At the SiriusDecisions Summit this morning, we got a case study that took a different, and refreshing, point of view on this topic. Joe Levin, Head of Sales Enablement at CDW, said the company had colossal content challenge on its hands: four content portals, more than 20,000 pieces of content and no unified search tools.

The company’s sales force desperately needed timely, relevant content to stay knowledgeable about the company’s offerings. Instead, they found themselves in a situation where looking for relevant content was like wading into a swamp in the middle of the night.

I won’t run through CDW’s entire journey solving this problem — that’s a much bigger topic that we’ll probably explore on Demand Gen Report next week. Instead, I’ll focus on one data point: As part of CDW’s new approach to using content for effective sales enablement, it eliminated 93% of those 20,000 unique content items.

Think about that. If your organization had to dump that much existing content, no matter how worthless it happened to be, what would the discussion sound like?

As Levin put it, those were some “really tough discussions” when CDE went through this process. But a less-is-more approach wasn’t just helpful for them, it was absolutely necessary.

“Less is more” is not something you hear very often when it comes to B2B content. But I suspect that many more companies will start thinking in these terms over the next year or two, both for their internal sales enablement content and their customer-facing content.

It’s still true that marketing organizations will struggle to produce enough relevant, high-quality, targeted content to feed their demand engines and their sales teams. At the same time, however, I think more organizations also need to have these difficult conversations about weeding out the massive quantities of sub-standard content that often burden their marketing and sales enablement efforts.

-Matthew McKenzie

The post For B2B Content, Sometimes Less Can Be More appeared first on Content4Demand.

Here’s the raw survey data, which I think is descriptive enough to include here:

First, let’s set aside the outliers: Podcasts are increasingly rare as B2B content assets, and interactive presentations (such as Brainshark or Slideshare) are an up-and-coming format that is still gaining traction.

Next, look at that “frequently” column. The most-shared content formats turn out to be white papers, blog posts and case studies. Infographics — the format most often associated with shareability — falls in the middle of the pack. Taking a broader view, however, shows that our respondents at least sometimes share a very broad range of content formats. Even “heavier” content like white papers and webinars tend to get shared by a surprisingly large number of B2B buyers.

These findings work against the conventional wisdom about content-sharing practices; there are many good reasons to create infographics, for example, but it’s a mistake to assume B2B readers are more likely to share them than to share other formats.

I’ll leave you with two takeaways:

• Experiment with ways to make all of your content even easier to share. More of our clients, for example, are using tools like Click to Tweet that generate shareable callouts in their E-books and white papers. Given the level of sharing already going on here, it makes sense to facilitate the process as much as possible.
• These findings once again illustrate the value of a balanced content-marketing attack. Give your readers a wide variety of content formats, and you’re likely to find that they all deliver a significant return on investment.

-Matthew McKenzie

The post B2B Content Sharing: The Surprising Benefits Of A Balanced Attack appeared first on Content4Demand.

Here’s the relevant data point Joe cited: 85% of all corporate blogs have published five posts or less.

Think about that. These companies spend thousands of dollars on content strategies, development and management. They’re on board the content marketing train, and they expect great things from their investments. Yet they’re surprisingly quick to surrender one of their most visible — and potentially valuable — content channels to crickets and tumbleweeds.

We’ve all been there. Like Joe said, most of us are better at starting things than we are at staying with them. It’s an occupational hazard in a field where there’s so much to do and things move so quickly.

That’s why I think it’s worth repeating a fairly obvious point: You’re better off executing a basic corporate blogging plan consistently than you are running a hit-or-miss plan with all of the bells and whistles. Posting to your corporate blog once a week, week in and week out, will build a much stronger online presence than a blog that publishes three times in one week and then goes dark for a month at a time.

If you can’t post consistently, think carefully about whether you want to publish a blog at all. A neglected site makes a statement about your business, and it’s not the kind you want to make.

There’s a corollary to this rule. A simple, 200 word blog post that hits one or two major points can be just as effective as a 900 word post that takes hours to research and write. Honestly, in a content environment where busy people are looking for a quick payoff, that short but sweet post might be a lot more effective.

Here’s the best news of all: Consistency can be your company’s secret content marketing weapon. It will make your content stand out, it will build your reputation and it will bring your readers back for more. Those are big benefits for such a modest investment.

-Matthew McKenzie

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This is what ABM chief executive Clark Pettit had to say about the decision:

“This was driven by our own strategic view of where the industry is going,” Pettit said. “Associations have to bring together the pieces of an industry needed to develop the business models of the future, and allow members to align with where their customers are going, not align the communities of the past.”

If the merger is one data point addressing the state of the B2B publishing industry, here’s another: this week’s bloodbath at United Business Media. UBM’s Tech Group is getting completely out of the print media business and planning hundreds of layoffs:

“Traditional b-to-b media has changed dramatically in recent years,” says UBM Tech CEO Paul Miller in a statement. “A lot of what worked in the past is no longer viable.”

Here’s one other thing to consider. UBM Tech will shift all of its remaining digital brands to its DeusM platform. The DeusM group was launched to build and run community-focused web sites for B2B technology brands, based mostly on a sponsorship model.

By most accounts, DeusM has been extremely successful, even as the rest of UBM Tech stumbled through a series of leadership shuffles and reorgs. Whatever the technical merits of the DeusM platform, the decision to regroup what’s left of UBM Tech around that platform tells you which way the wind is blowing.

Put together all of these pieces, and it’s clear that we have hit a turning point in the history of B2B publishing. ABM was a standard-bearer for traditional B2B media; now, it’s being folded into an organization dominated by technology brands. While some of UBM’s traditional editorial brands remain intact (notably InformationWeek), it sure looks like UBM is far more concerned with serving and supporting its B2B content marketing activities.

Traditional B2B editorial isn’t going away. It still serves an important, if undeniably diminished, role. But this week’s events make one thing abundantly clear: Companies with ambitious, forward-looking content marketing strategies represent the future of B2B publishing. Have you considered how your firm fits into this picture?

The post We’ve Hit The Tipping Point For B2B Content Marketing appeared first on Content4Demand.

…content creators are usually a little despised, or at least not as valued as entrepreneurs. A double standard currently exists as represented by this commonly shared belief that “all the marketing in the world won’t help you if you don’t have a great product.” Yet, time after time, great entrepreneurs turn to great content marketers to promote their product.

So, what is it? Do entrepreneurs really think content marketing is a waste, or do they in fact rely on us to help others fall in love with the product they created?

The author, after a detour into the idea of Freudian narcissism, concludes that it would be great if both sides learned to get along and respect one another. I agree, but it’s ultimately a pointless sentiment.

There’s one thing the product people will always understand: numbers. Show up at the table with a touchy-feely explanation of what content marketing can do, and you’re taking a wet noodle to a gunfight.

Show up with hard data connecting a content campaign to lead generation, sales pipeline and revenue activity, and you suddenly have the product team’s undivided attention. More to the point, you have the CFO’s undivided attention, and we all know who signs the checks.

By all means, wage a charm offensive against product people who don’t understand the power of content marketing. It can’t hurt. But if you aren’t ready to track, measure and document the dollars-and-cents impact of your campaigns, don’t hold your breath waiting for respect.

-Matthew McKenzie

The post Want Respect For Content Marketing? Kill ‘Em With Numbers — Not With Kindness appeared first on Content4Demand.

In the meantime, I wanted to share a sneak preview. One of the questions we asked involved which types of content people are willing to view in exchange for registration — name, email address, industry info, and the like. Here’s what we’re seeing so far:

This isn’t surprising in some ways: We already know that gating videos and infographics is generally a very bad idea. Conversely, we also know that gating high-value content like white papers and webinars is a practice that buyers understand and accept.

There are, however, a couple of interesting things going on here. First, B2B buyers generally expect case studies to be ungated content. Different companies handle this different ways, so this finding may influence their gating strategy.

Second, and more important, is the fact that B2B buyers take a dim view of any content that requires a long or invasive registration process. We define “limited” registration in our survey as “name, company name and email address,” with “full” registration involving anything more than that.

In other words, four out of five buyers won’t share more than the  most basic information, even for high-value content such as webcasts. Presumably, they either provide phony information or simply walk away when they’re asked to share more.

This is a missed opportunity. Content marketers have a wide variety of tools as their disposal, including progressive profiling and data-appending services, to work around this challenge. If your company can capture even a small part of that 80% that balks at providing detailed registration data, how might it affect your conversion rates and revenue impact?

By the way, if you haven’t yet taken the survey, there’s still time to do so — and to get a chance to win a VIP pass to our Content2Conversion event in New York later this month.

The post Are Your Registration Forms Wrecking Your Content Marketing Strategy? appeared first on Content4Demand.

What we can give you is a chance to win a VIP pass to our upcoming Content2Conversion event, which will take place in New York City on April 22-23. That’s a $495.00 value, and one lucky respondent will get it absolutely free. That’s a lot of beer.

We do a fair number of surveys over at Demand Gen Report, but this one is probably my favorite. That’s because it’s one of the best tools we have for understanding what B2B buyers really think about the content marketers are creating. Last year, for example, the study turned up findings such as:

• The impact of LinkedIn, which more than half (53%) of the B2B executives surveyed use to share content with their colleagues;
• The fact that an overwhelming majority (75%) of B2B buyers say solution providers need to “curb the sales messaging” in their content;
• The growing popularity of interactive formats such as webinars, video and infographics.

This year’s survey will be even more interesting; we’ll have an opportunity to compare the results against last year’s findings and to discuss some emerging trends.

I’m sure we’ll see some results that simply confirm what everybody is already thinking about content marketing. But I guarantee that we’ll also get a surprise or two.

As always, however, we need your input (and just a few seconds of your time) to make this study as valuable as possible. Take the study, and we’ll make sure you get a copy of the results — along with a chance to join us in New York next month.

Take The Survey!

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Having said that, I think there’s a compelling message in this infographic sponsored by online video platform provider Brightcove. A couple of the advantages associated with video-focused content marketing are especially interesting:

• Video is more than 50 times as likely than a plain text page to appear on a first page of search rankings. That’s some pretty heavy-duty SEO mojo.
• Video can double your landing page conversion rates.

Check out the full infographic by clicking on the image below. Also keep in mind that we’ll be doing a special session on digital storytelling at our upcoming Content2Conversion event, featuring Limelight Networks’ Jason Thibeault, that will explore best practices for creating compelling video and other interactive content.

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A new Forrester Consulting study, commissioned by Aquent, indicates that mobile marketing budgets will either increase slightly or remain flat for 4 out of 5 companies in 2013. The biggest challenge, by far, involves measurement: 42% of the companies surveyed said they’re hard-pressed to measure the ROI of their mobile campaigns. In addition, 68% said they’re unlikely to get a green light to hire more mobile marketing expertise until they “prove that mobile marketing has a positive ROI.”

Measurement and analytics are an across-the-board challenge for B2B marketing organizations. As I pointed out a couple of weeks ago, interest is waning in social media analytics, presumably because they’re failing to deliver on their promises to track and quantify ROI.

What’s the counter-argument? That’s simple. According to Google, mobile Internet usage will eclipse the desktop by next year:

This isn’t just an issue for B2C marketers: According to our own 2012 DGR Content Preferences Survey, which was taken last March, 37% of the respondents were already viewing business-related marketing content on their smartphones, and another 30% were using tablets. We’re pretty confident those numbers will climb when we conduct our 2013 survey this spring.

I understand and sympathize with the need to establish mobile marketing ROI. But I also understand that your customers aren’t going to wait patiently while you get this sorted out. They’re voting for mobile content with their eyeballs and their dollars; if you don’t get ahead of this trend, your competitors will be more than happy to take up the slack.

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