Content Marketing

Pay-per-click advertising has become more expensive, and prospects only provide a Gmail address if they opt in—and that’s if they opt in at all.

As mentioned earlier, the notion of getting someone to opt in to your content and calling that email contact a lead is common practice. In our view, it’s not an optimal measure of success. There are several issues with counting an email address as a lead in 2019:

1. Prospects are a bit savvier today. They know that if they opt in to download your report or to other “gated” content, there is a good chance someone will try to follow up with a sales call.

1. Instead of putting in their official email address, most people put in their anonymous Gmail address—the one they use for filling out forms and downloading information.

1. The amount of content someone researches in one day is considerable, and it will require having to fill out multiple forms in order to access it. Prospects will only fill out a form or opt in if the content is a must-have.

Aside from the points above, following up on email opt-ins is not super-productive. There are several reasons for this. The buying intent of the prospect is very low—they are looking for information rather than seriously considering your products. In many cases, the opt-in will unsubscribe after they get the information they need.

LinkedIn has found that 37% of tech buyers are less likely to consider a vendor that gates the first piece of content. LinkedIn also found that 75% of tech buyers are less likely to consider a vendor that gates all their content.

Given that you are a new brand in the U.S., it is probably a good idea to go with ungated content. That means don’t collect an email address—instead, let them download your document without having to give you their email. 

You are going to include the Schedule a Demo button inside the content they download (see the Schedule a Demo Button chapter for more details). That means if they pass the document around to their colleagues, and they click on the Schedule a Demo button in the PDF, they are immediately linked right into your appointment book.

As well, when they leave your website, you will be following them around with our low-cost retargeting strategy (see the Retargeting chapter for more details). 

So, instead of you facing all the work and risks involved with gated content, your prospects will be: 

• downloading your PDF, keeping it on their computer, and passing it around to colleagues
• getting your branded reminder ads when they go to other websites for up to 3 months after they visit your site
• potentially clicking on the Schedule a Demo button and making an appointment!

Not that email lists and opt-ins have no value—it’s just a long-term play. The strategies discussed here are for companies who don’t have the luxury of time and the large sales force. They need to attract buyers now. 

Think of email lists and email marketing as the long-term strategy that will pay off over time. It may take hundreds (or thousands) of emails to create one decent opportunity. We’re focusing on prospects that want a demo today—in other words, buyers.

Hunt for Buyers Rather Than Fish for Email Addresses

Attract buyers and make them feel comfortable approaching you to book that initial appointment. 

So, what’s the best way to do that?

A Brief History of Google

As the dominant search engine for business users, Google accounts for 90% of all search engine traffic worldwide (April 2018). And for the purpose of brevity, whenever I mention Google, I am also including Bing, Yahoo, and other search engines.

In the beginning of the transformation from broadcast marketing to search engine marketing was the rise of search engine optimization (SEO). SEO consulting services set themselves up to help technology companies get content in front of prospects. 

The strategy was to use either white hat, grey hat, and/or black hat techniques to get a good position in the search engines for competitive keywords.

• White hat methods are playing the game according to Google’s publishing rules and guidelines.
• Grey hat techniques are borderline “gaming the system.”
• Black hat techniques are outright manipulation. Anyone detected using black hat techniques by Google is usually heavily penalized, if not outright banned for life.

As a result, your friendly SEO shop has become a content marketing agency in the last few years. Not to mention all the advertising agencies, website development studios, marketing communication companies, copyrighters, blogging experts, and lead-generation firms who offer the same. 

That’s a tsunami of practitioners creating content and preaching the benefits of content marketing services.

The Google search algorithm, which is as long as your arm and uses artificial intelligence, has become more sophisticated. SEO techniques alone do not have the potency they once did because ultimately what gets a good search result on Google is what any search engine wants to deliver to its customers in the first place: good, relevant organic content from authoritative sources.

Status Equals Authority

In social situations and society, there are three sources of status: wealth, power, and celebrity. This is a good thing to know when sizing up people in a meeting, at a convention, or in a boardroom. In the virtual world of content marketing, status plays a role as well—but in a different context.

Your online presence as a company and as a brand is determined by where you show up. As an example, if I look up ERP on Google, I will see Oracle, Microsoft, and SAP. These are obviously big players with lots of status on that front page.

Now, imagine if you did a search for your product or service and you appeared beside the large competitors in your industry? As an example, at an enterprise software trade show you would have to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to get the same prominent position as the ERP vendors above. In other words, if you don’t have status, it can be expensive to get it.

What If You Could Get That Status Without All the Expense?

Thanks to the democratization of information, you can position your company next to larger competitors in Google search results. You just need one essential qualification that will grant you that status: authority.

Google wants to deliver a great product to its customers, in the same way that you do for your customers. In Google’s case, a good product is organic content that is relevant to your search. Over the years, Google has filtered out poor-quality content, and they provide very consistent results across the search spectrum.

The Meaning of Google Authority

If Google sees your website as an authority on a particular subject, you have the opportunity to rank beside competitors who have more money and status than you do—even on a very competitive market like the U.S.

How do you convince Google your company website is a reliable go-to source of good information and expertise in your industry? The good news is your website has more authority than you realize. We find that many clients underestimate how much authority they already have and are in the dark about how to take advantage of it.

Massive Leverage

Much like a nondescript sedan that has a high-performance engine, companies are usually unaware of their unfair advantage. So, it helps to understand what you’ve got under the hood.

For starters, with Google you are considered an authority in your particular field if:

• You have an established company with employees, products, and revenues.
• Your company website (in Europe or the U.S.) is 7 years or older.
• You have one or more physical locations
• You have content on your site related to your products, services, and industry.
• You have a few blog posts of indeterminate date.
• The topic of your website has not changed over the years (in other words, you are still in the same business).

This is not a very high bar. If you are thinking there are a lot of businesses like that, you’re right. The upside is you are reading this book and finding out how to leverage the authority your company already has.

Not that you can snap your fingers and get instantaneous results—but with just a bit of work, the content you create can gain the status necessary to “show up” in the company of larger established players. In other words, you’re taking your website with the credibility described above and leveraging the authority Google has already given it! 

And by making your content even more relevant, that authority will provide the status necessary to get you onto those first few pages of the search engine results.

Once that happens, you are leveraging your website’s status and presence. That means more traffic, more people looking at your solution, more buyers seeing you as a viable second or third option, more prospects asking for more information, and more prospects booking a demo and wanting to know more.

Do You Have a New U.S. Website?

If you are starting out in the U.S. with a brand-new website, you do not have any authority at all, unless you bought a URL that had some history. The issues around a new website can be rectified, but it will take some effort depending on the industry and the amount of competition you have. Don’t let anyone convince you it’s because of the “design” or other creative nonsense. Contact us for strategies on how to fix this.

In order to get optimal results, it’s important to understand who you are speaking to, where you have leverage, and what to talk about.

Create Content for Prospects in One of Two Mindsets

The first mindset is made up of Buyers who are looking for a solution. These prospects are looking to buy and have done some research, looked at your technology solution, and want a demo and a discussion.

The second mindset is made up of Researchers who are exploring solutions. These prospects are looking around. If they had decided on your well-known competition, they would have talked to them long ago. Instead, they are open-minded and willing to consider several vendors, picking the top 3 or 4 candidates. You want to be in that group.

Anything beyond these two mindsets only complicates things. Take those complex buying funnel diagrams out of your PowerPoint presentations and concentrate on these two states of mind specifically.

Create Content Around the “Idea” of a Product

Because your brand or product is not well-known, you have to think about promoting the idea of your product: what problem it solves. Prospects will not search for your product if they don’t know what it’s called. It’s the idea of the product that generates interest. 

Your potential customers are searching (thousands of times a day) through articles, blog posts, and solution pages using everyday terms (or industry-specific language) that defines their challenge.

Take Stock of (or Establish) Status and Authority

One of the most important objectives of any content marketing campaign is to establish your website as a trusted source of authority with Google. There is no certification for this—it has to be earned. 

Having a good status with Google opens the doors to higher search engine ratings, more traffic, more opportunities, more visibility, and a faster route to booked prospect appointments and new business.

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