B1BLOG

One of the big themes of our upcom­ing Sum­mit is going to be the impor­tance of con­tent when it comes to gen­er­at­ing leads. My favourite quote on the topic comes from the peo­ple over at the adver­tis­ing giant JWT, who pro­claimed when relaunch­ing the agency that we needed to “stop inter­rupt­ing what peo­ple are inter­ested in, and be what peo­ple are inter­ested in.” Two years on and it still rings true as a clar­ion call to our indus­try. But the fact remains that the bulk of demand gen­er­a­tion spend­ing still gets piled in to intru­sive, inter­rup­tive marketing.

I believe that’s because so many of the prin­ci­ples and think­ing dri­ving mar­ket­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tions are still derived from the old adver­tis­ing world. The more atten­tion spans have short­ened, the more time we’ve spent ago­nis­ing over the sin­gle ‘killer’ con­cept that’s going to stick in people’s heads, the arrest­ing visual that’s going to grab their atten­tion, the call to action that’s going to make them click or pick up the phone.

By com­par­i­son, most agen­cies tend to spend very lit­tle time think­ing about what they’re actu­ally dri­ving peo­ple to. Typ­i­cally, a land­ing page with a visual and head­line that per­haps match the DM piece. A col­lec­tion of all our ana­lyst white papers and prod­uct datasheets. And forms ask­ing cus­tomers to tell us every­thing from their bud­get to their waist size.

What if we were to chan­nel more of our energy and cre­ativ­ity into devel­op­ing the con­tent that actu­ally helps peo­ple decide whether our prod­uct or ser­vice is right for them? Bet­ter still, help them to get stuff that mat­ters to them done. We are look­ing at re-writing our cre­ative briefs so that we force our­selves to think about the con­tent before we dive into the com­mu­ni­ca­tion. The sim­ple logic says if we first make the des­ti­na­tion more attrac­tive, then design­ing the sign­posts that get peo­ple there becomes so much easier.

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