Today's B2B buyer is overwhelmed with more information than they could ever consume. The last thing they want is to read your product-centric content. Instead, you need to build a content hub that helps your buyers. Enclosed here you will find my slides and main speaker notes from the B2B Content 2 Conversion Conference Preparing To Build Your Content Hub Before you can begin building your content marketing destination, you need to understand (and be able to articulate) that your role as a B2B Marketer is not to explain to the world what it is that you sell. But to show the world how what you sell helps your buyers. That's right, B2B Marketing is not about promotion. It is about telling stories. Stories from your customer's point of view on how what you sell has helped them. In my presentation I present a brief history of how the world has changed for marketers. And yet, stories remain a critical component of marketing. Stories present an opportunity for B2B Marketers to not just meet the needs of our buyers, but to delight them as we enable them during the buying journey. The Content Hub Business Case The next step is to present your business case. To build a content marketing hub, you need to show how your current content marketing efforts fail to meet the needs of your buyers. A couple of ideas: Search metrics: show how your business is missing out on vital conversations happening in the earliest stages of the buying process. Web analytics: show how most visitors to your site already know who you are. Content analytics: show how the content you create is mostly late stage or isn't being downloaded by anyone. Calculate the costs of this waste. Once you've presented your business case and gained the approval to move forward, you can take the following steps to build your content hub. Here are the 8 Steps to Build A Content Hub That Converts 1. Design: Look at existing market examples to help you design the site. Weigh the pros and cons of building within your existing domain or creating a new one 2. Branding: Define how subtle or prominent the branding will be on the site 3. Keywords: Conduct a ton of keyword research to determine the topics your audience is interested in 4. Content Strategy: Define the content strategy and sources of your content: how much will you create, curate or syndicate the content that meets your buyers' needs 5. Conversion: define the processes that will pull your visitors into an active relationship that converts down the sales funnel. Focus on creating value for the user and test different approaches. 6. Editorial: Create an editorial board including all your brands' content resources 7. Goals: Articulate your goals and report on them consistently 8. Test and Learn: dream up new ideas to test, analyze the results, learn and repeat.

2. Content Marketing:
Why & How To Build Your Content Hub
Michael Brenner
Vice President Marketing & Content Strategy @SAP
@BrennerMichael

5. My Story (Briefly)

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Me, 20 pounds years ago
@BrennerMichael

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Today we are all connected
@BrennerMichael

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What is Marketing?
“The aim of marketing is to know
and understand the customer
so well the product or service fits
him and sells itself…
~Milan Kundera
… The aim of marketing is to
make selling superfluous.”
~ Peter F. Drucker
“Marketing is too important to be
left to the marketing department.”
~ David Packard

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@BrennerMicha

14. Consumers are bombarded with
5,000 marketing messages per day

15. 2/3 of US on the “Do Not Call” list

16. 86% of people skip television ads

17. 44% of direct mail is never opened

18. 99.9% of banners never clicked

19. 90% of emails are never opened
and 99.5% don’t get a single click

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What’s Wrong With Our Content? It’s Too Much Like This…
@BrennerMichael

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And Not Enough Like This…
@BrennerMichael

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@BrennerMichael

23. Our Story

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What is a Content Strategy?
• Delivering the content your audience needs, in all the
places they go (by persona, buyer stage, channel, type)
• Managing content as an asset with an ROI
• Thinking and Acting like a publisher (like a business)

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Social Media
(Get Shared)
Lead
Generation
(Get Leads)
Search Engine
Optimization
(Get Found)
STORYTELLING
Why Is Content Marketing Important?
From: Joe Pulizzi, Content Marketing Institute

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The buyer journey starts with a search . . .
Customer Questions:
• What is real-time analytics?
• What is cloud computing?
• What is Big Data?
• What are mobile solutions?
• How are companies benefiting
from … ?
• Who are the top vendors in … ?
3000 X
-2 X
1000 X
17 X
28 X
40 X
-2 X
7 X
24 X
13 X

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How Much “Early Stage” Search Traffic Do We Get?
Later Stage Visitor:
Asks “SAP Software”
• 100s of searches / mo
Early Stage Visitor:
Asks “What is Big Data?”
100,000’s of searches / month

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•99.9% of our web traffic from
visitors who already know us
or bought from us.
•Less than 0.1% were net-new
or early-stage prospects
•Less than 10 keywords
generated all the early-stage
search traffic
We Were Not Answering Our Customers Top Questions

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Business Innovation (launched March 27, 2012)
A “Content Hub” to earn traffic instead of buying it
 Design: “Subtly” Branded
 Target: Business Execs+
 Stage: Early- to Mid-stage
 Editorial: Keyword-driven
 Content:
No Budget
100s of authors (“Author Curation”)
~50% external
 CTA: Subscribe, Offers, Explore
 Market examples: AMEX Open Forum, CMO.com, BCGPerspectives, AT&T Networking Exchange

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Created a Business Innovation “Editorial Board”
• Marketing Program / Campaigns
• Solution Marketing / Product Management
• Customer References
• Thought Leadership / “Corporate Story” (About Us)
• Global Communications and Local PR
• Value Engineering
• Competitive Marketing Intelligence / Market Research
• Partner / Channels
• Regional Marketing
• Internal Bloggers
• External Influencers

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Other People’s Content (OPC) - Content Curation
• Google Alerts for topics
• Research Reports
• Studies
• Whitepapers
• From any source:
• Analysts
• Competitors
• Consultants
• Assign to “volunteers”
• ALWAYS attribute source!

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• Traffic, connections and leads
we would’ve NEVER seen
• 2000+ articles published
(1+ / topic, 12-15 / day)
• 100s inbound links, up to
• 50% traffic from Social,
Search and Direct
• 83% search terms are Non-
branded or product terms
• 100s of Registrations, Chats,
Calls, visits to Store and
solution pages on SAP.com
Created An Infographic to Report on Goals:
Reach, Engagement AND Conversions

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Organic & Social Traffic “Up and To The Right”

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Most Popular Articles (10X average Pageviews)
•Top 50 Influencers for each topic
•Top 10 Blog Sites for each topic
•Terms You Need To Know
•Myths…Busted
•10 Predictions for…
•What is…?
•The First Step to Success in…
•How To Get Ahead With…

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Business Innovation From SAP: What’s Next?
Help Our Customers Tell Their Stories
• Adding “Our Stories”
• Dynamic Homepage experience!
• More visual (more $$$)
• Focus on Subscribers
• Curated, native, FULL LENGTH
content licensed from 3rd Parties

36. Our Content Ecosystem

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Activating SAP Employees: Where to blog?
Business Innovation, Forbes, “SAP Community Network”
Where million of engaged
professionals discuss the
intersection of IT and business
strategy.
http://scn.sap.com/community/business-trends
Connecting SAP thought
leaders to the business
leaders on Forbes..
http://blogs.forbes.com/sap/
Earning an engaged audience
by answering customer
questions to help them
innovate and grow.
http://blogs.sap.com/innovation/

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Paid, Owned, and Earned + Converged Examples
Paid Owned Earned Converged
Orchestrates POE to
maximize pull activity

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A Content Hub Run Like a Business
PAID Converged EARNED
Awareness Ads
Demand Gen extensions:
E-mail, digital assets, mailers
Paid social promotion: Via
Twitter, Linked-In, Facebook,
YouTube
Life
Business Innovation
SAP.com:
Sales Demo Tools Events
Social Communities:
- Twitter, Linked, facebook, G+
PR: Content promoted and
showcased via Press Releases
and PR initiatives
Publish stories
OWNED

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Forbes “BrandVoice”: A Blogging Platform For Premium
Advertisers

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Business Insider: Future of Business Site Sponsorship

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NYTimes “Ricochet”: Wraps Ads Around Curated Content

43. Thank
you!
Michael Brenner
Vice President,
SAP Marketing & Content Strategy
Michael.Brenner@SAP.com
Connect with Me:
Slides available on:
Slideshare.net/MichaelBrenner
Marketing Blog:
B2B Marketing Insider
SAP Content Hub:
Business Innovation
Twitter:
@brennermichael