Surviving the content explosion 2018 - icons
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The document discusses how B2B content marketing has exploded in recent years, with marketers producing more content than ever before to engage customers. However, it warns that this content overload has diminished returns, as prospects now have far more information to sift through. It then provides guidance on how to cut through the noise by deeply understanding audiences, creating truly relevant content based on their interests and needs, and properly distributing content to reach the right people.
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- 1. There’s been a content EXPLOSION B2B Lead Generation has changed
- 2. “ 91% of B2B marketers now use content marketing as a foundational piece of their strategy. Content Marketing Institute
- 3. B2B Decision Makers …are being continually engaged with content. They research before talking to sales. They expect access to the information they need, when they want it.
- 4. But now that everyone’s doing it… 72% 60% produce significantly more content than they did a year ago. create at least 1 new piece of content every day. plan to increase their use of original content. …your prospects have more to sift through than ever before when making a B2B purchasing decision. 81% http://marketeer.kapost.com/social-media-content-marketing-stats/ http://neilpatel.com/blog/38-content-marketing-stats-that-every-marketer-needs-to-know/
- 5. The emerging marketing epoch …when exponentially increasing volumes of content intersect our limited human capacity to consume it. “Mark Schaefer https://www.businessesgrow.com/2017/01/16/content-marketing-myths/ “Doug Kessler Velocity It’s inevitable. Marketers are about to experience diminishing returns from our content marketing efforts. https://www.slideshare.net/dougkessler/crap-the-content-marketing-deluge
- 6. …there is more content than your target audience can consume.
- 7. Search results pages are more competitive than ever
- 8. INBOUND JOURNEY SEO/Social Blog Subscribers EmailLanding PageQualification Conversion £
- 9. Content Funnel Awareness [Search/Social] Interest [Lead Generation] Desire [Sales Qualification] e.g. Blogs, Podcasts, Articles, Infographics, Videos, Slideshares e.g. Case Studies, Webinars, Demos e.g. Whitepapers, eBooks, Guides, Business Cases Show the Problem Sell the Solution
- 11. Who is involved in the decision when buying from you?
- 12. Barbra Thrifty budget holder Ed Enthusiastic Exec • Finance Director (Decision Maker) • Responsible for justifying purchase to board • Wants to see statistics and proof • Must be ‘need to have’ not ‘nice to have’ • Marketing Executive (Influencer) • Responsible for campaign ROI • Frustrated with the way things are • Wants to make his mark
- 13. What the prospect wants to achieve. Brand Actually useful information that they can use today Content - Market Fit The solution you offer to solve the problem. Customer
- 14. Finish all my work and get home on time (for once) Brand Ebook: “How ditching spreadsheets can save you hours every day” Finance SaaS Provider Grow customer base for new accounting software Customer
- 15. STAND OUT
- 16. Who are your best customers? Most profitable Revenue potential Customer loyalty Time-to-close New market? Use your CRM & Data to learn…
- 17. http://www.sage.co.uk/software-and-services/accounting-and-finance 1 – 20 employees 5 – 99 employees 50 – 1000 employees 10 – 200 employees Up to 2000 employees
- 19. Creating the content and deciding on an audience aren’t enough. Don’t be shy. You need to get your content in front of your prospects to cut through the noise.
- 20. If they’re up a creek without a paddle, and you give them the paddle, they won’t be annoyed that you interrupted them. https://legomyphoto.wordpress.com/tag/pirates/
- 21. “ We often refer to inbound marketing programs as “air cover” - they run 24/7 and provide a consistent stream of leads… …while the company pursues more targeted, tactical campaigns against specific accounts or market segments. Howard Sewell Spear Marketing
- 22. Intent Funnel Gather Intent Signals Convert Scored Leads Awareness [Digital Signals] Interest [Relationship Building] Desire [In-Market Understanding] Produce outstanding content then track & segment audience Sales Alignment and Enablement Relevant Content Journey & Lead Capture
- 23. “ …having technology, data science, and being able to manage, optimize and coordinate your publishing is the thing that gives you a competitive advantage. Jonah Peretti BUZZFEED https://www.fastcompany.com/3055894/what-buzzfeeds-dao- nguyen-knows-about-data-intuition-and-the-futur
- 24. What should they be interested in? Job Title Segmentation HUMAN RESOURCES Manager Director Influencer TalentL&DHiring Generalist 1 2 7 43 5 6 8 9 10 11 12
- 25. B2B Marketing Content Digital Content Email MarTech CRM Lead Nurturing Customer Data Segmentation Lead Scoring Forms eBooks Video Copywriting CTR 4 12 What are they actually interested in? 1 CONTENT SCORING
- 26. Activation What are their peers interested in? Persona 1 Persona Profile RECOMENDATION Intent Signals Persona 2
- 27. Understand your audience, Deliver truly relevant content, Survive the content explosion.
Editor's Notes
- My name is Ross Howard, I’m the product manager at Inbox Insight. We connect content to business communities globally. Today I’m here to talk about a change in the landscape of B2B marketing that is affecting all of us. If you’ve yet to feel its effects in your particular industry, you likely will soon. There’s been a content EXPLOSION.
- 91% of B2B marketers use content marketing as a foundational piece of their strategy. Why is that?
- It’s fundamentally because of a change in customer behaviour. It’s been discussed at great length elsewhere that B2B decision makers are spending more time researching before they contact a sales team from any given vendor. This change in behaviour means that marketers are producing content to try and get in front of these professionals when they’re researching. This in turn has created an expectation that these professionals should be able to find the information they need, when they want it. This has led to a Content Arms Race, as companies compete for attention from their prospects.
- 72% produce more content than last year. Over half create AT LEAST one new piece of content EVERY DAY Every day. Breakfast. Brush Teeth. Blog Post. 81% don’t think they’re doing enough, and are going to increase the amount they create. This means that when making a purchasing decision, prospects are wading through more and more content trying to find what they need and working out who to trust. As you can see this content cold war is well underway…
- We’re not the only ones who’ve noticed this, of course. Probably the first person to call this out as a problem was Mark Schaefer in his article Content Shock. He points out that with exponentially increasing volumes of content and a static human capacity to consume it we will hit a wall, where most of us won’t get the attention we want from this tactic. And in his amazing slide deck called CRAP, Doug Kessler points out that all this content competition means that we’ll start to see diminishing returns.
- So here we are, we’ve reached the edge. What does it mean for B2B marketing?
- We have many clients in the HR software industry. I’ll use that as an example of this noise. An HR Professional searching for information on best practice talent management is confronted with just under 9 million search results. Even content aimed further down the funnel – for example a query about which solution to buy - has nearly 8 million results. That is far more than they will ever consume, so it becomes a melee to get on the front page of search...
- Inbound journey normally looks like… Search / social Much Blogging Subscribe Email Landing page Qualification Conversion? Inbound funnel, is good and you should def do it, but… There may be unreliable spikes and dips in response, and you are relying on existing demand to make your prospects seek information. You spend your time creating, publishing and posting, building your audience slowly, so that over time you will earn an audience of your own. You have a bit of control through keywords… but you can’t really decide who is searching for you and coming through your landing pages. This can dilute the quality of leads matching your ideal criteria.
- And this battle for attention isn’t just happening in the preliminary research phase – up at the top of the funnel. At every point of the purchase journey it is expected that you will have content to answer questions and keep drawing that prospect further towards the sale. And most of the time you will be competing with your competitors – as they try to drag the prospect into their own content funnel.
- Our publishing platform Insights for Professionals connects content with business people globally. We bring together content from our clients, partners, and create our own around all areas of business knowledge. This means we have a lot of insight into what works when it comes to content marketing performance.
- To write great content you need to write it for the contacts in a company that will make a decision about buying your product. According to CEB on average 5.4 people are now involved in each B2B purchase decision. Who are they?... Talk to sales, or even your customers, look through your CRM data for job roles, and determine who is part of the decision making process. For example on our landing pages in campaigns we will use a question along the lines of: “what is your role in the decision making process for IT Security” We often have this put simply as business function (IT, Marketing, HR etc.) or authority (Manager level and above).
- Use this to construct personas of who you are targeting. Example personas: Eddie the enthusiastic exec – your champion to push for change and influence Barbra the thrifty budget holder – needs convincing of the return on investment Role in purchase Role in Company Pain point Personal motivator Again, when using personas they must be based in reality - you want to back them up with Data wherever possible. Could be anecdotal from sales or customers, Or based on how many contacts you have with that job title in CRM for example.
- Content is your silent sales person – content catches prospects at times your cold calls can’t. So how do you win the hearts and minds of your personas? Create content that fits the market you want to address. Create content that addresses that problem and helps them identify the need to do something about it. This generates demand. Create content that helps them do their job better, or in an easier way. This creates brand loyalty.
- Let’s run through how to apply these personas - E.g. You are a finance SaaS provider. What do finance managers in mid-size companies have as a challenge? Maybe moving from a paper filing to paperless accounting is a headache, or having to manage expenses of a growing workforce manually is becoming time consuming. What might the productivity or financial costs be for trying to muddle through with the existing system?
- Last thing on better content - Stand out, and wherever possible don’t be boring. Here is an example of a white paper we created with Citrix GoToMeeting. This was an asset designed to generate top of the funnel interest and leads. Have a clear value proposition for what they will learn by reading the content. This covers off top tips from Sir Richard Branson – then tells them how to apply it to managing remote teams (sometimes with video conferencing). Use reliable, popular formats to help structure complex business problems in a digestible way: Top 10 tips (all lists) How to’s Myth busters / avoiding pitfalls Hidden costs of X
- Now on to targeting. Company size is a great starting point, but if you want to get a little more granular you can combine strategy and data to select your lead criteria. Look at CRM data (if you have it) to identify factors like Most profit, Revenue potential Most consistent loyalty / multiple purchases, Quickest sale cycles - from open call to closed deal Or even pick an emerging market. Identify commonalities across these to pick out a profile of the perfect client – and build your lead gen criteria around this.
- Line up your product set & content with the companies that have that ‘size and shape’ of need. This aligns the solutions you sell to the problems you customers face. Sage (one of our clients) are good at this… Product Company Size / Number of employees
- If you go through this process to identify your criteria you will naturally exclude prospects, this is good. However, you should be careful not to fall prey to becoming too niche in your targeting. Your sales team might want to pitch only CTOs in companies with between 2000 and 3000 employees, however there are naturally going to be less of these opportunities available. Disclaimer – don’t limit yourself to prospects that are juuuuust right. I call this Goldilocks syndrome and it can sink campaigns. If every lead is a case of ‘Not too big, but not too small..’ you will limit your available quantity of leads and struggle to find enough people to pitch.
- So, you have market leading content, that’s relevant to your carefully selected audience. Now what. Don’t just chuck it in your resources section of the website, or post it a couple of times on social.
- Interruption is not bad IF you are being helpful. If you have followed the steps above, your content and targeting are relevant. If they’re up a creek without a paddle, and you give them the paddle, they aren’t annoyed that you interrupted them,
- Howard Sewell is president of Spear Marketing Group. He makes a good point about the role of inbound. You need to soak up the demand for your product that is out there – but you can more effectively generate quality leads with proactive campaigns. So what does a more targeted campaign look like? Well each of us in this room probably have different processes and software, but I’m going to take you through the underlying concepts about relevance and targeting that we use across the IFP network.
- Right, back to our content funnel. But now we’re looking at what type of content consumption is happening and what we can do to customise that buyers journey. In the awareness phase we want to present the market with outstanding content on subjects that align with what we have the authority to speak about. Now remember, this content is aimed at engaging the maximum number of relevant prospects. Then, at the interest stage, you want to start capturing contact information through lead capture, and building a profile of that individual within your marketing process. The information you gather here should be used to start that prospect on a path of lead nurturing content that is relevant to their needs. When you’ve nurtured that lead enough to build up a score against them – specific to a one of the solutions you sell – then it’s time to pass them through to the sales team to follow up. Align your sales enablement content (case studies, webinars, business cases, FAQs) with the topic they’ve scored the highest for to ensure maximum results.
- This is a quote from the CEO of Buzzfeed, why is that relevant for B2B marketing?! I have this written on the wall next to my team’s desk. I do it to remind them that we should be at least as good as the B2C sector when it comes to profiling and segmenting our audiences. Their content is “39 Overly Adorable Kittens To Brighten Your Day” or “What Pizza Topping Are You?” – that flies of the shelves! As B2B marketers our content might be about “Best practice guide to hyper-converged storage in the enterprise” We’re the ones that really need to zero in on who is going to be the most interested, and most relevant, for our content marketing to work. You have to be aware of your audiences preferences and behaviour, and bend your distribution of content to match.
- So. Where to start. Well first of all I find it helps to make simple personalisation decisions based on what we know for sure about our audience. If you’re capturing job title information on the leads you generate then you might already have a picture of what they are responsible for. Just by personalising your campaign by authority and specialism you’ll end up with 12 segments.
- Now if we get clever we can base this optimisation on the prospects own behaviour to see what they are actually interested in. Say within B2B Marketing I’ve categorised the content I produce. Then within that content there were all sorts of topics and keywords being discussed. I can map the preferences of my audience across those topics and start building segments based on what they’re most interested in. As they express interest by consuming content we want to capture that and feed them more content on the same, or similar, subjects. Building this content habit around relevance moves prospects further along their buying journey.
- How do we define relevance in a way that we can scale? Define and profile your audience into features, be it e.g. job title, demographics, e.g. intent /content consumption delivery channel e.g. web, email, mobile. Then use these to identify patterns, and look for the people that you haven’t reached yet, but that look like your target prospect. Remember all that data we used for content creation? Now you can leverage it again to make predictive marketing decisions. See if you can identify new audiences based on 4 out of 5 of those matching features. This is how emerging technologies like AI and machine learning power their recommendation engines – but it is possible to do manually with enough effort and a bit of tactical thinking.
- Phew, complex stuff. But if you take one thing away from today make it this: You’ll never out run the content explosion in B2B marketing. Your audience has to contend with more content than ever before But by understanding what they care about, and being truly relevant, you can thrive in the new landscape