CMOs and Marketers:
Have you stepped up to your new responsibility or are you still stuck in the past?
Right now almost any time a company needs a new product or service, they research what they need online.
They don’t contact a vendor until they’ve identified the product or service they want and have narrowed their choice of suppliers down to 2 or 3. At that point they contact a sales rep and start to talk to him or her.
Prospects Are Driving Engagement
The sales rep’s job has drastically changed. A company that needs a product or service initiates contact with the sales rep. They drive the engagement. The sales rep doesn’t.
The quandary every company faces is how do they get their product or service in front of their prospects when sales reps no longer can do it.
This Job Has Shifted to the Marketing Department
They are responsible for letting prospective customers know about new products and services and how their companies can benefit from them. One way they do this is through Content Marketing.
The objective of Content Marketing is to make almost all information about a company and its product and services available. A company searching for a product or service will find it and pick their company as one of the suppliers that makes their final list.
A marketing department does this through emails, white papers, case studies, blog posts, articles and other forms of marketing.
The Major Problem
Every company is using content marketing. In addition, direct marketers are using emails and other online tools to get information out on what they offer. Prospects are deluged by marketing materials and don’t know what to look at specifically. They don’t know which has their best interests at heart.
Marketing departments and CMOs are frustrated. They didn’t welcome picking up the role of the sales rep in moving prospects from leads to “Hot Buyers.” They are putting all of this information out. Results are negligible. It has to be Content Marketing is wrong. So they go into it half-heartedly.
Look at some of these findings of surveys done during 2016:
- Almost 100% of B2B marketers are doing Content Marketing.
- 76% of marketers increased their investment in Content Marketing in 2016. However, only 38% thought they were effectively using it.
- Marketers at only 23% of the companies thought their leadership was convinced of the value of Content Marketing.
- Only 19% of the marketers thought they could measure the Return on Investment of their Content Marketing effectively.
- More interesting was the Marketers’ concept of what Content Marketing should accomplish:
- 79% felt their Content Marketing resulted in further engagement with their prospects.
- 66% felt it strengthened their brand.
- Only 25% said it had a direct impact on their company’s sales.
In their 2017 Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends report, the Content Marketing Institute and Marketing Profs had this comment:
“21% of for-profit marketers in North America say they are extremely committed to the practice of content marketing.”
What do You Notice About These Findings?
The main thing is that almost all companies were doing some form of Content Marketing. Only about 20% felt Content Marketing was giving their companies the results they wanted. The other 80% were not.
Looking more deeply, that same 20% were those who understood the only way to determine the results from Content Marketing was by looking at Return on Investment. The other 80% felt it strengthened their engagement with their prospects.
23% believed their top management was convinced of the value of Content Marketing. So the management of 77% of the companies didn’t think Content Management was worth it.
The Question is Why?
I would suggest the answer is in the Marketing Department and with the CMO. Marketing people and their people are not convinced that Content Marketing will be successful. So they are not behind it.
True Content Marketing is a campaign where the marketing department leads prospects through a funnel from a lead to a prospect to an interested prospect to a hot buyer. They do this through a variety of marketing pieces they use to strategically move companies through this funnel.
To get a leg up on their competitors and all other vendors marketing, every piece of marketing information has to be interesting. So interesting – companies want to read it and anxiously look forward to any additional marketing information produced.
It Does Not Look Like Most Marketing Departments are Doing This with Their Content Marketing
They say they’re doing Content Marketing but they’re only doing pieces here and there. They may do a white paper, a case study or a blog post periodically. However, none of these are geared to moving a prospect down that funnel from lead to hot buyer ready to buy.
At the same time, they are doing the white paper, case study and blog post because they think they’re necessary. The material they are putting out is not interesting and doesn’t have their prospects anxiously looking forward to their next marketing piece.
2017 is The Time . . .
. . . for marketing departments and CMOs to decide once and for all whether Content Marketing can be successful or is just a passing fad. How do they do that?
By picking one product or service they offer and doing an entire Marketing campaign focused on it. They generate marketing pieces designed to move a prospect from a cold lead all the way to a hot buyer.
Then they measure the results each step along the way. They define steps in the funnel and see how many companies move to each step and then become a “Hot Buyer.”
Going back to the statistics mentioned earlier in this post, most companies didn’t know the main purpose of Content Marketing. The executives of any company are only interested in one thing. Did each part of their operation add to Sales? When they look at Content Marketing, they are asking what sales were produced and how much did it cost us?
This is Return on Investment
This may be foreign to you as a CMO or a Marketing Department. If it is, meet with your financial people and ask them for their help in measuring the results of your Content Marketing.
If your one Content Marketing campaign is successful, you should be excited and move on to expanding Content Marketing to other products or services. If more success is realized there, you will become a Content Marketing evangelist for your company.
One statistic mentioned earlier was that most felt 77% of their executives didn’t think Content Marketing was worth it. If these companies were looked at closer, most probably it would be found that in almost all instances their CMOs and marketing departments were not convinced of the value of Content Marketing.
