Tim Robertson

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.

You’re not alone in having concerns about how effective your content marketing is going to be or about the amount of work (and resources) it will take to produce it. There are many success stories and many ways to utilize the strategies and techniques content marketing offers. Here is some of the good news:

1. 87% of B2B marketers “struggle” to produce good content. Your competition is probably struggling too, giving you an edge with the strategies in this book. Source: Forrester

2. 42% of B2B marketers say they are good at content marketing, 41% aren’t too sure, and 16% considers themselves not good at all. Your competitors may do some content marketing, but they are not masters of the medium by any means. Source: Content Marketing Institute

3. Content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing and generates 3 times more leads. The time you spend on effective cutting-edge content marketing will be worth your while. Source: Demand Metric

4. 67% of the B2B buyer journey is done digitally. Nine out of ten buyers say online content has a moderate to major effect on their purchasing decision. The relevant content you create will affect the buying decision. Source: Lenati

5. 57% of B2B buyers are presold before ever speaking to a sales person. When buyers find your content, there is a good chance they are in a buying mindset. If they are not in a buying mindset, they are doing research and open to suggestions. Source: CEB Marketing Leadership Council

6. 74% say content marketing is increasing their marketing team’s lead quality and quantity. Content marketing is working, despite the challenges. It also means advanced strategies will work even better. Source: Curate

Now that you have established a website and spent some time marketing in the U.S., it’s time to take your content marketing strategy seriously. The reason for this is because of the paradigm change in how prospects look for solutions in your market.

Old Paradigm

Sales representatives and advertising had control. Enterprise buyers would get numerous sales calls to learn about the technology sales reps were offering, or they would see an ad that related to something they needed. Customers would go to trade shows and spend hours visiting all the booths.

New Paradigm

The buyer is in the driver’s seat. They are making their own decisions about what products to explore and purchase. They use Google and other channels to discover what they want.

This new paradigm is showing up in marketing stats for the U.S. As an example, 91% of prospects unsubscribe from automated emails, 20% of direct mail is never opened, and 48% of prospects in the U.S. are on “do not call” lists—and so on.

Content Marketing in Today’s Market

You need to create content that will attract buyers.  Buyers are researching solutions to their problem or need. The idea of creating content to attract prospects for your technology product or service might give you pause, however, when you consider some of the following stats:

1. There has been a content explosion over the last few years. 

There has been an 800% increase in blog posts created by companies over the past 5 years. For the most part, only a very small portion of this content is shared. The chances of someone reading your content is pretty slim.
Source: Trackmaven

2. In 2017, 1,440 blog posts were published every 60 seconds. 

Your competition is probably publishing a lot of articles, every day.
Source: Martech

3. Almost 95% of newly published pages don’t get to the top 10 ranking in Google within a year.

As a matter of fact, the average “top 10” ranking in Google is 2+ years old, and position #1 is in the 3-years-old range. The whole purpose of content marketing is to get found by prospects who use keywords or keyword phrases that define what they are looking for. Given these stats and how long content takes to rise and be noticed, it may be years before you get traction.

Source: HREFS

4. 83% percent of B2B buyers find themselves “overwhelmed” by the amount of content available.

Your content is only adding to their feeling of being overwhelmed.

Source: DemanGen

5. Companies spend 25–43% of their marketing budget on content, but only 23% of CMOs feel it is the best content for the right audience at the right time and in the right format. 

Knowing where, when, and what to publish to whom is very hard to figure out.

Source: Business2Community

6. The average reader spends 37 seconds reading an article or post.

Prospects may find your content but spend very little time absorbing it, let alone following up on it.

Source: NewsCred

7. Paid content promotion (basically, AdWords) is up 5x since 2014.

That’s because 98% of businesses choose a business on page 1 of Google, whether it is paid or organic. Your content on page 7 will not make the cut.

Source: Orbit Media

So, there is some bad news about content marketing, and you may have heard other things as well. But, what’s the good news?

There is an assumption by European companies that all it takes to succeed in the U.S. market is to do what everyone else does. That usually consists of building a U.S.-based website, paying for a booth at a few industry trade shows, and doing some prospecting with mailing lists to generate buying interest. 

Often, these activities do not produce anything close to an ROI and immediately become sunk costs. After spending a considerable amount of time and money on Google ads, booth graphics, hotel rooms, and mailing lists, many European companies wonder what it will take to be seen and heard in the USA—and at what cost.

The way we see it, there are three major forces shaping marketing for European companies entering the US market today:

• Pay per click advertising has become more expensive and prospects only provide a gmail address if they opt-in on your website – and that’s if they opt-in at all
• Purchased mailing lists based on demographics and territories have very low rates of response because prospects are overwhelmed with unsolicited email
• U.S. trade shows have become more of a social and professional meeting place where participants visit vendors they already have a relationship with, listen to one or two speakers on the schedule and then go out to dinner with the team

For companies that want to grow on the US market and are dissatisfied with the results they have gotten with trade shows, mailing lists, and advertising, B2B Marketing to the USA for European Companies presents a proven content marketing system that attracts enterprise prospects who are looking to buy. Unlike content marketing strategies that are resource intensive and overwhelming in scope, our methods are low-cost, fast, and laser-focused.

This strategy is designed for companies that are already established in their own country and are looking for growth on the U.S. and international markets. You’ve done well at home—now it’s time to grow abroad.

Growing outside your home market presents a challenge, however, quite possibly because:

• you’re up against bigger, richer U.S. and international competitors
• you have limited (or no) brand recognition outside your home market
• you don’t have a large sales or marketing team

While all these factors can work against you, I will help you get the same exposure and the status bigger competitors have—even without brand recognition or a large presence in the U.S.

The strategies work well for technology companies that serve the enterprise market. If your industry is considered to be unglamorous, under the radar, or misunderstood…all the better!

After studying some of the concepts in this blog or the book, you’ll know how to:

• be visible next to bigger and richer competitors without blowing your budget
• create surprisingly inexpensive brand awareness campaigns
• be extensively published in the business press
• attract enterprise prospects who are looking to buy