How rigid is your marketing content?

I just watched a great video by Gary Vaynerchuk about Telling Your Story - the guy is off the wall, truly inspired. Go watch it - I'll wait.

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Oh, good. You're back.

Did you feel your enthusiasm start to bubble up while you listened to Gary talk?

Was your head nodding about the rigidity of company messaging?

Has your PR firm changed the way they do their job for you in the last 24 months?

Do you still believe that you need a PR firm or your message won't get out?

In addition to PR, marketers need to think about how this mindset may still be playing out in their marketing content. If you really put your cards on the table and truthfully evaluate your company's marketing content practices, would you agree or disagree with these statements?

1. We must always stick with corporate-provided messaging in regards to certain topics, regardless of the situation.
2. We make sure to use the same corporate-mandated buzzwords in all our content.
3. We ensure our products are mentioned whenever possible, regardless of what the audience might find relevant or their stage in the buying process.
4. Our company is always referred to as "the leading..." or some other ridiculously self-assigned, pump-us-up verbiage.
5. Never ever do we admit we've made a misstep — even if we know we have.
6. Internal politics guides our marketing content development.
7. We excel at being reactive (instead of proactive).
8. Our content is more about us than it is about helping people solve problems. 
9. We update our website content only when we launch a new product.
10. You'd like to change all this but no one will listen.

How many "yes" answers did you have?

The thing is that companies often have the best of intentions—behind closed doors. But, when it comes to putting messaging out the door, they hesitate. They're afraid that if they don't control the message and keep the focus where they want it, bad things will happen.

Well, bad things are happening because of that fear. Your prospects can smell that self-interest from a mile away. And that's exactly what it is. Fear of change. Fear of taking their hands off the wheel, if you will. Which is silly when you consider that people can click away from your message or Tweet their response or blog about it, or just plain ignore you.

Did you notice that all 10 statements above are about the company? Company's focused on themselves to the exclusion of their markets' and customers' needs are losing them to companies with a more open mindset.

Think about it this way. If a company only cares about selling its products and the people they're trying to reach only care about solving their problems—how the heck do the two of them ever come together in any meaningful way?

Isn't the purpose in B2B marketing to build trust and credibility that inspires our prospects and customers to do business with us? How is that possible if we don't trust them with our message?

Comments

[Bob Johnson]

Changing the approach requires two things, latitude on the part of PR people to react and respond and in order to do that they must understand the underlying client messages, reasoning and link the conversation topic to potential impact. Many do not have the understanding or insight that requires. They suck what they need out of the client and simply turn out traditional communication vehicles.

Second, it requires doing things in real-time. This is challenging for many people who measure their impact by the pound or column inch, the building of which takes time. What all must realize is that user generated content is the future. And control is not theirs, rather it is the conversation that controls. They simply look, lurk, enable, factilitate, moderate or participate. And if a vendor is mentioned positively in a social conversation our resesearch shows it can increase the likelihood of putting that vendor on the shortlist by 8 percent.

This leads to a fundamental issue. It has been extremely hard historically for PR people to measure their value and impact for clients. The concept of "share of conversation" introduces a whole new set of challenges to prove one's worth, and also requires clients to adjust how they in turn measure the value of PR activities.

[Ardath Albee]

Hi Bob,

Thanks for your thoughtful comment.

An 8% increase in likelihood of making the shortlist is interesting. I'm wondering how fast that impact is growing and for which type of companies? I'd love to see the research.

And I agree with you that this shift to "share of conversation" and real-time activities are both challenges from an execution as well as a measurement standpoint.

It means PR firms are going to have to get to know their client's customers really well, not just a company message. Definitely not the role they're used to.

Thanks,
Ardath