Marketing Interactions

Robotic Email Campaigns Miss the Point

In addition to learning that lead generation is the top marketing priority for tech marketers, IDC's 2012 Tech Marketing Barometer Study asked them about their perceived effectiveness at lead nurturing. In reponse to the 22% who said they use regular nurturing touches geared to buying stages that include more than email and web-based multi-step campaigns, Kathleen Schaub, VP-research, CMO Advisory Service at IDC, said:

“I don't believe this, or people don't understand what nurturing means,” Schaub said. “I talk to a lot of our clients and people in the industry, and I know for sure that people are not nurturing well.”

Based on what I've seen, I agree with her. Kathleen also made the comment,

“A lot of people look at nurturing as, "Now we can program our campaign system to deliver six emails in a row.'"

Hence the need for this post. Yet again.

Lead nurturing is not about sending out emails on a regular schedule just because you can. Or just because you think that constant communication (regardless of relevance) will help you sell something. It won't.

And it's evidence that marketers have missed the point.

Lead nurturing is about providing education, expertise, and evidence that help prospects learn what they know during each stage of the process and build the confidence to make a buying decision in your favor — or to gain the consensus from those involved in the decision to get the deal done. It's about positioning your company as an expert that can bring more value to the project than the product would alone.

Let's face it, perceived value, expertise and credibility are the true differentiators in today's marketplace. Otherwise it would just be a price war.

Stringing together 6 emails as a set-it-and-forget-it program won't do this. Don't misunderstand. It's not about the number 6, but the laziness behind the robotic campaign that sets my teeth on edge. Based on the length of the buy cycle, 6 touches may do the trick — if they're relevant and build the right story.

The problem with robotic email campaigns is that they:

• Lack the consistent provision of relevance and value
• Irritate your prospects (based on the above)
• Don't build your credibility
• Are likely focused on feeds, speeds and products
• Don't take into account buyer behavior during the campaign
• Are a campaign, not a strategy
• Have no progression of story that builds momentum
• Have no cohesive story
• Do not differentiate your company
• Are more about timing than context
• Do nothing to stimulate dialogue
• Create another marketing silo
• Don't integrate with programs in other channels
• Probably push the sale for lack of anything better to do
• Are instantly forgettable
• Train your prospects to achieve speed records in clicking delete
• Are about you, not them
• Let you check the box without achieving objectives
• Put you squarely in the marketing fluff camp
• Usually aren't tied to revenue
• Make your company irrelevant
• Don't provide ideas worth sharing (or even pondering)
• Lack the ability to stimulate curiosity
• Repel engagement

I can probably think of more, but you should get gist.

Please understand that this has nothing to do with marketing automation. I think every marketer should have it. It's what you do with it that counts.

Lead nurturing is a process. It's the unfolding of a story that helps the buyer understand why they need to solve a problem, options for solving it, why they should change and why they should choose you to do so. It's never about buying a product. At least not overtly.

This takes thought, planning and the establishment of a lead management process that's managed to goals and objectives.

And it takes the chops to develop outstanding content designed for buyers.

It also means that you need to think outside the Inbox. Lead nurturing happens with every asset your prospects come in contact with in whatever channel they're using. Whether they see a Tweet and click to read a blog post or receive an email with a link to an article or white paper, or find your infographic using search, the result should be the perception of value and time well spent.

So before you go hook up 6 emails in a row to send out on a schedule, take some time to think about the experience you're creating for your buyers. If you need more motivation, review the list above highlighting the consequences of using robotic emails.

Picture courtesy of Robot Pictures

B2B Content Strategy Should Never Be a Wallflower

A B2B content marketing strategy should never be contained in a silo. First of all, to be literal, a silo is a dugout, cave or shelter for grain. Secondly, it denotes walls and barriers that keep its contents apart from everything else. A B2B content marketing strategy must lead somewhere. It should be based on a continuum that matches the needs of prospects and customers wherever they may be in the experience at any time.

The issue I see often, is that content marketing is an add-on to everything else that marketers have on their plates. It's viewed as a campaign, a project or a standalone initiaitve. A silo. This is in part related to the way marketers are wired. In the traditional sense, most of what marketers do has start and end dates and each effort is graded on its own merit (I'm using the word "merit" loosely).

How's our SEO strategy doing?

How many "leads" did that last campaign produce?

Did our webinar attendees increase for this topic?

How many followers did our Twitter account attract last month?

Is our web traffic growing?

Don't get me wrong, we need to measure and evaluate, but we need to quit using our metrics as boundaries that separate one initiative from another. To do this, we need to look at transitions and experiences across buying and the customer lifecycle.

An experience is a set of dynamic transitions that flow together. Until you step out of it or it ends.

When marketers focus on campaigns, they are instituting a construct that boxes in and ends the experience. Three email touches and a sales call, move on. This construct is for us, not related to anything our prospects or customers need, want or value. It was created so that we could manage and measure our efforts based on some ridiculous notion that a short-term campaign can definitively drive sales for a long-term buying process.

But I digress. The point I want to make is about the need to integrate transitions.

Channels are proliferating and marketers need to pay attention to the transitions between them. If your social media team isn't cognizant of your nurturing program, for example, how fluid will the experience be for a prospect or customer taking part in both?

If a buyer watches a video on your YouTube! channel and finds it fun and informative, then visits your website only to see a bunch of dry, product-focused content they find neither fun, nor informative, how will you overcome that disconnect? Or can you?

Often overlooked is the critical transition from marketing to sales. Marketers often plan their content strategy without ever sharing it with sales or - highly recommended - involving sales in its development. If the entire be all and end all of marketing is to help produce and grow customers, why the heck is this transition so overlooked?

It's time for marketing to stop producing more wallflowers and start creating the Belles of the Ball! You may laugh but the Belles of the Ball are sought out, followed and considered highly engaging. This will never happen if we don't integrate all of our marketing initiatives into our strategy and consider how to gain the benefits of dynamic experiences based on transitions.

I know this is difficult. If it was easy it wouldn't be near as much fun!

Take the first step by evaluating everything you're doing and discovering how to create better transitions that tell a story your audience finds engaging. Start connecting the dots. Just don't leave your content strategy sitting on the sidelines as just another project.

 

Designing Calls to Action for B2B Marketing Content

During my keynote at the B2B Content 2 Conversion conference on Tuesday, one of the questions the audience asked was about a slide I used when discussing how to create a content flow. To sum it up, I suggested that each "touch" should be based on three components:

• The question your content will answer for a persona.
• The answer to the question that becomes the content asset.
• A call to action (CTA)

I was asked to elaborate on what I meant by a call to action.

The normal response to the "call to action" mandate is inserting a "have a sales rep call me" or some other version of pushing the sales conversation. But, this is not helpful during much of the marketing process.

Marketers need to reframe the way they think about the CTA, flipping it from what they ultimately want (qualified leads that will buy from their sales team) to what will be helpful to their prospective buyers. But what's even more concerning is that much of the content used by marketing doesn't even nod in the direction of a CTA - demonstrated nicely by a post written by Eric Wittlake — New Research: B2B Content is a Dead End — which he telepathically knew to publish today so I could link to it!

Calls to action should be used to build the best and most engaging buying experience imaginable. They can take many forms and accomplish the momentum needed to turn cursory attention into intentional attention directed toward embracing change to solve a specific problem.

Some of the benefits available from putting thought into designing calls to action:

• Extend engagement by providing additional information about a topic the prospect showed interest in.


• Showcase your company's expertise in solving the problem.


• Expose the prospect to content that they may have overlooked by linking to the previous touch in your nurturing program.


• Differentiate your company's expertise from the competition.


• Build credibility for your company as a valuable resource.


• Cement your ideas with prospects so they get used in conversations when your company is not "in the room."

I'd say those are some pretty good reasons to give CTAs some serious thought.

An additional consideration is to make sure that you vary the types of content you're linking together to create that interesting experience for your buyers. For example, all calls to action don't have to be links to other resources. A call to action can also be an embedded resource within a content asset, such as embedding a video or slideshare into a blog post or article. If the prospect reads the post/article and views the embedded content then you've achieved that extension on attention.

One note of caution: Just because you can add CTAs doesn't mean you should saturate every content asset with links, embeds and "see also" extensions. This is why designing CTAs takes thought.

What's the one thing you'd like for your prospect to learn next?

Give them that with each content asset. If you do this, you'll create connected pathways that thoughtfully engage prospects by offering them additional ideas that make sense given what they've just engaged with. Don't overwhelm them with choices or it will backfire on you by increasing the effort to choose.

Calls to Action enable marketers to serve as the guide to the buyer experience. Go out and build a great one!

Below is my presentation from the B2B Content 2 Conversion conference. Slide 19 is the one I mention at the beginning of this post:

10 Steps to Launch a Content Marketing Strategy from Scratch

View more PowerPoint from Ardath Albee

Marketing Beyond the Chit Chat in Social Media

I was just reading a post written by Margie Clayman, Myth: Marketing consists of just talking to people (or what is social media marketing?). Margie asked her community the question What is marketing? to begin to get at the premise for social media marketing beyond those vague terms of "engagement" and questioning how just "talking to people" (if that's the definition of social media marketing) can actually impact the outcome of selling stuff. This is a great topic! Of course, Margie always comes up with great topics for discussion.

Margie's post had me flashing back to the reactions of many people to social media when it first hit the web waves. I remember people saying that they didn't care if someone just ate a PB&J or that they didn't want to hear what their favorite jeans (brand) thought on a regular basis.

That stuff is still out there but I see a lot of evolution in the way people "talk" to people on social media. Then again, I see a lot of people talking for the sake of talking - mostly to themselves, so who knows?

I think that in order to answer the question, What is social media marketing?, we have to back up a bit to why people go online in the first place. Since I focus on B2B marketing, I'm going to limit my perspective to people interacting online for business reasons.

The Quest for Information

Research shows that pretty much all business people start online with search when they are looking for information. If we start there, then we realize that the next step is a query.

A query is based on a question the person want's answered. How they arrive at the answer depends on what phrases or keywords they type into the search field. But it's also critical to understand that "search" has changed with the availability of social platforms. For example, those of us on Twitter often search by hashtags, such as #contentmarketing or #B2B.

On LinkedIn or Focus.com we may ask questions of a community of people interested in the topic on our minds. That's also become a form of search enabled by social platforms.

Social Media Marketing Benefits from Q&A

As human beings, we learn through asking and answering questions. As business people, we have priorities to address and problems to solve to meet objectives. When faced with a problem, the first thing most of us do is ask, How do I fix that? What are my options? Or even, Why should I fix it? Do I really need to?

Robert Rose wrote a fabulous post on How Asking "Why" Can Get You To The Larger Story over on the CMI blog. I also talk about the role and value of questions in my post on content marketing where I wrote about theory vs. practice. Note that questions are way too valuable to only be applied to one facet of marketing. In my opinion, you can use them for just about anything related to marketing and sales.

Applying human nature to social media marketing, B2B marketers will accomplish their goals if they match up their use social media to answering the questions the people who could buy from them are asking.

This takes social media marketing beyond just "talking to people" to actually providing useful information that helps them solve problems by learning what they need to know to do so successfully.

It's the quality and helpfulness of the "talking" that makes the difference, as well as the intention behind it. Although the end goal of marketing must be to sell stuff, the execution must be about providing value your prospects recognize in order to achieve it — whether that's in social media or takes other forms.

Of course, this is only my perspective. What's yours? What does Social Media Marketing mean to you?

Changing the Conversation

When B2B companies develop and implement a content marketing strategy it should be obvious that big change is afoot. Not just for marketers, but for everyone involved in the demand-to-revenue generation process. The most pivotal thing that needs to change in parallel across roles is the "conversation."

There are at least 3 types of conversations that will change in the marketing-to-sales process when a full-bodied, buyer-focused content strategy is put in place.

Content Conversations: These are the conversations that are generated by the valuable ideas that marketing content shares to answer questions buyers have during each stage of buying.

In fact, when a content marketing strategy is implemented, the word "campaign" should be stricken from the company's lexicon. It's no longer a stop and start endeavor, but a continuum that must be addressed ongoingly. Content marketing focused on buyer needs, preferences and priorities should get people thinking and talking about how to solve their problems using your ideas.

The interaction and engagement established via content marketing can be labeled a dialogue, two-way communications, or whatever you like, but it's still about enabling conversation.

Inside Sales Conversations: Once content conversations occur, inside sales can no longer follow-up with the lame script we've all experienced that's focused on selling or mining the prospect for qualifying information without delivering any value in return. A conversation must be mutually beneficial or it won't continue. 

As I've said in another post, content marketing changes expectations. Addressing these new expectations must be apparent in everything that follows. It's about the "experience" of the conversation. A self-serving call focused on what the company wants to know/sell/get isn't going to cut it.

The problem is that you cannot just hand inside salespeople a new script and expect that to do it. Changing the conversation requires a change management process that includes orientation, education, tools and ongoing support/coaching with a feedback loop that enables refinement.

Let's face it, content is a wonderful tool, but it's not definitive until it's validated to have done what it's supposed to do. In a complex B2B sale, that means human contact by inside sales. If the orientation, purpose and "content" of the calls doesn't reflect the expectations and experience set by your content, all that hard work and investment can be cast aside by a prospect who feels mislead by a wasteful conversation.

Sales Conversations: Salespeople are now coming into conversations with buyers differently than before. Buyers are educated, informed and self-focused. Salespeople need to understand just what that means and how they add value when they're no longer building releationships from the start - in many cases.

Stepping into the conversation where the prospect expects it to continue is the new competence that sales must embrace. But they are not clairvoyant. Marketers and inside sales both need to contribute to improving this transition. After all, they know what's transpired prior to the handoff.

Getting buy-in from sales (at all levels) is needed to change the conversation. How does changing the conversation fit into your content strategy framework?

Have you considered what it means to change the conversation?

How will you go about collaborating with all the teams involved to ensure the demand to revenue generation process will be a consistent conversational exchange that evolves as it needs to result in customer acquisition?

And finally, the end result of how well all of this works is reflected in Buying Committee Conversations. And those will play a major role in the decision to purchase.

 

Content Marketing: Theory vs. Practice

Sometimes I think content marketing can be made so convoluted and complex that it's nearly impossible to execute. I've seen spreadsheets and diagrams and lists of things you must do that make my head hurt. And, yes, I know I do this for a living. I'm a B2B content strategist - and dang proud of the work I do.

But reality is what we have to work with and a phased approach can be a beautiful thing. After all, if you can't execute the strategy it's not delivering a service to your company—or your customers.

Here are a few things I find true in practice:

• Marketers must be able to wrap their heads around the why, what, when, where and how.


• Content theories abound and if you try to kluge it all together, you will become as immobilized as a deer in the headlights of a rapidly approaching semi.


• Theory is great, but often difficult to put into practice in a reasonable way.


• Expectations need to be appropriate based on your resources, capabilities and limitations.


• Content marketing never ends, so quit trying to get it perfect before you launch.


• Until you launch, you have no real-world feedback to judge your strategy or programs. It's not about what you think, but what your buyers think and how they respond.


• Once launched, you can tune on the fly and add layers as you gain proficiency.

What I find with most projects is that the marketers taking on content marketing already have a full plate. This means that we need to figure out how to incorporate what they're already doing within the content strategy rather than approaching it as a standalone effort - which a content strategy should never be.

First, marketers need to build buyer insights and identify personas or market segments. It is only through gaining a clear understanding of each persona's orientation, objectives and obstacles that marketers can begin to design a relevant content strategy.

Without knowing your buyers, where's your focus? On your products and company, of course. Because that's what you know. This is why there's so much crappy content floating around in the ether.

Once you know your buyers, choose a segment, step into their shoes and figure out what are all the questions they need to answer based on their specific situation. Open a document and type the problem statement at the top of the page (or get a group together and use a white board to brainstorm).

Persona problem statement: I need to do X in order to get Y.

Start tossing up questions this persona would have about solving that problem.

For example:

• What are the different ways I can do X?
• How much of Y do I need?
• How are our competitors solving X?
• What competitive advantages could we gain if we solve X?
• Who else will be impacted in the company if we solve X?
• How will I convince them that Y is worth the effort to change the status quo?

Keep going until you can't think of another question this persona would ask in order to gather all the information they need to build confidence, gain consensus and make an informed purchase decision.

Now, given what you know about your persona/segment, how would you answer each question? The answers are the premise statements for your content development. And the answers should not be all about your product, but focused on what it enables that your prospect couldn't do before. The why, what and how that will get them Y. If possible, identify several different ways to answer each question.

Assess your existing content to see what questions it answers, or if it needs to be reinvented or retired. Identify your gaps for new content development.

How do your current and planned campaigns and events, etc. fit in with your content flow for this persona? Match them up and insert them into the flow.

Consider your marketing mix and where you've determined your persona goes to find information and create a distribution program. Based on the modes you use this can include website, email, blogs, social, etc. This is when formats come in. Not before. Your focus should be on the information first. Make sure you have the resources to execute and know what the timing looks like to get it done.

Don't forget to consider calls to action. What do you want them to do after engaging with the content? Be reasonable about what makes sense as a next step given the information they just viewed. It's not generally "have sales contact me." And, based on the technology you have, determine the best ways to measure and monitor outcomes.

Get it out the door and tune on the fly as you go. Even if you only start with one persona, just get it going. Evolve and add layers as you learn what works and what doesn't.

Content marketing in practice can be as easy or difficult as you make it. Focus on learning what your buyers need to know to reach objectives and give it to them in digestible ways they will value. That's really what's at the crux of content marketing.

Theory is great. All marketers should understand it. But practice is about execution.

B2B Marketers Need Every-Click Attribution

One of the beautiful things about digital B2B marketing is the ability to attribute behavior and engagement for prospects across a variety of channels that may be included in our marketing mix. Where things get a bit sticky is determining how attribution figures into revenue generation. For a simple transactional sale, this may be easier as sales cycles are shorter and less clicks are usually required. But, for a complex sale, attribution becomes a bigger challenge.

The mandate for B2B marketers today is to prove that their online marketing programs are contributing to downstream revenues. Determining how attribution is used can vary those results by quite a bit.

Take the example that Adobe uncovered in their recent report, Why Marketers Aren't Giving Social the Recognition it Deserves. [PDF] The difference for retail companies that applied first-click attribution over last-click attribution is 88% higher using fist-click. The report contends that social media is used earlier in the buy cycle to generate awareness and engagement and that applying the credit to whatever the shopper clicks on last, right before purchase, discounts the role social media plays in driving revenues.

This is a great example to start with. Sure, retail is more transactional in the example, but if you think about the number of clicks involved in a complex B2B marketing-to-sales process, using either first or last click to determine ROI will definitely reduce the value of a lot of elements in play during the buyer's journey.

This is why a content marketing strategy is so important. It's also why technology and analytics are so darn valuable.

Think about your marketing mix for a minute. Let's say you are using the following geared to address the priorities of a specific target market (persona):

• Twitter
• Blog
• Webinars
• Nurturing programs (series of emails with links to content assets mapped to stages of the buy cycle)
• White papers
• Demo
• ROI Calculator

If the prevailing trend is for a buyer to either visit the demo or the calculator prior to initiating contact with sales, it may be that tools like those get more credit than they deserve when reporting on ROI.

Or, because registrations for webinars are directly attributable, it may be thought that they payoff handsomely for lead generation when the reality could be that without your Twitter promotion, your webinar registration would have been 40% lower.

What's needed is to consider all of the conversion or transition points for your marketing programs and measure ROI based on what they are designed to accomplish in concert.

Every content asset and marketing mix element needs to have a goal for a conversion within the buying journey that contributes to the overall revenue generation process. The ability to string these conversions together and show how each contributed to achieving the end result determines the ROI of the strategy, not each individual component as a standalone tactic.

Getting to this type of ROI analysis takes hard work, focus and technology. But it's what makes the world of eMarketing and digital strategy so dang compelling.

It all starts with shifting the way we've always thought about and done it in the past.

Lost the Key to Your B2B Database?

A database is a beautiful thing — especially if it's built from contacts who've opted in rather than purchased lists. But, the problem I see repeatedly is that once a contact goes in, the database doors swing shut like a steel trap, with B2B marketers never exercising their visitation rights. With the rate of change in the business environment, this can be a risky practice.

When is the last time you actually looked at the contacts in your database? And when I say looked at them, I don't mean scanned the list, but actually took the time to look into and validate the contacts?

I dare you to go pull 50 leads from a segment of your database and do the following:

• Look up the contact in LinkedIn.
• Google the contact's name in relation to the company.
• Look at any social media accounts the contact uses (often listed in LinkedIn)
• View the company's website.

What you find could surprise you.

I did this recently during a client project and discovered a few things:

• A number of people had changed roles or employers rendering them useless for the program we were implementing—or any program for that matter.


• Real-life titles and job descriptions were often quite different than what the drop down fields allowed them to choose — for example if the choices include engineer or product development but the contact is actually a project manager, whichever field he chooses will mislabel him to some degree. Depending on the program, this type of distinction can make the difference between your content being relevant or ignored.


• Company websites that indicated that although they looked good on the surface, based on their website content, they will never become our buyer. This type of thing can be caused by a 3rd party expertise report the contact may have opted in to get, regardless of what you sell.


• Industry classifications that were not optimal because the umbrella category was selected, but not the sub-category that enables relevance. Think about the idea that you may sell a product into Financial Services (umbrella category) but it's aimed at regional bank (sub-category) line of business managers. If you were to execute the program by segmenting based on Financial Services and a specific title, how many of the contacts on your list would not find the content relevant? Credit card companies, investment services, national banks and others come to mind.

I'm not saying that database nirvana is a must-have, but I am saying that I'm seeing the need for companies to reconsider the fields they put on forms based on the goals they have for their marketing programs. Many of our forms were created prior to persona creation or segmented marketing program development. Perhaps your database is due for a review with the aim of creating better segmentation with what exists today as well as for future opt ins.

And don't just think about registration forms. Also consider how what you learn might change the way you think about progressive profiling.

Consider it this way. If you launch a lead nurturing program to a segment of 2,000 leads and only 500 of them may find the content relevant, what are the chances that the program will be considered successful, even when based on the best possible metrics? Fifty clicks is either 2.5% or 10%. Which is a truer gauge of effectiveness? And, which would you rather report to your executive team? Just saying.

Sometimes we need to back up and do our homework first. If we want marketing to be accountable for producing results, we've got to aim for precision — or as close as we can reasonably get.

What does your database tell you?

What Purpose Do Your Buyer Personas Serve?

In every project I work on, some version of buyer personas are involved. Sometimes I'm given personas (usually "profiles") to work with and sometimes developing them is the first step in the project. Let me tell you that I've seen a lot of personas - or what passes for them.

What I have noticed is that there seems to be two types of personas: those suited for marketing and those better suited for salespeople.

For example, I recently saw a collection of personas that were labled with titles such as The Forward-Leaning Buyer, The Risk-Averse Buyer, and The Jock Buyer (yes, I'm making these up for demonstration). The kicker is that each of these personas could be representative of the same title, roles, and responsibilitites as the others.

These personas went on to detail the personal lives and attributes of the personas including marital status, number of kids and even the breed of the family dog. And let's not overlook sports and entertainment preferences. (Yes, I'm still talking about B2B personas)

There were some useful details for marketers, but my first thought is how the heck would marketers begin to figure out which one of these personas were representative of their prospects in order to segment their databases appropriately?

Perhaps these personas are indicative of the need to develop content about how to train your Australian Shepherd to play frisbee or how to improve the efficiency of shuttling your kids to after-school activities. Then we could postulate that anyone responding to the content is related to the corresponding persona.

Okay - all joking aside - Buyer personas must serve the purpose they are designed to address.

From a B2B marketing perspective, this means that a buyer persona should:

• Serve as a tool that can be referenced easily to help guide the development of relevant marketing programs for the market segment represented by that persona.


• Point to specific topics of content as related to priorities defined as important to the persona.


• Reveal the circumstances of what could derail the deal (or the championing of the deal)


• Be unique from all other personas to indicate a truly definable market segment.

The purpose for a B2B marketing persona is to have a tool that defines and guides the marketing programs developed to engage a specific market segment. Never forget that a persona is similar to a composite sketch. It must help you to get close enough to the business interests of the actual humans involved in the process to create the opportunity for marketing programs to reach the goals set for them.

Personas that are based on personality traits or personal situations will not help as there are just too many variables to address to roll them up into a useful set of guidelines that have any traction with a market segment. This being said, these personality-driven profiles may be useful conversational tools for sales reps who are in conversations with a Director of Customer Service who they learn has an Aussie who won't return the frisbee.

Do you see the difference?

BTW - the picture is my girl, Bella, who absolutely LOVES to play frisbee.

 

Convince Execs to Convert to Content Marketing

The way marketing has always been done will not produce the results B2B marketers need to grow their businesses today. You know it, you've heard it — haven't we all? The question that remains is often about how to get executive buy-in and support to shift dollars?

Many channels and methods that have historically good performance may be slowing, but executives presented with new and unproven channels (for your company) can be hard to convince. Unless presented with proof and validation, perception can be that of more spins on fluff rather than a sound strategy that will lead to future business success.

Here are several reasons and ideas to help you convince your company to convert to content marketing strategies:

Historical performance is no longer a barometer for future success.

Buyer preferences are changing faster than ever. Perhaps it's not so much that their preferences are changing, but that they can now avoid having to interact with any content they consider sub-par. Channels are exploding and access to them has never been easier.

This doesn't mean you should rush out and incorporate all of them into your marketing mix, but it does mean that you need to listen and test the waters to find out where your buyers are spending time, what topics they're interested in and how you can achieve better results than "the way you've always done it" is producing.

One benefit from historical performance is to use those benchmarks to show declining or stagnant returns. Then do some listening and show your executives what's getting response in digital arenas that's relevant to your target markets. The point is to prove that those who could be your buyers are there and engaging with competitors because your company isn't present. Lost revenue opportunities can be very persuasive.

Controllling the conversation in a digital age is a pipe dream.

An argument often made by corporate executives is that they need to maintain control over their message and brand positioning. Although this is silly given that what others say about your company is your brand positioning, you can guide the conversation and reinforce it through participation and contagious content distribution that buyers will actually seek out, share and use.

If you don't play, you can't win — it's that simple. Refusing to participate where your buyers are by providing information they are interested in is the equivalent of choosing to be invisible. In today's age of transparency, choosing to keep your toys under lock and key in your own sandbox is self-defeating.

To sway opinion, choose some examples of companies that have taken the lead to provide innovative thinking and ideas that their audiences are embracing. Heck, there are plenty of case studies out there today with impressive results. Show your execs the money and you're more likely to gain support for content marketing initiatives.

One example is Kelly Outsourcing & Consulting Group as covered in BtoB Magazine's latest edition. Kelly OCG is spending 60% of it's B2B marketing budget on content marketing. That's a pretty impressive investment. I know Todd Wheatland, their VP of Marketing. He's a very astute marketer who gets it. Also in the issue is the CMO Closeup of Russ Fujioka from Dell, discussing how the company is using custom content.

By showing the success of other companies like yours, executives will become champions for your content marketing initiatives. One of my clients has a mandate from the C-level this year to turn marketing into a demand generation engine. To date they have always been a sales-driven organization. The need for change is a reality. There are plenty of proof points you can use to show that adopting a content marketing strategy is a sound business initiative, not more fluff.

Differentiate with interactivity for competitive advantage.

Let's face it, copycats are everywhere. Anything that is published digitally can be used as a model for other content development. What will set you apart is the way your company participates in interactive dialogues with your markets and how you apply innovative ideas to their business problems.

But the real payoff that results is permission. Interactivity will build opt-in and permission for you to continue conversations with an audience who is willing to and even anticipates receiving more valuable information from your company.

The biggest marketing challenge today is being found and then keeping that attention. The way your company chooses to interact with your prospects and customers is the biggest differentiator left.

Many B2B companies are still buying lists. What you need is opt-ins; people who have given you permission to communicate with them. Pit an opt-in list against a purchased list with the same content and emails and measure the interactivity that results. The opt-in list should blow the purchased list out of the water.

The thing is — you can't build an opt-in list without a content marketing strategy. No relevant, thought-provoking content, no reason to opt in, right? By proving that batch and blast lacks effectiveness, you'll likely gain approval to pilot a content strategy. Pick a project focus that can provide some quick wins and expand from there.

Finally, the best time to change your marketing strategy is before the existing one becomes defunct. To keep the momentum moving in your pipeline, you have to also apply momentum to the evolution of your marketing framework. Starting from scratch is painfully difficult.

Shifting while in motion is a much easier transition. Remember that you don't have to cast all traditional marketing to the curb. Some of it just needs a few tweaks to work well as a component in your content marketing programs. In fact, you may have a program that's successful, such as a webinar series. Take that program that serves as a stand-alone event today and incorporate a content strategy with it to improve conversions. Use that as your proof case.

What's helped you gain buy-in for content marketing at your company?