Junta42 blog

Giving Away Your Expertise IS Your Competitive Advantage

Erica brings up a great point about companies not wanting to share their expertise through content marketing. Why not share?

• Sharing secrets and expertise arms customers with too much information.
• Sharing secrets and expertise gives an advantage to the competition.

Neither are true, and I'll tell you why.

Most companies believe that their competitive advantage is in some process, some product, some service. That's hardly ever the case. Anyone at almost anytime can copy your process, product or service...especially today.

Your true competitive advantage rests in your communications, your marketing, your brand.

Once you realize that, giving away your "secret sauce" makes sense. Giving away your expertise and teaching your customers what you know does one amazing thing - it positions you as the expert in your industry. Once you are known by your customers and prospects as the industry expert, it will be almost impossible for any process, product or any competitive service to come between you and your customers.

Keeping your "secret sauce" to yourself does a few things:

• Customers/prospects will never know that you are the expert in your field.
• Customers will never share your expertise with others because there is nothing to share.
• It gives a huge opportunity for someone else to share their secret sauce and position themselves as the industry expert.

Now what are you waiting for?

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10 Reasons Why You Won't Do Content Marketing (and continue doing the same thing)

I had an amazing conversation this week with an agency that was trying to convince their client to invest in a content strategy and full content marketing program.  Just to give you the quick take, the client's goal was to reach certain consumer segments in the southeastern states.  They had a budget of $2.5 million dollars for marketing spend for the campaign.

The client's VP of Marketing didn't think anything could be done with a marketing budget that small.

That client is thinking about the world we used to live in.  The world of radio, television and placed media. It's hard to believe, but most of the marketing world still live in this reality.

Just think what kind of impact we could make with a $2 million dollar content marketing budget.  Boy, hire a few expert journalists to crank out some amazing content and you still have almost $1.9 million dollars left.

The conversation made me realize that, even though content marketing is certainly a legitimate and growing field today, there are still so many reasons why (we, you, I) don't do it.

Here are ten reasons.  I think it's helpful to know the reasons why we don't do something, which then may help us pull the trigger. Now here's a "Top 10" you don't want to be on.

Top 10 Reasons Why You Won't Do Content Marketing

1. Your company is set up to sell products or services, not to provide relevant and valuable information to customers and prospects. It takes a real mindset change to start thinking about your customers' informational needs as part of your marketing strategy.
2. You have well-worn marketing paths that are easy to follow.  Going off the beaten path into uncharted territory is intimidating.
3. You have strong relationships with media partners that may go back decades.  It's not easy to break those relationships by pursuing a brand-new content marketing strategy.
4. The reduced effectiveness of traditional marketing may have occurred so slowly that no alarm bells have gone off within your organization. You also may think things will come back at some point.
5. Many companies (possibly yours) aren’t measuring their marketing, so you may not even be sure what is and what is not effective. Hard to make any changes when you don't know.
6. You lack both the right people and the right processes to implement a new kind of marketing.
7. You are reluctant to abandon traditional marketing tactics for what they may believe to be unproven content marketing or new media practices.
8. You lack content marketing role models from whom they can learn best practices.
9. You place very little value in marketing versus other aspects of the organization (operations, product development). Little do you know, that every part of the organization is affected by (or actually is) marketing.
10. Even though I'd hate to think this one is true, I've seen it first hand...You have some real idiots running marketing for your company that don't have a clue about the needs of your customers or what to do about it. Before you can even look at content marketing, you have to ditch the idiots.

And Bonus #11 - It's hard.  It's more difficult to consistently create valuable and relevant content to our customers than place media. It's easier to just place an ad.  Listening, creating, co-creating, commenting, and actually having real customer conversations is harder.  Higher payoff, but harder none-the-less.

#12 (from Jonathan Kranz): You don't know how to connect your knowledge/experience/expertise with the hopes, fears, desires and objectives of your target market.

What did we miss?

In order for a company to alter their mindset toward one of new media or content marketing, they need one of a few things to happen:

• Business gets so bad that they start trying new things.
• Voluntary or involuntary turnover creates new thinking in the organization.
• A culture change in sparked in the organization, through an internal champion, external customer demands, or the merging of a new business culture through an actual merger or buyout.

The opportunity to become the expert industry source for your customers is there, right now.  How you take advantage of this opportunity is up to you.

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Content Marketing Gaining in Popularity

I had two phone calls this morning from colleagues that asked about the popularity of the term "content marketing".

In looking at trend lines for "content marketing" on icerocket.com, the buzz over content marketing has doubled over the past two years.

From August to October, 2007, there were an average of 8.57 posts per day about content marketing, totaling 771 posts.

From April to July, 2009, there were an average of 15.59 posts per day about content marketing, totaling 1,403 total posts.

More people are talking about the importance of content marketing, which means that more people are starting to "get" it and spread the word.

Related Articles:

• A Corporate Media Checklist: Content Marketing on the Rise
• The Decline of Advertising and the Rise of Content Marketing

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The Decline of Advertising and the Rise of Content Spending

Just read through a very interesting post from Brian Solis on Forrester's Five-Year Media Spending Forecast. From the results, this quote from Forrester's Shar VanBoskirk is worth some discussion:

"The most interesting takeaway from the research is that overall advertising budgets will decline.  Yep.  With dollars moving out of traditional media toward less expensive and more efficient interactive tools, marketers will actually need less money to accomplish their current advertising goals."

Takeaways here...

• Five years is a long time.  Twitter isn't even that old.  Take these with a grain of salt.
• Anyone who doesn't think that advertising budgets will decline should try a new career.
• Yes, online efforts are cheaper, and social media is essentially free...but what's not being said here is a lot.

Where's Content?

Let's look at a few of the biggest projected growth areas, social media and search marketing.

• I've said it before and I'll say it again, social media doesn't work without relevant, valuable and consistent content. Success in social media relies on a web content strategy that works for the brand and especially for the brand's advocates. Although social media distribution is essentially free (Twitter, posting on YouTube), the content planning, resource allocation and then creation is not. That's where the money is going.  Take Hubspot for example.  The distribution of their content is very cost effective (blog, online TV series, community site for example), but the planning time, knowledge, resources and coordination cost plenty.  Worth it...absolutely, but inexpensive...no. Content usually shows up in another line item on a budget, which may be the problem.  No one ever knows how much the content really costs. I know some executives that think that the content magically appears every week at the end of a rainbow.
• Then comes search marketing. Showing up in search results means you need great content. Getting results from pay-per-click usually means you need a great content offer. Either way, without content, search doesn't work.

What I've just pointed out may seem obvious to some, but I see this over and over again first hand. Small, medium and even large companies look to "alternative" online strategies and discount the cost of the content.

Actual client: "I want to create an ongoing content series, most likely a blog, that we can integrate into a social media campaign. We need a content plan and need to outsource the editorial.  Also looking for integration into social media (Twitter and other stuff like that) and monitoring of our objectives (more traffic) . Budget is about $5k." Yikes! (This example is from a $500 million dollar company)

Spend on the Right Content Initiatives

Okay, so what should you do with this?  First off, stop thinking about content marketing or content strategy as the end deliverable. The content process is not just the video series, the enewsletter or the custom magazine. It's the entire content strategy process, including (shout out to Kristina Halvorson from Brain Traffic on guidance here):

• The Content Audit. Before you usher in more content noise, it's worth it to figure out what you have said. Anyone about to spend significant investment in content creation should develop a content benchmark first.
• The Content Plan. Who's the audience?; What are their informational needs?; What are the success metrics of the content plan?; Who owns the plan?; What are the best content tactics?; How will we execute those tactics?;
• Content Maintenance.  Once we create the content, how do we keep it fresh, updated, and continually monitor our customers' informational needs so that we succeed with the content plan?
• Content Marketing. How are we distributing our valuable, relevant content so that we deliver on our success metrics?

So, the morale of the story is, take all that money you are saving by not advertising, and make sure you put it into the right content buckets. Yes, social media may be free, but succeeding in social media and your web content strategy is not.

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B-to-B Fundamentals Don't Change - The BMA Video

Thanks to David Meerman Scott and Rob Rose for passing this video on from BMA 09 - B-to-B Fundamentals Don't Change.