The Key to B-to-B Content: Engagement, Not Automation

Your company may be a reseller of office supplies, or a manufacturer of industrial equipment, or a developer of software solutions. But today, you’re probably something else as well—a content provider. And you’re not just presenting that content to customers and prospects, you’re (hopefully) engaging them in a conversation as well.

This transition can be stressful for companies as they struggle to find where or how to create content, what type of content they need to generate, and the best way push that content out and generate leads via email and all manner of social media.

At many organizations, getting the most out of content is a concern that goes beyond the marketing team. In an audience poll taken at the recent ten24 B2B Content Marketing Summit in Newton, MA:

• 24% of attendees said they reported to a CEO, management team,
board or investor group that feels company awareness needs to be increased.
• 46% said their sales teams or channel partners were looking for more leads to fill the pipeline.
• 27% are being told to do more with less when it comes to their marketing budget.

The keys to winning B-to-B content that will help you leverage your message and generate new (and productive) leads via email, social media and beyond? Consistency with your brand message, interaction with your audience, and an understanding of what that audience really needs.

Keep It Consistent
Companies may think that there is no such thing as having too many leads or too much content to populate their email and social streams, says Tim Hurley, managing partner, ThinkMedia Partners. But there needs to be a strategy and a set of processes in place to make sure that content is consistent with a company’s brand.

“It can’t just be a set of blogs that wander off the reservation,” he says. “Most companies both big and small have a lot of eager beavers who want to produce content—but have varying degrees of skill at doing it.”

Social media overload was reported by 26% of attendees at the ten24 event—indeed, they said the plethora of social communications tools at their disposal was actually making their jobs harder; only 9% said social made their marketing lives easier.

In the past, says David Crouch, partner/president of ten24, many
companies would start a print newsletter that would come out a few times and then die because it lacked strategy. “The same thing happens now with digital and blog posts,” he says. “It’s an age-old problem, because many of these things happen with no real tracking and a lack of resources.”

Interact, Don’t Just Automate
Many B-to-B firms want to automate their content by simply syndicating it around the web. That, says Anna Barcelos, director of client services at ten24, is a mistake. “To be successful, you have to interact with people and reply to people who respond to your social content. B-to-B companies are so used to just pushing messages out there. But if there’s no human body to reply and engage with prospects, it won’t work.”

For many old-school companies, the informality and sharing of social media is at first hard to adapt to. “It’s less of a legacy for younger social-media adept firms, who aren’t used to producing the 14-page white papers that no one is interested in really reading,” says Hurley. “I’ve had a couple of clients who have used the automated [syndication] services and they haven’t really delivered, the net wasn’t cast wide enough.”

For content to really catch fire with online readers, the communication flow via avenues like Twitter, blogs, LinkedIn and Facebook must be active and can’t seem mechanical. “You need an editor to pick and choose content and poll stakeholders to see what they want—you can’t just make assumptions about what they’re looking for,” Hurley notes.

“You need to ask consumers if the content is valuable if you want to transform your messaging into two-way communications,” adds
Barcelos. In every piece of content you create for email or social media, you must focus on whether the recipient will find value in it and learn from it, she adds. “We want to create that two-way dialogue, whether we’re doing blog posts, getting people to download white papers or linking to sites we’ve created.”

“Email is a tool to nurture those relationships that have started somewhere else,” says Crouch. “Of course, what works for one client doesn’t work for everyone. And with email, you can test and track easily, and make adjustments on the fly.”