Content Sells: harvest your two big assets

In B2B technology marketing, you’ve got two major assets that your customers and prospects value highly. Your job is to harvest them and put them to work for you…

1. Your experience across a wide range of customers. Your prospects may know their own situation and infrastructure intimately but you’ve seen many more. You know what works and what doesn’t. You know why.Part of your job should be to facilitate conversations between the front-line practitioners that you work with every day. As a vendor, you don’t have to have all the answers. You just need to be a part of the conversation—or to help make that conversation happen.
2. Your focus on one discipline – Your customers are generalists, you’re a specialist in one thing. You spend more time thinking about it, reading about it and talking about it than they do. This doesn’t mean your area of expertise is the most important thing in your prospects’ worlds—just that, in this one area, you’ve got authority. Use it wisely

The best B2B technology marketers exploit their focus and distill their experiences into something that will snag their audience’s attention and (our favourite phrase) earn the right to sell to them.

That something is content — and generating it is the second most important thing you can do as a marketer (the first is to identify your ideal prospects so you can focus your entire world on them).

Content sends important messages, even to those who choose not to consume it: that you have a lot to say on your area of expertise; that you’re passionate about what you do; that you’re a student of the art as well as a practitioner.

And for those who do choose to consume it, your content says even more. The people who go to the trouble to invest time in your content are the ones who are most serious about investing their money.

The goal is to build a strategic asset for your company: a growing library of high-quality content that leverages your multi-client experience and reflects your focus and expertise. Then promote the hell out of each new piece of content through your blog, social media, PPC, paid advertising, influencer relations, email nurture flows and offline activities like events and sales presentations.

The best way to do that is to leverage your two not-so-secret weapons.

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And a nice way to start might be to read our Big, Fat, B2B Content Marketing Strategy Checklist.