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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

With the next Demand Gen­er­a­tion Sum­mit just a couple of days away, one ques­tion to ask is once you’ve got the leads, then what?

For clas­sic B2B sales this often ends up in a con­ver­sa­tion around the hand-off pro­cess to sales and closed loop mar­ket­ing. But just as import­ant a ques­tion is: is your web­site play­ing its part?

Over on Con­ver­sion Rate Experts they have an excel­lent art­icle of the worst offend­ers when it comes to killing a lead stone dead. These include:

• The ‘empty cart’ but­ton posi­tioned where you’d expect the ‘sub­mit’ button
• The ‘too easy to click’ but­ton (or hover state) where you have to have the pre­ci­sion of a ninja to select what you need
• Ses­sion expir­ies (I’m glad this one is on because it sends me postal)

It’s a great art­icle and they are also look­ing for sub­mis­sions for a hall of shame.

Image by Mugley on Flickr

From Flickr Cre­at­ive Commons

There’s a com­ment that gets made about mil­it­ary strategy that goes some­thing like: when the war starts the first thing to go out of the win­dow is the plan.

While in mar­ket­ing no one is gen­er­ally in danger of dying (at least not in the kind I do), the prin­ciple is a pretty sound one. If, like me, you’ve sat in any num­ber of plan­ning and strategy ses­sions, you can quickly get the idea that the future is being mapped in front of your eyes. First this will hap­pen, then that, then that… It’s quite seductive.

But, of course, the world doesn’t work that way. As soon as you do X, your com­pet­it­ors will sim­ul­tan­eously do Y and the whole damn mar­ket will do Z. At around this point, all that future-gazing slide­ware doesn’t look quite so cer­tain anymore.

Of course, this is a prob­lem the mil­it­ary had to over­come some time back (primar­ily in the wake of the carnage dur­ing World War I). The res­ult was an approach that spent a long time determ­in­ing the over­all object­ives (the ‘commander’s intent’) and which left pre­cise tac­tics to officers in the field who were empowered to adapt to chan­ging cir­cum­stances as long as they kept mov­ing towards that over­all intent.

The approach was then fur­ther refined (primar­ily by US Air Force Col­onel John Boyd) to focus on the abil­ity to make very fast, very adapt­able decisions (within a ‘decision loop’) that would out­man­oeuvre the opposition.

It’s a prin­ciple that, I believe, is crit­ical for today’s mar­keters. You will never be in pos­ses­sion of per­fect vis­ib­il­ity. Events will never pan out exactly how you envis­age them. That’s just life.

The key is to have a robust, defens­ible ‘commander’s intent’ and to look at strategy more from the per­spect­ive of if X then Y rather than first X then Y. And finally, to never be wed­ded to any one set of tac­tics – if tra­di­tional media isn’t work­ing, shift to social media, if that isn’t work­ing try face-to-face. Bet­ter still try mul­tiple approaches in a low-cost way and let the fit­test sur­vive and thrive. In doing so, you can cre­ate a liv­ing strategy that can react and adapt to chan­ging cir­cum­stances while they are chan­ging and while there is time to make a dif­fer­ence in the market.

Admit­tedly, I’ve come a bit late to the whole Twit­ter thing (and I’ve always tried to be such an early adop­ter – well, ok, BMX bikes passed me by too – and don’t tell any­one but I’m not on FaceBook).

As it stands, a whole week in, I can kind of see the attrac­tion of Twit­ter. Essen­tially, it allows me to get a quick thought out without writ­ing a whole blog post. Of course there’s also the abil­ity to stay in vicari­ous touch with other people — either those I know or those I’ve heard of. But really it’s a time thing.

It’s inter­est­ing to note that at one time put­ting your per­sonal thoughts ‘out there’ meant cre­at­ing a web­site (well, there was a bit of a period pre-internet but let’s skip past that one). Updat­ing was a pain and not exactly con­du­cive to a dynamic, real time experience.

More recently came blog­ging which made pub­lish­ing the con­tent of your head way, way easier. Every­body waded in, writ­ing lots, updat­ing reg­u­larly. Until life and work got in the way and the posts began appear­ing at more sed­ate intervals.

Now, with the impos­i­tion of the 140 char­ac­ter limit, dash­ing off a quick thought is, well, pretty quick. It’ll be inter­est­ing to see how this latest phe­nomenon affects the volume of blog posts. Will people increas­ingly take the quick and easy over the con­sidered? We’ll see.

Of course, this makes me won­der about what comes next. Micro-tweeting with a 20 char­ac­ter limit? Emoticons only? Only time will tell.

It is per­haps stag­ger­ingly unsur­pris­ing that most mar­keters and their agen­cies spend most of their time in search of solu­tions for their brands.

After all, we all want to get to the right answer as soon as humanly pos­sible (if not sooner). It also provides the sat­is­fac­tion of actu­ally doing (and be seen to be doing) some­thing, any­thing – quick, unleash the mar­ket­ing ninjas (if only there really were mar­ket­ing ninjas).

The trouble is – this is kind of dumb.

It’s far bet­ter to spend qual­ity time (as much as you can spare) really under­stand­ing what the prob­lem is. The real prob­lem, not just the one you think it is. The strange thing is when you do, quite often the real prob­lem is quite dif­fer­ent than the one you thought it was.

Your motto in this should be the Buddhist mantra:

Don’t just do some­thing, sit there

Now let me pause for a moment to make one thing abso­lutely clear: I’m not say­ing we should all sit around inspect­ing our navels while the mar­ket goes whist­ling past. Speed is still of the essence. For­tune favours the agile. And ana­lysis para­lysis won’t get you anywhere.

But… if I had just just an hour to come up with a solu­tion, I’d prefer to spend 40 minutes of it get­ting to the bot­tom of the real prob­lem (and prob­ably another 10 minutes rede­fin­ing it) than to have a whole hour with a pad and a marker.

Unbe­liev­able I know. But check out the video below to get a glimpse of a future where you’ll be able to use a computer-based ‘sys­tem’ to access and read the news (well the future as seen from 1981 anyway).

I love the quote by one of the news­pa­per guys, “We don’t expect to make any money.”

Also, check out the home user’s modem with the rub­ber cups to put the phone hand­set into – the first modem I ever used was almost identical to this.

Those were the days.

Source: NOTCOT

IDC has made a new report avail­able on Slide­share: Selling in 2009: 10 Ways to find, Win and Keep the Money (embed­ded below). It takes a long hard look at the year ahead and what it means for IT com­pan­ies want­ing to sur­vive and thrive in the year ahead. It is pre­dom­in­antly US-based but many of the recom­mend­a­tions are just as valid in Europe (though the tim­ing may be out by six months or so).

While it gives a slightly mixed pic­ture of just what tech com­pan­ies are up against, there are some clear take-outs for sales and mar­ket­ing people. It makes some pretty plaus­ible, pretty harsh pre­dic­tions, including:

1. Selling strategies that worked last year will not work in 2009
2. Com­pan­ies that sig­ni­fic­antly reduce their sales and mar­ket­ing invest­ments in 2009 will be gone by mid 2010
3. Com­pan­ies that blame their lack of selling on the eco­nomy will also fail by mid 2010
4. Sales organ­isa­tions will be asked to do more with less (no news there)
5. Com­pan­ies that shift head­count to inside sales will provide sim­ilar levels of cus­tomer touch at lower cost…and driver higher cus­tomer satisfaction
6. Sales organ­isa­tions that bol­ster ded­ic­ated invest­ments in lead qual­ity and demand gen­er­a­tion will be rewar­ded with sig­ni­fic­antly higher sales productivity

There’s more in the report but that gives a fair indication.

It’s inter­est­ing that over 60% of respond­ents feel as con­fid­ent or more con­fid­ent about the pro­spects for sales in the next six months versus the last six months. IDC them­selves pro­ject rev­en­ues on the whole as either stay­ing flat or increas­ing mod­er­ately (although the more com­mod­ity end of the hard­ware mar­ket doesn’t look so pretty).

The scar­i­est thing in there for me is the con­tinu­ing lack of align­ment between mar­ket­ing and sales. On hardly any meas­ure did respond­ents rate their align­ment at over 50%. For­tu­nately, the one area that rated (slightly) over the mid­way mark is demand gen­er­a­tion as this will be a crit­ical factor in the com­ing year or two.

At Ban­ner, we’ve seen the rapid change of focus into demand gen­er­a­tion activ­it­ies in the last six months. Our timely part­ner­ship with Elo­qua has cer­tainly paid off as has the suc­ces­sion of people we’ve sent on train­ing as we’ve recently seen a shift into mul­tiple pro­jects involving con­tent cre­ation, sales enable­ment, demand gen­er­a­tion and lead nuture.

While these could simply be a sign of the times, I per­son­ally believe that these kinds of pro­grammes will form the bed­rock for the major­ity of tech­no­logy com­pan­ies’ activ­it­ies for some con­sid­er­able time to come. And while this may be driven by neces­ity right now, in the long term it could pay huge dividends for tech­no­logy com­pan­ies that get it right.

[slide­share id=923821&doc=idc-2009-sales-barometer-top-ten-predictions-1232120663160379–3]

Chan­geThis has been invit­ing people to nom­in­ate their top busi­ness books, (the ones that actu­ally made a dif­fer­ence rather than the ones you picked up in an air­port and didn’t get past chapter four). Now, in a delight­fully post-modern twist, there’s going to be a book about the books – The 100 Best Busi­ness Books of All Time. You can see the list of those that made it here.

Are these the best busi­ness books of all time?

All the usual sus­pects are there Good to Great, In Search of Excel­lence, Tip­ping Point, Get­ting Things Done (which I own and have never fin­ished to my wife’s con­stant amuse­ment). It’s a good list.

The ones that I would have nom­in­ated that are already in include: Flow by the fant­ast­ic­ally named Mihaly Csikzent­mi­halyi, A New Brand World by Scott Bed­bury, the bril­liant Orbit­ing the Giant Hairball by Gor­don MacK­en­zie and The Art of Innov­a­tion by Tom Kelley.

Ones I would add:

• The Art of Pos­sib­il­ity by Ben­jamin and Ros Zander – my all time favour­ite and one of the few I return to again and again. Par­tic­u­larly rel­ev­ant just now it gives an uplift­ing view of liv­ing, work­ing and man­aging today.
• Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath – the best storytelling book I’ve come across with some real prac­tical insights that I use time and again.
• Unstuck by Keith Yamashita and Sandra Spataro – great, quick fire ways of think­ing your­self out of problems.
• Slideo­logy by Nancy Duarte – the best book on present­a­tion design ever by a long, long way.
• How Cus­tom­ers Think by Ger­ald Zalt­man – a com­plete eye-opener that clearly demon­strates that there is no such thing as a rational decision.
• We, Me, Them and It by John Sim­mons – the best book on writ­ing for busi­ness (all his other books are pretty damn good too).

Hav­ing said this, one thing about the 100 best list and the books on it – there is a danger with adopt­ing such a canon of work that we fall into a sort of busi­ness and mar­ket­ing ortho­doxy. So, if I want per­mis­sion mar­ket­ing, I read Seth Godin. Present­a­tions it’s Garr Reyn­olds. Viral it’s Mal­colm Glad­well. While I love all these books, it’s really import­ant that we reg­u­larly step out­side the accep­ted canon (in fact out­side busi­ness alto­gether) to find truly fresh, ori­ginal thinking.

Too many the­or­ies (par­tic­u­larly in mar­ket­ing) become estab­lished largely down to a catchy title and an enga­ging writ­ing style without the evid­ence to back them up. As inter­est­ing and fun as this can be, it can also cost a whole heap of money for very little return.

Now, time to get back to our new Twitter-based campaign…

(Image by But­ter­fly­sha on Flickr)

It’s not too often I get com­pletely wowed by a new piece of tech­no­logy but Prezi has com­pletely bowled me over.

In a nut­shell, Prezi is a Flash-based present­a­tion sys­tem that allows users to cre­ate incred­ibly dynamic present­a­tions. Present­a­tions where you can zoom in and out across a large area (no slides), cre­ate motion paths, embed images and video and do things that pre­vi­ously needed a pretty com­pet­ent Flash developer and a whole chunk of time. It kicks tra­di­tional slide­ware way into touch.

And it is very, very easy.

Here’s a quick snapshot:

[youtube=http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=oIJ2cH9EyhA]

Prezi is cur­rently in private beta but I got to spend a bit of time this after­noon play­ing with it. I took my recent writ­ing academy deck (which you can see on Slide­share here) and put it into Prezi. You can see the res­ult here (as long as I’ve got the shar­ing right) – simply click on the right arrow at the bot­tom right of the screen to move through the presentation).

While I’ve gone a bit zoom-tastic, con­sider this took just a couple of hours and required that I only had to watch a few 1 minute videos to work out how to do it. And I can down­load a final ver­sion of the present­a­tion as a stan­dalone file.

There are lim­it­a­tions in terms of fonts and col­ours at the moment (which the developers are work­ing on) but even as it stands, it is very cool.

So there you go, zero to fan­boy in a single afternoon.

OK, so I’m prob­ably one of the few people in the world not to see the whole she­bang live but read­ing the tran­script in the paper today I was awe­struck by the writ­ing. It man­aged to be grand without being too gran­di­ose. It felt fresh but still hit the right tone for a world-stage occasion.

There were some beau­ti­ful phrases:

To those who cling to power through cor­rup­tion and deceit and the silen­cing of dis­sent, know that you are on the wrong side of his­tory; but that we will extend a hand if you are will­ing to unclench your fist.

And:

Now, there are some who ques­tion the scale of our ambi­tions – who sug­gest that our sys­tem can­not tol­er­ate too many big plans. Their memor­ies are short. For they have for­got­ten what this coun­try has already done; what free men and women can achieve when ima­gin­a­tion is joined to com­mon pur­pose, and neces­sity to courage.

And:

As we con­sider the road that unfolds before us, we remem­ber with humble grat­it­ude those brave Amer­ic­ans who, at this very hour, patrol far-off deserts and dis­tant moun­tains. They have some­thing to tell us, just as the fallen her­oes who lie in Arling­ton whis­per through the ages.

Lovely stuff.

The speech uses many of the rhet­or­ical rules and yet knows exactly when to break them for effect.

The papers are all count­ing up the most used words – the word ‘ter­ror’ gets just a single men­tion for instance. Of course, online there are bet­ter ways of doing this using the likes of Wordle which pro­duces this:

You can see the ori­ginal (and make your own) here.

And for the word geeks out there, I’ve also done a quick mark-up of the speech itself to pull out some of the tech­niques I find inter­est­ing. You can down­load a PDF here.