Adding Context To Content Marketing
By Bill King
By now, especially if you are reading this post, you’re aware of what content marketing is. For those of you still unsure, here’s a definition from Wikipedia:
Content marketing attracts prospects and transforms prospects into customers by creating and sharing valuable free content. Content marketing helps companies create sustainable brand loyalty, provides valuable information to consumers, and creates a willingness to purchase products from the company in the future. This relatively new form of marketing does not involve direct sales. Instead, it builds trust and rapport with the audience.
An important facet of brand publishing, Water Online has been embracing the value of content marketing for our clients since our inception, back in 1995. Beginning as an online publisher, we were an early witness to the higher-level performance clients received when they invested the time to create valuable information for our audience.
As it becomes increasingly difficult for sales reps to engage and influence the growing number of stakeholders involved in a purchasing decision, online engagement of new and existing contacts is growing in strategic importance. And as companies are pouring their energy into developing content specifically designed to engage a stakeholder, a couple of important conditions are emerging:
- Not All Content Works For All Stakeholders
As companies turn their attention to creating content based on their customers’ information needs rather than their own products and services, they are finding that the different stakeholders they wish to influence have different content needs and preferences. This often starts with the development of what is commonly referred to as personas.
Let’s say you market an asset management software solution. You’ll need to influence stakeholders that both manage the utility’s IT and OT infrastructure as well as the Operations and Maintenance leaders whose departments will get the most benefit out of using your application. It will take a completely different portfolio of content assets to influence these two very different camps to engage with your company.
- Different Content Is Needed At Different Times
The second condition is timing. Using our scenario above, let’s say the utility in question is happily utilizing a maintenance schedule that has been in place (with few modifications) for the past 15 years. The maintenance manager is a couple of years out from retiring and despite promises of efficiency and savings, loathe to introduce a new system requiring change.
Introducing product literature espousing the capacity of all the new features of your software to this gentleman will only serve to block your sales team from winning a call. Far better providing this manager with content that lets him consider the legacy he could set up for his successor and take some steps in the waning part of his career to prepare for a smooth transition.
The focus on these two considerations is being championed as context marketing. Rather buzzy in my opinion and no different than good content marketing done well but recognizing for content to work, it has to be designed and available to reach the right person at the right time to be effective.