Your Burning Content Strategy Questions Answered by Movéo and Earnest – Part One: What is Content Strategy and Why Does it Matter?

Movéo recently began a partnership with UK-based agency Earnest, and we were thrilled to learn that they’re just as interested in content marketing as we are. Our managing partner Brian Davies and Senior Brand Strategist Dave Skidmore sat down with Earnest’s Managing Director Chris Wilson, and their Planning Director Paul Hewerdine for a discussion on the content strategies we get asked most at our respective agencies. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be sharing parts of their discussion here on Get There.

Let’s kick off the series today with a discussion on the most important content marketing question of all: what’s content marketing and why does it matter? Take it away, Brian, Dave, Chris and Paul!

Read more on page 2.

Pondering the 2020 CMO

Today’s guest post comes from our Vice President of Engagement Management, Sheri Granholm. She stopped by Get There to talk about how quickly our B2B marketing world is changing, and to share her thoughts on what we can expect in years to come.

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Who doesn’t love prognosticators, especially in the world of business? So when I was scanning a recent email from CMO.com and saw the title, “The CMOs world in 2020” it instantly caught my attention.  Especially given the increasing rate of technology and data collection in the universe coupled with the fragmentation for how audiences are consuming information and being influenced in their buying decisions.

CMO.com invited marketing leaders to prognosticate about the future of corporate marketing. Below were a few of the top predictions in store for CMOs and their marketing teams that made us pause and consider.

#1 Wanted: Whole Brain Marketers

We’ve all heard how right brain people will rule the world as out of the box thinking will be needed along with a balance of logical, analytical skills to solve global complex issues. Tom Collinger, executive director of the Medill IMC Spiegel Digital & Database Research Initiative at Northwestern University calls them the “artist geeks.” “Those with the analytical chops married to strategic or creative talents will be increasingly valued in the corporate marketing organization,” Collinger said. As B2C and B2B marketers we agree that individuals who can bring a balance of both skills will be essential for connecting data analytics with behavioral engagement. We are seeing agencies (including Moveo) hiring talent with psychology and theater backgrounds–people that understand consumer mindset and the power of making connections.

#2 CMOs Let Loose

“There are going to be things happening that we can’t control and won’t want to control,” Ted Woehrle, CMO for Newell Rubbermaid said. “You can’t carve out an area and say, ‘This is my turf.’”

What Ted is saying is that there will be no lines drawn in the sand about marketing’s role in the organization. Expect more crossover of marketing function outside the department with a hybrid team of specialists. We are already seeing the role of brand building within an organization expanding beyond marketing’s auspices. Expect this trend to continue with the CMO playing the role of collaborator and organizer within an organization and less need for, dare we say, brand police and babysitter.

#3 The Death of the Annual Plan

Long gone will be the days when you created an annual marketing plan for your clients and then felt accomplished when you put it to bed. “The annual plan is going away,” Newell Rubbermaid’s Woehrle said. “While CMOs will still create an annual framework, they’ll be making adjustments to it every month to respond to changing conditions and opportunities.” We are already seeing this trend with the emergence of digital marketing and the top down focus on accountability and metrics that CMOs are being held to. The need for ongoing optimization and refinement have taken their front and center position in any marketer’s handbook.

#4 The Market is the Message

“Marketing success will depend less on persuasion, more on fostering peer pressure,” Bill Lee, CEO of the Customer Strategy Group said.  “Traditional MarCom, PR, and advertising skills will be usurped by prowess at bringing customers and prospects together to influence one another—and your brand.”

As I read this, I thought to myself, who would have guessed that bloggers would be wielding more power than traditional media power players like the New York Time, WSJ and CNN? In fact, Guy Kawasaki, Former Chief Evangelist of Apple Evangelist, who spoke at the 2012 BMA conference waxed poetic about “Lonely Boy 15” who embraced your product and told his 20 friends and so on and so on. Expect these influencers to take on even more of a prominent role in the success or failure of your brand in the coming years as we continue to live in what we call a global community.

Let us know what you think. Look inside your crystal ball and share your marketing predictions for the coming years.

Featured Image via Sherwood Farm Group.

The B2B World Presents Unique Media Relations Opportunities

As we’ve said in a few recent posts, we believe the lines are beginning to blur between B2B and B2C marketing. Still, as similar as the two worlds may become, B2B media relations will always present unique opportunities and challenges that do not exist in the B2C world. Let’s take a look at a few of those opportunities and think about how we might be able to leverage them to get more publicity for the B2B companies we work for.

• Trade publications are receptive to pitches. Consumer companies often face the daunting task of pitching their stories to mainstream publications that get thousands of pitches a day and don’t have any real tie to their particular product or service. As B2B marketers, we’re much more likely to pitch to a very targeted, niche group of trade publications. The journalists at these publications likely already have a good understanding of our industries, and they might even be familiar with our brands. Needless to say, this makes securing a pitch easier.

• The media habits of your target audience are clear. In B2C marketing, it can be tough to pinpoint the publications that your target audience is most likely to read. However, in the B2B world, there is at least one trade publication devoted to almost every imaginable industry on earth, from packaging to nanotechnology. These publications are narrowly tailored to meet the needs of the specific industries they serve, so your message will fit right in.

• B2B industry bloggers are professional and trusted. Both B2B and B2C marketers can benefit from pitching their stories to bloggers, but the benefits of doing so may be greater in the B2B world than in B2C. While some consumer marketing-friendly bloggers carry immense clout, many have very small readerships and care more about receiving free product samples than they do about creating great content. This is rarely the case in the B2B world. B2B bloggers tend to be better established in their niches and run their blogs like businesses. As a result, you can expect them to give you great coverage whether you provide a free product for them to try or not. 

What are some other opportunities you’ve found in B2B media relations? What unique challenges have you encountered?

Featured image via PR In Pink.

Three Reasons Marketing Automation is Booming for B2B

BtoB Magazine reported last week that marketers expect to spend $525 million on marketing automation this year — a 60% increase over 2011’s spend. We’ve certainly experienced this trend firsthand in our work with B2B clients, and have a few hunches about the reasons behind it.

Here’s our take on the top three reasons marketing automation is booming right now:

1. Marketing automation tools are more accessible. In the past, most marketing automation solutions have priced themselves out of the sizeable small business market. Today, newer players like HubSpot and InfusionSoft are making it easier to get involved on a smaller budget.
2. Content marketing has helped companies understand marketing automation. We need to give credit to marketing automation providers like Marketo for creating information-rich content marketing programs around the idea of marketing automation. The many white papers they have developed, blog posts they have written and webinars they have hosted have helped companies understand how marketing automation works and how indispensible it can be.
3. Hiring is down, marketing automation is up. Many companies have put the breaks on hiring over the last few years as a result of the recession. Marketing automation systems can handle a lot of the work that employees once oversaw at a fraction of the cost, and B2B companies are taking notice.

Is your company increasing its marketing automation spend this year? Tell us why in the comments.

Best of B2B Olympic Advertising

As we mentioned back before the opening ceremony, there are quite a few B2B companies in this year’s group of Olympic advertisers. Now that the games are almost over, it’s about time we review a few of the best B2B ads from the games.

Here are a few of our favorites so far:

General Electric

It seems that we can almost always count on GE to develop powerful, relevant messages for the events in which they advertise, and the London Olympics are no exception. Their ads about the company’s impact on premature babies were touching. However, we enjoyed the commercials about the role GE has played in powering famous London landmarks like Tower Bridge, and the accompanying interactive map most of all.

EDF

Utility Company EDF’s ad about the men who power the Olympic Stadium was really clever, and just humorous enough to stand out from the sea of serious and motivational ads that aired during the Olympic games.

GlaxoSmithKline

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hy-ch43OCDQ

Medical Technology Manufacturer GlaxoSmithKline hit the mark with their ad, which shows a simulated view inside athlete Marvon Devonish’s body using a GSK microscope, and then ends with the line “the crowd is my only drug.” What a great way to tie a high-tech product into the controversy and spirit of the games.

Three Content Planning Tools for B2B Marketers

If you run any kind of content marketing program, chances are you’ve tried your fair share of content planning tools. Content marketing can be complex, but the right tools can make the process almost pain-free. Here are a few of our favorites: 

DivvyHQ

We mentioned DivvyHQ in a recent post on social media tools, but it’s worth bringing up again. This spreadsheet-free app allows you to organize all your content ideas, set up monthly content calendars, manage deadlines and schedule posts. Our favorite part is the feature that reminds your co-workers to provide you with that piece of overdue content so you don’t have to.

Sprout Social

Much like DivvyHQ, Sprout Social allows you to publish and schedule updates and send tasks and assignments to your team. However, what sets this product apart is its robust reporting and analytics and CRM features. We’ve had some great results with Sprout’s discovery tools, which mine social media to find people who need your product or service. The tool’s beautiful analytics reports are an added bonus.

Google Calendar

If you like to keep things simple, Google Calendar might be the content planning tool for you. We know a lot of marketers who simply schedule their content as appointments on their calendar and then send reminders to complete tasks and follow up with staff. Though it’s not as robust as DivvyHQ or Sprout Social, the flexibility, cost and on-the-go availability of Google Calendar makes it a viable option for content planning.

Using Buyer Personas For Content Mapping

In last week’s post about mapping content to the B2B buyer’s journey, we said that B2B marketers must focus on both the information needs of their customers and the content formats that best deliver this information when planning a content marketing program. However, as some of you pointed out on Twitter, this idea only works if you know what information your customer requires at each stage in the decision-making process. What if you don’t? We believe the answer lies in the development of buyer personas.

To figure out what kinds of information your buyer needs at each stage in the decision-making process, you must truly get to know your customers. Buyer personas are a great way to do just that.

Here’s how to create a set of buyer personas that will help you figure out the information needs of your customers:

1. Understand what a buyer persona is. “Buyer persona” might sound like jargon for “target market,” but a buyer persona is much more than a simple target market definition. Buyer personas are detailed profiles of the types of customers you serve that use real names, faces and personal characteristics in addition to demographic, psychographic and geographic information. Buyer personas allow you to narrowly define your audience and create content that appeals directly to the individuals within it. To learn more, check out the authority behind buyer personas, The Buyer Persona Institute.
2. Consider your current customers. Chances are your target customers have more than a few things in common with your current customers.  Learn more about your target by really getting to know your current customers. Ask them questions, send them surveys and be observant of the things they say and do when you’re together. Pay special attention to how they progress through the buying process.
3. Research, research, research. If you’re expanding into a new sector or working to reach a new kind of customer, you might need to do some research. Read the industry publications that your new target would read. Connect with them on LinkedIn and see what they’re up to. Take someone in your new target market out to lunch. Do whatever you must to learn what makes them tick.
4. Start with the basics. After you feel that you have a good understanding of the people who do business with your company (or those who should), it’s time to get started with your first profile. Begin by profiling the type of customer that you consider most valuable to your business, either because they have the biggest need for your product/service or the most money to spend. Give them a name, and find a photo of what they might look like. Define their age, job title and industry. Keep in mind that you’re just creating an example of what your customer might be like. Don’t worry if the traits you come up with don’t fit for all of the customers in the group you’re considering.
5. Get into the nitty gritty. Now it’s time to get more specific about your buyer’s priorities, challenges and desires. The Buyer Persona Institute suggests detailing their priority initiatives (What do they care about accomplishing most this year?), their success factors (How do they define success?), their perceived barriers (What’s keeping them from buying a product/service like yours?), their buying process (How do they go from awareness to action?) and their decision criteria (What things do they consider when making a purchase?). Other areas to investigate might include the industry publications they read, their professional activities, their salary and their leisure habits. Compile as much detail as you need to get a good feel for your buyer.
6. Repeat steps 4 and 5 for other customer groups. If you serve multiple verticals, you’ll want to complete a buyer persona profile for each one.

After you’ve completed your set of buyer personas, it’s time to put them to work to figure out what kind of information your customers need at different stages in the decision-making process. Use your buyer personas to put yourself in your buyer’s shoes. Think about the sale you’re trying to make and ask yourself, “If I were this customer, what would I truly want to know right now?” If you’ve done the work to develop your buyer personas, the answer will be obvious.

Image via Buyer Persona Playbook.

The Merits of Mapping Content to B2B Buyer’s Journey

There has been some interesting debate taking place on the blogosphere lately about the merits of mapping content formats to the B2B buyer’s decision-making process. As B2B marketers, we’re taught to believe that our customers follow a standard sequence when making a buying decision that looks something like this:

It makes sense, then, that we would try to map the content we create to meet the unique needs of our buyers at each stage of the process. It also makes sense that we would pay attention to research on the content formats customers prefer at various stages, which is often represented in charts like this one from TechTarget:

While we wouldn’t go as far as to discount content mapping entirely, we can’t help but wonder whether Eric’s ideas have some merit. Rather than focusing on format (asking whether our target wants a white paper or a case study in the “desire” phase, for example), he recommends focusing on identifying the information our target needs at each stage of the buying process and then providing it in whatever format makes the most sense.Most B2B marketers still go this route, and most have found it to be effective. However, B2B expert Eric Wittlake thinks we’ve got it all wrong. He calls research about the types of content that B2B buyers prefer at different stages of their decision making process “misinformation” and says that this approach is diverting our focus from what’s really important: giving customers the information they need as they work to make a decision.   We think that a combination of these two approaches works best. While we agree that it must be our priority to give customers the information they need when they need it, we also feel that certain content formats are better at delivering certain types of information than others. An approach that focuses both on information needs of our customers and the formats that best deliver this information sounds like a win-win to us. What do you think?