Crystal Clear Communications Blog

Advertising trained people to think ‘Campaign first.’

Some companies find it nearly impossible to break the campaign habit. So they resist any move towards content marketing.

But almost 9 out of 10 marketers apply content marketing today. Others are striving to catch up.

To succeed, first marketers have to prove that content marketing can be successful in their company.

Why do buyers need always-on content marketing?

By their nature, ad campaigns focus on the topics sellers want to address, not what buyers want to know.

Ads break through sometimes, but they are often skipped or ignored. In contrast, content marketing is the kind of marketing customers seek out 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

To understand why the move towards content marketing is crucial to buyers, look through the eyes of customers on high-consideration purchases. Ask:

• Which topics are most relevant to buyers?
• Where will buyers get the evergreen information they need to make good buying decisions?
• If a brand does not provide educational content, where do buyers go get it?

In many markets, sellers don’t provide all the information that buyers need to make well-informed decisions. So, buyers turn to content from influencers such as nerdwallet.com or to news media such as Consumer Reports.

Brands miss sales when they lack the right content.

Each time a buyer turns to a middleman for information, the brand loses.

Advance your brand by providing the information buyers need, rather than sending buyers off to learn from middlemen. Content helps you build a relationship of trust that leads to more sales in the end.

Ask: How can your brand become your market’s best teacher?

In addition to ad campaigns, provide the evergreen content buyers always need for high-consideration purchases, including:

• Relevant information about topics that interest them
• Answers to their questions
• Comparisons of available options
• Social proof from experts and happy customers
• A step-by-step process to make the right decisions.

To sell the idea of evergreen content at all levels, take 5 steps:

1. Ask people to examine their own advertising consumption.
2. Reduce risk by calling content marketing a “pilot project.”
3. Pursue low-hanging fruit first.
4. Find funds from your experimentation budget.
5. Assume more responsibility for conversions.

1. Ask people to examine their own ad usage.

Ask your colleagues about how they consume advertising. Do they:

• Block ads on their web browser?
• Ever click a web banner ad?
• Fast-forward through TV commercials?
• Change the radio station when ads come on?
• Throw away junk mail without opening it?
• Trash unopened emails?

All of those behaviors indicate how hard customers work to avoid seeing ads they don’t want.

Content marketing, on the other hand, is the always-on marketing that customers seek out 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Customers want you to teach them to become the smartest buyers in your category. That’s what content is all about.

2. Call content marketing a “pilot project.”

To transform content skeptics into believers, start small. Move towards content marketing on a small scale first, to prove that the move towards content marketing is viable and profitable.

Give content enough time to make a difference. It may take a year or more to prove that content works. Make sure your pilot project has a year or two to prove it.

Once you meet with success, you win the authority to scale up content marketing.

3. Fund content from your experimentation budget.

Smart marketers set aside 5% to 15% of the annual budget for unforeseen needs and experimentation, as Linda Boff, GE’s former CMO, did. Tap the experimentation budget to move towards content marketing.

To get the most out of your experimentation budget:

• Find the hungriest product managers or sales managers in the company, and partner with them.
• Fix marketing processes before automating them.
• Choose lower-cost suppliers such as freelancers instead of agencies.
• Take away funding from projects that underwhelm.

If you didn’t include experimentation funds in this year’s budget, what to do? Wring savings from other marketing projects. Make a pitch to Sales or Product Management to fund a content experiment from their budgets.

Hoard savings to create an experimentation budget. To continue the move towards content marketing, build experimentation into your annual budget, going forward.

4. Harvest low-hanging fruit first.

Every company has mature products that are neglected by marketing. When sales of these products plateau, marketing resources are taken away.

What if you could turn around a mature product by becoming buyers’ best source of information on crucial topics? Find the most promising opportunities to work on:

• Products in markets with unaddressed customer segments
• Relatively untapped opportunities
• Markets with less competition.

Work with a sales region that desperately needs marketing help, one that’s challenged to reach its goals.

Content marketing can drive account-based marketing to help turn around a struggling sales region. Once a region that’s saddled with low expectations begins to outperform, other regions will seek out the same kind of marketing help.

5. Handle conversions with extra care.

In relay races, good hand-offs are the key to success. But the hand-off of a lead from Marketing to Sales is one of the trickiest maneuvers in any company’s revenue process.

When you hand off marketing-qualified leads to Sales, the moment of truth is at hand.

If Sales calls the first 3 prospects and wins no immediate deals, they start complaining that all the marketing leads are bad. So, they’ll ignore future leads from Marketing.

Marketing can combat this problem by taking additional steps to qualify a lead:

• Reduce the number of leads you give to Sales, by as much as half. Ensure that only the highest-quality leads go to Sales.
• Use marketing automation to identify prospects who consume a big quantity of content in a short time.
• Seek soft conversions before hard conversions: get buyers to say yes to small requests before making a bigger ask.
• Phone prospects to ensure they are real buyers before handing them off to sales. Do they have a real need that fits the product? Do they have a budget in hand? Do they hold buying authority or influence?
• Follow the leads all the way through the proposal process to the outcome. Independently calculate a win/loss ratio and return on marketing investment (ROMI).

“How do you convince all levels of an organization to move toward content marketing and away from the campaign to campaign?” is one of marketers’ Top 100 Questions about content marketing.

To sell the idea of always-on content marketing in a campaign-minded company:

1. Ask people to examine their own advertising consumption.
2. Reduce risk by calling content marketing a “pilot project.”
3. Pursue low-hanging fruit first.
4. Find funds from your experimentation budget.
5. Assume more responsibility for conversions.