Digital First, Documents Last

Throughout the history of marketing, documents have been the cornerstone of B2B content creation and delivery – brochures, white papers, press releases, data sheets, etc.

The digital age antiquates this model. Documents as the focal point of content development does not support multi-channel, multi-media content creation and distribution. As a process it does not deliver the scale necessary to efficiently support the digital mix, nor does it match digital consumption preferences.

It’s not that documents no longer have a place in the content mix, but digital content strategies need to think beyond the PDF. This means digital first. Workflows need to evolve to produce content that is modular and scales to support all media forms and distribution channels.

Documents will remain relevant as a format, but they are only a part of a much broader mix. They can no longer be the foundation of the content development process.

March 3, 2013

Multiplying Content to Accelerate Inbound Traffic

Content marketing is all the rage. It should be. Its influence is well documented and as a result, it has spawned a new industry of marketing experts and professionals.

But how does a resource strapped enterprise capitalize on the need for more search optimized content and growing consumption habits? By capitalizing on existing, effective content, and converting it into many other forms. Repurposing original content is a common recommendation. The result?

Consistency of message for audience
Content that conforms to multiple user consumption preferences and learning styles
Creation of social media content kits
Improved analytic reporting and consumption assessment
Improved editorial coordination
Ease of management
More scalable content development projects
Increase in content back-links, and URLs to related content
Reduced cost of creation;
Exponential volume of search optimized, quality content across the web
Greater awareness across the marketing & communications group of content and messaging
Increased qualified inbound prospects

If your website is well optimized for lead generation, increased traffic and engagement translates into more qualified leads, a percentage of which convert into sales.

Content Magnification

How many content items can be created from a single source? A LOT.

Take for example a your white paper. The primary information source is the SME, who provides the key customer value propositions to a writer or your marcom team, who are then tasked with the project of creating a compelling, consumable information source describing why your prospect should consider buying from you. In years past, it was a print document, today it is digital – probably a PDF.

This is a historical and well defined exercise that has been practiced for decades. This was well suited for brick and mortar business, but falls short in today’s digital economy. But the question before us is not about creating the source content (which is another important process to be considered), but how many ways can it be leveraged for digital consumption. Content marketing is a beast, and it is hungry.

Why do we feed it? Because your prospects are hungry for information and your content is marketing currency. Currency that has an exchange rate that converts into qualified web traffic and web traffic into leads for sales. It is an ecosystem.

What does the content marketing beast consume? Can we feed it? Repurposing existing material is a beginning to reach prospects beyond the document. Here a starter list of what can be generated directly from the initial collateral:

Web content
Landing pages
Webinars
Online presentations
Video
Audio Podcasts
Social media (tweets, blogs, commentary)
Promotions and campaigns
Direct mail & newsletters
PPT speaker notes
Press & analyst resources
Translated content resources for regional teams and audiences

Repurposing your best material can certainly generate all this, but it can also be done concurrently and by design, which is the idea behind “content engineering”. It’s easier than you might imagine. Is it necessary? After all, the collateral is produced and available, but it’s not enough, not today. A single document with your well-conceived and developed value proposition is not enough. A new approach to magnifying content is beyond important. It’s essential.

January 5, 2013

Context, Urgency and The Lizard Brain

I wanted to share this post from Harvard Business Review, written by Tim Riesterer. What initially “engaged” me was a great headline: Stimulate Your Customer’s Lizard Brain to Make a Sale. Points for Tim; the title stopped me immediately. It made me act. Just like Tim intended.

“The lizard brain” is a phrase first introduced to me by Seth Godin who defines it as “hungry, scared, angry, and horny.” It is primal. It cares what everyone else thinks and is the source of resistance to change. It is our autopilot, its sole purpose is to survive and it embraces status quo. The lizard brain is afraid of change; change is not safe.

The core premise of Riesterer’s message is that to be successful, marketing and sales must overcome a prospect’s primal resistance to change, but that most focus on the wrong message.

Any message designed to change behavior must create a compelling sense of urgency. It must change the perception of the survival instinct, to convince it that change is now safer than the status quo.

Riesterer cites several research findings in his analysis:

The Sales Benchmark Index – “nearly 60% of qualified leads fall victim to the status quo.” While most marketers and salespeople believe they are selling against the competition, they fail to see the most important competitor – the status quo.
Forrester Research found that 65% of high-level decision makers give their business to vendors that create the “buying vision”
Executives want vendors to tell them something they don’t already know about a problem or opportunity. Instead, most only talk about themselves.

In complex B2B marketing and sales, decision makers need companies to be consultative. Vendors who provide experience, vision, and insight into increasingly complex business challenges are the ones that offer true value to the role of any decision maker.

The tendency of companies to talk mostly about themselves is a messaging problem pervasive in B2B marketing. For internal marketing groups in particular, it is safe lizard brain behavior. After all, every organization embraces the message about how well their solutions perform. Drink the Kool-Aid, share the Kool-Aid.

The digital world is in hyper-drive competing for our attention. Messaging must instantly capture attention and hold it. Which means the message must have meaning and context for your target audience. Know them; speak to their business needs in their terms. Create urgency and communicate a vision for change and proof points that trump the evil status quo.

Don’t get me wrong; status quo can be a great thing. My wife, my kids and my friends – those are the parts of status quo that I wish I could preserve in perpetuity. In business, marketing and sales, status quo is dangerous. As a marketer and content strategist, I hate “status quo.” It is lethal.

Please share your own thoughts and experiences.

December 16, 2012

Video as an internal and external enterprise tool

I’ve been involved with video at the commercial broadcast or enterprise level for over 30 years. I’ve seen it evolve from an expensive, elite marketing media to an accessible everyday tool with multiple applications. What is worth noting is that video should be not only part of a communication strategy, but also part of the content creation strategy.

I did an interview in early December with Paul Ritter of Business Video Today. The topic was how video is being used by enterprises as an internal and external content and marketing resource.

Internally, the typical uses most people consider remain. Training and internal communications are common, desktop video is becoming a tool for some, but not yet pervasive. New tools such as application sharing and interactive whiteboards have emerged but are limited by many other factors.

Externally, video has become a great method to capture thought leadership from subject matter experts, customer testimonials continue to have impact on potential buyers, and even product demos offer scalability for prospects deep in the buying cycle. Some companies are investing in short, creative video to stimulate awareness and feed the prospect funnel.

During the interview, Paul raised the issue of how video producers should think about producing video in an extensible and intelligent way, seeing is as bigger than just one video. This is a point he and I have talked about many times.

A shift needs to occur at the planning level. Business must think long-term big picture, versus a line item checklist. Video? Done, check. Next?

Most producers and companies think in terms of “I want to do a video so that it will bring traffic to my site,” or perhaps promote a product.

Isolated, it is a narrow, short-term view. It can and should be bigger. Video needs to be part of the overall content and communication strategy. This statement applies to both development and distribution.

At a minimum, it needs to be looked at from the perspective of ‘what am I trying to accomplish?’ How does it fit into the larger communication or marketing programs and that I’ve got? How can it either lead, supplement, or do both for those activities? How can I leverage that video to build and augment other programs that may be totally non-video related? My experience has taught me it can affect and influence all of those things in very positive ways, but you have to see that from the beginning. It must be part of the plan.

Video is a tool. It is both content source and finished media. Creativity needs to be applied not only to the creation of video, but to the planning process to recognize how it will serve and support the entire content process and journey.

Video has remarkable scale if used strategically. Combined with complimentary technologies that have emerged over the years, video is the killer app, and it’s right in front of us.

November 10, 2012

Patterns, Perception and New Thinking

I read a great story recently by Paul Valerio on the Fast Company’s Co.DESIGN website that illustrated how patterns are the key to human perception. For me personally it was also a reflection on the creative process and how our common environment can make it difficult to perceive things in new ways.

The article was titled What Astronauts And Toddlers Can Teach You About Consumers – When observing and measuring consumer behavior, tune into the noise and the patterns that drive human perception.

One little-known quirk of the Apollo moon landings was the difficulty the astronauts had judging distances on the Moon. Without “noise” familiar to them the data their minds were trying to process was too pristine. All of the “noise” essential to creating the patterns their minds needed to process the data accurately was missing. And patterns are the key to human perception, especially for experts.

The lesson is that patterns drive perception more so than the integrity of the data that create the patterns. We perceive our way through life; we don’t think our way through it. Thinking is what we do after we realize that our perception has failed us somehow. But because pattern recognition is so powerfully efficient, it’s our default state. The thinking part? Not so much.

Conversely, when searching for new solutions and approaches to problems we are familiar with, the noise patterns that frame our existing perceptions can limit our ability to see things in new ways.

November 3, 2012

Old Habits are Hard to Break

Change is hard. “An A+ for stating the obvious” you are thinking to yourself?

B2B marketing is stuck in “old ways”. Like any generalization, there are exceptions, but they remain the minority. I’ll explain.

Business thrives on process. From process comes efficiency, which is a critical element of success. Consider FedEx and the UPS. Process is their competitive advantage and they have embraced new techniques, structures and core processes to capitalize on fundamental shifts in technology, audience needs and service models. They are winning big because of it.

Process is key to efficiency but a process based on an old set of rules is disaster. In many ways this is the status of B2B marketing.

Marketing is about message, content and audience reach. B2B is adapting to the audience reach part of the model. But it needs deeper analysis. Marketing has not adapted to the message and content processes required to truly capitalize on new distribution models and audience consumption preferences.

The Internet and “digital” has forever changed how buyers evaluate and make purchase decisions. In response, Marketing no longer prints collateral but publishes PDF’s on their websites. Many have adopted “marketing automation” tools to leverage their database. Some discovered video, audio podcasts, eBooks. The list goes on.

Communications teams are blogging and tweeting all day long to capitalize on the power of social media. Many new tools, formats and media are being used, all powerful and with tremendous reach.

But here’s the thing. Few marketing and communications teams are working together to consider the synergy of each effort, or the content required to support each channel. The activities are related and inter-dependent upon each other, though they are often not executed as such.

Engagement is the new buzzword in marketing. Engage with customers, prospects, and partners. “We need to engage online. Establish a conversation.” But for many organizations the teams responsible for customer engagement are not truly engaged with each other. They talk, have meetings and conference calls, but they are not engaged. Why?

Old habits. The approach to content creation, communication, and the structure of organizations has not evolved. B2B has historically undervalued creative, message and content, and they have not yet recognized the need to adapt the process of creating content. One team creates collateral, another press and media communications, and a third owns marketing automation. Other teams own the web, video, and training. Each is focused set of deliverables but not the coordination or relationships of the messages they are delivering.

Unless co-developed, creating a PDF whitepaper to publish on the web and writing a blog post for LinkedIn, without a strategy to leverage their inter-dependencies is not a new approach, just a new distribution method.

Would love to hear your own opinions on this.

October 27, 2012

Video is a Disruptive Force

Video has been an important advertising content format for business since the dawn of television. While remarkably powerful, the reach of video as a business communication tool was limited however to broadcast advertising, infomercials and internal training until the mid 1990’s.

Like the impact to the music industry, news and other business models, the Internet is a disruptive force that will forever change how we use and consume video, including “traditional” broadcast television.

YouTube, while the most visible example of the shift in video creation and distribution, is also an important illustration of the shift in the content itself. Like most other content forms delivered via the Internet, it reflects the extreme ADD (attention deficit disorder) of the audience. Do you glance to the timeline once you click to see how long the video is, thus making a decision to watch or close? It is also an important barometer of the growing micro-segmentation of content.

Why this observation is important is because most B2B video content creators don’t really understand how to adapt to this shift. They have the tools and the desire to leverage it, and every marketing VP wishes they could produce a “viral hit”, but they see video creation with an “old school” perspective. Create a script, read and record the script, edit and publish. But like your website, just because you build it does not mean your audience will find it or even consume it.

This is the foundation of what I will write about in the video section of The-Content-Strategist. Video is a business tool that is far more powerful than anyone realizes and not just in the role of advertising, training or marketing. Video will change how we perceive, create, define and manage “content”. It will become a positive yet disruptive force within the business world.

The shift that we are about to witness in video creation and consumption models, including traditional broadcast television will be as dramatic as iTunes and the mp3 format was to the music industry.

October 12, 2012

Content Engineering

I’d like to be able to claim that I coined the phrase “Content Engineering.” I can’t. I do find myself using it a lot lately though. I don’t know where I first saw it or I would give credit where it is due.

Curious by nature, I googled it the other day and was surprised by the number of results. Wikipedia defines content engineering as “a term applied to an engineering specialty dealing with the issues around the use of content in computer-facilitated environments.” Not exactly consistent with how I’m using the term. Another listing (Brockmann & Company) defines it as the discipline of developing content that greatly improves the rankings of the target site and thereby returns a higher result. Still a fairly technical, application based definition. The best one I found was from Content Marketing Institute which defined the term in an article titled “A New Breed? 7 Roles of the Content Marketing “Engineer” which defines the content engineer as “a marketer who creates and optimizes the many forms of content required to engage social customers, based on the data presented by available analysis tools.” Since the query returned a result of about 1,020,000,000, I stopped there. I’m not that curious, but none of what I did review matched my current interpretation.

So how do I define it? Content Engineering is a strategic collaborative approach to marketing content creation that considers the goals of the message, the channels and media options available for publishing and distribution. Content is designed to fulfill a varied set of communication requirements and objectives, audience targets, media choices, scope, calls to action, scalability and potential delivery mechanisms. It is an orchestrated process that occurs over time. Minimal waste, no duplication of effort, not one and done but a content opera which is measured for effectiveness and refinement.

Content marketing is relatively new and evolving. I’ll probably be curious enough to return to my definition soon to see if it still fits. I’m sure it will likewise evolve.

January 21, 2012

What Does the New B2B Marketing Organization Look Like?

I recently wrote a blog post that suggests addressing the question that has been debated over the past couple years: Who Who should own Social Media – Communications or Marketing? I conclude that it is in fact, the wrong question.

The correct question is this – How should enterprise marketing structures, strategies and processes adapt to the content demands of social media and new rules for audience engagement, enabled by ubiquitous information and all things digital – the web, social media, search engines, etc?

So what does this new approach look like? It is an ecosystem, organized around a common mission, message set and strategic deliverables. It is holistic in approach based on top-down marketing and communications strategy, digitally focused with scale, consistency and repetition as a cornerstone objective. It recognizes that content is marketing currency which must be invested, managed, nurtured and measured for performance (just as the business manages other assets – pipeline, ERP, operations, finance). It also demands a renewed focus on creativity, not only in how we craft compelling messages, but creative in how and where we deliver those messages.

To support B2B social media, marketing departments must work together and across sub-groups as a team, not in silos. The traditional marketing structure fostered discrete approaches and deliverables. It is perhaps this very approach that bred the original question of ownership.

While every effective program requires a manager and owner, marketing as a whole must own responsibility for supporting, enabling and planning the execution of targeted social media activities. Social media teams, be they cross-functional or dedicated, will be enabled by content derivatives of existing marketing message programs and projects.

Consider for a moment a writer staring at a starkly empty page, tasked with delivering a story or message but not knowing where to start. Intimidating. And, time consuming. Yet this is the reality for many social media contributors. What if however, there was a social media toolkit, a central repository of content that marketing assembles in support of current messages and programs? What if that lonely writer could reach into the toolkit and grab a topic that has been prepared, give it a voice, perspective and then publish to one (or more) of the predefined strategic media targets? Tweets, blogs, opinions, all can be prepared and nurtured thru the repurposing of existing content and delivered as a component of every new project.

Each content project can be viewed as an opportunity to support social media and digital channels with new source material. Every document and video can be parsed into small consumable bits and bytes that can be ‘socialized’. This unified approach will not only provide social media contributors with a rich source of topics and content that will make execution much easier, but will also provide a foundation for consistency of voice and message.

Managed properly, every enterprise contributor can have access to source content, with predefined target objectives, back-links, calls to action and strategy supporting an overall editorial program. It can be syndicated to the business partner communities. Regional marketing teams can translate and publish in local languages. All of this expands the digital presence, thought leadership, the base of long-tail keywords and increases the volume of qualified, inbound traffic to your website. It is also much more efficient to execute.

So how is this dilemma resolved? By thinking differently about how business marketing operates as a team.

B2B marketing can no longer be “one and done”. The press release, another email offer, a new whitepaper or brochure, conceived, created, managed separately and thrown at the web team to “post” without continuity to all other activities will at best, fall short of its potential. In the real mission of marketing and communications, it will fail. It will fail to breed repetition, expand your digital footprint, nor will it scale to facilitate social media.

To impact the market today, digital content must be fluid, evolutionary, mutually reinforcing, measured for response, and refined for improvement. And then, repeated. It must be architected and orchestrated, search optimized, published and curated methodically, blogged, tweeted, and repurposed until the cows come home. As a program, it must communicate with directly with your target audience personas needs through a series of compelling messages, targeted to address each phase of the buying cycle. At all times it must communicate to your customer the strength of the company’s vision and position the business as an leader. Just like a good salesperson engages with a prospect, digital marketing must now accomplish this before a prospect will engage with sales.

January 21, 2012

Who should own Social Media – Communications or Marketing?

What is the impact of digital and social media? — How has digital communications and social media changed your approach to content and marketing?

Remember this early debate when social media first emerged as a B2B marketing channel? Since appearing on marketing’s radar, the question of who should ‘own’ social media within the business has echoed across small and large enterprises everywhere. Here is my take – It is the wrong question.

The correct question is this. How should enterprise marketing structures, strategies and processes adapt to the content demands of social media and new rules for audience engagement, enabled by ubiquitous information and all things digital – the web, social media, search engines, etc?

Traditional marketing structures of most enterprises today are outdated. They evolved to meet traditional marketing media. Now they must evolve again to address the new rules of inbound and outbound marketing, press and analyst behaviors, customer expectations and most of all, shifting buy cycle trends. Here’s why.

Let’s explore the traditional B2B model, formed around collateral and interruption-based media of the 20^th century. The typical structure was defined as:

Marketing (brand, collateral, advertising, direct mail, promotions) and
Communications (PR, Analyst relations, media relations).

The term mar-com took root and the web didn’t exist.

Customer awareness was delivered in the form of advertising; information was the role of collateral, trade press and particularly sales, touching customers early in the buying cycle.

Communications handled press and analyst activities by phone, snail mail, PR newswires, and in person. Personal relationships were as important to press and media people as they were to sales. Content was important, dominated by collateral and press releases, perhaps an occasional advertorial. Deeper content produced separately by product management came in the form of manuals and user guides, training educated sales and supported customer product knowledge, all often developed outside of marketing’s view.

Compare that to the digital world we live in today. The web provides people with access to ubiquitous information in almost any form. Customers expect it. It’s no longer about finding customers but making sure customers find you. Customers are now controlling the conversation via the web and social media, and sales touches the customer much later in the buying cycle. Why? Because buyers don’t need to rely on a salesperson for information as they once did. In fact most buyers don’t even want to talk to sales until they’ve already researched and made numerous decisions about what solution provider is likely to meet their needs.

So what does this mean for today’s marketing teams?

It is now the customer’s expectation (and marketing’s responsibility) to produce much greater volumes of content. Content to address a wider audience, in many additional forms and optimized for search to compete with hundreds of thousands of competing information resources. This is the evolution of what is known today as “Content Marketing”. And, we haven’t even begun yet the discussion of social media and how that can be executed by the business, except by inference as it is directly connected.

Call it the perfect storm. On one hand we have much greater demand for content and information enabled by the web and expected by customers. On the other hand, few marketing organizations have seen a corresponding increase in resources to satisfy the insatiable demand. In fact, the recession has reduced most marketing budgets and resources.

Why is the debate about who should own Social Media the wrong question? Because without re-evaluating what we consider to be content, how we produce it, manage it, and scale it, enterprise marketing and communications cannot meet the demands social media and other digital channels present to create a successful marketing engagement, and still fulfill the current definitions of their day jobs.

The answer to the original question? We all must own it. So how does business organize to support it strategically and tactically?