B2B Content Marketing Roundtable

Content Marketing Roundtable on Marketing Made Simple TV featuring Joe Pulizzi, Doug Kessler and Jim Burns from Jeffrey Ogden on Vimeo.

I was pleased to be a part of a recent webinar panel on B2B Content Marketing and thought you might like to check it out.

My fellow panelists were:

Joe Pulizzi, the head of the always-excellent Content Marketing Institute. Joe knows more about content marketing than anybody and he’s super-generous about sharing it.

Jim Burns founder and CEO of Avitage, the guys who are doing some very cool things with scalable video content marketing.

We were interviewed by Jeff Ogden, the hat-wearing, tweet-shooting, lead-generating host of Marketing Made Simple TV.

Some of the points that came up

I really enjoyed this session and could have gone on for hours with these guys. And I think we hit on some pretty interesting issues, including:

The trend towards building content expertise in-house – while still leveraging outsourced agencies. Joe says it’s the only instance he can recall where in-sourcing and outsourcing in a market are BOTH growing fast at the same time. That’s how big the demand is.

Just hiring journalists isn’t enough – journalists are great at telling stories but aren’t experienced at doing it in the service of a marketing strategy. We still need a content strategy to keep the whole effort on track.  (Good news: our new B2B Content Marketing Strategy Checklist is here to help).

The need to get stakeholders on board is more important than ever – A lot of content marketing initiatives are killed too early or aren’t allowed to succeed because key stakeholders in the business haven’t been brought along. Starting with a bit of internal selling is critical.

An ‘under the radar’ approach can work too – If you’re struggling to get key people to the table for some kind of alignment workshop, you might want to try a pilot program that’s invisible to the business. Then when you bring the idea of content marketing to the table, you bring data from your pilot with you.

Outbound and paid media is coming back – Outbound went out of style when content marketing was new. But with so much content out there, we’re all going to have to get out there and promote our own. The good news: content offers out-perform product offers. So the two together make for a powerful combination.

Scalable content processes are the next challenge – A continuous, high-quality content machine is what most B2B businesses need, not what Jim called ‘Random acts of content’.

Shareability will power search performance – Increasingly, Google is promoting content that is getting shared. So it’s really important to make your content shareable (and share worthy) and to build a following to share things with.

We’re still earlier than you might think – Those of us who live and breathe content marketing can fool ourselves that most marketing departments are right up to speed. Joe makes the point that very few are.  The groundwork is NOT in place yet.