B2B Content Marketing

Welcome to the newest of the new economies where customers demand justification before they loosen their purse strings and the person often controlling them is the CFO.  Like it or not every deal these days lives or dies in the CFO’s office.   In December 2008, CFO Magazine dubbed 2009 as the year of the CFO, with that in mind, it is important that your content marketing initiatives articulate how your firm provides value,  be it in the every day mundane functions, process and activities to strategic initiatives that their office may be working on, after all, even in a recession companies must get their work done.   Here is an overview of the primary focus and measures of the CFO:

Primary Focus

• Revenue, cost, profit and margin.
• Budget management
• Investor relations
• Transaction process efficiency and effectiveness
• Cash flow and liquidity
• Accounting and legal compliance

In a nutshell the CFO’s job to measure and monitor the audit and financial processes – but also to enable efficiency and effectiveness in their operation.  Do not present canned presentation and numbers.  When writing to a CFO prepare by understanding their latest year-end and quarterly results.  Spend the time to listen to their earnings call and identify a quantifiable value proposition with hard, tangible numbers framed within financial metrics that CFO’s understand and use to make decisions.

Will your solution;

• Increase earnings per share
• Increase working capital
• Increase Market Share
• Increase Productivity

To get their attention, approach CFO’s from a fiscal angle with unbiased content that educates them on the business value of your solution.  Quantify benefits with case studies or references, don’t go in with ROI or TCO until you have their numbers.  CFO’s are the first to realize that past performance does not guarantee future results. CFO’s are not concerned with the speed and feeds of your solution but are very concerned with what your solution can do for their business.

 Hot Topics;

• Alignment and strategy
• Costs and efficiency
• Leveraging technology
• Compliance and planning

Business Issues;

• Cash flow
• Inefficient business process
• Decrease of market share
• Pricing pressure
• Competition

Key Metrics

• Revenue and growth
• Gross/Net profit and margin

Bottome line:

Today’s CFO’s have many concerns, understand them and how your company is uniquely qualified to solve their issues and become a trusted advisor through thought leadership.   As financial stewards they often look to peers and subject matter experts.  Focus on what is important to them and how they measure,  add value and understand CFO’s require strategic advice that is grounded in facts.

My father taught a simple strategy for creating good content, even today, when I set forth on writing a paper  I repeat his mantra, “who, what, when, where, why and how.”  That mantra is not a far cry from what 5th graders are learning in school today about how to evaluate a good website, can you imagine, 5th graders!  In a previous post, we discussed the value of role-based content. In our case, that is content targeted to a chief financial officer, the head of procurement, HR  or a business unit.   It is important to understand why they are “searching terms” and coming to our client’s website with their need for certain information.  A B2B content marketing program addresses how to gather, evaluate and understand user wants and needs and how to transform that into content that will be of value to your client’s business issues.  A B2B content marketing strategy is not something that is developed to sit on a shelf; there is a constant interaction between marketing, sales, creative and IT.  It is important that the internal team has a through understanding of the goals and that the client remains the central focus of the program.  A content life cycle strategy will insure client buy in and helps guide customers to your solution.

Inbound marketing leaders Hubspot and Marketo are taking heat from bloggers that any unsolicited  contact is a big no-no.  Back in December Blogger  John Flynn,  called out Hubspot on an unsolicited phone call, and last week blogger Rebekah Donaldson, President of B2B Communications Group called out Marketo for their follow on process that assumes permission on follow up correspondence.

No vendor’s process is differentiating itself  with their actions to the market because no clear process exists. There is no better way, no new mouse trap, no shortcuts.  You still have to find people looking to buy your product and service and you have move them along a sales process to get them to “sign the line that is dotted.”   If they tell you otherwise, they are probably looking to sell you something.  The chart below shows over 50% of respondents reported that of all the email they received from legitimate companies, they had asked only for 25% of it or less. Nearly 20% responded that they hadn’t asked for any of it.

On Friday, there was an interesting question asked in a Linkedin™ group called Lead Nurturing,   headed, Conference/Trade ROI, Does Anyone have a good way to figure out a show’s ROI? Or a good system for qualifying a show?

For a significant portion of my career, I worked for a research advisory company who had a high percentage of their revenue coming from conferences. This company had it all, field sales, great content, and lots of events.   The question always intrigued me, which channel had the greatest ROI?  Since our inception,  we have been asking that question via a poll on our website, “What is the most effective way to market your product or service?”  I pulled the latest results, below:

Meeting and conferences 21.43%

Surveys and white papers 25%

Direct mail and email 10.71%

References 42.86%

When it happened, I was quite surprised that conferences slipped to 3rd behind white papers.  I made a few calls, everyone I spoke to “in the business” was concerned about the continuing shift away from their trade-shows and conferences, but there are some bright spots, according to Tradeshow Week, not all shows are having problems. The 2009 Off-Price Specialist Show year-over-year attendance was up 10%. In addition, Integrated Systems-Europe, an audio-visual and electronics systems show held this past February  had attendance up 12%.

I don’t think trade shows and conferences are going away.  To draw, they will need to be micro-targeted to specific audiences and topics.  With that, show producers must use content marketing to justify and  articulate the business value an attendee will receive and marketers must pay closer attention to serving their prospects and clients on their time and their turf with B2B Content Marketing.

SWAG from SXSW Interactive-2009

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