Technology Content Marketing Blog

Why Product Marketing Needs to Care about Content

info@kimgusta.com — 2012-02-08T23:21:30+00:00

When it comes to content – planning it, creating it, using it – Product Marketing’s role is often unclear. In many organizations, the role of content creator and planner is the Marketing Communications team. They handle outbound marketing execution, and hence, take the lead in content creation and distribution.

But given that Product Marketing is often a key business owner for a particular product or service, and probably cares a good deal about how their product is being marketed to buyers, it makes sense to include Product Marketing in content marketing efforts.

Plus product marketers have the buyer knowledge to create really good content. No one else in Marketing likely knows as much about their buyers as the product marketers.

So exactly where does Product Marketing fit with the content lifecycle? In my recent article for Pragmatic Marketing, I outline Product Marketing’s strategic role in content development – by understanding the buyer deeply enough to determine what content will alleviate concerns and answer their questions. Without this essential knowledge, the organization creates generic content that doesn’t engage anyone.

Product Marketing is the key marketing role that interacts with buyers and has responsibility for interviewing them regularly whether through Win/Loss interviews, as advocated by Pragmatic Marketing, or ongoing interactions at trade shows, site visits, etc. This vast buyer knowledge is essential for creating content that resonates with buyers.

If you’re a product marketer and wondering how to get started sharing your buyer knowledge with your Marketing Communications team, consider using the Buyer/Content Matrix to map your buyer knowledge to each sales stages.

You can download a free Buyer/Content Matrix template here and customize it for your organization.

The Buyer/Content Matrix is useful in many ways – not only does it capture your expertise about questions buyers have throughout the sales cycle, but it’s a useful tool for training other Marketing teams about your buyers.

As you’ll see in the above example, the first three rows – Economic Buyer Questions,…

Leads: Quality Wins Over Quantity Every Time

info@kimgusta.com — 2011-09-15T18:36:00+00:00

Monday 9 am. The Sales VP is drumming his fingers on your desk demanding more leads for his team.

You have two choices:
1. Fire off an email offer to your entire database.
2. Calmly explain the advantages of quality over quantity.

I’d take #2.

If you’ve been in Marketing for awhile, you likely were schooled in “the more leads, the better” theory.

Wherever the names came from was fine. Whatever likelihood they had of buying your product was irrelevant. Let the Sales team weed through them – just give them the leads.

Early in my marketing career, I remember my boss chewing out the Sales Director because his team wasn’t following up on the leads we were giving him. This was a high-performance sales team – they were darn good at closing deals. But they had enough in their pipelines, and they were only following up on new leads that looked promising.

Which meant 70% of the leads we generated were languishing.

Later I realized the lack of follow-up wasn’t really Sales’ fault. It was ours. We confused quantity with quality.

When clients ask me about generating leads, we discuss how content marketing is one of the best lead generation and nurturing tools at your disposal. If you do it right, you’ll get higher quality leads. Not necessarily an overwhelming quantity of leads, but they’ll be prospects who are intrigued by your solution and interested in doing business with you.

How do you do this?

1. Build Content Paths. Understand what content your prospects want at each stage of the sales cycle. Then build that content and “drip” it out to them. Make every call-to-action another piece of valuable content that helps “pull” them through the sales cycle stages. Build a content path of high-value stuff.

2. Start Small and Do it Very Well. If you have limited resources to build content, start small and do it very, very well. The worst thing you can do it kick-off…

Let Buyers Move at Their Own Pace

info@kimgusta.com — 2011-09-06T16:13:27+00:00

Don’t Scare the “Bejeezus” Out of Them with Aggressive Sales Tactics

It’s true: buyers want your marketing information. What they don’t want is your sales pitch.

They don’t want cold calls, or your Sales team bothering them just because they downloaded a white paper. It’s a sure turnoff in the sales process and could easily lead them to drop your company from their research.

Ardath Albee’s blog post “The Payoff for B2B Content Marketing is Movement”
sums this up well.

As she says:
“Pestering a prospect to move faster makes them dig in their heels and stay stuck, or even reverses their intention to change (think delete, unsubscribe, and voicemail jail).

Why? You’ve just scared the bejeezus out of them.

The goal of marketing should be to produce incremental movement.”

We rarely think of marketing’s goal being incremental movement based on the buyer’s preferences. Instead, we dangle promotions in front of our buyers, hoping they’ll respond.

Our Sales team has numbers to hit by the end of the quarter so we send out another email blast. Or leads have dropped off lately so we schedule a product overview webinar – all reactive marketing moves designed to “shock” our buyers into taking action.

But does it really work?

What is our real goal with content marketing? Building relationships with our buyers by giving them content that satisfies their information needs throughout the sales cycle. To do that well means you need a long-term view that eliminates blatant sales messages and gives buyers helpful, high-value information.

This may mean telling your Sales team “No” the next time they ask for a last minute email blast to bring in more leads. It means educating your peers on why content marketing has a valuable pay-off, and the importance of letting prospects move at their pace. It means setting expectations with your Executive Team so they understand how content marketing will achieve your revenue goals, but they have to let the system work.

Remember, incremental movement is the goal. Scaring the…

The #1 Thing All Technology Marketers Should Do

info@kimgusta.com — 2011-07-20T13:29:39+00:00

It will Transform Your Team into Your Company’s Most Valuable Asset

Adele Revella is the queen of buyer personas. I was fortunate, early in my career, to attend Adele’s “Effective Product Marketing” class. It’s where I first heard of buyer personas and their positive effect on your organization, your revenue, and your professional reputation.

Adele defines personas as “a composite picture of the real people who buy, or might buy, products like the ones you sell.” Done well, they can “transform marketing from a passive, outward-facing function to a key source of strategic insight closely watched – and respected – by top management.”

I’ve seen this work first-hand – it isn’t a bunch of hooey. Buyer research is one of the most important ongoing activities any marketing team can do. The payoff is immense and the time commitment small in comparison.

Adele has trained many companies on how to do buyer research and has learned a lot about best practices and potential hiccups. She recently released an e-book I highly recommend, “The Buyer Persona Manifesto” which captures why this research is so important, how to do it correctly, and how to apply your newfound insights.

I interviewed Adele about her e-book and what she’s learned lately about buyer research.

Kim: Adele, why did you write this e-book?
Adele: I find many marketers think they know their buyers well, but in reality, they don’t have deep insights into buyers’ concerns or priorities. This is a problem, because marketers spend money on campaigns and marketing materials that aren’t producing the results they could. And being recognized as buyer experts gives your team a unique competency and earns your organization’s respect.

I want this e-book to help marketers be strategic players. Because until Marketing becomes strategic, they can’t differentiate their products and services, they annoy buyers, and they’re always chasing the next popular marketing tactic.

Kim: How does…

Content Marketing Infographic

info@kimgusta.com — 2011-07-19T15:30:12+00:00

Summarize Content Marketing in One Graphic? Yes, It’s Possible.

Here’s a cool graphic from Eloqua and JESS3 that, quite simply, explains the how and what of content marketing. Have someone who doesn’t really get content marketing in your organization? Maybe they’re a visual-kind-of-person? Run this by them.

I love the first buying stage which is “Bored at Work.” How would you build content for that prospect?

Elevate Others to Grow Your Business

info@kimgusta.com — 2011-06-30T20:14:49+00:00

Elevate Others to Grow Your Business

We’ve got it all wrong about content.

It’s not about selling. It’s about helping.

Michael Stelzner, author of the new book Launch: How to Quickly Propel Your Business Beyond the Competition, says we need to create generous content that helps our audience –without expecting anything in return.
You’re likely thinking “How do I get my VP of Sales to believe that?” Give him (or her) this sobering statistic: fewer than one in three people trust marketing messages according to Edelman Digital’s annual survey of trust. Ugh.

You could call Mike Stelzner a generosity marketing guru. With little knowledge of social media, he built SocialMediaExaminer.com, the top small business blog in the word according to Technorati, to 80,000 subscribers in 18 months. I watched the meteoric rise of SocialMediaExaminer.com and can attest that Mike knows how to engage readers and keep them coming back for more.

In Launch, Stelzner details the strategies that “launched” SocialMediaExaminer.com’s meteoric growth like a rocket ship. Many of his ideas are applicable to high tech marketing, including his key strategy: the “Elevation Principle.”

The Elevation Principle formula is:
Great Content + Other People – Marketing Messages = Growth. In other words, helpful content focused on other people, but minus the marketing messages, creates growth. Or “How can we help you?” versus “What can we sell you?”

Here are some key-takeaways from Launch for technology marketers:

Strategically use primary and nuclear fuel. Stelzner defines primary fuel as regularly produced content that meets the needs of your reader base. It includes valuable articles, blog posts, expert interviews, reviews, and more. It gives people a reason to keep coming back to you.

The six types of primary fuel Stelzner finds most effective are:
• How-to articles
• Expert interviews
• Reviews (book, product, etc.)
• Case studies
• News stories
• Contrarian stories (articles with an opposing view to a popular topic such as “The Dark Side of Desktop Virtualization”)…

How to Write a Datasheet

info@kimgusta.com — 2011-06-09T22:07:18+00:00

Design Your Product Datasheet for Skimming and Scanning

Product datasheets are one of those checklist items in the technology industry; your buyers expect you to have them (or, at the very least, your sales team does.) But the nagging questions are: Does anyone really read them? And, more importantly, what can we do to make them more readable?

In my opinion, technology buyers WILL read a datasheet if it’s written and laid out well. The key is understanding the majority of buyers will first scan it to pick up the main points, and, if they deem it useful or interesting, they’ll skim the other content. If it passes the skimming and scanning test, some buyers will read the datasheet in detail. So, it’s important to write good copy that gets to the point quickly and to use a very readable layout.

Here are some tips on creating a datasheet for easy skimming and scanning:

Focus on the most essential information. Most datasheets are short – usually only the front and back side of one page. By the time you account for your template layout, you probably have only a few hundred words to describe your product.

Spend time thinking about the 3-4 most important points your audience wants to know. Examples could be:

How does your product work from a technical perspective?

How is it different from your competitors?

What does your product do?

How does it benefit your buyer?

Who else is using it?

Include a product definition on the first page. I rarely see this on most high tech datasheets, and I think it’s crucial. Include a brief (2 sentences or less) product definition right at the top of the first page. It orients your reader to your product and provides context for the rest of the datasheet.

Summarize product benefits upfront. Give readers reasons why they should continue reading by including a brief benefit list on the datasheet’s first page. I often do this in a bulleted list in a dedicated left or right-hand column…

Interview with a High-Tech Sales Executive: Insights for Technology Marketers

info@kimgusta.com — 2011-05-20T15:15:41+00:00

How Can Technology Marketers Help Sales (and Themselves) Be More Successful?

I often preach about the importance of deeply understanding your buyers in order to create engaging, useful content. One extremely valuable channel for intimate buyer understanding is your sales team. They’re on the front lines all day long talking to buyers, and they have great insights on what resonates and what doesn’t.

However, it’s been my experience that most high-tech marketing and sales teams aren’t very close. There are factors that make it tough to build this relationship – distance could be an issue since marketers are often located at headquarters and sales executives could live around the country (or the world).

But more often it seems to boil down to an issue of respect and understanding. Marketers think Sales doesn’t get marketing, and Sales thinks Marketing doesn’t get sales. Marketers tend to have a big-picture view, and Sales is more short-term. The two teams are inextricably linked in the results they need to produce, but failure to have a positive relationship is detrimental to both.
To get more insights into how marketers can help our sales counterparts, I recently interviewed Paula Buerkle, a very successful technology sales executive, for her thoughts on how we can all just get along.

Kim: Paula, you’ve been in technology sales for quite some time, won many sales awards, and built very successful relationships with your customers and partners. So tell us, how can Marketing best help Sales be successful?

Paula: A lot of it comes down to communication and building relationships. If the two teams never talk, it’s tough to have a harmonious relationship. But that being said, Sales realizes that Marketing has insights that could be helpful to them, and Marketing can certainly glean great buyer knowledge from Sales.

A few things Marketing can do to benefit Sales:

Help Sales stay up to date on industry trends. Marketing keeps a pulse on the big picture in the industry, while Sales is focused on generating dollars. Sales would benefit greatly if Marketing were to take the time…

Chief Content Officer: a New C-Level Executive for High Tech Companies?

info@kimgusta.com — 2011-05-11T16:04:04+00:00

Does Your Organization Need a Chief Content Officer?

Just how important is content marketing to high-tech organizations’ strategic marketing direction? Important enough that a C-level executive should be appointed to direct all content marketing activities?

Maybe so – check out Joe Pulizzi’s Chief Content Officer (CCO) job description which was created by crowd-sourcing. As Joe says “it’s clear that this is an extremely challenging but necessary position in any company today, as brands continually evolve into media companies.”

Here’s an excerpt :

Position Summary

The Chief Content Officer (CCO) oversees all marketing content initiatives, both internal and external, across multiple platforms and formats to drive sales, engagement, retention, leads and positive customer behavior.

This individual is an expert in all things related to content and channel optimization, brand consistency, segmentation and localization, analytics, and meaningful measurement.

The position collaborates with the departments of public relations, communications, marketing, customer service, IT and human resources to help define both the brand story and the story as interpreted by the customer.

Responsibilities

Ultimately, the job of the CCO is to think like a publisher/journalist, leading the development of content initiatives in all forms to drive new and current business.

I don’t see high tech companies appointing CCO’s anytime in the very near future, but it’s a topic worth pondering. What exactly would your organization gain if you DID have someone in charge of content? Someone at the executive level who can create and drive the organization’s content strategy, someone with a team of experts dedicated to producing high-quality content, someone who can get buy-in from internal constituents like Sales, Business Development, and HR.
Although this might seem like a “specialized” C-level position relevant only to very large high-tech companies, capturing a Chief Content Officer’s responsibilities in a job description reinforces that content marketing isn’t an area to be ignored.

Content marketing often falls into the Demand Marketing team’s domain or Product Marketing. Although these teams’ responsibilities certainly overlap with content marketing, they aren’t solely dedicated to it.

Maybe your high-tech company isn’t ready for a Chief Content…

Book Review: “Content Rules” by Ann Handley and C.C. Chapman

info@kimgusta.com — 2011-05-02T21:46:06+00:00

Highly Recommended for Content Marketing Strategies & Tactics

I’m an avid reader of business books, but truthfully, I don’t find many that are helpful and offer up unique ideas I haven’t heard elsewhere. Many seem to be filled with fluffy strategies that aren’t relevant to my situation – well-defined tactics are often missing.

Here’s a book that really delivers outstanding strategies AND tactics: Content Rules: How to Create Killer Blogs, Podcasts, Videos, Ebooks, Webinars (and More) That Engage Customers and Ignite Your Business by Ann Handley and C.C. Chapman. If you want a book that clearly defines HOW to use content marketing with unique ideas, then you should read this. It’s a worthwhile time investment from the very beginning.

First, it’s an easy-to-read book. I love Ann Handley’s writing style – casual and conversational (a good style to emulate in your content, too.) Second, it’s clearly organized, and you needn’t read the entire book to get what you’re looking for. Just flip to the chapter on “Webinars,” for instance, and you’ll get great stand-alone content about webinars (although you’ll definitely get a broader understanding of content marketing concepts that support webinars if you do read it in its entirety.)

The book is divided into three major sections: an overview of the “content rules,” the how-to section, and case studies of companies successfully implementing unique and useful content marketing.
The “content rules” are very useful. They range from being clear about who are you and the “voice” you want to use to re-imagining existing content in multiple ways. And one of the most important premises of content marketing – “share or solve, don’t shill.” (A worthwhile phrase to repeat to your sales director.)

In case you’re concerned the book might not be overly useful to B2B companies, a chapter is devoted to B2B content marketing including how to marry content to your sales cycle stages. Well done stuff.

The How-To section is a handy reference - it…