall into the category of thought leadership, education or inspiration, as opposed to pure sales.

Another option is to repurpose materials. A blog post from a few years ago might be distilled into an arresting infographic, for example, or a dated PowerPoint presentation might be converted into an entertaining and current video. It’s possible that you’re too close to the subject and could benefit from a fresh set of eyes that can see new possibilities in existing content—and can help you discover new ways to keep it relevant.

The ongoing creation of new content will always be critical, of course, but the “evergreen” approach can supplement and round out what you do.

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By Jeff Walter, Senior Editor and Writer

Regardless of your industry, your organization is brimming with knowledge on a range of topics. The best, brightest and most experienced of these might well be considered subject matter experts (SMEs). What intelligence and insights they might share! But are they doing so?

We’re not suggesting that you give away any trade secrets. But useful facts and astute observations from your people, whether that information is recently acquired or from the “vaults,” may be a hidden asset that your organization has yet to exploit to its full potential. You might use it, for example, to establish your industry credentials, arouse consumer (or B2B) interest in your brand and potentially drive traffic to your proverbial door, or keep existing customers engaged and tuned in to your brand and what it’s been up to lately. Your SMEs can play an important role in fostering loyalty over the long haul.

E-books, white papers, blog posts, videos, webinars, social media, virtual events, infographics and other content culled from your experiences can educate and inform without being overtly sales-oriented. This content can target as broad or narrow a base as you desire to reach.

Your SMEs’ wisdom—your institutional knowledge—is a resource you can tap to produce compelling content that shines a bright light on your brand, without explicitly angling for the sale. When you share what you know, others can draw useful lessons from it that will increase your long-term value to them and help you nurture lasting relationships.

 

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By John Lavey, CEO/President

One trend that influences the solutions we bring is the evolving marketing operations we see with our clients. I’ve been seeing more and more companies develop a leaner marketing team, perhaps even led by a fractional CMO, supported by a team of key outside partners.  
 
That model makes sense, and here are what I see as the five factors that go into making that a successful operation, supporting your growth and communication goals.

1. A solid marketing plan—It all starts with a plan, supported by company leadership, that articulates all the channels and what will realistically define success for those channels. This plan also helps align partners toward a common goal. 
   
   
2. Dashboard for activity and performance—Being able to successfully manage all the marketing channels that support a company’s growth means having visibility into all the activities that are taking place, and performance, too. 
   
   
3. A lead strategic partner—One who understands your company, your industry and your audience is best positioned to be the general contractor, with the other marketing functions serving as subcontractors. You might be able to do this role yourself, but a lead partner can support your efforts. 
   
   
4. The ability to pivot and iterate—With a dashboard to assess performance, and a strong strategic partner, you can honestly look at what’s working and what’s not working and make decisions to change course. 
   
   
5. A commitment to the commitment—Being restless and wavering every time the market looks slightly different, or when you face sales obstacles, is not a good way to run your marketing. You should build a plan to focus on a span of time that looks critically at performance, but trust in the solution you are providing, and don’t just walk away.

Changing marketing operations structures are the new reality. The principles above can guide your approach and help you succeed. Where are you with your marketing operations?  

 

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By John Lavey, CEO/President

There is a well-known story about William Wrigley Jr., founder of the chewing gum company. 
 
Wrigley attributed the success of his chewing gum business to its massive investments in advertising. A young accountant for the company asked the boss whether the brand wasn’t well established enough to divert that investment into profits instead of continuing to feed the spend. They happened to be on a train.  
 
Wrigley asked the accountant, “Why doesn’t the railroad remove the engine and let the train travel on its own momentum?” 
 
Today’s equivalent is investments in content marketing. More than 9 in 10 B2B marketers use content marketing as a primary marketing tool, with estimates that it generates three times the number of leads as traditional marketing channels (Demand Metric).  
 
Yet, right now, many companies are being very conservative with their spending, sitting on their hands and holding off on investments in marketing. 
 
It’s as if they decided to “remove the engine” and hope that they can succeed and grow on the power of any momentum generated from prior investments.  
 
We see it differently. We know that removing the engine means losing ground quickly to competitors. In my own business, there was a day when Hammock was known as one of a few firms in Nashville to go to for certain work. Now we have to think about competing against the world, and we have to focus on constant content generation to stay relevant. 
 
How’s the trip going for your business? Are you fueling the engine, or trying to operate on fumes? 

 

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By John Lavey, CEO/President

Image: Getty Images

 

By John Lavey, CEO/President

1. The iPhone, which came out in 2007, changed everything. As adoption of this mobile content consumption device proliferated, we had entered a new era. We all saw the opportunity to push content to someone and then, as a result, see them purchase our products or services. We became interested in immediate gratification.
2. The 2007–2008 financial crisis made marketing budgets evaporate. When content marketing budgets came back, they were often smaller amounts of investment, and marketers wanted to see successful results. The ability to tie those investments to sales became the coin of the realm

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By Jeff Walter, Senior Editor

There is a reason you’re in the business you’re in, and it’s not just to sell products and services. This reason runs deeper than even the best mission statement you might compose. Chances are, you get a little emotional thinking about it. Your passion helped you get where you are … and it will keep motivating you to get where you still want to go.

But you didn’t reach this point on passion alone. You’ve done the legwork: the self-education, the research, the outreach, the preparation, the partnering and collaboration that are necessary to do what you do at a high level. You’ve made agonizing decisions, confronted daunting challenges, celebrated victories large and small. You quite likely have faced the challenge of selling others on your dream and your vision, be they partners or investors or employees.

It all makes for a heck of a story. How well are you telling it?

Consider that your customers, like you, are interested in more than just products and services. Perhaps they love a good story, especially one that makes them feel good about the product or service they are buying. What else might you and your organization offer them beyond overt sales-oriented marketing?

There’s the vision, the origin, the journey so far. There’s the experience: the hard-earned wisdom you’ve accrued along the way. What anecdotes and insights, old or new, might benefit your customers while helping you connect with them on a more personal level? From the organizational level to the frontline individuals who personify the team, from behind-the-scenes glimpses to inspirational customer features, there are numerous little stories to be told, even as the big story is still being written.

Blog posts, videos and other digital content that captures why you do what you do can get other people fired up about it as well. We’d welcome the opportunity to help you share your story.

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