Effective Content Marketing Comes From Effective Drilling
Posted on 08. Feb, 2011 by Tony Wanless in B2B Marketing, Content, expertise marketing
Content marketing demands much more knowledge about prospects’ hopes and fears and problems than traditional marketing.
It appears a six-month old report on the state of B2B content marketing is as prescient now as it was when it was released in Sept. 2010.
The report, prepared by the Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs, found the biggest challenges facing B2B marketers using content was “producing engaging content (36%), producing enough content (21%) and finding budget to produce content (20%)”.
I’d submit that they’re still major challenges as we start off on another year in which content marketing is likely to increase.
And that kind of marketing will increase. Fifty-one percent of B2B marketers said they planned to increase their content marketing spend in the next 12 months. Also, if personal evidence is any indication, much of that increased spending kicked in at the beginning of 2011: I have been contacted by several traditional B2B companies in this new year about starting content marketing campaigns.
Their reasons appear to be two fold:
- They believe content marketing will enable them to cut through the marketing clutter and better engage potential clients or customers.
- They see content marketing as more cost effective than traditional, shotgun-style marketing.
Both these beliefs are true to an extent. But both are also deceptively false if only the surface is examined.
For example, the belief that B2B marketing based on content will enable marketers to better communicate with TARGET clients and customers, has been proven by metrics. However, the same report also showed that from 44% to 69% (dependent on the content used) of B2B marketers were not confident in the effectiveness of their various content marketing efforts.
This indicates that marketers, to some extent, may still be taking the shotgun approach –blast away and hope something hits the target — used in the old advertising and marketing world. It also indicates that marketers have to be much more diligent in their measurement and tracking.
Perhaps, they would be better off better studying their audiences, and then concentrating on only a few content marketing techniques that are most appropriate to those in them.
Content marketing is not simply replacing one methodology with another in the hopes of saving some spend. It has its own set of techniques and requires — in some cases — much more digging than the old methodology.
Whereas once, all you needed to know was the size of the market and the most popular channels to deliver messages to it, today you must drill down far deeper into the psyches of prospects to find and address their deep-rooted fears and problems.
If you want to engage prospects today, you need to know — and address — their hopes and fears and problems to an extent that was never true before.
