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.

Apple announced new tools to create and view iBooks on the iPad, and a new distribution channel for digital textbooks. In doing so Apple ignited a firestorm of debate on the subject of digital books, and the future of the publishing industry, book distribution, and likely consumer consumption patterns. More importantly, they set the stage for what we will someday recognize as a new medium, a new form of content in its own right.

And meanwhile Apple is doing so at a time when the publishing industry is at risk, with outmoded business models, under attack on multiple fronts.

More Than Just Textbooks

Apple positioned their January 19 announcement as an education event, with the aim of revolutionizing the textbook publishing industry. According to the Wall Street Journal, only 6% of textbooks are delivered today in digital form, forecasted to reach 50% by 2020. That’s a big target in its own right, but I’d guess Apple’s unspoken aspirations are even broader…

Well beyond what we think of as “books”

Years from now, we’ll look back at this moment and realize that Apple lit a fire, fueling a new medium, one still to be named.

What Apple has in mind is not just a book or a textbook rendered digitally on an iPad. Their vision for this new type of content goes well beyond digital books, enhanced ebooks, or whatever labels we use today.

Their vision mashes up elements of movies, games, animations and dynamic models, interactivity,  hyperlinking and nonlinear navigation — key enhancements to the core elements of storytelling, narrative flow, design, layout, etc. Here are some of the core elements that will drive our understanding of this new medium, as I see it.

— Source, Christine Thompson, Informing Arts ©2012

Textbooks First, But Not Last

I suspect Apple chose the textbook as the initial target for reinvention because the limitations of a print-based medium for multi-dimensional, complex or time-sensitive subjects are so well understood. Apple’s long experience at selling to and supporting educational institutions affords the company unique insights into what works, and what’s broken, when it comes to 21st century education.

The textbook publishing industry is huge, and can help finance the trials that will eventually shape the winning characteristics of this new emerging medium. In North America alone the traditional textbook publishing industry generates $12–14 billion annually, according to one expert (for a more conservative assumption: > $4 billion in 2011 textbook sales, according to the WSJ today; $8 billion in 2010 according to Forrester. Clearly no one agrees on the definition of the industry, but it’s huge.)

From Apple’s perspective (as a master of disruptive innovations), the educational publishing industry must be a sitting duck, ripe for transformation.

““We are educating people today in the same way as we did when there was 1% as much knowledge.”

– Danny Hillis, The Economist, March 22, 2001

That said Apple is willing to be a partner, not just a disrupter. Apple announced that it plans to partner with educators and publishers (reported by the Wall Street Journal today). When this partnership is productive, those who embrace change and can envision a new medium should profit enormously.

This New Medium Requires New Talents & Specialties

What will emerge is a new form of multi-faceted content. This new medium will require contributions from many specialties, such as:

• Photographers, videographers, musicians, producers
• Designers, illustrators, animators
• Art/creative directors for the ensemble as a whole
• Game developers — people who know how to incorporate game mechanics (“gamification”) within designed experiences
• User experience and interaction designers
• Usability testers
• Web developers and producers (HTML5 and CSS3 experts), scripters and coders
• Information architects, taxonomy and tagging specialists

And of course, the usual:

• Writers and copywriters (as well as translators for books with global appeal)
• Editors
• Fact checkers
• Talent spotters (acquisition experts)

On the strategic level this new medium will require visionaries, risk taking pioneers, game changers and others whose personalities are probably abhorrent to the traditional publishing world.

Not to mention new models for brand building, social media interactions with consumers, and new forms of marketing. But that’s a whole different subject in its own right.

[Disclosure: I played a key role in Apple’s early days of digital publishing, but have had no involvement in their current activities. The opinions described here are my own, based on interpretations of what I’ve read and heard over the Web.]

I’ve been a fan of the Business Model Canvas as a strategic enabler for organizations that seek business model innovation, or for entrepreneurs who want a simple but powerful way to describe a new business concept. But as I note below, this approach has not gotten the attention it deserves within the Northwest tech community. Thanks to a forthcoming enhancement, the Business Model Canvas is now poised to become a formidable tool for business innovators.

Critics point to the Business Model Canvas’ lightweight treatment of the central value proposition — the underlying rationale that fuels future revenues — how and why specific offers will satisfy the needs of defined customer segments. Ironically, where the canvas is most weak lies at the epicenter of what drives entrepreneurs to go without pay or sleep, mortgage their homes, and risk their most important relationships in order to build a business.

Enter the Customer-Value Canvas to address that challenge, as a conceptual “plug-in” for the Business Model Canvas.

The Business Model Canvas itself is based on groundbreaking work by Alex Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur, with crowd-sourced contributions from hundreds of business leaders. Their approach is described in a delightfully illustrated book, Business Model Generation, which I highly recommend. (I also recommend Osterwalder’s blog.)

Outside the time– and money-starved tech community, the Business Model Canvas has been acclaimed by many forward-thinking businesses. Here’s why.

Business Model Canvas Overview

The Business Model Canvas enables entrepreneurial teams to collaborate on a new business concept that can then be presented on a single page. The canvas itself is a 9-box framework, encapsulating the key dimensions of a holistic business model.

Structured Brainstorming

The canvas provides an effective means to structure collaborative thinking, discussion and brainstorming about the most important aspects of a proposed business model. Via a brainstorming process (online or in-person workshops), people capture their ideas using sticky notes that they place within the appropriate box. Constraining ideas to sticky notes enforces high-level thinking… Constraining those notes to fit within the boxes requires the team to set priorities.

Each box represents 1 of the 9 most important components of a holistic business model (e.g., customer segments). Each note outlines a single idea, an aspect of their proposed business concept. The team must ensure there’s an internal logic to the model — each sticky note (or idea) must be conceptually linked to other core drivers of the business model.

The 9 Components of a Business Model

Osterwalder and Pigneur, the proponents of this framework, define the 9 most important aspects of a business model as:

• its value proposition
• customer segments to be served
• customer relationships (how the organization will interact or deal with its customers)
• the channels to be used
• the organization’s key activities to be performed
• the key resources to be utilized
• the partners needed to fill in key gaps (e.g., gaps in channels, critical activities or resources)
• the cost structure
• the revenue streams to be generated

See Business Model Generation for more information on how “visionaries, game changers” and entrepreneurs are using this approach to envision innovations that can be designed and then developed into action plans.

“Yes, But…” Say Tech Firms

This approach has been proven as an effective innovation resource, when adopted via facilitated workshops that bring out the best thinking of the innovation team. In fact a worldwide consulting industry has emerged to deliver workshops and follow-on services leveraging the Business Model Canvas. (Just search on #bmgen to see the many tweets from practitioners.) The European business community has been especially enthusiastic about this approach.

But when proposing this framework to tech clients here in the Pacific Northwest, I often encounter resistance due to its lightweight treatment of the value proposition and customer needs. Clients criticize its lack of focus on the value prop’s implications for segment-specific product/service offers, or the rationale for those offers.

When this model fails to resonate with what tech entrepreneurs care about most, they often overlook the value of the BM Canvas as a means to structure or draw out their thinking in more productive and holistic ways.

As a stopgap I’ve developed some approaches to bridge this conceptual gap; however, that has entailed rough links to customer development, lean startup and other frameworks for entrepreneurship and innovation. Clients find this obvious mash-up of models to be too confusing…

Fortunately, the creators of the Business Model Canvas have now begun work on a supplementary canvas that focuses squarely on the customer-value proposition linkage — the sine qua non of a business model that can actually create value for all stakeholders.

Linking Customer-Value to the Business Model Canvas

Alex Osterwalder, one of the core architects of the Business Model Canvas, is now prototyping what he calls the “Customer-Value Canvas.” Calling it a “plug-in” to the Business Model Canvas, he is testing and refining it via client engagements.

This new Customer-Value Canvas should help innovators focus attention on what matters most when crafting a value proposition — the key drivers that respond directly to the pains and desired gains that surround a customer’s unmet needs.

Osterwalder recommends framing those needs in terms of the jobs-to-be-done, a proven model for less risky innovation that’s based on research and practice by Harvard’s Clayton Christensen, Mark Johnson of Innosight and others. He also reinforces Steve Blank’s call for real-world, “out of the building” observation of customer needs, rather than basing a business on what the founders assume to be true.

Here’s the customer-centered component of Osterwalder’s Customer-Value Canvas; this drives focused thinking on the most important aspects of the customer’s job-to-be-done, and the pains and gains associated with that customer “job.”

The Customer-Value Canvas | Observing the Customer’s Needs

Source: The Customer-Value Canvas created by Alex Osterwalder

The right-hand side of this canvas should reflect real-world assumptions about customer needs, based on “out-of-the-building” observations of what customers really care about: the jobs they need to perform in their personal or work life, and the obstacles to getting those jobs done today. (Read Four Steps to the Epiphany by Steven Blank for more insights into this process.)

It’s dangerous to base these assumptions solely on what the founders say is so, no matter how impassioned their argument…

Designing the Offer to Satisfy Those Needs

The left-hand side of the canvas shows the value proposition that will be designed in response to the customer’s job-to-be-done. This value prop comprises the core aspects of a compelling offer that will satisfy the customer’s needs — the things that will deliver on the customer’s desired gains, and eliminate or neutralize the pains they confront today. This is where the entrepreneurial team should focus its thinking on the bundle of products and services to be delivered.

Source: The Customer-Value Canvas created by Alex Osterwalder

The Business Model Canvas describes how the company will organize itself to deliver that value proposition to those customers, and how it will generate profits while doing so.

Based on the Best Thinking about Entrepreneurship

What makes Osterwalder’s proposed customer-value model even more powerful is the way it builds upon some of the best thinking for 21st century entrepreneurship:

• Lean Startup models for entrepreneurs, for continuous innovation (Eric Ries and others)
• Customer Development Process (Steve Blank)
• Seizing the White Space, a disciplined approach for innovation and execution (Mark Johnson)

Adoption of the Customer-Value Canvas should help forward-thinking tech founders and innovators clarify their thinking about the critical ingredients that power their revenue engine. If so, they will be better equipped to build smarter businesses that are less likely to fail.

Holiday shoppers who buy Apple products can give them with confidence, knowing that their gifts will be desirable and well appreciated. In 2011 these gifts will reflect Steve Jobs’ special touch, his passion for excellence, his vision.

They’ll embody Steve’s Zen-inspired values and design principles, everything he has taught his staff about how to design products that consumers will treasure.

This year’s gifts may even take on an emotional halo, a reflected glow from all the media attention showered on Apple and Steve Jobs since Steve’s passing in October.

But What About 2012?

Will Apple products still be as desirable next year as they are now? Will consumers continue to beg Santa for Apple phones, tablets, laptops and other gadgets?

It’s safe to assume that Apple has major products in the pipeline for 2012, such as the widely rumored iPad 3 and much anticipated iPhone 5.

Apple watchers are also speculating about key updates to the MacBook Air line, featuring more power, improved graphics — and a brand new 15-inch model. If their predictions are accurate, we could see these products in the first few months of 2012.

And what about a reimagined TV, a digital connected hub for intelligent couch potatoes?

Steve’s Lasting Gift

Will Steve Jobs’ true legacy prove to be the enduring culture that he fostered at Apple, the values learned and embraced by the people lucky enough to work with him at Apple or Pixar?

Will this culture be capable of identifying significant latent opportunities, things consumers don’t know that they need or want until they’ve experienced them? Will their contributions continue to delight and inspire us for years to come?

But Apple is a public company, and Wall Street expectations can have a polluting impact… How long will Apple’s product execs have the courage to reject design-by-committee decisions? To refuse the many tiny compromises (in the quest for better margins) that inevitably result in the boring mediocrity that plagues so many product companies?

I find myself somewhat reassured on this point, having read Walter Isaacson’s masterful biography, Steve Jobs. I was moved by Steve’s reflections on where he invested his energy, once he learned his cancer would be a death sentence.

I can’t wait to see what happens over the long term to the company on which Steve lavished so many time and attention. Time will tell.

Like other former Apple employees, I hope that Steve’s legacy will have a lasting impact on the people who now must translate Apple’s brand into future generations of inspiring products and services. As Steve noted to his biographer:

“ My passion has been to build an enduring company where people were motivated to make great products. Everything else was secondary….

Some people say, “Give the customers what they want.” But that’s not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they’re going to want before they do…. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page.

— Steve Jobs, reflections cited by Walter Isaacson in the Steve Jobs biography

If his legacy proves to have lasting impacts, our holiday gifts from Apple will be eagerly anticipated for years to come.

Importantly, what will today’s entrepreneurs learn from Steve’s legacy?

Like most former Apple employees I’ve been mourning the passing of Steve Jobs, and reflecting on his lasting impact. The many and profound ways in which he shaped employees’ values, behaviors, critical thinking skills, and approach to innovation. His impact on the world, inspiring products and services that would be embraced (and widely imitated) for decades to come.

I joined Apple back in the early days, before the Macintosh had an internal hard drive; the logo sported rainbow colors. It was a hopeful time, an innocent time — shaped by Steve’s mantra, “The journey is the reward.”

Steve had been fired just a few months before I was hired, but his culture and values endured. When we faced difficult decisions and saw no clear answer, someone would tell a story about Steve — and that insight would guide us to the solution that was most true to everything Apple stood for, the one most likely to lead to customer delight.

Leaving Apple 5 years later was the most painful career decision I ever made.  Steve’s impact had become diluted, and the Board was too focused on pleasing Wall Street at the expense of customers and partners. Executive leadership was in disarray, too willing to accept mediocrity even if it meant abandoning core values. Apple was at risk of becoming yet another me-too computer vendor. It was time to move on.

I mourned Apple — the loss of the dream — for months and years afterwards. It felt like a love affair that had ended too soon…

I was comforted when Steve returned to Apple in the mid-1990s, and restored the company to its founding mission: changing the way people work, learn, live and play. Here is Steve talking about those core values when explaining why he launched the “Think Different” brand campaign upon rejoining Apple:

Under Steve’s leadership and this galvanizing vision, Apple became a role model and a source of inspiration for people, businesses and schools everywhere. A source of endless delight to consumers, touching hundreds of millions, if not billions of people around the world.

Once Steve moved beyond the domain of personal computers to reinvent media, music, publishing, movies and animation — both creation and consumption — his vision for unifying art and technology would ignite new forms of expression and interaction. Not to mention where and how we engage with media (and each other) via iPhones, iPads and Apple laptop computers.

I profoundly hope that the people of Apple remain inspired by and shaped by Steve’s values and passionate commitment to excellence. If so, we can look forward to Apple innovations that spark our imagination (and unlock our wallets) for years to come.

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.

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.

Lately most of the newsletters delivered to my in-box at work seem to be breathlessly touting some aspect of content marketing or an upcoming conference on the subject. Because the senders tend to be technology providers, marcom agencies or others with vested interests, I take their pronouncements and special offers with a large grain of salt. But then I decided to dig deeper to find the true gold disguised in all that pyrite.

My first reactions — wry amusement, if not cynicism:

• The luster of social media is wearing off, so it’s time for self-styled gurus and vendors to find something new to evangelize.
• It’s just marketing collateral, gone digital; repackaged under a new name and positioned as something innovative or revolutionary.
• PR experts who view themselves as strategic, rather than just execution experts, would assert they’ve been recommending and “developing content” for decades.
• Been there, done that. New name, that’s all.

But then I read several reports yesterday that made me think a bit harder about content marketing, and realized that there’s some merit to the concept beyond the sheer hype.

Recent research points to its growing importance: 90% of B2B marketers claim to be engaged in content marketing, and allocate on average >25% of their budgets to content marketing activities. Their budgets are likely to increase in 2011. [Source: B2B Content Marketing: 2010 Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends, MarketingProfs and Junta42.] This is still an area where marketers are willing to outsource some activities, so it’s easy to understand the appeal to service providers. Having said that, budgets remain one of marketers’ more persistent challenges.

Content Marketing Defined

Let’s start with some definitions of content marketing.

“The creation and sharing of content for the purpose of promoting a product or service.

— Creating Content That Sells: Content Marketing for Demand Generation, Marketo white paper, 2010

Or:

“The creation and distribution of educational and/or compelling content in multiple formats to attract and/or retain customers.

—Content Marketing: 2010 Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends, MarketingProfs and Junta42, 2010

And finally, Wikipedia’s take:

“An umbrella term encompassing all marketing formats that involve the creation or sharing of content for the purpose of engaging current or potential consumer bases. Content marketing subscribes to the notion that delivering high-quality, relevant and valuable information to prospects and customers drives profitable consumer action. Content marketing has benefits in terms of retaining reader attention and improving brand loyalty.

—Wikipedia

Content Marketing: Same Old, or New and Different?

When the proponents explain what’s new or different about content marketing, they point to one or more of the following attributes:

Put Content in a Strategic Context

What’s really interesting is the opportunity for marketers to combine key aspects of the above, and thereby craft a more coherent content strategy. These combinatorial qualities, I believe, are the reason for all the hype that currently surrounds the notion of content marketing. This makes it strategic, rather than just tactics du jour or the latest faddish frenzy.

IMHO: Content strategy can be enormously effective when:

• it’s developed from a research-grounded, insight-enriched perspective
• it proceeds from a problem-solving, buyer– or user-centered needs framework
• it maps content options to buyers’ roles and needs, both informational and motivational
• it responds to peoples’ usage or consumption preferences (platform, device, format, timing, degree of personalization, etc.)
• it addresses needs at different phases of the buying cycle (including post-purchase experience phases)
• it creates appropriate opportunities for the end-customer (or sales, support and distribution partners) to add their respective contributions to content creation, sourcing, review, commentary – let them add to the conversation

Said otherwise, what’s really cool about content marketing is the possibility that it will enable “marketing nirvana”:

Deliver the right message to the right person, at the right time and place, in the form that they prefer to see or hear.

But Let’s Get Real

What I’ve learned from client engagements is that most companies lack a holistic understanding of their customer; have a shallow understanding (at best) of buyer roles, needs and motivations; and often set hard boundaries (AKA, organizational silos) between the moment of purchase, and what happens after purchase.

For the customer this is when the joy — or suffering — really begins.

And thus we marketers have a long way to go before we can really deliver on the promise of content marketing.

Like other Mac users eagerly awaiting 4G LTE service in the US, I was angry to learn that Verizon’s initial 4G modems will support Windows only. There’s no official word when the service will be extended to Mac and iPad users…

Initial Reactions from a Long-time Mac User

How could that be possible, I fumed: Mac and iPad users tend to be enthusiastic early adopters, especially for services that help us express ourselves, communicate, or help our companies stand out from the rest.

Surely, I thought, we must fit Verizon’s ideal customer profile for their new 4G LTE data service. If we can afford the Apple brand premium, we must be attractive prospects for Verizon’s top-of-the-line wireless service.

And we’re increasing in number, too. Professionals who work out of the office, travel often for biz dev reasons, sell or consult — and importantly, those in roles with direct purchasing authority — are increasingly likely to use Mac laptops and/or iPads when our device choices are not dictated by IT or purchasing policies. Although fewer in number than the Windows community, we traditionally drive spikes in demand for groundbreaking services that suit our multi-faceted modes of work and play.

Surely we’d be very attractive customers for Verizon. Why would Verizon take the risk of alienating us by denying us a service that we want?

Over dinner I talked about this with my husband who, though not a Verizon employee, has a well-informed view of wireless industry behavior. His POV made sense, although it didn’t resolve my disappointment. Here’s how the thinking unfolded as we tried to imagine what drove Verizon’s decision to support PCs only, at least at first…

A Plausible Business Scenario?

Let’s start by assuming that Verizon expects Mac, next-gen iPad and future iPhone users to become significant 4G customers over time. They most likely represent Verizon’s most strategic customer acquisition opportunity over the next few years. Not to mention ARPU boosters (margin improvements). So this is a high-stakes play for Verizon and its shareholders…

Here’s why the delay probably makes sense from Verizon’s POV.

Technical/Business Factors

• Verizon’s LTE network is bleeding-edge technology, especially at the scale needed for the whole US market
• The shift to an LTE nationwide network is capital intensive and fraught with risk
• Verizon must resolve many technical and infrastructure issues before the service is reliable, their LTE footprint covers all of the major markets, and actual bandwidth delivery meets people’s inflated expectations
• Service will be rocky for early customers
• Verizon faces unknown scaling issues for network provisioning, customer on-boarding, etc.
• Unlike AT&T, Verizon lacks real-world experience scaling up to respond when actual bandwidth demands exceed forecast by orders of magnitude
• Verizon has watched AT&T scramble to add bandwidth capacity after dramatically under-estimating what iPhone users would consume — with brand tarnishing consequences for AT&T when iPhone users screamed loudly in San Francisco, New York and elsewhere, not to mention billions in unforeseen capital investments
• The USB LTE dongles are first-generation technology comprising 4 radios, each with its own chipset, so they’re large and clunky
• Qualcomm, Verizon and their technology ecosystem must move up the learning curve before they can afford to miniaturize and deliver the LTE-enabling technology in smaller and more elegant form factors, with improved reliability

Brand/Reputation Factors

• Apple has trained its customers to have little patience for unreliable services or devices
• Apple customers expect superior user experiences (that’s why they pay extra for the Apple brand)
• Apple has taught its customers to expect elegance of form and function — in Apple devices, and the peripherals and accessories that are designed to work with those devices
• Apple/iPhone customers expect the same caliber of user experience from their wireless carriers that they expect of Apple
• The Mac and extended Apple brand fan community have proven to be highly vocal when angry, frustrated or disappointed
• Macs are widely used by media businesses to produce magazines, newsletters and other mass media, online or offline, so the brand fans’ voices will be amplified by the media
• Verizon doesn’t want the brand risk of large numbers of disappointed Mac and iPad users blogging and tweeting about how awful the LTE service is
• Verizon wants to deal with a manageable set of users during what is essentially an in-market pilot phase for the early LTE service

My Conclusion

Verizon plans to extend LTE service to Mac and iOS devices once Verizon is assured that the service experience and overall quality will meet what Mac and iPad owners have come to expect of their technology providers.

So, disappointed as I am, this scenario seems plausible to me from a strategic perspective, given the stakes for Verizon.

Having said that, I won’t be surprised if there’s an announcement by Apple and/or Verizon in January (at CES?) with service availability announced for H1 2011. Perhaps in Q1 we’ll see some off-brand drivers hacked together by eager techno geeks serving bleeding-edge users who can’t wait for the Verizon-branded modems for Mac users.

Oh yes, and there may be a wee bit of revenge operating here as well, payback for the long wait before the Apple-AT&T exclusivity terms expired so Apple could bring the iPhone to Verizon customers.

So, happy holidays, Mac and iPad owners. There won’t be a Verizon LTE gift card in your Christmas stocking this year…

Update: If you’re willing to use Bootcamp and Windows on your Mac (and probably jump through some other hoops), you can use Verizon 4G LTE on Macs with Intel processors, someone has tweeted to me. At least in Houston, that is.

Update #2: Here is some discussion about the Verizon iPhone offer (3G at first, not 4G) and reasons why. Source: ZDnet. My guess? A 4G Verizon model will be announced in June, for late summer availability. Based on Apple’s past patterns…