Part of my consulting role to clients is keeping an eye on marketing trends. While doing that recently I found an excellent presentation on B2B content marketing trends produced by the UK based agency Velocity Partners.
The deck outlines five trends, which the authors call “Beyonds,” showing how B2B content marketing is evolving. Tactically these are brilliant and make total sense to me. However, I was disappointed not to see anything about how to integrate this highly creative content into the sales process. That’s a critical component in the campaigns I work on everyday for clients.
The deck outlines five main trends in B2B content marketing:
- Beyond Gutenberg — moving away from print content
- Beyond Search – think community, not what pleases Google
- One Size Fits All Content – you need to analyze, segment your audience and then produce specific content for each
- Content Tools — don’t tell your audience, give your audience tools, education
- Personality – no more anonymous corporation, age of the B2B marketing rock star, connotes authenticiy
The entire deck is embedded below. To be totally fair, on slide 43 the authors talk about the need to integrate these efforts into the larger marketing function. And they promise that “consolidation” is on the way. But that’s it — one slide out of 48.
Unfortunately, that won’t cut it with my clients. For most of my clients, content marketing is a new and different approach. They won’t sign on without a coherent, logical explanation of how the content contributes to the sales funnel. So I spend a lot of time working with clients on integrating the content effort with whatever automation platform they use — Eloqua, Marketo, eTrigue to name a few.
As exciting as these trends are, personally I caught a whiff of old fashioned advertising as I viewed the deck. It reminded me of the old advertising days, when creative teams churned out beautiful content designed to raise awareness about a company or product. How to translate that to revenue? That was the client’s problem.
Of course creativity is required in content marketing, and I realize how tempting it is for an agency to just work on that piece. Some agencies with large corporate clients can focus on branding and not be held accountable for hard ROI. That’s not the reality in the field marketing world I work in, however.
Is it always fun or easy to be held responsible for feeding the sales pipeline? Heck no, it’s a tough road filled with technical issues, marketing vs. sales issues, change management issues and more. It requires constant effort and close collaboration with the client.
But when it works, you’re no longer just a marketing vendor, you’re a part of the sales process with proven ROI. That’s the recipe for long term B2B client relationships.