The award-winning marketing expert, Jeff Ogden of Find New Customers finds a lot of marketing content on BtoB sellers websites. Some of it is pretty good. Some of it is atrocious.
But most of it, I think, misses the mark of delivering revenue because of five key flaws:
- They lack deep buyer personas
- They’ve not mapped buyer variables, like job title, buying stage, problem area, etc.
- Their content lacks Catch Factors (Ardath Albee term) - hooks to keep them engaged.
- They lack a marketing automation system to deliver the right content at the right time to the right person.
- They don’t have content stored properly so they can recall and deliver the right message at the right time.
Remember, the goal of content marketing is to move prospective buyers through a buying process. Most BtoB marketing content fails to accomplish that goal.
Content marketing requires deep insights, a real plan, the right tools and the right approach.
I suggest you check out Avitage and Junta42, as well as the numerous experts out there. By the way, Marketo has a great list of Sales and Marketing experts on the Marketing Moguls page. (including us)
What do you think? We love comments, re-tweets and Likes. All those are here. Thanks.
Jeff Ogden, the Fearless Competitor, is President of Find New Customers “Lead Generation Made Simple.” He’s also the author of three highly acclaimed white papers
- How to Find New Customers (sponsored by Marketo,)
- Definitive Guide to Making Quota, and
- Moving from Transactional to Conversational Email Marketing (sponsored by Genius.com)
as well the e-book, Prospect Driven Marketing (with Communication Strategy Group) and holds a degree in Marketing from the University of Notre Dame. (Notre Dame is teaching B2B marketing to the next generation using this content.)
Find New Customers helps business develop and implement programs to drive more sales leads by improving the way they find and acquire new customers using best practices in lead generation.
Jeff, you’re right that the ultimate goal of creating B2B content is to move lead towards qualification and a sales. And yes, most B2B content isn’t working.
A lot of it still has to do with pain, not education. We marketers can educate until the cows come home but the final challenge is making the customer believe his pain will go away with your particular solution. Case studies and testimonials can help, but #4 is going to take a time for marketers to understand when exactly the right time to present content is.
The next few months/years will be interesting as this evolves (which it appears to be doing quickly)
Cheers.
Thanks for the comment, Joe, and I agree with you.
The problem is that people focus on the delivery, not the message.
My old boss wanted to know how many emails I’d sent out each week, but if I tried to sit him down to work out what was special in one of the products or how we appeal to a particular customer group he would find an excuse to be somewhere else.
Churchill is supposed to have said “I’ve written you a long letter, because I didn’t have time to write you a short one. So many case studies, web pages etc. are simply brain outpourings, with little thought given to appeal to the reader, key points, strategy in communication or anything else. It is simply “write a page and send it off to the agency to put in some stock pictures”.
If you’re going to have a content strategy, the first thing you need is great content!
Thanks for the note, Peter, and I agree with you. It’s not quality, but rather quality that really matters. The more personal it is, the more effective it is.
Jeff Ogden
Find New Customers
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