Bob Leonard

In the B2B world, it’s going to require what Oliver Wendell Holmes called “simplicity on the other side of complexity”.

What I mean is that marketers are going to have to work hard to distill product and service information (features and benefits, competitive positioning, value propositions, etc.) into easily consumed, and quickly digested morsels. I’m not referring to slogans or tag lines. Marketers have moved beyond sales messages to delivering relevant and useful information. As the sheer volume of this information grows exponentially, marketers must learn to communicate to target prospects not only in a meaningful, concise way; but also using multimedia to engage more of the targets’ senses. To teach and to entertain simultaneously.

I happened to have a prediction ready for Joe because it’s something I’ve been thinking about quite a bit.

As a content developer, my primary communication vehicle has been the written word. As technology advances, and the amount of information available to people explodes, text on a page or a screen is becoming less and less capable of competing for peoples’ attention. So, I decided to work on something new. I was looking for something I could do largely by myself with just a PC, some software and an internet connection. I’ve found that thing. I call it ‘storyboarding’.

It’s a mashup of PowerPoint, video and podcasting (voice over).

I’ll be evolving this blog to that format within the next few weeks. And will be using it to help clients communicate to their customers and prospects.

Meanwhile take a look at Joe’s 100 Content Marketing and Social Media Predictions for 2010.

You should register to receive Joe’s blog. Content Marketing is the only thing that’s working today for B2B, and Joe is one of the world’s top experts. As the video illustrates, it has always worked for B2B, it’s just that we didn’t call it ‘Content Marketing’.

The way it worked was a salesperson knocked on doors and built relationships over time. Eventually he or she built trust and prospects began to believe what he or she told them. Very difficult and too expensive to do today. Much more effective and much cheaper to do it online.

Complex technology sales can’t be closed online, but trust and relationships can be built that way. Then, prospects will contact you when they’re ready to talk price and Ts & Cs. You still need smart, hard working salespeople, but you can deploy them more strategically.

That’s the way it works today. You have to build the content. Relevant and useful information. Added fresh at least three times a week. A blog is a good way to do that. Case studies, podcasts, surveys, videos, whitepapers and other types of content work too.