Marketing Interactions

Can B2B Marketers Become Content Whisperers?

One of the mandates bandied about lately is that B2B marketers need to become listeners. They should set up listening posts and they must listen first, before launching marketing programs. You're told listening is a requisite for establishing 2-way dialogue and sustaining relationships across the buying process. If you've "listened" to all of this, then you know that listening informs (or should) how marketers respond to prospects' online behavior.

Anyone who's married or in a relationship can relate to "listening." Trust me, I've been married to a wonderful Italian man for 16 years and it's not so much what's being said, but what it means, that counts.

This is great and dandy for one-to-one relationships or even amongst small groups of people, family and friends, but what happens when you're a B2B marketer with thousands of contacts in your database? How the heck do you manage listening to that level of volume? In other words, the input of a few will not necessarily correlate to the wishes or intentions of the many.

Telling marketers they need to listen is one thing. Helping them figure out how to do so in a way that produces an effective input to inform marketing programs is entirely another.

A Few Ways Listening Goes Wrong

Listening is defined as making an effort to hear something. Hearing can be defined as paying attention to gain knowledge or insight.

Unfortunately, many people treat listening as the stimulus for their response, rather than an act of learning to inform their response. I call that selfish listening. Much marketing is done in relation to selfish listening. This is when you see the "me, me, and more about me" marketing content based on products and company grandeur rather than what prospects are interested in.

The other thing that can have listening lead your marketing astray is when you allow individuals—rather than the collective that relates to your personas—to influence how you market to a segment of a target market. You see examples of this related to the squeaky-wheel-that-gets-the-grease syndrome.

If one person says so, is it true? How about 10? Or 100?

The Role of Personas in Listening

When trying to determine if what you're hearing from prospects should inform your content marketing strategy, the first thing you need to do is ground the feedback. Is the person (or people) you're listening to representative of the persona the marketing program is designed to engage?

Marketers must make sure that feedback and dialogue is considered in the appropriate context before acting upon it.

Is the input common? How can you be sure?

Assuming you have a content strategy that was used to develop content related to answering your persona's questions, concerns, and informational needs related to solving a specific problem your product addresses, what inputs can be used for "listening?"

For example:

• The average time spent reading the content is 25 seconds when it takes an average person over 2 minutes to read the piece is an indication that the content isn't a relevant part of the persona dialogue.


• A lack of click through—whether from social media or email—indicates that your message isn't resonating with your audience.


• A discussion you start on a LinkedIn group or industry forum where you know your persona hangs out that points to a blog post to back up your premise gets no clicks or comments.


• A blog post written for Persona A gets shared by dozens, receives numerous comments and garners a nice volume of clicks to a landing page you linked to offering a white paper on a related subject.


• An article in your lead nurturing program for Persona B that also offers links to related content is shared by a number of prospects with colleagues they work with at the company.


• A Twitter thread using your hashtag becomes active with numerous people offering comments and perspective.

The list above includes both good and not so good responses to your content marketing efforts. If you're listening in relation to personas, you can likely find some things to improve and determine which may not be relevant based on who is reacting to what content.

The one thing marketers often forget is that just because we design content for one persona, doesn't mean it won't find exposure with others. In other words, all feedback should not be weighted equally.

You will never make everyone happy, so you must choose how and when to allow listening to shift your strategies and your response.

From Listener to Content Whisperer

The trick to listening is to equate what you're "hearing" to creating higher engagement, interest, and momentum with your personas.

Don't get me wrong. If an individual reacts to your content by leaving a comment or saying something on social media or replying to an email, a relevant response is warranted. But that doesn't necessarily mean changing your strategy.

In B2B marketing, often the response is passive viewing. At least during quite a bit of the self-education phase that seems to be growing longer as more and more content fills up what used to be empty space. But marketers cannot sit by passively if we want to achieve their goals. That's a luxury reserved for your prospects.

This is when becoming a content whisperer comes into play.

Nicoholas Evans wrote The Horse Whisperer, inspired by Dan "Buck" Brannaman who is known for the philosophy of natural horsemanship, based on the idea of "...using an understanding of how horses think and communicate to train the horse to accept humans and work confidently and responsively with them. One of Brannaman's stated goals is to make the animal feel safe and secure around humans so that the horse and rider can achieve a true union."

To become a content whisperer, marketers must focus on listening to propect behaviors to help them become credible (safe) resources that buyers trust (secure) and want to do business with (union). (Okay - maybe stretching it, but bear with me)

When prospects are passively engaging, marketers must "listen" to that engagement based on the information prospects are willing to spend time with. If they respond with content related to those topics, then they are helping to create a two-way dialogue that is the goal of listening.

• Prospect expresses interest
• Marketer provides more related content
• Prospect engages again
• And so it goes

If marketers have designed content to answer specific questions that a persona will have to get answered during their buying process to move to next steps, then based on the content they engage with, a marketer should be able to anticipate what might also be of interest. This is the art and science of B2B storytelling at its finest.

It's important to note that content whispering is not only related to your content, but to content produced by others that may get the reaction or dialogue you're looking to establish. Marketers need to consider not just what prospects say, but what they do.

What can you learn from "listening" to the content that engages people represented by your personas?

Perhaps becoming a Content Whisperer is a skill worth developing...if you want to create a 2-way dialogue that builds momentum toward buying.

What do you think?

Content Strategy Must Reach Beyond Marketing

Arguably, content strategy is most often thought of as a marketing application. That's a great start, but it doesn't do the practice justice. In fact, that view tends to cause siloed efforts and limit the potential of content strategy.

Content is a part of everything a business does in regards to communicating with prospects, customers, and the industries their offerings serve.

Content is anything that says something about your company, brand, expertise, or point of view that forms an impression, including:

• email
• video
• articles
• white papers
• blog posts
• blog comments
• conversations
• trade show swag
• call scripts
• sales collateral
• webinars
• advertising
• conference presentations
• newsletters
• direct mail
• solution briefs
• Tweets
• status updates
• discussion forum participation
• infographics
• referrals
• eBooks
• executive interviews
• press releases
• advocates
• data sheets
• media coverage
• customer stories
• websites
• ETC.

*Note the the focus of this blog post is on external audiences. But it also applies to internal audiences as well with another long list of formats and applications.

That's a lot of stuff. It's also why I wrote the previous post about why content should never be in a silo. Please note that much of this is created by the company, but some of it is not, such as referrals, and advocates. And some can come from the company as well as others, such as Tweets, status updates, and discussion forum participation. Regardless of source, it's still content that affects impressions about your company--good or bad.

(How content strategy applies to addressing content created by others about your company is another post)

The point I want to focus on today is that content strategy must address what lives beyond traditional marketing boundaries.

Two of the most prominent boundaries that must be dissolved are Sales Momentum and Customer Retention and Expansion.

Sales Momentum:

You may also think of this as Sales Enablement, but I don't like the term "enablement." Salespeople, by their very nature, should be enabled. The role content strategy can play with Sales is in helping them to continue to escalate opportunity momentum towards a deal, rather than stop it in its tracks if they step into the process out of sync.

I'm sick and tired of the battle for alignment between marketing and sales. There, I said it. Seems ridiculous if you ask me. I work with marketers everyday that are engaging salespeople in content strategy design and development because they realize salespeople are critical to the process. Not to mention that Sales really appreciates the help due to the constant change and shifting buyer attention in the marketplace today.Their position has changed, and they know it.

One of the interesting things I see when marketers involve Sales is that salespeople often have no real idea of what marketing actually does that may be helpful to them. This being said, just as marketers can no longer implement effective programs without getting to know their buyers, they also cannot help salespeople without knowing them, their priorities and what they're experiencing on the street that may be blocking or winning deals.

Marketers cannot provide the same content to salespeople that they provide to prospects. The context is different and the situation is different. The questions and obstacles are different.The interactions are different and so are the expectations from buyers on the receiving end.

By working with Sales, marketers can create content that salespeople will actually use to develop and engage late-stage opportunities. Once they see it's useful, valuable, and helps opportunities move to the next step in buying, marketers will find themselves inundated with requests for more. And that's a good thing!

Marketers must prove accountability. If they can do so by tracking use of content designed for sales interactions, their contribution to downstream revenues can be better substantiated. I hear a lot about salespeople taking credit for deals at the expense of marketing, but if the caveat to getting more content designed for them includes feedback on what's working, why it works, and what it helps them to accomplish, that will diminish.

Think about it.

Customer Retention and Expansion:

Most of what I see marketers focused on is new customer acquisition. But I often hear the lament that companies are having a difficult time expanding customer footprints. When I ask how their content strategy is designed to promote customer retention and expansion I hear things such as, we have an annual user conference or we send a monthly or quarterly newsletter. Or that it's someone else's problem, such as account reps or customer service.

Those are cop outs.

A few things marketers need to realize about customers is that their status quo is different than that of prospects. They solved their problem when they bought your solution, right? So what's next? What did solving that problem do to open up possibilities that can now be addressed?

That's where to start.

Expanding customer accounts is not about promoting products. It's still about solving problems - new ones. Why do companies think that rule changes once prospects become customers?

Do you have customer personas? Yes, they are different than buyer personas. See above.

Do you have content that helps them use the solution they've purchased to its fullest value? Have you made it clear why they should? Sharing your expertise should only increase in relation to customers. They are  much more of a known value to you than prospects.

And I'm not talking about using feeds and features. I'm talking about business value. Think beyond the end users of your solutions to other impacts the results of using it make to your customers' businesses.

How can you tie that into their ability to solve new problems? What's the additional business value they can gain?

Growth doesn't just come from new customer acquisition. But, for some reason, companies seem to take their customers for granted by assuming they need less attention than potential new logos. That's not a good business decision.

Perhaps it's time to rethink your customer retention and expansion programs and how they fit into your content strategy.

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.

 

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.

 

Expectations and Experience are the New Competition

For years, B2B marketers have been worried about competitors' products and solutions. They spent a considerable amount of effort trying to differentiate their features and prove their offering is better than another company's version of something similar.

As technology continues to shorten product time-to-market and allow for rapid updates and improvements, it's also enabled marketers to become publishers, applying even more pressure to move faster to produce more information than competing vendors. Online publishing is the new version of one-upping. (Competitor A just published a cool infographic, we need one, too!)

The issue is that not much has changed in the way messaging is designed. Just today, I saw a template for a client to complete that was based on the premise of a persona message map. However, the columns requested information all about the products, unique product value proposition and product differentiators. Although there was an attempt to align these messages with the persona's goal, it was so high-level that the only real choice left is to talk about the products rather than what the persona really wants and needs.

Due to the ease of accessing information online, a big part of what's changed in the buying process are your customers' expectations about the experience they'll have along the way.

Because buyers can self-educate rapidly and much easier than the were able to in the past, they know more. In return for this education, they've raised the bar. They expect to continue to receive value each step along the way. And they expect it on their terms.

This is a big adjustment for marketers who are used to working on internal timelines and still believe they control the information flow. Or that what they want to say is what buyers want to hear.

What's important to note is that all this technology evolution and speed to market has also increased the complexity of solving problems. It's just not as simple as buying a product anymore. Education is the resulting mainstay. It will always be needed. Expertise is necessary beyond the product to help deliver on the promise made. Preparing for the future is no longer a next step down the road, it's an ongoing effort that needs to be incorporated as part of every purchase decision.

What marketers choose to publish online can no longer be "good enough" content. Instead, content has to play an integral role in facilitating the buyer's experience. And that's not best served by feeds-and-speeds content.

You know this, but it bears repeating: according to Selling Power, “Today, up to 70% of a customer’s buying decision is now made based on information he or she finds online well before a salesperson has a chance to get involved.”

What Buyers Expect:

• Educational information. 23% say there's not enough - IDG Connect


• Expertise. 48% said if the quality of thought leadership improved, it would influence their purchase decision - ITSMA and PAC


• Relevance. 39% say this key element is missing - IDG Connect


• Consistent Value. 43% of marketers say customers view their content as disjointed or hit and miss - Forrester Research

I read a lot of research that delves into the opinions and thoughts of B2B buyers. Not once have I ever read a statistic saying that they want more product or solution information.

What buyers are saying is that their expectations have changed. Their online behavior and engagement levels are barometers reflective of the experience provided to them by your content, web properties and social media dialogues.

Let's face it. The only true differentiators left are your expertise and the experience your company provides to help buyers achieve their goals. If it was just about products, it would be a hat toss.

You're no longer competing against the vendor with a similar product down the street. It's the ability to exceed buyer expectations and provide a valuable buying experience that will determine the winner when the time comes to make a purchase decision.

What Happens When Inbound Marketing Works?

The term "inbound marketing" is getting a lot of play these days as B2B marketers grapple with labels and learning more about how marketing practices are evolving — including the dynamics of content marketing. I'm not getting into what all that means now, but invite you to be part of The Great Marketing Conversation, on January 24th, if you'd like to delve into the nuances. With Robert Rose, Mike Volpe, and Marcus Sheridan, we're bound to stir up quite a discussion.

What I do want to talk about in this post is what happens when your inbound content marketing works. Have you thought about it beyond the idea of getting prospects to come to you? Do you have a response plan? Is your sales team on board?

The whole point of inbound marketing is getting prospects to find and interact with your company. But it's what you do once you make that happen that can determine the success or failure of your contribution to revenues.

Here's the thing:

Generating inbound prospects who are more highly qualified and sales ready is the goal. But when you change the buying experience, you need to consider how the underlying processes on your side must change as well. Not just for marketing, but for sales.

What companies haven't yet quite grasped is that by changing the buying experience, they've also changed their buyers' expectations. And you can't stop those changes at the handoff and hope to be successful if your salespeople try to continue on in the way they've always done. It just doesn't work that way. This is where sales enablement needs to be orchestrated to keep the brakes off momentum.

Consider this scenario:

• You've worked really hard to understand your buyers and develop content focused on their needs, problems, goals and aspirations. (not your products)


• A prospect is following you on Twitter, visiting your blog and following the links you share socially.


• One day he goes online to search for specific information and comes across a search result for an eBook you published six months ago that they weren't aware of. So he visits your site and fills out the form to download it. He doesn't hesitate because his experience with your company has been great thus far.


• An inside sales rep sees the activity and calls the prospect to follow-up. Unfortunately, she starts off the conversation with a monologue about your company and products and tries to push the prospect into a demo.


• Your prospect extricates himself from the call and goes dormant.

Yes, this still happens. Happened to me just the other day from a company I thought knew better. And the account exec couldn't even tell me what I'd downloaded, just that they knew I'd downloaded something.

The problem is that all the work marketers do on the front end will be wasted if they don't create a response plan and enable sales (both inside and direct) to continue the dialogue without disappointing  prospects.

Follow-up by inside sales is fine. But remember that they need to be able to have a business-relevant conversation with the prospect. Following up on a content download isn't a sales call, but a relationship building experience. The sales rep should be able to discuss the topic the prospect expressed interest in and offer additional content the person may find relevant. Along the way, the rep can subtly learn more about the buying stage the prospect is in.

Inside sales follow-up should be treated as a form of progressive profiling, unless there are buying indications that indicate it's time for escalation.

This means that marketers need to think beyond their lead generation strategy to create a response plan that coordinates with nurturing and how they'll enable sales to meet those expectations your brilliant content is setting. If you can't keep prospects engaged once they come to you, what's the point?

Things to think about include:

• The process in response to specific content downloads and lead gen offers
• What additional content offers relate to a download?
• What conversational prompts will be helpful to ensure relevant follow-up conversations?
• What questions need to be asked/answered to help you be more relevant as the relationship continues? Focus on need first, not budget.
• Should the reponse to a download be a call? Or should that download activity serve to trigger an auto reponse email to be sent with a related content offer?Or, perhaps it's indicative of which lead nurturing track the prospect will find most valuable.

The concept of inbound marketing is great. But the strategy must be planned beyond the "getting found" part to what comes next.

The Art of The Ask in Content Marketing

When working on content strategies with clients, the question about which content should be gated always comes up. Content — great content — takes a lot of time, effort and resources to produce. It just makes sense that B2B marketers want people to pay for it with their contact info. Or does it?

Regardless of how much has been said about giving to get, setting content free, and sharing without restraint, what comes up for many corporate marketers is that they're stuck in the cross hairs of corporate objectives that don't give them a lot of wiggle room. Accountability and proof of contribution to revenues also has marketers leaning toward shutting the gate, if you will.

The issue isn't the form as much as it's the attitude. Marketers feel entitled to contact information in exchange for access to their content. Unfortunately, over zealous behavior by companies in response to form submissions is still a bad practice that doesn't seem to be abating. Therefore, resistance to form completion is growing.

On the flip side, buyers expect that if you want to do business with them that you'll provide the information they need to make that decision. If accessing the content requires too much effort, they'll move on to a competitor with less hoops to jump through.

The downsides of the gate—in addition to less downloads—are that they introduce hesitation and doubt into what should be a fluid process of establishing a relationship with your buyers. We've all had the experience of trolling along through content we find interesting only to be confronted with a form. The form surfaces thoughts such as these:

How important is this going to be to me?

What are the chances that they'll call me?

Is it worth the risk?

I always wanted to be Mickey Mouse...

Maybe I can just alter one digit in my phone number...

And I can use my throw-away email that I ignore...just in case they send a link to the PDF instead of letting me download it right away.

Once this happens, trust diminishes just a bit. Or more than that. In order not to risk losing a relationship that hasn't had a chance to develop, marketers need to think a bit more about the art of the ask.

How Not to Ask:

• Gate everything. I've been on websites that gate everything - including case studies. Seriously? Why would you want to make it difficult for people to learn about how you help your customers?


• Keep Older Content Under Lock and Key. Who hasn't filled out a form for a white paper that's over 2 years old? How disappointed were you? Try setting that content free after six months to allow it to help you get more mileage out of it. Consider adding a link at the end of it to newer gated content if they want to learn more about that subject. Yes, this means you need to keep track of and update your content.


• Embrace Form Field Mania. How much information do you really need? You're not going to use my street address for anything, so why ask for it? More than 4 - 5 fields is too many and makes you seem greedy and self-interested. What's most important? Name, email and 1 other thing. What's most helpful based on your marketing strategy? Industry? Title? Company name? You don't have to get all their info at once. Progressive profiling is a good thing!

Deciding When to Ask:

Make strategic decisions about when and why you decide to gate content. One thing that helps with this is to map your content to buying stages. Anything early stage doesn't need to be gated. Use this content to build a relationship by sharing information that helps them form their thinking around the problem and why to go about solving it. Once they make progress, then offer them something worthwhile in exchange for a limited amount of contact information — only what you need to establish a dialogue.

Use the weight of the content when deciding to gate or not to gate. People generally expect to fill out a form to register for a webinar, a research report, a white paper or ebook. Anything less than that doesn't have enough heft to provide a mutual exchange of value. This being said, also evaluate the buying stage. If you write an early-stage white paper, set it free to build awareness and get that dialogue underway. Or offer an executive summary for free and gate the full version. The point is, the sooner prospects start using your ideas to think about solving problems, the better off you'll be.

Give Them a Guarantee. Consider adding a check box to have a salesperson call them and add wording that assures them that no call will happen unless that box is checked. Make sure to get buy-in from sales!

Gate to Gain Insights. What's the promise of your content? If the person takes you up on the promise and fills out the form, what will that tell you about their interests, where they are in their buying process, and what your next interaction with them should be? Doing this well means that you must know your buyers. You need to be able to think about and plan for next steps, not just this one transaction.

And, given the promise of your content, if that lead is already in your database, what one or two questions could you ask on the form to help you become even more relevant to them? Yes, this is where progressive profiling comes in.

Asking is an Art — but it's also a strategic part of marketing that must be clearly thought out to provide value beyond adding someone's contact information to your database. Asking is about getting what you need to improve their experience with your company and your content. It requires a bit of thoughtful planning.

What Questions Will You Answer for Prospects in 2012?

I love this time of year. The New Year is stretching out infront of us, an open book ready for a story. That story will be fleshed out by the content you create and share over the next 52 weeks. Seems like a long time, but it will go by in the blink of an eye - just like this year.

One of the reasons that questions are so important is because they drive the curiosity to find answers. In a best case scenario, the answers to your prospects' questions will be found in your content.

So how do you find the questions?

Some resources include:

• Trend and prediction reports for the industries you serve. The analysts are out in force right now and many reports based on surveys of the types of target markets you serve are being published with an eye to what's coming.


• Customer interviews. Not necessarily formal surveys, but one-to-one conversations that help you hear the phrasing, concerns and opportunities voiced in your customer's words. If you can't do this, ask your salespeople to help out. Outline some goals for what you're interested in learning and let them run the conversations. If you can sit in, all the better.


• Social Media listening posts can also help to pinpoint interests. If you've created a list of prospects on Twitter, for example, what are they sharing with their networks? Which prediction posts do they find worthy enough to forward on? What are the trending topics you can identify and how do they line up with what the analysts or top industry bloggers are saying? (You are following them, right?)


• LinkedIn Discussion Groups are also a good source of industry-related topics that are gaining traction. With many of the groups now sporting open membership, you can often gain access where you might not have been been able to gain entry before. You'd be amazed at what you can learn.

You may also take a look at the end goals your customers have stated and then back into the questions they needed to answer to arrive at the decision to buy. LinkedIn profiles and job descriptions for roles your prospects fill can also provide insight to goals people in their positions are responsible for achieving.

Questions can also be indicative of which buying stage your prospects are in.

For example, a question that's equivalent to "Why should I care?" indicates that a prospect is in status quo. They are not actively pursuing solving the problem your products address or they wouldn't respond to that type of question. They would already care. These people are at the very early stages of the buying process and your content's job is to answer that question well enough to get them to assign their attention to learning more.

If the question is the equivalent of "Who can best help me solve this problem?" then it's likely that your prospect is in the options stage where they are in the process of selecting their short list. If this is your first entree to the party, you'd better come in fast and strong with information that will make them stop and consider learning enough about your company to consider adding you to their list.

The beauty of structuring your content to answer your prospects' questions is that you've designed the content to help you learn more about which stage of the buying process they're in. Once you've got an idea about that, you can increase the relevance, and thereby the level of engagement you can establish with them, through subsequent interactions.

To begin generating a list of questions for your prospects:

• Start with the problem they are trying to solve. 
• Narrow your focus to one persona or profile.
• Based on what's involved in solving the problem, what do they need to know?
   - what are their concerns about risk?
   - who else will be impacted and at what perceived level of cost or effort?
   - who do they have to convince to gain consensus for the purchase decision?
   - what could derail the deal?
   - what impact could their decision have on their career?
   - why should they trust your company and solution to deliver?
   - what do they need from a vendor that they don't already have? (beyond product)

Those are just a sampling of questions to ask yourself to get to questions your prospects will have. But hopefully enough to get the juices flowing.

Once you have your list of questions, how will you answer them? The answers will define the content you'll develop.

As you go through this process, you will start to see the order or flow that makes sense for publishing. (You can find more indepth instructions on this process in my book - excuse the self promo)

When it's all said and done, how well you can anticipate your prospects' questions and answer them in a helpful and relevant way will serve to determine your success with content marketing in 2012.

You ready?

The Secret to a Longer Life for Marketing Content

I work with a lot of companies that are limited in their ability to produce enough marketing content. I don't mean just any content, but content that resonates and serves as currency to buy prospect attention and actions. The truth is that the life span for marketing content is usually cut short prematurely.

The secret is rather simple, actually. It's repetition.

But, before you can grasp the power of the secret, you need to understand what repetition is not:

• Using the same piece of content over and over.
• Saying the same things everyone else in your market is saying.
• Using the same self-serving calls to action (schedule a demo today!)

For repetition to offer up a secret life to marketing content, it must be based on the ideas it shares, not on a content asset, itself. Contagious content (that which buyers love so much they can't wait to share it with others) is based on the quality of the ideas and the context in which they're developed.

The secret to repetition is to spin those ideas from a number of angles to create multiple content assets based on the strength of an idea. I often refer to this as the Rule of 5.

Here's a basic example:

Let's say the main idea is "The expectations of the new buyer." The original idea is to write an article about how the buyer has changed, backed up with industry statistics and examples that are relevant for the target market you've selected.

To put repetition into play, determine other ways to spin this main idea. Examples might include:

• 10 reasons you need to change what you're telling buyers
• Why your customer's trust level has declined
• How to have a conversation with today's buyer
• What sales needs to close the new buyer

Now you have 5 topics based on one main idea that you can develop into marketing content using the same research you'll do to develop the content asset around the main idea. All with a different take or spin. Now, consider if you spin these 5 ideas based on vertical applications...

Prospects who are interested in any of this content will likely be interested in all of it. Now your calls to action can be "see also" links connecting these ideas in a way that motivates the prospect interested in that topic to engage with more of your ideas, influencing how they think about the topic.

Benefits for you include:

• higher relevance with prospects
• extended attention from prospect
• a connected content storyline
• less time and resources to develop the content
• increased credibility and trust because you're tackling the issue from a variety of perspectives

Why wouldn't any marketer want to create a longer life for the content they develop?

One reason is we get bored. We know too much. We think that since we've written about it once, our prospects know the information and understand why they should do something (hopefully with us).

This isn't necessarily true. It takes repetition for ideas to take hold. Up to 7 times or more for new ideas. The trick is that for repetition to be successful, it must be focused on the ideas - not the content asset. A longer life for marketing content is based on giving your ideas a bigger platform.