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Con­tent mar­ket­ing is one of today’s hot mar­ket­ing top­ics – par­tic­u­larly in B2B. It’s been fuelled by the per­cep­tion that tra­di­tional push mar­ket­ing doesn’t work in a social media dri­ven world – it’s too shal­low, too manip­u­la­tive, too inauthentic.

While this view is almost cer­tainly over­stated (plenty of push mar­ket­ing cam­paigns are still gen­er­at­ing healthy responses) it has a point. There is a wide­spread desire on the part of cus­tomers for more human, less spun com­mu­ni­ca­tions that add value to their deci­sions rather than mud­dy­ing the waters.

The answer for many mar­keters is con­tent. While it is being touted as the bright shiny new thing, there is of course noth­ing really new about con­tent itself (white papers, for exam­ple, have been around for as long as the tech­nolo­gies they talk about). The new news is really in the shift­ing of con­tent to the core of B2B mar­ket­ing strat­egy and the explo­sion of dis­tri­b­u­tion channels.

Cre­at­ing com­pelling content

The key to devel­op­ing an effec­tive con­tent mar­ket­ing strat­egy is, as with all mar­ket­ing, rel­e­vance. More than ever you need to step into your cus­tomers’ shoes. What are they strug­gling with? What do they need to know? How can you help them? (Note: help not sell.)

On top of this, why would your cus­tomers send your con­tent on to their col­leagues and fiends? What value are you adding? This brings me on to…

Con­tent shouldn’t be pas­sive or sta­tic or a one-off

Going back to the white paper, there is a dan­ger that con­tent is viewed as the Switzer­land of mar­ket­ing – neu­tral, dis­en­gaged, pas­sive. The real­ity is quite dif­fer­ent. While con­tent does not assume the overt sales role of adver­tis­ing or direct mar­ket­ing, it should be any­thing but pas­sive. Good con­tent is a con­ver­sa­tion. It engages the audi­ence. It is part of a process (not sim­ply the end of one).

It is crit­i­cally impor­tant to take the long view of your con­tent mar­ket­ing pro­gramme – how does one piece of con­tent lead to another? How and where are you invit­ing cus­tomer par­tic­i­pa­tion? What tools are you build­ing in to help cus­tomers achieve their aims (and which will give your con­tent a viral aspect)?

Think once, cre­ate many

As I men­tioned above, there are now a wider vari­ety of ways to deliver con­tent. So when cre­at­ing your con­tent, don’t sim­ply stop at the usual sus­pects (eg vari­a­tions on a PDF doc­u­ment). Not every­one wants to read off screen.

So in addi­tion to ebooks, cre­ate vari­a­tions of the con­tent as a pod­cast, pre­sen­ta­tion, video, an editable wiki, blog post, dead tree book, a newslet­ter, a webi­nar, an appli­ca­tion or wid­get – and that’s just for starters. Of course, you don’t have to do the lot but by widen­ing out the media you use you will widen the reach and increase the effec­tive­ness of search.

And dis­trib­ute everywhere

There are so many dis­tri­b­u­tion options for con­tent it’s stag­ger­ing. For PDF-like mate­r­ial (docs and pre­sen­ta­tions) – check out Slideshare, Scribd, Hub­Pages, Authorstream and Slide­boom. For video there is, of course, YouTube (where you can cre­ate a branded chan­nel quickly and eas­ily) but also Vimeo, Dai­ly­mo­tion and a bunch of oth­ers. For pod­cast­ing, there are iTunes, Pod­cast Alley and many more. And for com­mu­nity there are LinkedIn, Biznik, Face­book or, if you want to cre­ate your own, Ning.

Then there’s pro­mo­tion which can cover every­thing from tra­di­tional media through to rich online media hous­ing your con­tent and on to Twit­ter, blogs, RSS, Deli­cious, Digg, Stum­ble­Upon – the list goes on and on.

The trick, once again, is to take a holis­tic view of your entire pro­gramme. Although, impor­tantly, to also relin­quish con­trol allow­ing your audi­ences to share and dis­trib­ute your con­tent too.

Isn’t all this just thought lead­er­ship in new clothes?

Well yes and no. Thought lead­er­ship is a legit­i­mate and laud­able aim of a con­tent mar­ket­ing pro­gramme. But it is not the only aim. The end result of pretty much any con­tent mar­ket­ing pro­gramme should be the per­cep­tion that you are the go-to peo­ple to talk to. How­ever, pure play thought lead­er­ship is not the only game in town.

If we have all learned any­thing in the last cou­ple of years, it’s that com­mu­nity mat­ters. Con­sumer gen­er­ated con­tent has already gained adop­tion in B2C. And B2B itself has a long his­tory of round tables and tes­ti­mo­nial case stud­ies. What this means is that it is not always nec­es­sary to be the thought leader as long as you know the peo­ple who are and can get access to their heads and opinions.

5 approaches to try for starters

There are numer­ous approaches you can take to begin devel­op­ing a con­tent mar­ket­ing pro­gramme. Here are 5 to get you going:

1. Grow your own expert – every busi­ness has a few experts (in B2B they tend to have more than a few). Find yours and use their brain(s) mer­ci­lessly. If they are artic­u­late and pre­sentable, use the rest of them too. Just make sure you remem­ber this is about help­ing cus­tomers (not show­ing off).
2. Rent some­one else’s expert – short on experts? Need greater impar­tial­ity? Speak to an ana­lyst house to help you cre­ate high value con­tent with­out it being tainted by the sus­pi­cion of spin.
3. Make a stand – what do you hate in the mar­ket? More impor­tantly, what do your cus­tomers hate? Take a stand, rail against it, begin a movement.
4. Research – tra­di­tional or social research can arm you with invalu­able con­tent and an excuse to engage cus­tomers and prospects. Make it really good and it could get you on Radio 4.
5. Com­mu­nity of gurus – bring cus­tomers and part­ners together to cre­ate a thought lead­er­ship com­mu­nity. Run invitation-only sum­mits and round tables. Cre­ate a home for them online. Hang a forum off it for every­one else to get involved. Poll for opin­ion and incor­po­rate it into the discussions.

There are of course many, many other options.

I’ll leave you with a final round up:

• Con­tent is an impor­tant tool for today’s B2B marketers
• It is fun­da­men­tally about help­ing cus­tomers achieve more
• You need to take a holis­tic view
• Think once, cre­ate many
• Dis­trib­ute everywhere

Related posts:

1. Top 10 mobile mar­ket­ing campaigns
2. Nav­i­gat­ing Mar­ket­ing 2.0 (part 1): social networks
3. Agile mar­ket­ing (or why the plan is never the plan)
4. Nav­i­gat­ing Mar­ket­ing 2.0 (part 3): open source
5. Con­tent comes before communication