Do You Have Content Marketing Backwards?

Many B2B businesses view content marketing the wrong way. If you want to know why, let’s look at the definitions. Oxford (which is what Google uses) defines content marketing as “A type of marketing that involves the creation and sharing of online material (such as videos, blogs, and social media posts) that does not explicitly promote a brand but is intended to stimulate interest in its products or services.” So, according to them, no sales content allowed, since anything that explicitly promotes a product promotes the brand.

Joe Pulizzi, second only to Gary Vee amongst the content marketing apostles, defines it as a “Strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.” This definition is a tad ambiguous, but it's followed up on his company's website with "Instead of pitching?your products or services, you are providing truly relevant and useful content to your prospects and customers to help them solve their issues."

So again, no sales content, since Pulizzi says the goal is to attract or retain an audience through relevant and useful content, meaning the actual "pitching of your products or services" is someone else's problem.

Of course, not everyone agrees with this. LinkedIn gathers a nice collection of content marketing definitions here. Some of the leaders included in this list do include sales as part of content marketing, but they're in the minority, and the ones who don't include it have a lot more clout in the content marketing world.

Personally, I find distinguishing sales from content marketing absurd. There are no formal definitions of content that justify it, and each and every stage of the funnel involves the use of marketing assets that have a physical and/or conceptual start, finish, and order (my personal definition of content), yet for some reason, only some stages of the funnel count as content, while others don’t.

And these distinctions are not purely academic, they have real-world consequences, often expressed as imbalances in how marketing resources are allocated. Content marketing is definitely at the top of the totem pole, with sales content largely considered an afterthought by the marketing powers that be.

Thus, you often sales activation money being wasted, because it only ends up "activating" terrible sales content. Businesses will often spend a pretty penny on a populous well-maintained blog, to only follow it up with klutzy product pages, inept case studies, annoying emails, and hideous brochures.

And this situation makes no sense at all. All the wonderfully-written blogs and newsletters in the world won’t sell a damn thing if the sales content that follows it doesn’t get the job done. So, how did we end up here? How did we end up thinking “content marketing” was so essential to success, while sales content wasn’t?

The Messenger Became The Message

I think the issue goes all the way back to when the concept of content marketing first entered the lexicon. Brands were told to create newsrooms, think like publishers, act beyond selling, etc. Content marketing evangelists were saying that brands could become leaders by becoming publishers and thought leaders. And those evangelists, and others like them, were building their own business empires by becoming publishers and thought leaders. And I think this is where we started confusing what was personal with what was business.

Businesses thought they could do what the evangelists were doing and get the same results, but this assumption was flawed, because the evangelists' success was heavily based on their personal brands and philosophies, and this is something most businesses (unless your business is a proxy for your rockstar CEO or CMO) don't have.

This flawed assumption, that business brands can be built in the same way as personal brands, has had many grave consequences. Much of the business world has since drunk this kool-aid very deeply, so much so that I often see startups focus on building out a blog before building out an explanation of what they sell. And I see many other brands where the marketing seems more focused on making content than making it rain.

Personal brands are just that, personal. They are built through something personal. Your appearance. Your personality. The way you speak, or write. It could be a lot of things, but they’re all personal. In other words, when it comes to personal brands, people mostly follow you for you.

But businesses are not people. A business brand is a collective construct. Your assets. Your messaging. They’re created by different people, at different times. And a customer’s relationship with them is usually transactional, not personal. A few lifestyle brands do manage to create an appeal that at least approximates something personal, but if you’re reading this, you’re probably not with one of them, and it never happens in B2B, where the personal is considered unprofessional.

Without that personal appeal, a B2B brand cannot be built through content marketing in the same way that Gary Vee’s was, despite the fact that a lot of you are attempting to do that now. As a content person, I’m not really supposed to tell you this, but it’s the truth. You can’t content-market your way to leadership, at least not in the conventional way. The reason why is because, unless you’re a leader already, nobody cares what you think.

Even if your brand offers genuine research, scholarship, or other information (i.e., what orthodox content marketing is generally intended to do), few are likely to read it, because people don't follow follower brands simply to be informed (they follow the news for that), they follow follower brands because they're cheap, or because they work there. It is therefore entirely possible to publish good content as a follower brand and have it be read by nobody. I see this a lot, and it's a tragedy, caused largely by follower brands assuming they can just "publish it and they will come" in the same way that leaders can.

However, leader brands should not get arrogant, either. People don't follow leader brands strictly because they're great or because their content is great (though that does play a part). People follow leaders because leaders have the power to follow-up what they say in their content with meaningful action. In other words, people follow leaders because they want to know which way the industry is heading. They don't follow leaders (in B2B) because they like them, but because what they say is valuable. If you’re a follower brand, what you say has limited value, because you have little say over which way the industry heads. This makes what you say a footnote, or an opinion, and opinions are a dime a dozen (though you probably paid more for yours).

This confines most orthodox content marketing (i.e., most forms of thought leadership & brand journalism) largely to market leaders and the Fortune 500 as a useful tactic. Follower brands, who, by definition, have nothing original to say, have little practical use for it, beyond reaching out to vertical prospects, who, if you’re lucky, might not be aware that you’re a follower.

If others are already saying what you would say, and saying it better than you could, don't expend your resources on repeating it, let them expend theirs. You’ll get more bang for your buck creating good sales content assets, like case studies or solutions guides.

What About That Marketing Week Article?

At this point you might fire back at me with that recently published Marketing Week article that says that in any given quarter of the year, only 5% of potential B2B customers are looking to buy. I don't find this number, and the way Marketing Week presented it, entirely useful, because it only applies to long-established domains where businesses already know what they need and roughly how often they'll need to buy it. It won't apply much at all if you sell something entirely new that businesses might not currently be aware that they need.

Nonetheless, I'm willing to concede that the percentage of potential customers who are ready to seriously consider you, at any given time, is fairly small. Some interpret this as a sign that you should focus less on sales activation and more on brandbuilding. This is good, sensible advice, but not always easily followed in the real world. It's easiest for market leaders to do this because for them, "brandbuilding" is largely "brand reinforcement," which can be achieved through various orthodox PR and content activities.

But, if you're not a leader, brandbuilding is harder. You've still gotta sell, a lot, because you'll just get lost in the noise if you don't, because leaders have gravity, other brand positions don't. Simple noisemaking is not enough to build your brand if you're not already a leader (for the same reason I mentioned earlier). There are things like analyst relations, partner relations, media relations, getting good testimonials from customers, etc., that are very important in B2B brandbuilding, and they can make a big difference if you're not a leader, but marketing doesn't always have control over these.

One area marketing can influence is brand positioning. If you can reposition yourself into being a challenger brand, instead of a follower brand, content and PR activities will become more useful to you, because what you'll be doing with them is attacking the leaders (i.e., you'll be saying something different and therefore potentially valuable).

You can’t defeat leaders this way, at least not entirely, but like a good defense lawyer, you can create doubt, thus weakening them, thus causing them to lose customers. But without good sales activation and content, you risk those lost customers ending up with one of your competitors. But even if you don't get them all, the brands of the leaders will still be weakened, both directly through customer loss, and indirectly through your siphoning off of their attentional oxygen supply.

What's more, weakening leaders is surprisingly easy to do, because you don’t really need much in the way of proof. The burden of proof is on the one building the case (i.e., the leaders) to be right, not on you. Challengers don't have to prove anything, they just have to create doubt, by attacking the weak spots, and there are always weak spots. Think like a mosquito. It only takes one well-placed bite that draws blood to throw a giant off their game. And if that giant swings back at you, all the better, because they've just informed the entire world of your presence, and that you're worthy of attention.

Now, if you’re not a market leader, I’m not saying that you should abandon your more orthodox content tactics such as your blog or your whitepapers. I'm just saying their mere existence is not enough to be effective. You either need a challenger's viewpoint, or validation of your content by a leading third-party (i.e., a consultancy's name, positive coverage by a respected journalist or influencer, etc.), or both.

And no matter which route you take, you also need to be thinking more about how your content leads to sales. Because whether you’re a follower or a challenger, content can never exist just to fill a calendar, or because you think you should be publishing it. Leader brands have armies of writers (i.e., branded newsrooms), so they can play that game.

But you can’t. Making good content consumes too many resources. Try and keep up with the leaders, and either you’ll bankrupt yourself, or you’ll publish ineffective crap in bulk quantities. Which means every piece of content that you make has to sell, or really drive prospects towards a sale, with a sense of urgency and intention, not unintention. It must grab, convert, get them to the next stage of the funnel. If your brand isn't a leader, content can’t just be, it has to do.

And most businesses, by definition, are not leaders. This limits the utility of our current views and definitions of content marketing, which treats information as the goal, and sales as more of an afterthought, a position only leaders, who already have great sales, have the luxury of holding, and this is the crux.

Orthodox content marketing helps leaders stay leaders, but it’s doesn't make a leader. Sales is what makes a brand a leader.

The sooner your organization realizes this, and assesses it in terms of where your brand is now, and where you want it to be, the better, because it has big-time influence over how resources should be allocated, what your goals should be, and who you might want to hire.

In other words, your company's future.