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Forget that it’s Friday the 13th: the weekend’s almost here! Punch out and pull up a chair—we’ve got this week’s top content marketing headlines on tap.

LinkedIn Launches More Robust Content Targeting & Reporting Options
By Pamela Vaughan at HubSpot
This week LinkedIn announced two new tools that let marketers customize communications to followers and generate statistical reports about those followers. According to Vaughn, these new tools provide “segmentation, targeting, personalization—these are all concepts that, when executed effectively, can deliver much better results no matter what marketing channel you’re using.” continue reading…

Image by Jim Kelly

Punch out early and enjoy a frosty mug of content marketing headlines. This week we’ve got a B2B content infographic on tap, served along with marcom tips cribbed from Ernest Hemingway (who knew a thing or two about happy hour).

Infographic: Marketers Who Share Content Drive Traffic, Gain Customers
Joann Pan at Mashable
In 2011, B2B marketers distributed more content via social channels than ever before. Mashable presents a slick infographic on how marketers are using content to drive traffic and build their brands.

How to Fix Six Common Content Problems—and Boost Sales
If your content isn’t driving sales, it’s probably because you have “the content problem.” This malady can be resolved quickly by attending to six common symptoms such as too-little content, a sales/marketing disconnect, and automated collateral dependency.

Print News Media Go Live with Video Programming
Brian Stelter at New York Times
Tablet and smartphone adoption is on the rise, and print media outlets are taking advantage of this trend to redefine their content strategies. Traditional outlets such as the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times now stream live video to compete with newer online sources like the Huffington Post.

Dell’s Russ Fujioka on B2B Marketing
BtoBonline.com
Russ Fujioka, vice president of the Marketing, Public and Large Enterprise Group at Dell, explains how relevancy is key to Dell’s content strategy. As Fujioka explains, Dell uses social media, online communities, and custom-published magazines such as Dell Power Solutions (which TDA produces) to ensure that the right content is placed before the right prospect at the right time.

The Hemingway Guide to Content Marketing
Jesse Noyes at Eloqua
Ernest Hemingway might not have been a content marketer, but his writing process provides great insights on how to produce great content. Noyes offers five tips cribbed from Hemingway’s writing process that can help produce great content. One of our favorites: get out among the people.

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If your marketing communications programs aren’t helping accelerate sales, you almost certainly have the content problem. Typically the malady has at least one of six symptoms—and can usually be resolved quickly. As always, recognizing the problem is the first step toward recovery. How many content problem symptoms does your company have?

Symptom #1: Too little content. Let’s start with the easiest symptom to address. Here, not enough good content is available to support the sales cycle.

Solution: Obvious and easy: create compelling content for target audiences—which follows the time-tested formula of starting with a challenge, then describing your solution, and concluding with specific business benefits. Hey, problem solved. But it’s surprising how many organizations find this approach difficult to implement.

Symptom #2: Too much content. This symptom arises when so much content is available that salespeople can’t find—or don’t know about—relevant content for specific sales efforts.

Solution: Start with a collateral audit. Compare what you have with what the competition is issuing. Be sure to poll top salespeople and managers about collateral they find most effective and actually use. Don’t be surprised if you discover they’ve developed their own sales tools and prefer them. Once the audit is complete, you can weed out the ineffective content and build a searchable repository of the sales material that is effective.

Symptom #3: The too-little/too-much content hybrid. Imagine a ship foundering because poorly placed ballast causes the vessel to list precariously to one side. You may not sink with a lopsided mix of content that favors one particular business unit, but you’re going to expend a lot more energy sailing your course, and you may even run aground.

Solution: Start with solutions for the too-little and too-much symptoms. Then make sure content is aligned with another tried-and-true formula for marketing success: goals drive strategy, strategy drives messaging, and messaging drives content. Once again, this is a simple formula where poor execution can set you adrift.

Symptom #4: Sales/marketing disconnect. A lead sales executive complains marketing isn’t generating enough high-quality leads—which compels the sales force to spend too much time on prospects that aren’t ready to buy. The crisis builds as marketing leadership retorts that, hey, the sales organization created the definition of a qualified lead in the first place—and the leads being produced follow those specs.

Solution: Who’s right? Who cares! Both parties are missing the point, and as they argue, the field sales staff is probably taking matters into their own hands. The American Marketing Association estimates that salespeople spend up to 25 percent of their time every month creating or searching for content that can help close a deal.

Frequently a qualified lead doesn’t convert into a customer because the prospect simply doesn’t understand the offering well enough to purchase it. Make sure the offering is clear to decision makers—show you understand and can address their pain points. Create deliverables that your target buyers will find insightful, educational, even helpful. The most effective marketing content rarely feels like marketing at all, but rather is timely and useful information that truly helps the prospective buyers get through their day.

Symptom #5: Automated collateral dependency. Some companies, especially in high tech, turn to software to organize, serve up, rate, and deliver marketing content to improve sales efficiency. We recently talked with one of the vendors of these “marketing automation” systems. They were concerned about losing renewals because their software only delivers value if the marketing content being managed actually helps sales. But in many cases, company reps confided, it does not.

Solution: See the solutions for symptoms #2, #3, and #4.

Symptom #6: Pre-sales buyer’s remorse. The content problem is particularly pronounced in highly competitive, technology-intensive markets where customers will only sign purchase agreements after they’ve become extremely comfortable with their decisions.

Solution: Recognize and accept that purchasing requires comfort, and comfort requires understanding. Fostering that understanding requires effective content. This real comfort is impossible to achieve without imparting deep understanding of the benefits of a product or service, and how they are achieved. Effective enterprise content doesn’t seem like “marketing” at all. To the audience, it’s valuable or helpful information. It gets the target customer to think, “Hey, I had no idea that was possible,” or “Holy smokes—I need to get my boss to read this,” or “I’ll bet if that worked for them, it’ll work for us too.”

Learn to recognize and address these symptoms of the content problem, and you’ll be well on your way to accelerating sales. Consistently ignore them, and you risk watching your competitors speed right past you in the marketplace.

Do you have a content problem not addressed in our list of symptoms? Drop me a line. We’ve probably run across it—and may have the solution.

In a meeting with a very large client last week, we asked a VP there what kinds of collateral his sales team finds most useful. The VP’s response was immediate: “Case studies, no doubt about it.”

This reinforces what TDA has come to know over the years. In survey after survey, salespeople invariably say they want more case studies. Why? Because they know first-hand that customer testimonials radically shorten sales cycles. Prospects find real-world examples product and service benefits relevant, credible, and compelling.

The “one in ten” rule So given the value they place on case studies, why is it hard to get salespeople to help generate leads? After all, sales folks are closest to customers, maintain relationships, and can best navigate the geopolitical customer landscape. They are in the best position to know exactly whom to contact to about a customer case study, and when.

And that’s critical. TDA experience shows that only one out of every ten case study leads actually makes it through to publication. Some customers decline to participate outright, while others drop out along the way for a variety of reasons. Just like the sales process itself, customer reference programs need a pipeline. The more story leads you generate, the more case studies you’ll create. Without a robust pipeline of potential customers, the efforts of well-intentioned marketing departments can stall before they even get started.

The checklist for getting more case study leads from sales Thankfully, there are a number of ways to help generate leads for the case study pipeline. Here are six of the most important:

1. Get it in writing. Yes, it possible to establish contractual language that requires participation in customer references. This may seem elementary, but many organizations fail to include boilerplate terms about customer reference participation into standard contracts. This is especially important for case study leads, because it‘s harder to get permission later on. Of course, deal negations sometimes result in this clause being removed, but other times it flies through unscathed. That’s why it should be in the boilerplate contract. Assume that every customer will be a reference until they tell you otherwise.

2. Regularly update sales staff about case study goals, progress made, and what you need from them. From a sales perspective, marketing has one job: Make sales easy. One way of garnering support is setting and sharing goals for how many case studies you plan on publishing over the course of a month, quarter, or year, and how many story leads you need to make it happen. Make sure you let salespeople know the plan—if they don’t know, they can’t help you. Include program updates in whatever field communications are most effective. Some organizations share updates via sales team conference calls, other use internal e-mail newsletters, still others post to the sales intranet. A key question to ask is: What communications channel does the VP of sales or CEO use to get a strategic message to the field? Whatever the answer, that’s the channel you want to use for your program updates.

3. Share the love: Make sure sales incentives align with the customer reference program. Sales professionals, as rule, want to know what’s in it for them. Because their income depends on performance, good salespeople focus their time, attention, and efforts on their quota. You can use a similar incentive to enlist support for your reference program. Establish the number of leads you need and how many stories you’re looking to publish, and then set reasonable expectations. Work with your sales compensation architects to see if it’s possible to reward those whose actions support program results.

4. Provide comprehensive program management support. While salespeople have great insight into potential case study leads, their priority is closing new deals. Your team needs to allay fears of distractions. Make it easy for salespeople to help with case study leads, and make sure your interactions with customers are always courteous, professional, and even fun for the customer.

5. Track and share performance data. Consider putting up a leaderboard that ranks sales people and/or departments with a point system for story leads and completed case studies. These metrics can be posted on sales intranets, or on posters in sales break rooms or other public areas. When they see how their efforts compare with those of their peers, salespeople’s competitive natures will help motivate their support.

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Of course, I haven’t posted #6, which is the best way to juice up your organization’s case study program. For that, you’ll have to contact me. But most enterprises have more case study prospects than they realize. With assistance from people in the field who best know customers, reference programs can take off—and marketing can beat goals and expectations.

Because you’re reading this blog, enterprise media is probably important to you. Enterprise media is an umbrella term that describes all forms of proprietary content designed to accomplish a business objective. Examples include marketing collateral, sales tools, Web sites, custom publications, Flash animations, corporate videos, podcasts—really anything you can think of that’s designed to capture the attention of potential customers and move them through the sales process.

Here at TDA, we help our clients define and execute enterprise media strategies. These programs tend to be big, ambitious, and span multiple forms of content and channels.

When designed well, enterprise media programs can shape perceptions in the marketplace. When customers truly understand and appreciate the client value proposition, they become better customers: they upgrade more often and more easily, shop less often with the competition, become less price-sensitive, negotiate contracts with more trust…the list of benefits goes on and on.

Effective enterprise media also makes the business benefits of your products and services crystal clear to prospects. This is especially important when selling to those who’ve previously bought from the competition. In today’s competitive world, the only way to grow market share is to reach, influence, and sell to these prospects. And let’s face it: they probably have a bias against you. If an organization is accustomed to buying from your competition, that organization’s decision makers are very likely to believe what your competitor is saying about you.

But enterprise media can help these prospects become more open to your offering, see and understand the differentiation you offer, and consider you alongside the competition.

In the complex world of high tech, that takes more than pretty pictures. TDA begins every engagement by understanding the business goals of our clients, and the strategies they’re employing to accomplish those goals. With that in place, our creative teams have the ingredients they need to shape perceptions in the marketplace. It takes a mix of media, consistent messaging, and flawless execution. And every detail must align with the bottom-line needs of the enterprise. When it all comes together, these efforts can change marketplace perceptions to your advantage.

And at TDA, that’s exactly what we do.