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Beware the Fat

You have probably read a few articles on what a good content marketing program should have. But a lot of conventional practices are not necessarily the best strategies for European technology companies. 

There are many reasons why what is thought of as “best practices” are not the best anymore. One reason is the large industry of content creators, marketing-automation platforms, and marketing firms that are benefiting from the huge shift. 

Traditional “broadcast” marketing depended on advertisements and sales calls. Today, buyers inform themselves and do their own research. The need for content to meet that demand has transformed an entire marketing industry worldwide.

Conventional Content Marketing in 10 Painstaking Steps

The thinking around content marketing best practices is not flawed. It does work over time if you can get all the parts to work—and there are a lot of parts! Here’s the basic formula:

  1. Articulate what marketing objectives you want to achieve with your content marketing program. This could include building awareness, educating buyers, nurturing leads, or thought leadership.
  2. Create numerous buying personas. This includes all the roles of the people involved in the buying process as well as influencers who support the buying decision.
  3. Discover all the SEO keywords and key phrases prospects are using to search for a solution to their problem.
  4. Create content to match the buying journey for each persona. The buying journey consists of Awareness, Consideration, Interest, Preference, and Action (depending on which buyer’s journey chart you examine).
  5. Set up an editorial calendar and publish content for each stage of the buyer’s journey you are concentrating on.
  6. Now that people are coming to your website and blog, capture their email addresses with gated content or an offer to be on your newsletter mailing list.
  7. Keep creating content to attract prospects to get them onto your mailing list. Publish blog articles, videos, ebooks, infographics, interviews, email campaigns, white papers, surveys, newsletters, trade magazine articles, and downloadable PowerPoint slides. Don’t forget podcasts.
  8. Make sure you are sharing snippets of all the content you are creating on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Q&A forums.
  9. Further promote your downloadable opt-in content with PPC text ads on Google, Bing, and network banner ads.
  10. Nurture the leads on your mailing list by feeding them content that matches where they are in the buyer’s journey for your industry. Have your sales team follow up.

Having said all that, keep in mind the content you create only validates itself once it is published. Everything is in a testing phase until it proves itself to gain traction and deliver conversions or other tangible marketing results. 

With all that publishing and sharing, it might take a considerable amount of time to determine if:

  • Your personas make sense.
  • The content for each aspect of the buyer’s journey is accurate.
  • You are delivering the right content at the right time.
  • Your assumptions about how to measure buying intent (with a point system or other metric) is relevant.

It’s not that there aren’t any success stories based on this process, but it’s most likely the companies that can afford to follow through on such a complex process also have the resources to dominate the market with their branding programs. 

You know who I’m talking about—those competitors in the U.S. with large sales forces who seem to have millions of dollars to spend on banner ads, trade shows, and Magic Quadrant reports.

The Elusive Buyer’s Journey Remains…Elusive?

The overall premise of most content marketing strategies is that you can estimate where people are in the buyer’s journey and deliver the right message to them in a timely manner. The echo chamber of voices that adhere to this notion clashes with the real-life experience of someone like Adelle Revella1. 

This is someone who has spent many years in the field actually talking to business buyers. Here’s her take on it:

Across thousands of buyer interviews spanning dozens of industries, there is one aspect of almost every buyer’s journey that is pervasive and absolutely terrifying—almost no one can recall any marketing engagement that influenced their decision.

I don’t like to communicate bad news. But I cringe every time I see a graphic depicting an elaborate buyer’s journey that is utterly unrelated to anything a real buyer has ever told us. – Adele Revella, CEO of Buyer Persona Institute

So, it’s not necessarily a bad thing to spend extraordinary amounts of time predicting where someone is in the sales process—it’s just not precise and, for the purpose of generating new business, not that efficient.

The “expanding belly” of conventional content marketing can be slow, expensive, and, let’s face it, exhausting. Let’s explore how you can get results in the U.S. faster with a leaner approach.