Now that you’ve heard Movéo and Earnest’s views on the importance of content strategy and showcasing subject matter experts through content, let’s hear their thoughts on the influence that content can have on B2B buyers. Catch up on the first three posts in this series here.
______________________
BD
Some of our clients are somewhat skeptical about the influence of their own content when they shouldn’t be. There’s research out there showing that people value brand-generated content just as much as expert or media content today. There are probably a lot of reasons for that, but it’s no longer a situation, obviously, where you have to rely on media to exclusively get your message out. There’s earned media in the form of social and brand-generated content that has just as much authority. Again, if you are able to come up with a content strategy that takes into account the needs of your users, your readers or viewers, you’ll be able to really tap into the authority that your brand has because it’s no longer about products — it’s about solutions, and anybody can have solutions. It doesn’t have to be something they read about from a third party necessarily.
PH
Content strategy might not just necessarily be about content creation, but it might be about content curation, to use one of those horrible terms — how you can aggregate content across your sphere of expertise and then add great analysis back in, and put that out in a meaningful way. You’re shortcutting the process. We do that a lot ourselves at Earnest in the way we blog and use social. I think of the content curation piece, which is almost like a fast track to great content really.
CW
Some of the most successful businesses out there now, when they’re looking at buying from another business — so a business to business buying cycle — they are genuinely looking for expertise, insight, authority and understanding and they are, just to your point, going to journalists or an analyst. Those are a viewpoint or a number of viewpoints, but the vendors have a massive role in this, and increasingly, organizations are starting to see that they need to come and open up a bit and let some of that expertise out. Organizations just need to be proud of their own expertise and not worried about this and that. Get the expertise out. People care what you’ve got to say. Just say it genuinely.
BD
Certainly in the consulting industry, for years they have basically built their communications models around thought leadership, and a huge percentage of their marketing budgets are devoted to that. I see that model going well beyond that industry now.
CW
Another good example that I always like because it’s so simple and it really works very well. HP has a huge task: To train its solution partners, its customers on a very, very broad product line. At some point, they just looked at how they were doing this and said, “Well, lets just open this up.” They’ve got lots of people who know these products, but can’t have them on the road all the time doing these road show demonstrations. So why not just get them all on YouTube? So this HP copy series has hundreds of people — not always very polished presenters — but people who know the product and can demonstrate it and explain it. That’s not what anyone would call “thought leadership,” but it’s just really good practical help for the partners and the customers. That, again, is the sort of thing that can come out of the content strategy. Though it’s not their entire content, is it useful? Absolutely. It’s really useful to their customers.
DS
That’s a good example of that brand expressing itself in a certain way. So in that instance, the decision was made, whether explicitly or implicitly, that content mattered over style and substance, so that you had presenters who knew what they were talking about. Maybe they weren’t as completely polished as you might want in some high powered PR campaign or something, but for that particular instance, in that venue — on a YouTube video — somebody showing somebody how something works — that was of the highest value and that’s why it was put out there, even if it wasn’t as polished or had some other features that that audience wouldn’t really value.
CW
That last point around the audience is very important. Because, certainly, the ones I’ve seen, these are for IT, junior management guys in organizations —that’s the audience. They don’t want a slick Armani suit telling them how a server works. They want their peer, their technical guy wearing a kind of dreadful tee shirt [laughter].
BD
It’s interesting how enhanced production value on certain things can lead to the creation of artifice.
(Click here to expand)
