If you’re a B2B marketer, you’re no doubt suffering through the painful consequences of buyers taking control of the purchasing process. You’re under attack from all fronts, your budgets are dwindling. Constant conflicts with sales colleagues. And just to add to the pressure, the suits in the C-suite demand proof (fact-based evidence) of how much your marketing efforts contribute each quarter to revenues and margins.

Meanwhile you’re barraged with competing claims from tech vendors promising miracle solutions, if only you’d invest in their technology or services for:

• lead nurturing, revenue performance management, demand gen
• content marketing
• social conversations
• community engagement
• reputation monitoring, social media monitoring
• brand storytelling
• transmedia strategies

The list of alleged silver bullets goes on and on… What’s a marketer to do? Where’s a smart place to start, to invest your precious time, attention and budget?

Mastering the Buyer’s Journey

To drive improved revenue performance means providing buyers with what they need, when they want it, in their preferred channels. That means you must respond to what they need, based on how they make buying decisions. As B2B marketing expert Ardath Albee writes, you need to:

“Be found with the right information in the channels buyers prefer.

— How Online Publishing Changes the Game, Ardath Albee

What B2B buyers strongly prefer is information that’s specific to their job roles, relevant to their industry or marketplace. It takes insight-driven marketing to respond appropriately: to know how to position the value of your offering in ways that are meaningful to your buyers, to support the business case they will eventually have to construct.

You can’t arrive at insight-driven marketing by just sitting in a conference room, huddled around a whiteboard. Despite the pressures to act now, act fast, you need to invest in some buyer-centric research. You need insights into each stage of the buyer’s journey, across the lifecycle of their engagement with your company — and that means understanding what they expect and need from you long after the sale has been made.

As Apple’s Steve Jobs famously said:

“The journey is the reward.

— Steve Jobs

So here’s my version of Steve Jobs’ advice, adapted for B2B marketers:

“Mastering the buyer’s journey leads to the reward.

— Christine Thompson and other B2B marketing strategists

If you’re being honest, how well do you understand who your buyers are, the roles they play within their companies, the pains that motivate them to find a better way, the factors they’ll use to evaluate options and business cases? In my experience as a consultant, few B2B companies really understand how customers make buying decisions due to the traditional myopic focus on the sales process.

If you haven’t figured out how to gain these buyer-centric insights, I recommend the white paper written by Ardath Albee of Marketing Interactions, How Online Publishing Changes the Game, sponsored by Hoovers. Albee’s paper provides a thoughtful overview of how B2B marketers need to up their game: by centering all activities (including content marketing) on the buyer’s journey rather than remaining mired in tactics driven solely by the sales process. According to Albee, it all starts with the right insights into the buyer personas. Her paper offers both conceptual advice as well as useful tips on where to focus first.

There are multiple ways to get started: such as LinkedIn research, syndicated research, asking probing questions of your salespeople — and talking directly to customers to learn what matters to them. Consultants can help…

Painful Consequences of the Status Quo for B2B Marketers

According to a recent report by Forrester, here are some of the typical consequences of traditional B2B marketing, approaches that haven’t responded to the new realities:

• Only 12% of tech marketers say they have a “very strong” relationship with their sales counterparts when it comes to achieving alignment on sales pipelines, processes for managing leads, etc.
• Half are unable to reach solid agreement on basic things like business targets.
• No visibility into what’s going on with the buyer (or buyer committee) once the lead moves into the sales pipeline.
• Chaotic engagement with the customer, siloed communication channels, inconsistent messages, lost opportunities.
• Too many tools, too little integration, too much overlap, wasted spend.

— Automating Lead to Revenue Management, by Lori Wizdo, Forrester Research, December 9, 2011.

If you don’t take action to “master the buyer’s journey” and respond appropriately, your company is liable to suffer missed forecasts, disappointing quarterly results, angry shareholders, diluted brand equity — not to mention on-going hostility between sales and marketing.

Net net: The more you fail to meet buyers’ and customers’ expectations, the more your business will decline. If your business continues to decline, your job is likely to be at risk. So act now — take steps to understand the buyer’s journey.

Like it or not, marketing does not command the respect it used to, back in “the good old days” of the 20th century. Execs continue to scratch their heads, looking for proof that marketing warrants the investment. Disagree? Just think about how many companies cut marketing budgets first before slashing anywhere else. Or how hard you have to argue when making a business case for the next new shiny object.

Clearly, we marketers have to return our passionate attention to what drives value for the corporation, and that means, what drives value for customers — as seen from the customer’s point of view.

“

Seeking counsel on the future of customer value and growth, corporate executives have naturally turned to their senior advisors in marketing. Unfortunately, they have not been impressed with the caliber of insight they receive…. The sad truth is that marketing… simply does not have the insights, perspectives, and strategic directions to offer.

— High Performance Marketing: Bringing Method to the Madness of Marketing, by Naras Eechambadi.

Instead we get more and more specialized, fragmented, chaotic; we talk in obscure jargon or activity-based metrics that don’t make sense to senior execs. We’re at cross purposes with the C-suite. Execs demand accountability and want to see proof as measured in terms of “ROMI”: return on marketing investment.

The pursuit of ROMI requires that we take a more cohesive, planful and disciplined approach to everything we do, orchestrating ourselves and our activities to ensure they support corporate strategy and deliver meaningful value to our customers.

—Adapted from High Performance Marketing

There is no silver bullet. It’s going to take more than mastering social or content marketing.

It’s all about becoming expert at orchestrating value for our customers.

We’re still in the early days of content strategy, so there’s no consensus on the meaning of content strategy nor its scope. Most discussions of content strategy are too narrowly focused, trapped within silos: different marketing functions, digital specialties, and so on.

From a marketing architecture POV, most conversations about content strategy for B2B marketing are mired in the tactical realm. Content strategy for lead nurturing, content strategy for inbound marketing, content strategy for sales enablement… It’s very likely that content programs shaped by this limited mindset will fail to deliver enough ROI to make a real difference for the enterprise or the program’s sponsors.

It’s time for marketing leaders to step up to the challenge of linking content strategy to the broader realm of business strategy.

Taking the bull by the horns, I’ve begun to create a content strategy maturity model (shown below). My intent in doing so is to offer a framework that guides B2B marketers toward a more holistic content discipline — one that offers real potential to deliver positive ROMI (return on marketing investment) on a lasting basis.

Here’s my current draft model (with placeholder data) — key dimensions of content strategy maturity are outlined below:

© 2011 Informing Arts.

Once this model has been developed, with supporting assessment measures, my consulting firm will use it to advise clients who want to up their content marketing game, and recognize that the status quo is insufficient.

Dimensions of Content Strategy for Marketing

Context

A strategic and disciplined approach to content strategy will explicitly support overall business intent, explain how it will do so, and align with annual sales and marketing (and perhaps customer care) objectives. Done well, it could be a source of strategic advantage for the enterprise.

From this perspective what people call a “content strategy” for a website redesign is a tactic that supports the broader content strategy and the overall marketing mix.

By framing content strategy at the bigger picture level, marketing leaders can talk to executives and CxO’s about the business impact of their strategies, given their business architecture for content marketing. This is the appropriate context to tackle priorities and resourcing requirements, given its import to the business as a whole. Without such an architectural roadmap, marketers are stuck trying to resource a chaotic set of one-off content projects, without the efficiencies of a more scalable and effective approach.

Dimensions for Assessing Organizational Capabilities

By undergoing an assessment process using a maturity model like this, organizations can assess how effectively they are designing content marketing programs, deploying workflows and supporting processes, and leveraging key technologies and infrastructure.

This assessment will equip the leadership team to identify key gaps, and make the business case to develop and fund initiatives to bring about the desired changes.

Key Dimensions

With that preamble, here are the dimensions that I propose for this draft maturity model:

Maturity Levels

Once elaborated, this model will support 4 maturity levels for each of the key dimensions.

After working through an assessment process, organizations will have a clear perspective on where they are doing well, and where they need to drive change so their content programs deliver key business results.

Feedback welcome.

When it comes to technology marketing and messaging strategies, clarity often seems to be deprecated — in execution, if not in intent. Instead, knowingly or not, many marketers pursue its mirror opposite: obfuscation, particularly in complex product categories such as enterprise software. (See definitions below.)

Positioning — The Intent to Clarify

Ever since Al Ries and Jack Trout wrote their groundbreaking book on positioning, marketers have tried every tactic imaginable to differentiate their products from all others in a crowded marketplace. This strategy worked pretty well, for at least a decade or two, until media fragmentation and audience attention deficits became so overwhelming that few marketing budgets can break through the clutter.

The goal of positioning is consumer or buyer clarity — “conditioning the mind” of the potential customer so that when she thinks of _____ (your product category), your brand name is the first or second to come to mind.

This is the essence of positioning strategy as preached by Ries and Trout in their classic Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind. Successful positioning makes the shopping process easier, by reducing or simplifying the choices the consumer needs to consider before making a purchase.

The same dynamic works in B2B marketplaces, reducing the number of brands that end up in the buying committee’s final “consideration set.” Or at least, that’s how things are “supposed to work,” under the traditional rules of marketing.

The Purple Cow Mandate — Be Remarkable

Seth Godin approaches the quest for clarity from a somewhat different perspective.

He writes about the importance of standing out — by being remarkable — in Purple Cow: Transform Your Business By Being Remarkable.

He advocates that marketers and product teams invest in improving qualities intrinsic to the product or service, rather than rely solely on messaging and positioning activities that take place after the product is a fait accompli.

Godin points to the need to invest upfront — in product design, use case simplification — in activities whose results will make the product experience truly remarkable in the minds of customers. (This is the strategy that Apple pursues.)

In his usual spirit of asking provocative questions, Godin writes:

“What would happen if you gave the marketing budget for your next three products to the designers? Could you afford a world-class architect / designer / sculptor / director / author?

– Seth Godin, Purple Cow

Godin implies that positioning and messaging strategies that were effective in the era of mass media and mass marketing no longer suffice. Therefore the pursuit of clarity demands that we do things differently.

Why don’t we?

Where Does Clarity Get Lost in Execution?

Technology marketers lose the benefits of clarity when naming or messaging efforts go astray, despite the best of intentions. When KPIs require your product to be #1, 2 or 3, you may choose to re-segment the market and rename the category in order to carve out a space that you can dominate. If the market agrees with your reframing, you can sometimes win big.

When it works, you own the frame of reference when people compare your product to competitive alternatives. And you can more readily achieve a leadership position when you’re a bigger frog in a smaller pond. From a marketer’s standpoint, this is goodness.

But it’s hard to pull off if you don’t have enough of a marketing budget to “educate” people on what you mean, to infuse the [new] frame of reference or basis of comparison with enough meaning to make a difference in customer’s behavior…

Sadly, there are multiple causes of obfuscation. For example, clarity in external communications can be obscured:

• when the way you reframe the category is just “hair splitting” — re-segmenting based on things of minimal value to the customer
• when you don’t have enough resources, or can’t attract enough influencers who share your interest in reframing the category, and as a result the market rejects or ignores your efforts
• when you’re not listening to market conversations and refining your story until people “get” what you say, and care about it (AKA, lack of resonance)
• or when your messaging is larded with too much proprietary jargon or poorly defined concepts, and therefore meaning is obscured from all but a narrow niche of category wizards.

People who work for large enterprises complain that clarity also gets lost when technical product managers work through the typical shared services marcom team. They say too many people are empowered to tinker with the messaging and “dumb it down.” This happens, they say, when generalist writers don’t take the time to learn what is significant about a complex product category, the key purchase factors for buyers, etc. In their attempts to write short copy in plain English, they strip out the meaning.

Definition of Terms

Clarity: clearness of thought, style or expression; lucidity.

Obfuscation: to make so confused or opaque as to be difficult to perceive or understand.

Sources: online dictionaries.

Marketo’s Jon Miller wrote a provocative blog post today, describing the difference between a CMO and a VP of Marketing, in terms of leadership and openness to innovation. His post raises some important questions for content strategists. While a VP of Marketing “runs a department,”

“

CMOs fuse strategic long-term vision with a strong bias for sales and marketing integration, and they balance creativity with hard financial data, marketing analytics and measurement… Leading CMOs orbit around the customer. They’re obsessed with understanding their target market.

— Jon Miller, “Lessons in Marketing Leadership and Innovation,” March 24, 2011

Given this perspective, how will your CMO rate your current content strategy? Is it truly strategic, or a tactical activity? How do you know the difference?

Most Content Strategies Are Too Tactical

Content Centric

The typical content strategy is developed from a very content–centric perspective; the plan addresses “what, how, why, where and when.” Audience goals tend to be addressed in a narrow context, such as navigation, meta data, SEO implications (e.g., what words do people use when they’re searching for ___), personalization, etc.

The content-centric plan is often framed in the context of the channel to be used — web, email, print, kiosk, webinar, etc. An example of this framing is Kristina Halvorson’s wonderful book, CONTENT STRATEGY for the Web, a guide that is often cited as the best exemplar of content strategy. As good as it is, it’s just focused on the Web channel.

Narrow Perspective

As another sign of a tactical content strategy, most of your planning focus is on the editorial calendar. Adapted from the publishing world, the editorial calendar is a technique to organize what you’re going to say (or write), for whom, when it will appear and where (Facebook, corporate blog, etc.). Even so, developing an editorial calendar is a relatively new behavior for content practitioners.

From the perspective of a CMO, content strategies focused on a single marketing channel or limited to an editorial calendar are too tactical, and unlikely to grow the business.

A More Strategic Approach

Start with the Business’ Goals

A better approach is to develop your plan in relation to the overall marketing strategy. That means you need to start with a clear understanding of what your organization is trying to achieve this year.

Example: high-level business goals (from a webinar aimed at marketers):

This company plans to “get new business” while keeping the customer relationships it already has. It aspires to win SME customers in 2011, while getting a larger share of wallet from existing customers.

New opportunities must be evaluated based on their costs and feasibility, such as the cost to acquire, keep and serve new customers — or enhance offers for existing customers.

Understand the Marketing Strategy for the Business

It’s likely that the marketing strategy for Aon will specify the relative priorities of acquiring new customers versus retaining the existing customer base (and how those priorities may vary across regions or geographies). It will define goals (how many, where, and so on).

Moreover, the marketing strategy will outline the customer value propositions for the various customer segments, the distribution channels, the marketing channels to be deployed, the partners and influencers to be prioritized, and so on. It should identify opportunities to leverage and gaps to be addressed, as well as the overall success metrics that will indicate how well the marketing investment is delivering on the corporation’s larger priorities.

Align Your Content Strategy to the Marketing Strategy

If you want your content strategy to deliver real value to the business, you must design your content programs with a clear view as to how they will help your employer (or client) achieve the defined marketing goals and objectives.

For example, if the primary goal is to win new customers in BRIC or secure business-building partnerships in China, what does that imply for your content strategy? How can you best reach Brazilians and Russians (in the segments your firm has identified)? Is online the only marketing channel to consider? How do literacy rates vary from region to region — and what does that imply for the most effective tactics for telling your organization’s story?

Fortunately, you only have to develop a strategic content strategy once a year — or as often as your organization revises its marketing strategy.

Another take-away from Jon Miller’s post is that leading CMOs “orbit around the customer” and “obsess about their target markets.” This means that successful marketers — and content strategists — need to invest in what it takes to really understand the people you want to engage.

Know Your Audience: Buyer, Customer, Partner, “User,” Etc.

It takes research to understand the needs and preferences of the people you want to engage. Don’t limit yourself to keyword research or a couple of days of Google desk-based searches. If your company produces reports and analytics about customers or prospects, make sure you understand their implications.

Ideally, figure out ways to observe people in their real settings so you can see:

• what they are trying to accomplish
• what their goals are — what some strategists call the “job to be done”
• how they go about solving those needs today

Find where they congregate online (or offline), go there and listen to them, engage them in conversation.

If they’re prospective customers, find out how they go about shopping for solutions to the problem at hand. Who else is involved in the decision? Who or what influences their perceptions? How and where do they prefer to learn about the brands they’re considering? (Include social media as a potential source, but don’t limit yourself to it.)

Even if you can’t afford customer research, a common sense approach that thinks through the stages of a customer relationship can provide useful insights. Don’t stop at the point of sale…

If you can afford research, you may want to invest in buyer persona research and playbook development.

A Real-world Example

Here’s a practical example: thinking through the content strategy for home heating and cooling systems, to serve the needs of a defined audience (or segment).

Continue on to Part 2 of this story.

A curious aspect about the hype surrounding content strategy for marketing is the lack of agreement on what it means — or clarity on whose budget should fund content strategy development. Like the blind men with the elephant, we draw different conclusions based on varying frames of reference and professional experience. Our perspectives also differ based on whether we approach the challenge as a marketer with revenue accountability, or as a service provider to marketing organizations.

Marketers need a multi-faceted framework that affords customer-relevant “market conversations” and brings order to the explosive growth in content types, content objects and media outlets.

We need infrastructure that flexes and scales, delivering increasingly personalized customer conversations, while reporting detailed metrics to prove our contribution to revenue or ROI goals.

At present this framework is aspirational, due to the many operational and cultural changes required of highly siloed marketing disciplines. Marketers need to overhaul and retool workflows, processes, behaviors, attitudes — a bigger challenge than adopting new technologies and hoping for the best. For that reason this transition will probably take at least a decade to unfold.

We need to question our tried-and-true notions of what works best. We should invest in a “social savvy” content strategy to uncover how people prefer to learn new skills or communicate with brands and enterprises. This means understanding how to respond to their needs and preferences. Such a content strategy should be informed by insights that emerge from listening and responding to buyers, customers, partners, influencers, shareholders, etc.

It’s a far cry from conventional marketing tactics: interruption advertising, direct mail blasts, “spray and pray” — typical brand– or product-centric monologues.

Content Strategy Is More Than Just the Web

For the sake of future proofing and business agility, marketers should develop content strategy independent of any specific medium. It’s too limiting to constrain content strategy to the domain of web communications only. Or web plus email. Or social media like Facebook and Twitter. We need to take into account all the customer touchpoints, throughout the customer’s journey.

Start with People First

Marketers need to craft content strategy to address and prioritize the needs of multiple stakeholders: e.g.,

• sales people or channel partners
• existing customers
• prospective buyers
• employees
• investors and industry analysts
• third party developers, suppliers, etc.

Insights based on well-informed personas for each stakeholder category should inform our plans and content strategies. We need to pay close attention to the stages of the buyer’s — or customer’s — journey. A customer seeking self-service support to solve an immediate problem has different content needs from a prospective buyer who needs evidence for the business case to justify a purchase recommendation.

How and where people go about finding or consuming our content are also critical considerations when crafting content strategy.

Given those inputs, our content strategy should encompass multiple factors, such as each persona’s:

• media preferences (web vs. print vs. email, etc.)
• goals: where they are in the buying (or ownership) cycle, etc. — what are they seeking to learn or trying to accomplish
• device preferences (iPad vs. PC or Kindle, etc.)
• genre preferences (podcast, video, case study, demo, ROI calculator, problem-solving aid, etc.)
• language (English, Spanish, Chinese, etc.)
• context: at work, at home, at school, etc.

There are additional complications for businesses that go to market via a vertical or industry orientation — adding yet more complexity to the content strategy requirements.

Map Content to Their Needs

For any given campaign or marketing program, we need to map the content components to the buying cycle, given defined goals of prioritized buyer personas. We risk slowing down the buying cycle if we don’t supply what each buying role needs, at the right time and place.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg… I didn’t even mention meta data or strategies for organizing content to enable machine-based searching and personalization, so each persona can more readily find things relevant or compelling to them.

Marketers, It’s Time to Get More Strategic about Content

The more complicated the situation — fragmented audiences, an explosion in digital content types and devices — the more burning the need for coherent content strategies. How else can we provide intelligent guidance to the people responsible for crafting relevant or memorable web-based or mobile experiences? The web writers and designers, information architects, UX / interaction designers, and so on. Without that guidance their work is likely to miss the mark, or squander precious resources and limited budgets.

Whether we approach content strategy from the vantage point of marketers, media execs, web developers or information architects, the business imperative is the same:

“
Until we commit to treating content as a critical asset worthy of strategic planning and investment, we’ll continue to churn out worthless content in reaction to unmeasured requests. We’ll keep trying to fit words, audio, graphics, and video into page templates that weren’t truly designed with our business’ real-world content requirements in mind. Our customers still won’t find what they’re looking for. And we’ll keep failing to publish useful, usable content that people actually care about.

– Kristina Halvorson, “The Discipline of Content Strategy”

Fellow marketers, it’s time for us to step up to the challenge.

Content marketing offers tremendous promise, but there’s a dark side to it: looming content chaos, coupled with a serious skills shortage that could limit its potential impact.

By choosing to embrace content marketing, you will confront the challenge of managing content across an increasingly complex lifecycle.

From the frenetic scrum of content creation and revision, to the locked-down governance phase of corporate-approved assets.

Whether you wrangle content in-house with just internal resources, or juggle virtual teams of freelancers and agencies, you’ll encounter challenges with content creation and content management: people, processes, skills, and toolsets.

Content Chaos

Although we all agree that content is created, deployed and eventually reaches the end of its useful life, no one agrees on the definition of the content lifecycle, nor how many stages it involves. This is just one symptom of the chaos in this burgeoning new world of digital communications.

Once you move beyond the traditional, one-size-fits-all print or broadcast model — yesterday’s world — content chaos will complicate your work life. It’s inevitable.

Given the fragmentation in media types and formats, the proliferation of devices and channels, content chaos is rampant. It’s getting exponentially worse due to the explosion in content volume, a consequence of tailoring messages and tweaking content elements to the needs of specific audiences and diverse viewing preferences.

There’s Hope for Larger Organizations

Content management experts like OpenText recognize the need to educate the market about the risks and challenges of “content chaos” — a real issue for organizations of all sizes, and for all types of content.

OpenText offers a broad set of solutions for mid-market and larger enterprises, including the types of content so near and dear to content marketers’ hearts: web content, brand and marketing assets, as well as social media.

Likewise Microsoft and its partners provide platforms for managing content created by sales and marketing people, based on SharePoint 2010 and its underlying infrastructure. (For example, here’s an introductory podcast to digital asset management and SharePoint).

Generally speaking, these are enterprise-class deployments, and come with mixed blessings (and high price tags): the need for information architects, taxonomy wizards, IT professionals, and other highly trained people to manage the server farms, content repositories and role-based permission sets.

Microsoft would have you believe theirs is a less complex approach. Enterprises that have deployed the server version of SharePoint 2010 have mixed viewpoints on its benefits for content management, although all agree it’s a big step forward from previous versions.

No doubt there are highly productive solutions for content marketers, if your firm can afford an investment in custom consulting and the software licenses entailed, and enjoys IT support to drive the procurement process. There are probably bazillions of Microsoft Certified partners who have attained competence in content management, if not taxonomy wrangling or digital asset management for marketers.

Complex Solutions, Complex Messaging

Given their core buyers, enterprise software suppliers tend to communicate in terms better suited to IT pros than content marketers. So even though their platforms may offer everything a content marketer needs, and more, understanding what’s possible or where to start is beyond the ken of most marketers. Here’s just one example (from Microsoft, writing about digital asset management):

“Increasing numbers of office workers create or reuse images and other rich media assets as part of their daily tasks. Often, however, no common repository exists at the departmental or enterprise level that is optimized for storing these assets. A common repository lets users easily discover and reuse rich media assets that others have already created. The asset library in SharePoint Server 2010 can save an organization time and other resources by providing a specialized repository for storing and managing digital assets. Users no longer have to look for assets in multiple locations over the network, or re-create assets from scratch. By using a centralized repository for managing digital assets, the organization also exerts tighter control over brand-sensitive content and can ensure that only approved assets for products are made available to the appropriate users.

Chaos, A Fact of Life for Small or Virtual Teams

For smaller firms like mine, the path out of chaos is less clear. We can’t afford enterprise-class solutions nor a hefty investment in custom development by highly trained IT consultants. We don’t have IT procurement resources in-house. We like web-based services because they free us from server management headaches.

It’s too early to tell whether the cloud-based versions of SharePoint and Office — called Office 365 and SharePoint Online — will satisfy the needs of content marketing teams within SMB enterprises or start-ups. (This is not the focus of Microsoft’s messaging or solutions positioning, so only time will tell if the offering fits our needs. At present these platforms are still in beta.)

Is there a cloud-based solution in store for us? We may not even have the skills to answer that question or assess our options adequately. So we default to what’s simple and well understood.

Many of us limp along with a mish-mash of Excel, Basecamp, WordPress (or other open source CMS platforms), NAS drives, Box.net, DropBox, and who knows what else. We run into trouble with SaaS offerings when the transition from one content lifecycle stage to another entails a change in content ownership — but our suppliers have no way to handle those ownership changes. (I’ve blogged on this before.)

It’s almost laughable to see the behind-the-scenes negotiations between freelancers and creative agencies over which set of tools and technologies to deploy for a new client engagement. A symptom of the chaos that’s our daily reality…

Freelancers and small firms cope daily with the chaos of project-based, content silos — the consequences of little-to-no project budgets for content management. And it’s only going to get worse until someone comes up with an easy-to-use, comprehensive solution that’s scaled (and priced for) smaller organizations and the virtual talent networks that are so prevalent across the creative community.

A recent survey of B2B CMOs by MarketingSherpa reports that 76% of CMOs say generating high-quality leads is their most pressing challenge. A related issue is the increasing number of people and buyer roles involved in complex purchase decisions. This has important implications for content marketers.

Here are some of the key findings, showing the changes since the 2009 survey, the most significant being the growing number of people involved in purchase decision making.

Source: MarketingSherpa B2B Marketing Benchmark Survey, August 2010

Complex Sales Are Getting More Complicated

The economic downturn has led to more cautious buying, resulting in more people involved in B2B purchase decisions. This has serious consequences not just for people involved in sales activities, but also for marketers who must create and adapt content to meet buyers’ needs (including key influencers).

To improve sales productivity marketers must provide relevant information to support the needs of both key decision makers, as well as the buying influencers. Effective lead nurturing campaigns are highly dependent upon the availability of relevant content, for each key touchpoint throughout the buying cycle. B2B marketing automation experts like Eloqua and Marketo say that this content should be relevant to the buyer’s role and key business issues, not just to the application or solution under consideration.

45% of CMOs surveyed say they are faced with “marketing to a growing number of people involved in the buying process,” up from 30% for whom it was a key issue in 2009. On average B2B content marketers and their sales counterparts must satisfy the needs of 2–4 people who are directly involved in purchase decisions — not to mention the influencers who operate behind the scenes.

Source: MarketingSherpa B2B Marketing Benchmark Survey, August 2010

This has significant implications for B2B content strategies. Marketers need to shift their focus from product-specific collateral/content to buyer-centric content.

Start with a Content Audit

It’s a good idea to start with a detailed content audit. This audit should uncover the assets you have to work with, how much usage each asset gets, and where the gaps are in the information you provide to buyers, influencers and the people in sales roles. It’s important to determine how much traction your current content gets, as a potential indicator of its relevance to your buyers and your sellers. IDC research suggests that as much as 50% of all marketing collateral is under-utilized…

If your organization experiences low utilization rates for your content assets, the key question is why. For each such asset, does it resonate with its intended audiences, or are they unable to find it, due to SEO, naming, tagging (or “curating”), or navigation issues?

Are you targeting the wrong audience — or no audience? Are you trying to cover the entire marketplace with a one-size-fits-all messaging or content strategy?

Is it way out of date, written poorly, or in the wrong language? Broken link? Did you produce it for the wrong device or platform, so it’s unavailable when and where your customers go looking? Is it downright ugly, because your design strategy “homogenized” it across devices?

Kristina Halvorson offers some practical advice on how to conduct such an audit in Content Strategy for the Web.

Develop Buyer Personas

When building your content strategy, don’t overlook the critical importance of identifying key buyer personas and characterizing their respective needs as they progress through the buying cycle. For example, if a CMO, CFO, and VP of Marketing Operations all need to say yes before you can make a sale, how do you address their differing concerns?

What’s a buyer persona?

“A buyer persona is a detailed profile of an example buyer that represents the real audience — an archetype of the target buyer. Marketers can use buyer personas to clarify the goals, concerns, preferences and decision process that are most relevant to their customers. Imagine how effective marketers could be if we would all stop making stuff up and start aligning our messages and programs with the way real people think.

Source: Adele Revella, Buyer Persona Blog

The leading vendors of B2B marketing automation platforms, such as Eloqua and Marketo, offer interesting “why to” and “how to” resources to help marketers refine their buyer personas. Eloqua, for example, writes about the need to follow “digital body language” and understand the profile of “the new buyer.”

The reason these vendors are creating educational resources about buyer personas and content mapping is to help their customers achieve better ROI from marketing automation investments. They and their customers have learned the hard way that lead nurturing campaigns are heavily dependent on high quality content that can be served up to the right person, at the right stage of the buying cycle. Without that content, lead nurturing initiatives cannot deliver superior results.

How

Unless you already have a rich knowledge base about your customers and their characteristics, developing buyer personas will require upfront research, some of which can be done online. Plan on some direct interaction with current and prospective customers, relying heavily on modern qualitative research methods.

Here’s a case study about how one person successfully researched her organization’s buyer persona needs.

You might also look at adapting some of the techniques used by ethnographic researchers, so you can observe customers at work, in their settings (but with their permission, of course!)

Why

Among other things, the findings from your buyer/customer research should guide the design of marketing campaigns and content strategy. These insights are key to shaping your hypotheses about what’s likely to be most relevant to each buyer persona. (The final determination of what’s relevant should be data-driven, thanks to web analytics, A/B testing, etc.)

How Many Buyer Personas?

When you develop messaging frameworks, how “granular” should you get? How many different buyer roles should you address with role-specific content? The answer depends on how many your organization can effectively tackle and still be credible when interacting with your buyers.

A post in the Buyer Persona Blog tackles the question: how many specific buyer personas can you afford to address with “differentiated messages?” Its author, Adele Revella, offers constructive advice on how to determine how many buyer personas are appropriate, and how best to leverage persona research and discovery efforts across the enterprise. Revella writes that during the early phases of working with buyer personas, organizations try to tackle too many, particularly large enterprises with many different product lines…

Map Buyers to Content

Once you’ve identified key buyer personas and developed a POV on how best to inform or motivate them, you’ll want to turn that into a content map. B2B marketing automation Marketo provides several resources to help with content mapping. For example, Marketo’s blog shows a grid that you can adapt, with rows and columns to map the content you have (or need to create) for each key buying role, for each key stage of the buying cycle.

The Benefits

If your content strategy operationalizes the best practices for buyer persona creation and content mapping, you should benefit from one or more of the following:

• Less money wasted on irrelevant and under-utilized marketing assets
• Better informed buyers, potentially higher pass-along rates
• Better qualified opportunities
• Potentially shorter buying / selling cycles

Done well, these approaches should help CMOs address some of the key challenges inherent in dealing with increasingly complex selling situations and more demanding buyers.

If you’re interested in the MarketingSherpa research report about CMOs’ perspectives on marketing automation challenges, a complimentary executive summary is available from Marketo. The full report can be purchased from MarketingSherpa.

Ten years ago Forrester cautioned marketers about challenges resulting from “content hypergrowth.” Back then the environment for digital content was relatively simple: just a few Web browsers, minor differences between Macs and PCs (color gamut, resolution, native fonts, etc.) Designing and managing country– or language-specific content added new complexities for organizations that did business globally.

But even with that relatively simple environment, the signs were clear: smarter approaches would be required of businesses that aspire to master the challenges of digital content.

In 2001 Forrester urged marketers to rely less upon disconnected or manual ways to manage their content. Instead, wrote Forrester, marketers should adopt technology platforms, workflows and other methods that would enable content discovery and reuse (among other benefits).

Forrester’s report illustrated some of the drivers of content growth, as well as the complexity in managing content assets, as shown here (image ©2001, Forrester).

Content Strategy, 2011

Now fast forward to 2011. I find myself wondering, how much progress have we made since 2001? Are we prepared for the realities of an “atomized” content publishing world?

How many creative teams or marketing departments are ready to execute content strategies that nimbly support multiple devices, with differing viewing or playback capabilities?

Do we have the right content creation and production strategies, able to produce, manage and deploy assets optimized for the point of use?

Or do we default to one-size-fits-all, “lowest common denominator” approaches? If so, that approach is guaranteed to lose in a competitive environment. As people in the digital asset business know all too well, your future possibilities are constrained by the design choices you make at the point of content creation or capture. Low-res scans or low-quality images are going to look shoddy on a high-res device like the iPhone 4.

Getting Smarter about Content Strategy

It all starts with smart content creation strategies, approaches that identify and respond to the opportunities and requirements of optimizing content for distribution across a diverse set of devices.

And the reason we support a diverse set of devices is because we have a strategic understanding of our customers or audiences: we recognize that buyers or customers have different behaviors, characteristics, device ownership profiles, etc. So we develop a game plan that ensures we deliver the right content to the right person, given her needs and preferences. We deploy content with the optimal attributes for the device(s) she will use to read, see, hear or interact with our content.

We know that “the right content” means that we’re delivering what people need or want at this moment, based on where they are in their buying or ownership phase of their relationship with our brand.

This adds a whole new dimension to persona development, and the implications of mapping content to different personas at different stages of their buying or post-purchase life cycle…

It also means we need to anticipate how, where and when our customers or audience will want to consume or engage with our content. For example, if I need help reprogramming my home thermostat, I want something that I can print on paper, or hold and read while I’m standing in front of the thermostat.

It’s one thing to prepare content for viewing on screen or the printed page. Optimizing content for different screens introduces a whole new can of worms these days…

Intelligent Content Design

Are our design strategies equipped to exploit the interaction and visual differences between, say, an iPad and an iPhone 4, let alone a PC laptop? How much effort do we invest to identify the differences in device characteristics, and their implications for experience design?

Do we have methods for creating, tagging, managing and deploying different variants of an asset — so we can deliver the optimal version to each class of device? Do we have the content management infrastructure in place to deliver up the right asset when it’s called for?

Here’s a wonderful discussion by a design firm on some of the lessons they’ve learned when designing content on an iMac for consumption on an iPad. Consider, for example, typography and readability:

“Web body text sizes (14–16px) feel too small on iPad while bigger sizes clash with the canvas dimensions. This leads to all sorts of grid restrictions.

iPad’s resolution is higher than a regular LCD but still lower than an iPhone which gives the pixel type an unusual “in between” feel. Paradoxically this can make type feel more pixelated than on a regular computer screen that is usually farther away from the eye and less contrast-intense.

The blog post goes on to explore multiple dimensions of the first-generation iPad, and the opportunities those create for both good, and bad, design.

It’s a safe bet that the next-generation iPad will add more wrinkles, especially if Apple ups the ante and aims for a screen resolution that’s closer to the detail and definition of the iPhone 4 “retina display.”

Content strategy and content marketing challenges have sparked some great online conversations. Although the emergence of digital media has put “content” in the crosshairs, it’s the proliferation and diversity of new digital devices that are forcing marketers to rethink how to communicate with customers, partners and influencers with the best mix of digital channels, media and content. As someone who has worked in the digital content field for 20 years, I’m delighted to see today’s thought leaders taking a deeper look at what content marketing entails, and its implications for brands and marketing organizations.

Today I came across a thought-provoking blog post by John Bell, head of Ogilvy’s 360° Digital Influence team. Reflecting on announcements from CES, he discussed implications for marketers: the need for a more coherent cross-organizational response, now that people are “accessing content in more ways via more devices.” As a consequence, Bell writes, brands need to step up to the challenge of retooling their content strategies and processes, and potentially their organizational strategies, to behave as if they were “their own media company.”

Organizing So You Can Execute a Content Strategy

When most people think about how to organize for content marketing, they’re focused on tactical implications, e.g., editorial calendars, tools and processes for web content management, etc. Or a single type of digital content… To see what I mean, just Google “organizing for content marketing.”

Olgilvy’s Bell writes about it more holistically. He describes content activation as a strategy and process to “create, distribute, promote and measure” content:

“Today, the corporate marcom lead has plenty of reasons to see the value in developing a complete content strategy to reach corporate communication goals and to reach product brand marketing goals. Brands can build virtual engines to create a mix of multimedia and more spontaneous content that is designed to either be useful or entertaining.  This causes people to spend time and interact (i.e., engage) or spread that content across their social graph (i.e., advocate). Brands must distribute that relevant content across an ever-changing ecosystem of owned, co-owned (e.g., Facebook), earned (e.g., bloggers, media) and paid platforms (e.g., all types of ads from advertorials to print ads to online display).  But feeding the fire hose with the right content is not enough. Brands must take responsibility for promoting content to get in the hands of people who will engage and advocate. Lastly, true content activation culture requires constant measurement to understand performance and the diagnostics or levers that can be pulled to improve impact and outcomes.

He then went on to discuss several key factors, potential organizational drivers for building what he calls a content activation culture:

• The relative benefits of  centralization versus federation: “Chief Content Officer vs. Process”
• The need to develop clear brand themes as an over-arching context to unify content strategies, messaging (product, corporate or brand), and external communications, including promotional campaigns
• The need for more training on processes, techniques, and emerging digital capabilities and competencies; and their implications
• The on-going need to measure progress and impact
• Implications for teams and process development

My POV on Content Marketing Organizations

Here is my feedback on John’s post, informed by experience with client engagements over the past couple of years:

“John, I couldn’t agree more with some of your comments. Having said that, one of my concerns about today’s almost faddish focus on “content” is how often the discussion is divorced from the context of customer needs and buying processes. In other words how will the content strategy and each component of it serve what the customer needs to know, believe or feel to progress that customer’s relationship with the brand or potential purchase decision. (I’m thinking of considered purchase categories here, rather than impulse buys. IMHO considered purchase categories will benefit more from a coherent content strategy than brands that represent impulse buys.)

Yes, social listening and monitoring software represents an important advance here, but let’s be honest, it’s just revealing the footprints a customer leaves behind, and even those are imperfect or potentially misleading. A 140-char tweet doesn’t leave a lot of room for insightful dialog… So we need to inform our customer insights with a much richer set of sources, of which the social inputs are just one set.

Enterprises (i.e., your firm’s clients) need to develop a coherent view of buyer personas, people’s needs and motivations, and how those qualities evolve across the purchase process through to product usage, and hopefully the advocacy phase. And we need a context or lens to connect these buyer/customer insights to our content strategies (and of course, the product/brand strategies over the customer lifecycle).

As I’m sure you agree, the marketing funnel has outlived its usefulness. We need a new insight and engagement framework, mapped to the customer lifecycle, to guide our architecture of the content strategy, so we can deliver the right content (informative or entertaining), to the right person, at the right time/place/context, respecting that person’s likely device preferences for that type of content consumption. And we must know the purpose that content is intended to serve, from the buyer or customer’s POV. This to me is one of the most important, and challenging, aspects of the shift from the broadcast– or publisher-centric view of marketing to the customer– or buyer-centric view. This is the true meaning of “sympathetic” (or empathetic) intelligence that you refer to.

Developing a new framework like this is hard enough, but when you’re also dealing with entrenched marketing functional silos, disconnected information repositories (or lack thereof), as well as outmoded skillsets — this whole marketing makeover becomes very daunting (and ultimately will require significant investments on the part of your clients). Not to mention “instrumenting” the change process so clients see measurable benefit, payback, ROI — whatever they care about — to keep them incented to work through the painful changes.

I agree that federated approaches are most likely the best; however, some empowered change agent with a direct connection to the CEO and COO will have to play a key role in driving these changes.

Your thoughts? Has the time come for enterprises to step up to what it takes to build a content activation culture?