Friday, Feb 10, 2012: Welcome to our curated recap of the week’s best links relevant to B2B Content Marketing, from all around the Web.

We publish these posts every Friday. Subscribe or follow us to get these updates each week.

Here are the links:

1. Email Marketing Best Practices – Subject Lines: Possibly the most important thing to figure out for your lead generation campaigns.
2. Marketing Lessons From An Accidental Con Man: What do hitch hiking and B2B marketing have in common?
3. The Hemingway Guide to Content Marketing: Most importantly – don’t over think it and get a good editor.
4. Create Trust with your B2B Marketing: Why Marketers are guilty of making unfounded claims and what to do to get your prospects to believe you again.
5. Get Satisfaction Infographic – How Brands Listen in the Digital Age: Hint- you can’t ignore Facebook & Twitter.
6. Content Marketing Is On the Rise [INFOGRAPHIC]: The statististics and pictures to prove it in this great visual.
7. 4 Hidden Benefits of Content Marketing that Go Beyond ROI: Taking a moment to acknowledge the power of content marketing on the inside of an organizations too. Company morale, trust & a recruiting edge can all be unintended results.

Friday, Feb 3, 2012: Welcome to our curated recap of the week’s best links relevant to B2B Content Marketing, from all around the Web.

We publish these posts every Friday. Subscribe or follow us to get these updates each week.

Here are the links:

1. 13 Questions Marketing Should Ask the Sales Reps: A reminder that the whole point of marketing is to drive sales. And aligning sales with marketing might involve asking your reps a few key questions.
2. Infographic – How Are B2B Marketers Optimizing their Funnel? Visual representation of statistics highlighting website optimization and multichannel messaging strategy for improved demand generation
3. Giving away the secrets of 99.3% email deliverability: Critical if email is any part of your B2B Marketing campaigns.
4. Customer Evidence Infographic: Visual representation illustrating confidence in content sourced from customer vs. that from 3rd party analysts.
5. The Essential Guide to Meta Descriptions that Will Get you Found Online: Social media means that getting Meta is more important than ever. Read more for how and why.
6. 47 Essential Social Media Tools for Content Marketers: Covering the basic & advanced options for listening, syndicating and managing your B2B marketing strategy (and business operations).
7. Are You a Content Curator? 5 Great Tools for Content Curation and Sharing: New ways of leveraging now familiar tools like Twitter, Google Reader & HootSuite.

Not surprisingly, both 3rd-party analysts and the voice of the customer were considered more effective than content written in-house.

What was interesting, however, was the degree to which the voice of the customer was considered to be more effective than even content sourced from 3rd-party analysts. (By “voice of the customer”, we’re referring to things like case studies, customer testimonials, videos, etc.)

In all, 94% of respondents rated content sourced from customers as Very Effective or Extremely Effective, vs. 54% for content sourced from 3rd-party analysts.

Here’s a quick chart we made that illustrates our findings:

Go to the full survey results to see more data.

As B2B marketing professionals, we’re guilty. We make a lot of claims. Many corporate declarations fall on skeptical, if not deaf ears – not exactly the most effective way to reach your audience.

Imagine a product heralded by its marketing team to make systems perform faster, require no maintenance (all the while making its users richer and thinner) without any hard proof. It’s easy to understand the healthy layer of skepticism prospects have developed.

In fact, this skepticism has created a huge barrier in between marketing messaging and the targeted audience, making prospects numb to any message, whether it’s true or not. Prospects have grown ever more skeptical and sophisticated. Without the numbers and credible source to back them up, unsubstantiated marketing claims tend to rate very low in credibility.

So how do you get prospective clients to believe you again?

Our State of Content Marketing Survey showed that many B2B marketing communications lack credibility. Results strongly indicated that prospects have the most confidence in unbiased 3rd party evidence and fact-based marketing.

As a result, there are three marketing tactics all B2B marketers should employ when creating credible campaigns and content:

1. Leverage third party stories of your customers in your go-to-market messaging. This social proof can build believable and impactful narratives that their prospects will listen to. Over 54% of B2B marketers rated their current unbiased 3rd party customer evidence as extremely effective – in stark contrast to 15% that had such confidence in their content developed in-house.
2. Use metrics & statistics in your marketing. B2B organizations rely on quantitative proof points on results in their buying decisions and will increase the credibility of your marketing efforts.
3. Opinions from industry analysts and other 3rd party sources can lend the type of credibility that is crucial for B2B marketing efforts to gain attention.

How credible is your current marketing content? One quick way to evaluate your content’s effectiveness is with our free Content Grader. This online self-assessment tool will ask you about your marketing content. It then compares your answers to a database of 421 other B2B marketers, crunches the numbers, and emails you a detailed report on your content’s relevance and related factors.

Friday, Jan 27, 2012: Welcome to our curated recap of the week’s best links relevant to B2B Content Marketing, from all around the Web.

We publish these posts every Friday. Subscribe or follow us to get these updates each week.

1. The Phrenology of the Modern B2B Marketer: Some pseudoscience to get your morning started off right.

2. Content Ideas Worth Stealing: Artists steal and borrow. Start by appropriating some of this B2B marketing inspiration.

3. Tablet Content Marketing – Crazy Stats and Time to Move: Nearly 29% of Americans own a tablet computer. Is your content optimized for the trend?

4. How to Use Pinterest for Content Marketing: Thought Pinterest was just for shopping for wedding dresses? Consider driving traffic to your B2B content with the fast-growing site. Check out Mashable’s infographic page here.

5. How to Measure Engagement of Your Thought Leadership Program: Take a programmatic approach to measure the return on investment of creating thought leadership content.

6. 5 Basic SEO Troubleshooting Tips for Content Marketers: You’ve taken care of the content creation. Now to take on the ever dynamic field of search engine optimization.

Apple’s recently-announced financial results for Fiscal Q1 of 2012 (the 4th quarter of calendar year 2011) are currently all over the news. Apple reported just over $13 billion in quarterly profit, which is more than Google’s entire revenue, and the second most profit any company has ever recorded in a single quarter. One interesting way to look at this is to break it down into human terms. As in, per-human terms.

Let’s do some quick math:

• Q1 2012 was a 14-week quarter, which gives us 7×14 = 98 days.
• $13.06 billion in quarterly profit / 98 days = roughly $133 million in profit per day in Q1
• According to the US Census Bureau, there are about 313 million people in the USA and 6.99 billion people in the world.
• So, for the USA, in the quarter Apple made $0.42 of profit per person per day. That’s $41.72 of profit in the quarter for every man, woman, and child in the USA. At an annualized rate, that’s $155 per person per year.
• Accounting for all the people in the world, Apple made $0.019 (1.9 cents) of profit per person per day. That’s $1.87 of profit in the quarter for every person on Earth. At an annualized rate, that’s $6.94 in profit for every human being on the planet.

Of course, not everyone in the US is an Apple customer, much less the world. And, these estimates don’t break down Apple’s US vs. Global income. Still, it’s an interesting way to put such a large profit figure in perspective.

Perhaps one reason for Apple’s chronically depressed price/earnings ratio compared to other companies with similar growth metrics is that there’s only so much disposable income in the world, and at Apple’s current size and growth rates, they’ll start to run into fundamental economic limits, like a giant sucking all the air out of a sealed room.

Apple's average quarterly p/e ratio, courtesy of Bullish Cross. Click for more analysis.

Maybe. But my money is still on the theory that the investing world still doesn’t get Apple — it can’t understand how superior products can continue to beat the copycats, and, more to the point, it can’t actually recognize superior products. Customers, however, seem to be able to recognize them just fine.

Compelling. Funny. Insightful. Original. Let’s face it: you wouldn’t use those words to describe most business’ blogs. Unfortunately, that may also go for your own company’s blog. Here are 11 ways to fix that:

1) Don’t write about yourself.

Usually, a B2B company’s blog is dominated by information about their products or services — features and benefits, updates, upgrades, yadda, yadda, yadda. We’ve all written this type of content, and while some of it does belong in your blog, it should be sprinkled in lightly, not ladled on. Nobody outside your company is going to make it a point to read that self-focused content.

So, if your blog isn’t going to be primarily about your products or services, what should it be about? Think about your target prospects and what matters to them. Define one or two topics in that area that you know something about, or wouldn’t mind learning about in order to better understand your customers. For TechValidate, it’s all about B2B content creation and content marketing, and how that content drives B2B sales.

SEOmoz and Hubspot are two textbook examples of successful companies that have used their informative blogs to drive inbound lead generation.

2) Be consistent.

Commit to a regular posting schedule and stick to it, even if that means some posts will need to be short. A weekly roundup of topical links can be an easy way to have a regular content feature that doesn’t take long to create and is worth subscribing to. If you’re focused on the topics you blog about, you can just save interesting articles that you find over the week. Here are three examples of good weekly roundup posts:

• This Week in B2B Content Marketing: Jan 13, 2012 (one of our own weekly recaps)
• The Inbound Marketing Week in Review
• SEO Recap: Amazing Finds On Twitter This Week

3) Be opinionated.

Have a point of view, even if it will turn some people off. Critique something if you’re an expert in the area. If you find yourself saying “however” and “on the other hand” frequently in your posts, you may be trying too hard not to offend. Having a strong point of view, even if it’s controversial, is important to define your company’s voice, and essential in creating content that people want to share and discuss. Here are three examples of opinionated B2B blog posts:

• 9 Ways to Truly Suck at Lead Management
• What’s Wrong With This Picture? The Stauer Chronograph
• Marketing Emergency: Nobody’s Making Content Worth Reading

4) Wrap your content around real data.

Hard data, especially when put into visual form, is the backbone of many popular blogs. The best source for interesting data to wrap your blog posts around is to collect it yourself, via polls and surveys. If you don’t have time to collect data on your own, there are many public sources for data that you can draw from. The data you present may not be original to you, but if you put it into a chart or provide an original way of looking at the data, you’re still adding value that your readers will appreciate.

As a case in point, the most linked-to posts on our blog in 2011 were all related to our 2011 State of B2B Content Marketing Survey, which we conducted in-house and analyzed in a series of blog posts.

Another nice example is Appirio, which uses charts they’ve published with TechValidate as the centerpiece of their Appirio Research Blog.

The Appirio Research blog

5) Make it easy to read.

If you want people to read your blog, it has to be easy to, well, read. Use dark text on a white (or very light gray) background, a body font size of 15 pixels or larger, make sure your line spacing is generous, and add a full blank line between each paragraph. Here are 30 more tips on enhancing your blog’s readability.

6) Break it up.

Break up long blocks of text with headings, call-outs, and bullet points. This makes your content easier to scan, and enhances the clarity of your design. Here’s a nice example of a boxout from the Economist’s website. This technique works just as well in blog posts as it does in printed media.

An example of a magazine-style boxout from The Economist.

7) Add photos and videos.

Add images and videos to your posts, even if you don’t have time to create them yourself. SEOmoz analyzed the number of websites linking to each of their articles, and then cross-referenced that against the types of content they had in each post. The data clearly shows the importance of including images and videos in your posts:

One of our favorite techniques for finding interesting images to add to our posts is to search for Creative Commons licensed content on Flickr that is authorized for commercial use. You have to make sure to properly attribute the work, but this is a vast source of free imagery that often has more personality than stock photography.  To find the photos with the right licensing terms on Flickr, you’ll need to use their Advanced Search page.

8) Write for people, not (just) Google.

Some business bloggers say “our blog’s goal isn’t to create an audience of regular readers, we just want to generate leads and improve our SEO”.

Congratulations — you’ve got your eye on the ultimate goal for your blog: to help generate inbound leads. However, you’ll have a better chance of converting visitors to leads if they find your content genuinely interesting, and that chance is exponentially higher if they find your content compelling enough to subscribe to (whether via a newsletter, RSS, or social media).

Today, having an audience of actual human readers is also critical to SEO. The larger your audience, the more social sharing your content will have, which is an increasingly important factor in search engine rankings.

So, don’t just focus on stuffing your articles with the right keywords at the expense of readability.

9) Have standards.

I said above that it’s important to stick to a regular posting schedule, but it’s even more important to set a quality standard and communicate it to each team member who will be blogging. The fastest way to turn off a reader is to post weak or poorly-edited content.

Granted, not every piece of content you publish will be your best. The quality — and the traffic — for different posts will follow a power-law distribution. But, stick to your minimum quality standards, even if it means sometimes you won’t get an update out on schedule. Your blog isn’t a daily newspaper.

10) Don’t get trigger-happy.

A corollary to the previous point is to wait before you hit the “publish” button. Once you think your post is finished, read it over, and have a colleague proofread it for you if you can. Even better, write drafts of your most important posts ahead of time so you can come back to them later and read them with fresh eyes.

11) Use lists (just like this).

This post may already be circular enough (after all, I’m trying to write an interesting article about writing interesting articles), but to top it off, I’m going to recommend that you make list-oriented posts a frequent feature of your blog. It may be a cliche, but it’s a cliche that still works.

Research has shown that list-based posts are consistently linked to more than average. They’re also often easier to write, since it lets you choose a theme and flesh it out within a well-defined structure.

…

Hope you found these tips useful. If you have any more tips to add, please do so in the comments or let us know via Twitter.

Friday, Jan 20, 2012: Welcome to our curated recap of the week’s best links relevant to B2B Content Marketing, from all around the Web.

We publish these posts every Friday. Subscribe or follow us to get these updates each week.

1. Marketing Emergency: Nobody’s Making Content Worth Reading: Snarky critique of the current state of B2B marketing and why enterprise companies should strive for startup mentality with their content creation.
2. Flowtown Infographic: What Mattered in 2011 for Social Media: A visual rundown of the year’s most dramatic successes & flops in social media.
3. Blogging Lessons from 317 Posts: A month by month case study on how keep quality high while churning out high quality B2B marketing & thought leadership blogs.
4. How to Use LinkedIn to Generate and Qualify B2B Leads: Leverage thus growing social media network for lead generation and position your business as a thought leader.
5. What’s Hot and What’s Not in Content Marketing for 2012: An analysis of what emerged as the most important trends in the space including crowdsourcing, content curation, marketing integration & brands as media.

1. Infographic: A History of Disruptions in B2B Marketing
   
2. The Importance of Relevance: A Cautionary Tale 
3. Where Social Media Marketing Fits In Your 2012 B2B Marketing Budget?
4. 11 Ways to Use Content to Build Online Authority
5. Battling Entitlement, the Innovation-Killer
6. Is Your B2B Social Media Strategy Sending Mixed Signals?
7. Top 10 Ways to Improve B2B Landing Pages
8. How to Optimize Your Website’s Resource Library for Lead Generation

Hope you found some of those resources useful. See you next week.

Part 2 in a 5-part series on how to make your B2B marketing content more effective. This series was inspired by our own learnings, and what we discovered when we created our free marketing content grader. Check back next week or subscribe to see the next post in the series. 

2012 is the year to work smarter not harder. For many B2B marketing teams, plans for the new year include creating more content, but also making that content more effective. With this in mind, we’ve put together some strategies for smarter content creation:

Issue: Prospects believe what their peers say, not a company that is trying to sell them something.

Strategy: Use as much social proof as possible to back up your claims and prove your value.

It’s much more persuasive to show your prospects stories from your successful customers than for you to do all the talking. Customer-sourced content such as case studies, interviews, and testimonials are all highly credible, and they’re also content pieces that you don’t have to write yourself.

Our own research shows that content sourced from unbiased 3^rd parties is easier to believe than unsubstantiated claims and marketing hyperbole.

Issue: Content must be continually renewed/refreshed for maximum effectiveness.

Strategy: Each year, evaluate your existing content to identify what needs updating and what needs to be deprecated.

Take time in your marketing planning for 2012 to assess your existing content and determine what has grown stale or outdated. Then establish what should be weeded out altogether and what can be updated to fit with your current messaging and industry trends.

This exercise can help you identify a selection of evergreen content that keeps paying dividends long after it’s created, and offset the volume of new content you need to create in the coming year.

Issue: Insufficient resources to create the caliber of content you need.

Strategy: Consider sourcing some marketing content from outside.

There’s no getting around it: creating compelling content can be difficult and time-consuming. If your team doesn’t have the time to create the content you need to stand out, you may need to source some of it from outside your own four walls.

As mentioned above, the most cost-effective way to source outside content is to harness the voice of your satisfied customers. Aside from customer-sourced content, if you have the necessary budget, 3rd-party analysts, freelance writers, guest bloggers, and professional photographers/videographers can all be a worthwhile investment to help your content reach that next level of professionalism and persuasiveness.

Issue: You’re not quite sure how effective your content is.

Strategy: Compare your content production to other similar organizations. 

In addition to reading about the content-creation practices of other B2B companies, one quick way to evaluate your content’s effectiveness is with our free Content Grader. This online self-assessment tool will ask you about your marketing content. It then compares your answers to a database of 421 other B2B marketers, crunches the numbers, and emails you a detailed report on your content’s relevance and several other factors.