DCS Killer Content of the Week: Marketo’s “Creating Content that Sells: Content Marketing for Demand Generation” White Paper
For some, taming the content beast — or understanding how to map content effectively to the buyer’s journey — can be challenging, to say the least. The white paper titled Creating Content That Sells: Content Marketing for Demand Generation, delves deeper into buyer centricity, building trust and ways to validate content effectively.
In this exclusive Q&A with Demand Creation Specialists, Maria Pergolino, Senior Director of Marketing at Marketo, shares additional insights into content development and innovative, budget-friendly approaches.
DCS: The white paper focuses on how BtoB marketers must do their best to minimize personal risk, which can be done only through building trust with prospects. Can you speak to how content marketing helps develop this trust?
Maria Pergolino: In BtoB marketing, sales cycles can be anywhere from a few weeks to a few years. Often the longer the cycle the more risky the decision, because of cost, implementation time and number of decision makers involved. By helping the decision makers and influencers with their purchase through content marketing, the purchasers feel more confident and have fewer questions.
Further, by creating content that isn’t just front of the funnel (for lead generation) you increase the chance of your logo sitting in front of the decision maker at critical times. Examples of this later stage content include sponsored analyst reports, RFP templates, and buyer’s guides.
You might get them in with your top 10 lists or new white paper, but you’ll keep their eye on your product with content that helps support their decision.
DCS: Additionally, this infographic illustrates the driving factors of content marketing adoption — risk mitigation cited as a top tactic. What are the factors that contribute to the “trusting buyer,” and how do content marketers need to reflect these needs?
Pergolino: The content needs to follow some basic rules to be useful to the company, useful to the reader, and to build trust. They are:
- Non Promotional- you have to have content that supports the industry and educates the buyer, not just promotional content that promotes your company
- Relevant to Reader- the content that you send has to help support their decision and address their pains, not just share what you want to say
- Closes a Gap- sending them information they already know isn’t going to get them closer to buying your product or building trust. Instead, ensure content educates the reader.
- Well-Written- you don’t want your buyers distracted from your education or message because they are interrupted by poorly written information. Spell and grammar check.
- Relevant to Your Company- if your content is great information, but doesn’t actually tie back to your product or industry in any way then you aren’t going to get them any closer to your product. Think about how your content educates in a way that makes them think of your solution.
- Gives Proof- the reader may not consider you an expert or may believe your content to be biased. Supplement your content with 3rd party information that provides support for your message, giving them proof that this content is both informational and accurate.
DCS: Budget is clearly a prominent barrier to widespread adoption of content marketing strategies and tactics, but the research shows that budget will increase in the coming year. How do you anticipate that growth to impact emerging media and technology usage in content?
Pergolino: I think we will see a mix of companies who use new content budget in more traditional content methods, like white papers and blog content, and others who will push the envelope with videos, widgets, interactive games and more. While both will help support sales cycles, ensuring your content mix has engaging content will be critical to success.
DCS: What are some of the internal considerations around BtoB content development?
Pergolino: Marketo is a bit lucky in content marketing because we sell to marketers. This means that marketers can write a lot of the content. But, for many BtoB marketers, the content they need is about high tech, manufacturing, finance or other vertical. This means that the marketer must seek other experts to build out the content they need.
One way I think this can be done successfully is by using webinars as a source of content and then repurposing into many other formats. The content expert has an assigned date for the webinar, which means it can’t be pushed off (a common problem when relying on others for content). And the marketer can then use what is best of it to create shorter videos, articles, blog posts, and more. Here is an example of how you can repurpose videos to achieve multiple forms of content:
