Marketing Vision 2009 expanded - Part 1: Marketing Content

My post on December 13th received a comment asking me for suggestions for how to make my Marketing Vision for 2009 happen. Thanks Susan! When I started to answer her, I realized I had a whole lot to say about how to accomplish all the great things I see ahead for marketing initiatives in 2009.

This is the first of several posts that break out my vision for 2009. The others are about Listening, Sales Enablement, Storytelling, Marketing Automation, Social Networking and Measuring Value & ROI.

This post is based on this excerpt from my vision post:

“Next year is the year of interactive content marketing and custom publishing. It's the year that marketers will take on the digital environment with a flair for conversational interactions.”

Content Marketing and Custom Publishing in 2009 won’t be focused only on those you already know. The interactive component of content marketing coming to the fore means that content needs to be where the people you want to engage "hang out" online.

Companies will also focus on designing their content to invite dialogue. This is where custom publishing comes in. As companies bring their own voice to the table, they’ll need a story strategy for achieving more “social” interactions.

Marketers have to start thinking beyond the norm of blasting database lists. They need to not only respect their house lists, but they need to create content that’s got some juice to it. Dry, tasteless, thinly veiled sales pitches won’t cut it.

Content marketing for the complex sale is about giving your audience (prospects and customers, influencers and recommenders, colleagues and peers, and yes, even your competitors) valuable ideas that help them do their jobs better. It’s about building relationships and impacting reputations—yours and theirs.

For a long time, I’ve heard people say that the only emotion worth pursuing in B2B sales is trust. But there are a lot of emotional constraints that keep people from buying your complex products and service offerings, even if they trust you. Consider the Amplify Buyer’s Attention eBook I wrote a few months ago. Every one of the 7 Amplifiers is about how to structure content based on relieving an emotional constraint.

Marketers need to learn to walk that fine line that allows them to interact on a “peer” level with their audience, but also become respected for the expertise they can provide. This feeds into the conversational aspect of interactions. Marketers will have to learn to talk with people, not at them. In fact, perhaps we should use the term people instead of prospects, buyers, or customers.

The secret is in humanizing the exchanges we have. We won’t succeed unless we respect our audience as we expect them to engage with us.

The purpose of content marketing in 2009 will be to pull prospects to you, not grab them out of the ether and add them to your lists so you can try to force consumption of your content. Focus on those who want to hear from you – those who are interested in what you have to say.

Everyone with demographics that match who you sell to is not your customer. Getting the prospects who have potential to self-select as prospective buyers is the goal for new lead generation. That’s what I mean by pull. By publishing content that's relevant, people will choose to interact with you. They need the education your expertise provides to answer their highest priority issues. These are usually outside their core competence or they'd be solved already.

With all of this in mind, here are 13 tips for marketing content in 2009:

1. Review your content and eliminate all self-serving terms and jargon.


2. Aim for Simplicity and Conciseness – time for attention is limited. [This is harder than it looks, but pays off handsomely when done well.]


3. Develop content about industry trends, problems, challenges and opportunities your audience is interested in knowing more about.


4. Make sure your content is focused on the audience’s perspective. Not your product offerings.


5. Be generous with your expertise.


6. Don’t try to write general content for everyone, because it‘ll be superficial and serve no one.


7. It’s not about how many people you can reach with one message, it’s about the quality of the interactions you can develop with select audiences. You’re not giving a speech—you’re inviting dialogue.


8. Personalization is about more than “Dear <first name>,” – the content has to actually be of interest to them.


9. Do not post the same message repeatedly. Different mediums and audiences require a different context. That doesn't mean you have to start over, it means you need to consider the angle you choose to approach a topic based on the context of the channel.


10. Share your ideas on related industry ezines, community websites and blogs.


11. Include links to online content that extends a conversation you comment on. [Only if the content you link to is relevant and useful, or else this tip backfires.]


12. Focus on becoming a thought leader in your niche. This means open, transparent sharing of useful information.


13. Revamp your website to make it interesting and valuable. Make it a resource destination your prospects and customers will revisit when they need to know more about a problem your company solves. This means adding fresh content regularly.

Content marketing presents a wealth of opportunities to generate awareness and responses that develop into dialogues, and generate leads beyond reliance on download forms. Just keep your focus on the customer.

Other Markeitng Vision Expansion posts:

Part 2: Listening

Part 3: Sales Enablement

Part 4: Storytelling