B2B Content Marketing

With the economic rebound in play and knowledge and content gaps at an all time high, a sales information portal can transform process activities efficiently and effectively with just in time information.  Let’s first lets talk about the components, Figure 1 identifies a typical work flow of  a sales information portal:

Sales: Current inside and outside sales force and marketing.

Legal: Current terms and conditions document

IT: Technology used to support process

ATS: available to sell

WIP: work in process (product)

AR: accounts receivable

SME: Subject matter expert

CRM: Customer relationship management

The integration points is a taxonomy, process activity and anticipating what is in the mind of the buyer, i.e. is product engineering information is required during the sales process.

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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.

Michael Stelzner, one of the leading authorities on writing and marketing white papers,  sat down with David Meerman Scott to talk about David’s new book, World Wide Rave.   One point that struck a cord with me?  “No one cares about my product but me….”

I agree, it is not about creating a great product, people expect that, for VAZT it was allowing  people to find  us in their Epiphany Phase, the moment when people begin the search for a solution on a business issue they are having. They want to know how you can solve their business issue and how you can do it better then anyone else.

I am a big fan of  David,  my photo below is in the World Wide Rave video. VAZT is developing a new microsite that matches buyers and custom content developers called www.b2bcontentmarketing.com, our concept is getting raves from some of the 16 members who signed up since last friday.

Please take the time to check it out and consider participating.

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Implementing B2B content marketing is both art and science.  With Google™ and search, the customer is in control of where they visit and how long they stay. Educate them and they will be content, confuse them and they are off your site and onto your competitors.   Technically, your content must align to their keyword search string and if you do show up in Google™ results, your site’s user experience and content must exceed client expectations in order to develop mind share early in their buying life cycle.   In order to be successful your site must be physically appealing and your content must align to your visitor’s buying process.

Keyword marketing allows you to pick a specific business topic or issue that your product or service addresses.    Because of that granularity, keywords and microsites allow you to articulate your in-depth understanding of that topic and the associated business issues. Use your past experiences to share your insight on potential outcomes and goals for these new visitors. This allows you to put the right content at the right time in front of someone with a particular business issue.   To gain their trust you must educate the visitor on how you can solve their business issue and how your firm is uniquely positioned in the market on their particular topic.  Below is a chart from Hitwise™, showing that longer search queries are becoming popular.

In September 2007, I saw writing on the wall that sales processes were changing.  It was harder to get appointments, cold calls were not picked up and we had full-blown “blitz days” to get people to attend a seminar.  We even had compelling direct mail campaigns with relevant content that was not seen as a value.

In the meantime, on a website that I launched in 1988 to post details for an upcoming fishing trip, I had thousands of visitors, so many in fact, I could not keep up with the inquires.  When forming VAZT, I thought how could I leverage what I knew was happening in our sales process and create a sales and marketing engine that self qualified visitors throughout their buying lifecycle?

In January 2008, VAZT Global was born, but how could we go to market when the main keywords we use internally were not showing up in the top three in organic Google search? From experience, I knew that search engines are all about degrees of keyword relevance.   It’s not rocket science, even Google advises webmasters to,  “think about the words users would type to find your pages and make sure your site actually includes those words within it”.  We spent a year developing content and our B2B Content Marketing Platform.  For our first anniversary, we showed up number 1, the strategy worked again and it can work for you too.

Keyword selection is important as part of any B2B content marketing campaign. When selecting keywords for your next campaign think in the mind of the customer and their wants and needs. Next build the right content that addresses your buying lifecycle, be it one day, one week, one month, one quarter or one year.

In today’s tumultuous economy, a systematic approach to implementing an integrated content marketing campaign is a requirement. Integrated programs combine  your brand with content creation, media and press relations, online marketing and event production.  Lack of a plan costs time and money; a plan with defined outcomes will avoid little or no return on investment.

An effective campaign must include your intellectual property and thought leadership that builds your own community.  These days, I believe there is too much focus on social networking sites; these sites drive people to somewhere else other then your site. Sites like my MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter can be important strategy, but unless tightly controlled, it may be difficult to articulate your companies messaging.

4 steps to launching an integrated marketing campaign:

1. Understand who you are targeting and how they are currently interacting with your company and your site.    It is important to identify your target market, be it micro-businesses or major corporations,  understand your audience’s business issues.

2. Understand, based on what we know about our visitors, what you can sell to them or as important, if you want to. Qualify, qualify, and qualify through each stage and milestone.

3. Connect the dots from A to Z by developing a robust content strategy that will engage your target audience,  understand quickly where they are in a buying life cycle and create scenarios and content to move them further in a pipeline.

4. Have a follow-up process established before  the campaign release.  Identify goals for a registration process, have scenarios for multiple follow-ups, what happens  on the day of visit/download, and what are the follow-up campaigns for those who respond and those who don’t?

Integrated campaign management is  both art and science, it’s as easy as a blog, a podcast, a process to effectively submit to search engines and monitoring constantly to improve your rankings.   Use the 4 steps as your blueprint to ensure bases are covered.  As in most cases, the better you plan and the better you communicate the better your results.

When executives visit Google today they often want information to help them do their jobs better. To engage prospects business marketers must focus on creating valuable information and content.  A recent Junta42 study suggests, “Even in tough economic times, money is still flowing into content marketing initiatives. 31% of marketing and publishing decision-makers plan to increase spending in 2009.”
Their top content formats are:

Membership/social initiatives
E newsletters
Blogs
Online video
White papers
Microsites

Smart companies are packaging and integrating multiple content formats into their sales buying lifecycle, yet buyers are all keenly aware and skeptical of push and hype marketing.   How do you plan on engaging and converting your website visitors into customers in 2009?