What should you do instead?

1. Get creative. Treat each new campaign as if the whole world has changed since the last one (because it has – even if the last one was yesterday).
2. Be aware of your competitors, but don’t imitate them. Be better. Work harder. Add more value (yes, your marketing should deliver value to your prospects).
3. Social media ‘likes’ are a good thing, but they aren’t the point. The point is to nurture prospects with useful and relevant content. Useful and relevant content builds trust. Trust sells.
4. Fancy ad shoots are fun, and sometimes they’re worthwhile… but do a cost/benefit analysis before spending your client’s (or employer’s) money.
5. Partnering with any affiliate who will have you is lazy and risky. Be selective. Have a good reason for linking your product/service/brand with another company’s, and research them for potential liabilities.
6. Don’t spam. Just don’t.
7. Everybody enjoys a pat on  the back, but awards should be a byproduct of your efforts… not their objective.

Do you have a reaction to Tom’s cartoon you’d like to share?

‘Pretty good’ isn’t good enough. The only way to have your marketing messages ingested and digested is by baking them into exceptional content – what I call ‘Gourmet Content’. People find Gourmet Content because they seek it out. They consume Gourmet Content because they WANT to. It’s extraordinarily good.

Gourmet Content

A gourmet is a person with a discriminating palate and a deep knowledge of fine food. Gourmet Content is information that isn’t designed for mass consumption. It’s researched and developed with a specific audience in mind – an audience that has been carefully targeted and finely detailed. The developer of Gourmet Content knows what his audience is interested in… what fascinates and delights them.

The word ‘gourmet’ can also be used to describe meals that have been prepared with inordinate effort and art. Gourmet Content must be made from the freshest ingredients (text, animation, audio, charts, infographics, video, or other elements). It isn’t quickly thrown together and shoved through a ‘To Go’ pickup window. It is thoughtfully formulated, comprised of congruent ingredients that support a coherent message. It’s allowed to marinade overnight so the flavors mature and ripen.

Presentation is key. Where the content is placed, how it’s contextualized, the tools used to develop and display it – all must be carefully selected and expertly manipulated.

Your target prospects are much more likely to consume your marketing messages if those messages have been prepared and presented to gourmet standards. If you’re a B2B IT company, contact me to learn more.

I know there are marketers out there who will disagree with my basic quality vs. quantity premise. Please comment. Let’s have a lively, yet civilized, debate.

What do B2B decision makers and purchase influencers care about?  Reducing risk!

They want to make a buying decision that will enhance their careers. They want information that will help them make the best business decision possible – a decision that will result in cost savings and/or increase top line revenue.

Sounds easy enough.

Just deliver the information that tells them why your product or service will make them the hero of their company, right?

Wrong.

That path results in overly salesy materials that will turn off your prospects. Instead, you first need to understand their perceptions about the business problem that your product or service solves. One of the best ways to uncover this information is through qualitative research, which can help you develop the strategic B2B content that potential buyers of your product or service are interested in. It’s the first step in continuous marketing improvement.

Market Research that Digs Deep

One of the primary reasons to do market research is to understand why people behave and think in the way that they do. The best insights can’t be obtained by surveying hundreds of people, or by monitoring and analyzing social media mentions. These insights come from deep (but loosely structured) interviews with a small number of highly targeted individuals.

Qualitative research methods rely heavily on the skills of the interviewer to interact with the interviewees and to dig deep into their motivations and experiences. Such methods are defined as qualitative because they seek quality information over quantity. Qualitative research is exploratory.

So, how do you do qualitative research?

I like the methodology outlined by Kristin Zhivago. Kristin is a revenue coach who helps CEOs and entrepreneurs increase their bottom lines by understanding what their customers want to buy, and how they want to buy it. I have ‘borrowed’ Kristin’s qualitative research methodology (which she outlines in clear detail in her books), to elicit the information I need to develop content marketing strategies for my B2B clients.

Kristin eschews the use of focus groups and instead recommends one-on-one interviews. People in focus groups are surrounded by peers from within their own company and/or peers from another (possibly competing) company. So, they provide careful answers that don’t reveal the whole truth.

Aim for completing about 10 personal interviews. Depending on the quality of the responses, you may be able to scale back, or you may find that you need to conduct a few more.

NOTE: Many marketers shy away from asking busy client executives to give them an hour of their time for an interview. Don’t! As long as you make it clear that this information will be used for important purposes (as the foundation of a major marketing campaign), your client executives will be flattered that you asked, and will have a more positive opinion of your business as a result.

How to Conduct One-on-One Interviews

Kristin recommends conducting interviews via the phone instead of face-to-face. In her experience, people are more forthcoming over the phone because they’re sitting in their own environment, and they’re alone and relaxed. I prefer phone interviews because they’re easier and less expensive to execute (no travel).

The two most important factors for these interviews are selecting the right people and asking the right questions.

Find the Right People

Your best target interviewees are current customers. You want to select:

• people who made the buy decision,
• people who influenced the decision, and
• people who are using the product/service.

You want happy customers and not-so-happy customers. If this is a brand new product launch, you’ll need to find appropriate prospects, which is more difficult to accomplish, but is doable.

Ask the Right Questions

Here’s the kind of information you want to gather:

• What questions did they need answered – at the different phases of the buying cycle?
• What objections did they have? How were those objections overcome?
• What land mines had been placed by your competitors?
• What information did they have trouble finding?
• At what point did they feel ready to talk to a salesperson?
• What helped them to sell your product or service internally?
• Now that they’re using your solution, what didn’t they know about it prior to the purchase?

Finally, ask them what question you should have asked but didn’t.

The Key: Really Listen

During the interview, LISTEN.

Your interview subjects may go off on a tangent. Let them. That’s often when the most valuable information is uncovered.

The resulting information, once organized and analyzed, will give you a good sense of what your content strategy should be. You’ll learn:

• which topics need to be covered at what points during the buy cycle,
• what information specific titles (CFO, CTO, VP Sales, etc.) are interested in,
• and what the best vehicles will be to deliver the information.

I originally wrote this blog post for the Content Marketing Institute where it appeared under the title ‘How One-On-One Interviews Can Reveal What Your B2B Audience Really Wants‘. Please share your adventures in B2B market research by contributing a comment below.

My forwarded curations are also highly personalized. I rarely blast an item to a long list of people. The vast majority of the time I send a tidbit to a single individual, or a small handful of people. The information is highly relevant, meaningful, and hopefully valuable to these people. I’ve trained them to look forward to these tidbits so my ‘open and read rate’ is very high.

That’s on the personal level. Curated content can also be an important input into more formal marketing communications/content marketing campaigns designed to inform and gently persuade regarding products, services and solutions.

So how’s it done? Something like this:

Step 1: Identify Your Topics of Interest

• What topics make sense for your company and product set?
• What peripheral topics might be of interest to your sphere of influence? What industries are they in? What types of technology do they manufacture, purchase or use in their businesses? Are there political or regulatory issues that affect them?
• Is there a specific niche in which you’d like to position yourself as a thought leader?

Step 2: Select Your Search and Aggregation Tools

There are many tools available online. I prefer to use a limited number of these, paying particular attention to the search terms I develop. The more ‘advanced’, selective and sophisticated your search terms, the fewer results you’ll get, but those results will be more valuable and relevant.

Google, the king of all things search, has many free resources that can help you to become an ‘advanced’ searcher. Spend two or three hours to learn this skill. It’ll save you hundreds of hours over the next decade.

Tools to use to find relevant information, aggregate it, organize it and deliver it to your constituents:

• Addictomatic.com
• Digg.com
• DuckDuckGo.com
• Google.com/Alerts
• Google.com/Reader (set up via RSS feeds)
• HootSuite.com
• IceRocket.com
• LinkedIn.com (group discussions)
• Paper.li
• Scoop.it
• SocialMention.com
• StumbleUpon.com
• Technorati.com
• TweetDeck
• Twitter.com

There are many others. The point is to select the subset that you like, and then set them up correctly. They’re just tools. You want them to help you find the nuggets of gold hidden in the vast mountains of available information.

Step 3: Gather

Once your tools are set up, the information will be delivered to you daily. It’s up to you to skim and scan, trash and save, read and contextualize.

Step 4: Organize

You can get as detailed as you want about this. I think it’s a matter of personal style, plus the amount of data you’re dealing with. Obviously, the larger the amount of information, the more you’re going to need to categorize it, perhaps creating sub-categories and metadata to enable efficient searches. My personal style is not terribly organized, and I find this is helpful (in this context). My brain tends to sift information and make connections that wouldn’t normally occur in an organized taxonomy.

I do organize my curated content by target audience, though.

Step 5: Share

There’s no point in doing all the above (at least from a marketing perspective) unless you deliver the appropriate (and relevant) information to your various constituents (individuals, small groups, distribution lists). Remember – what’s useful and relevant to one person is irrelevant and useless to the next.

You might deliver to individuals in an informal, unscheduled way via email. For groups of people (aggregated by shared interests) you might use newsletters, social media (including blogs), podcasts, etc. and disseminate on a pre-determined schedule (once a day, week or month). What’s important here is to assess the content, and assess the audience; then select the appropriate vehicle and frequency.

Attribution

There’s an old adage – “If you take from one information source, you’re plagiarizing. If you take from twenty information sources, you’re researching.” There’s a spectrum of content curation ranging from direct quotes all the way to completely re-thought, re-contextualized, re-written material. All are equally valid… as you approach and reach the direct quote end of the spectrum, you should attribute the source including author and publication.

Did I miss anything? Are there any helpful tactics or tools that you can’t live without in your content curation endeavors?

Consistent, Quality Production

Everybody who works in SMB B2B marketing is well aware of this. The agencies, the clients, the consultants, the gurus… everybody knows it. Smaller businesses just don’t have the resources available to create relevant and useful content on an ongoing basis. They start out with good intentions. They write a few blog posts, get increased traffic and some comments; but the real business payback doesn’t occur until after months of consistently publishing compelling content. Content that people consume because they want to… because there’s value in it.

It takes time, skill and energy to produce all that content. What if you don’t have the time, skill or energy?

Content Curation

I define content curation as the process of assembling, summarizing and adding commentary to information from multiple sources in a context that is relevant to a particular audience. I think this discipline is essential to content/social media marketing.

Today, we are drowning in information. Most of it is poor quality and of little value (i.e. not worth the time spent to consume it). There is tremendous value in sifting through the mountains of content to find those rare golden nuggets that are high quality, relevant, useful and (hopefully) entertaining. With the ever increasing volume of information we’re faced with, businesses can bring real value to their prospects and clients by serving as a filter.

Marketers can build trust by providing focused curation in areas that matter to their prospects and clients. Quality original content has always had value, but curation is coming to have nearly equal value. The key is to stake out unique topic areas. For SMB B2Bs, those are the areas that are of professional interest to the buyers of your products and services.

The information you curate should help your target audience make better buying decisions; and it should increase the benefits of using your products and services. It might include economic or regulatory news that affects their industry, and other adjacent but relevant topics. Your aim is to become the most trusted source in those areas. You don’t need a lot of time or money to do this. You just need to have a deep understanding of your chosen niche.

In this post I told you the ‘what’ and ‘why’ of content curation for SMB B2Bs. In our next post, I’ll discuss how to do all the above effectively and efficiently.