We’ve finally made our way to the fifth and final law in our Five New Laws of Content Series. If you’ve been following along, we hope you’ve learned some valuable lessons that will change the way you think about content marketing. And now, onto our final law: The Law of Exchange.
The Law of Exchange can be summarized as follows:
As the value of content increases, the value ofwhat it is exchanged for increases.
Think about it: what is the difference between a report from Frost & Sullivan, which costs $6,000, and a report on the same topic that is available in exchange for an email address? Clearly, the anticipated value of the content. People are simply willing to give more in exchange for high quality, valuable content.
This law has significant implications for the kind of content that is created by content producers. “Thought leadership” has been defined by Gartner as “the giving — for free or at a nominal charge— of information or advice that a client will value so as to create awareness of the outcome that a company’s product or service can deliver, in order to position and differentiate that offering and stimulate demand for it.” Central to this definition is the expectation of exchange — in a best-case scenario, a prospect may become a customer after being impressed with some intellectual capital; in a worst-case scenario, a prospect grants the content producer permission to contact them in the future with the implicit understanding that they may be interested in receiving additional content.
Consulting firms have been using this model for years. In fact, Gartner estimates 20% of the marketing spend of these types of firms has gone to support it. Thanks to the growth of content marketing, thought leadership (as a quasiorganized sub-discipline of the practice) is now coming to a marketing program near you.
There’s no denying that the growth of thought leadership and content marketing presents tremendous opportunity for brands and brand building. But how can you take full advantage of the opportunity and make sure you get your content marketing program right? On Friday, we’ll release our Five New Laws of Content White Paper for download, where the answer to these questions will be revealed.
At Movéo, we believe there is no better way to learn about the future of our industry than from leaders at successful B2B companies. That’s why we jumped at the chance to attend last week’s BMA luncheon with GE’s Executive Director of Global Digital Marketing, Linda Boff.
Before the event, we posted about some of the things we were hoping to learn from Linda, but her presentation gave us so much more than just the answers to our questions from last week’s post. That’s why we’ve decided to share the top three lessons about B2B social media that we took away from the event.
Business is social. Gone are the days when social media mattered only to consumer-driven companies. This isn’t the first time we’ve realized how powerful social can be for B2B, but nothing has driven the point home like learning about the success that GE has had with social media in the industrial, manufacturing and B2B spaces.
Social media doesn’t require a big budget. For one of the biggest players in B2B social media, GE’s social spend is somewhat small. Linda told us that GE’s social team includes a social media manager, several “quasi-interns” and a community management agency that handles day-to-day execution. If they can generate the results we’ve seen so far with a team of that size, there is no reason that small companies should feel that social media success is out of their reach.
Content requires context to be effective. Linda is a big advocate of content marketing, but she was quick to point out that content can’t exist in a vacuum. For content to reach its full potential, it must exist in the context of a community that is passionate about the information being shared. When social media and content marketing work together, great things happen.
Were you at the event? If so, we’d love to hear what you learned from Linda.
If you’ve been following along with our series on content strategy over the last few weeks, you’ve already learned about the laws of consumption, complexity and reputation. If you’d like to catch up, you can find all the posts here. If you’re ready to continue learning, then stay right here, because we’re moving on to the Law of Evolution in today’s post.
Examples of the evolution of content can be found everywhere. Here’s just one of them: A newly-launched career website lets job seekers upload video of themselves explaining their background and expertise, answer employer-submitted questions via an automated phone system, and upload sound bites to their profiles. Just think how much richer this content is when compared with the stand-alone, paper resumé of old.
This brings us to the fourth Law of Content: As technology improves, the production value of content goes up.
Increases in bandwidth, processing power and storage do not mean the written word is in immediate danger of losing its seat at the content table, but it clearly has less elbowroom than ever before. “Share of eyeballs” for richer content is growing, which makes sense given that motion and sound can make for a more informative or engaging user experience
Growth in Internet video consumption, arguably the highest form of content production value now available, has been increasing rapidly for some time. In 2011 alone, it increased by approximately 45% over the year before. This trend will continue. After all, when developers are technically capable of doing something (3-D anyone?), it tends to scale rapidly.
The implications of this law for content producers are a double-edged sword. On the one hand, the content that is produced will be more involving, and this will increase message penetration, and thus the likelihood of further brand engagement.
On the other hand, producing such content will be more time consuming and resource intensive (e.g., video equipment, editing software, skilled creatives, etc.) than the written word. This means more and more content will need to be outsourced, at least for those organizations that have not made the capital expenditures to make such production possible in-house.
Again referencing the recent Content Marketing Institute and Marketing Profs study, 41% of those queried found that producing the kind of content that engages prospects/customers was their biggest challenge. This percentage will likely go up as technology — and the production value of content — continues to advance.
We’ll be back later this week week with the fifth and final new law of content.
Tomorrow, several of us are planning to attend a BMA Chicago event on GE’s social media strategy with their Executive Director of Global Digital Marketing, Linda Boff. GE is one of the companies we admire most in B2B marketing, so needless to say, we’re excited about this event.
Here are a few of the things we’re hoping to learn from Linda, who is likely one of today’s brightest minds in B2B social media:
What challenges did GE face in bringing together so many diverse business units under the umbrella of one social media strategy, and how did they overcome these challenges?
How did GE integrate its social media strategy into the company’s overall marketing plan?
What motivated GE to make cause marketing a key component of its social media strategy with the ecomagination challenge, and why was the challenge so successful?
Check back next week when we share what we learned from Linda and her experience with GE.
If you didn’t update your Facebook page to the new timeline layout before the end of last week, you may have been surprised to see that Facebook went ahead and made the change for you. Whatever you do, don’t leave your page as-is! Spend some time tweaking your page to make it work in the new layout, and while you’re at it, take advantage of the new opportunities for sharing rich content that it provides.
Last month, we posted about a few B2B companies who made an early switch over to the timeline layout. If you want to see how the timeline can be used effectively, that’s a great place to start. But now that we’ve made the switch ourselves, we’re ready to share a few of the lessons we learned.
Check out our tips and let us know how you like your new timeline.
1. The cover image matters. Your new Facebook cover image (the big image at the top of your page) measures 851 x 315 pixels. That’s a lot of screen real estate, so you’ll want to make sure to use a high quality image that is a powerful representation of what your business stands for. We chose a cover image representing our data and analytics mindset to represent Movéo and our approach to marketing. It’s simple, colorful and highlights work we’ve produced for our clients.
2. Custom apps are easier and more effective than ever. In updating the page to the new layout, we decided it was time to add some rich content like our blog and white papers to our Facebook page. Fortunately, this is a simple process thanks to the WooBox Custom Tab app, which allows you to create apps from any URL, HTML file or image you might want to use. We created an app that makes it easy to view our blog without leaving Facebook, and another that allows users to download our most recent white paper after submitting a form. All of this was done without coding using the Facebook Developer platform. Thanks to the new timeline layout, our new apps are featured prominently at the top of the page, making them more accessible to our fans.
3. Apps provide opportunities for design, too. In the new timeline, you’ll find your photos, ‘likes’ and any custom apps you’ve added right below your cover image and page name. While the standard version of this part of the page can look a bit disjointed, you have the option to adjust the way your custom apps appear through the “manage” section of the admin panel. Simply choose “Edit Settings” in the app section of the admin panel and add an image measuring 11×74 pixels for any of your custom apps to change how they appear. We created buttons and custom apps for our photos, blog and white papers.
When it comes to managing a successful content marketing program, finding ways to meet demand for fresh content and overcoming the challenges of managing complex content streams are just the tip of the iceberg. You also have to build a reputation for your organization and the content you share. That’s why the third law of content is all about reputation.
The Law of Reputation can be summarized as follows: As the number of content sources increases, the importance of source reputation increases.
We see examples of the power of reputation with publications like The Drudge Report, Fox News and The New York Times. All three are considered reputable sources fornews content despite their political, historical and stylistic dissimilarities. The reason for this is they all have reputations that have been carefully cultivated.
Everyone has heard the expression, “Opinions are like (fill in the body part), everyone’s got one.” And so it is with viewpoints on everything from where whole industries are heading to why product “A” is better than product “B.” The Internet has been a great equalizer, enabling almost any person or organization to publish this type of content. But that doesn’t mean all content is equally good. In fact, the vast majority of it is far less than that.
I recall a video from a few years back in which one of the characters deadpans the line, “So basically I thought the best approach would be to repeat exactly what you told me on the first call and shuffle the words around a bit.” This statement summarizes much of the content on the Internet — unoriginal and devoid of critical thought. Bad content can even be insidious. Lots of online material is now produced at “content farms,” companies that employ large numbers of writers to generate content designed specifically to be ranked highly by search engines. While this content might pass muster with indexing technologies and algorithms, the discerning reader can usually spot it a mile away.
What this means is that content consumers will increasingly use the sponsor of content as shorthand for its perceived quality. The implication for content producers? Sharing useful information will continue to be a great way to build credibility and trust, but a strong brand is the best way of ensuring that their content will not only be consumed, but valued by the consumer.
Tell us: What are you doing to build your reputation through content?
Last week, several members of our Movéo team attended the Business Marketing Association’s breakfast seminar with Karstin Bodell, VP of General Business Marketing at IBM. At the event, Karstin shared the results of IBM’s CMO study, which aggregated the results of interviews with 1,700 CMO’s across the globe. As expected, we came away from the event with a better understanding of what chief marketing officers are thinking about, working toward and struggling with. We also left with some new thoughts on how B2B marketing has changed in recent years, and how it will continue to evolve in the future. We’d like to share a couple of those thoughts today.
Relationships matter more than ever before. The Internet and social media have forever changed how customers interact with brands and businesses. Companies are more accessible than ever before, and as a result, customers now expect to have meaningful relationships with the companies they do business with. This is as true in B2B as it is in consumer-driven businesses. So what’s a B2B CMO to do? IBM suggests that, “CMOs will have to connect…in ways their customers perceive as valuable. This entails engaging with customers throughout the entire customer lifecycle, building online and offline communities of interest and collaborating with the rest of the C-suite to fuse the internal and external faces of the enterprise.”
Corporate character is essential to success. Corporate social responsibility and transparency have been big buzzwords in C-Suites for the last few years, but they’re not just trendy topics anymore. They’re necessities. IBM’s study notes, “What a business believes and how it subsequently behaves are as important as what it sells.” Karstin emphasized that there are no longer any secrets in business. Thanks to the Internet, customers can now find information on everything from how much your top executives are paid to how environmentally friendly your production line is, and this information can have a big effect on purchasing decisions in both B2B and consumer-driven businesses. As B2B marketers, it’s our responsibility to clearly communicate what our companies stand for and to make sure we follow through on our commitments to our customers.
ROI is becoming more important and harder to prove. CMOs are under more pressure than ever to prove that they are making smart financial decisions in their marketing plans, and that their initiatives have a solid ROI. However, ROI is not always easy to measure, especially when it comes to social media and other emerging tools. As B2B marketers, we will need to make ROI a driving force behind everything we do, rather than an afterthought.
The full CMO Study is available for download here. We highly encourage you to read it and share your thoughts. What other key learnings do you think B2B marketers can take away from the findings?
When we posted about the pros and cons of Pinterest on Monday, one pro we mentioned is that Pinterest is a great repository of visual content. What we didn’t explain in-depth is why visual content is so important for B2B companies.
We thought we’d do just that in today’s post, but then we happened across the great video above from BtoB Magazine and thought, “why reinvent the wheel?”
In this six-minute video, Danielle Leslie explains why visual media should be part of your marketing strategy. She also explores some other popular visual sharing sites (think Tumblr) and the visuals themselves (think infographics). We think it’s a must-watch for all B2B marketers.
Let’s jump back into our “Five New Laws of Content” series with a discussion of Law #2: The Law of Complexity.
The Law of Complexity is a lot like the Law of Entropy. The Law of Entropy loosely describes something we all know by casual observation: the amount of chaos in a system tends to increase with the complexity of the system. Similarly, the Law of Content can be summarized as follows:
As the complexity of content increases, the challenge of managing it increases.
When your organization was eking out a couple white papers a year, the need for a content plan — much less a content strategy — was nonexistent. Yet, today content is the fuel of the marketing engine. Everything from nurture marketing programs to search engine optimization to social media demand a steady supply of it. With so much content around, it is more important than ever to manage its collective presentation in ways that create meaning. This calls for a new skill set — that of curator.
To return to our science example, a curator is an “information chemist.” He or she must strategically develop, select and place content in the appropriate vehicles, in the appropriate environments, in order to engage the audience, convey a message or inspire action. The majority of organizations are set up to sell products and services, not to manage the production and delivery of a wide array of editorial material. As a result, content can end up being created for content’s sake, with little alignment with the strategic interests of the organization. In other cases, words, images, audio and video can be “shoe horned” into vehicles they weren’t truly designed for, without the real-world content requirements of the audience in mind.
When these things happen, the audience can’t find what it’s searching for, or worse, does not value what it does find. Either of these eventualities can tarnish the very brand the content was meant to burnish.
Organizations need to take a hard look in the mirror. If they don’t have curatorial capability on staff, they need to hire or outsource that capability — and before they execute their next wave of content.
Join us next week when we discuss Law #3, and don’t forget to look for our white paper on the five laws of content, which we’ll release in the last post in our series.
There’s no denying it: Pinterest has officially become a major player in social media. The social-sharing photo website — introduced just ten months ago — allows users to “pin” images they find interesting to virtual pinboards and share them with their followers. The site has already grown to attract over 13 million users, and marketers have taken notice.
What Pinterest has certainly been more popular among consumer marketers, a few B2B marketers have begun to integrate the platform into their social media strategies as well. But should they? Should Pinterest really be used as a B2B marketing tool? Let’s take a look at a few pros and cons of Pinterest for B2B.
Pros
Referral traffic. You might be surprised to learn that Pinterest generates more referral traffic than major players YouTube and LinkedIn. In January, Pinterest accounted for 3.6% of total referral traffic, according to Mashable. Twitter, which is arguably second only to Facebook in social media, only accounted for slightly more referrals at 3.61%. If you want to find new ways to send people back to your site, Pinterest may be worth considering.
SEO. As Karlie Justus points out in a Social Media B2B post, Pinterest creates a stored link for every image a user posts. These stored links act like inbound links to your site, and inbound links will boost your search engine ranking.
Visual content. Pinterest is all about visual assets. For B2B marketers, this could mean product images, videos, infographics or even images that fit into a certain theme related to your business. In many cases, B2B marketers are already creating this visual content for other purposes, and Pinterest provides a visually interesting way to group and showcase it, all the while building backlinks.
Women. According to this AP article by Barbara Ortutay, 65% of Pinterest users are women, and women drive 85% of traffic on the site. If your company targets women, Pinterest could be a great way to reach your consumer.
Cons
Copyright problems. There has been a lot of discussion lately about whether pinning certain images to Pinterest could constitute copyright infringement. There is still a great deal of confusion about what can be pinned and what cannot, but Pinterest promises to take steps to protect their users. If you’re pinning only images that you own, you’re unlikely to run into problems, but this is still an area where B2B marketers should exercise caution.
Business isn’t a focus. Pinterest is evolving quickly, but it is still focused on lifestyle content — things like recipes, fashion and home décor. Most people aren’t visiting Pinterest to find business-related content, at least not yet.
Women. While Pinterest’s female-dominated user base can be a positive thing for B2B companies, it can also be a drawback if your target is made up primarily of men. Take some time to consider how closely your target resembles the average Pinterest user profile before making the platform part of your social media plan.
What do you think? Do the pros of Pinterest outweigh the cons for your business?
