At Forrester’s CMO event last year, David Cooperstein, presented some insight on how marketers think their roles have changed – the most poignant focused on the amount the discipline and job role has taken on, and the level of pressure that marketers feel they are under to get results. I think this is indicative of many professions, not just marketing, at a time when more needs to be done for less and business models are being redrawn.

If you look at marketing, the remit of internal communications and external programmes have been expanded with social, online and video. These have conspired to make the marketer’s job potentially harder with all the different channels that have to be managed, the need to stretch budgets to support more activity and prove ROI on new models that are still evolving.

Content marketing represents a way to respond to the wealth of different routes to customers that have emerged over the past few years. Forrester analyst, Ryan Skinner pointed out that part of the reason to invest in content marketing was its ability to endlessly re-package materials in ways to suit customers and prospects at different points of the buying cycle.

This seems to be broadly true: content can be themed around products, for example, but use different language and formatting to offer information to given audiences at different points in the buying cycle. However, what will be more challenging for many businesses is how that content marketing strategy gets started.

Granted, not all companies have customers that are as keen to embrace new social networks or online channels instead of traditional marketing approaches. One attendee at Forrester event from a software provider mentioned that their prospects are all in the public sector space and don’t yet use social channels as part of their work. This may be a valid observation but the question to ask is; do they in their own time? And will they in time? The answer is likely to be yes. It’s also important to consider that you’ll still need to evolve your marketing to capture new and future customers who, having been brought up as digital natives, will expect companies to have a sophisticated social presence.

For companies in the B2B space, the changing sales environment gives an opportunity to rethink the role of content as part of an effective marketing and new business development strategy. One way to start is to look at how existing content can be redesigned and used in different ways to make it fly further online and be more powerful as sales assets. This is where the use of external creative support is worth its weight in gold.

Being able to inject creative ideas into even the driest marketing collateral is a good example of where creative agencies can work magic. Rethinking how customers are presented to the world or white paper discussions are brought to life can add fuel to new product or service promotions.

Content marketing as a formal strategy is beginning to go beyond the bleeding edge and into the mainstream – as verified in B2B Marketing’s 2013 content marketing benchmarking report, with 43 per cent of respondents answering that the importance of content marketing is ‘critical’. The urgency around this approach is because buyer’s habits have changed or are changing (see our first post – The B2B buyer has changed), forcing marketing and sales processes to adapt.

Rather than looking at marketing collateral as isolated assets, planning content development has to bear in mind the journey that a customer will go through from beginning to end as they make decisions on the products and services they need. However, as with any new approach to content marketing has to be based on getting the initial creative theme right. Without this great “big idea” in mind, it’s harder to link content into a longer-term plan for getting that material into the minds of the right people, in the right format, at the right time.

 

By Thea Hickman, Communications Director at onebite.

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