Frontline Perspectives

By now, most B2B marketers know that creating content and establishing thought leadership — through blogs, white papers, etc. — is a critical component of marketing success. The value of nurturing prospects and driving search engine traffic has been hammered home consistently over the past decade. Each step in the evolution of the web has emphasized the importance of communication with customers and prospects via a high-quality content portfolio — from corporate website content to blogs and now social media.

So why is it so hard to create quality content on a consistent basis? It usually comes down to one simple word — bandwidth. Marketers simply don’t have the time. There’s too much on their plates already. This was the situation when blogs first emerged as an important tactic (several years ago) and it hasn’t changed much in the age of social media. The only thing that’s changed is volume of opportunity you miss without a content development plan in place.

The Two Great Content Creation Stumbling Blocks
So why is it so difficult for marketers to hire new staff or reassign current resources to focus on content development and distribution?

For the most part it comes down to two essential issues:

The Payoff Isn’t Obvious
Most marketing tactics have a readily visible set of objectives and a fairly easily measurable return on investment (assuming you’re accurately tracking all your marketing initiatives — which you are, of course).

Assigning ROI to content creation can be difficult. Content creation and dissemination provide benefits in many ways — search engine optimization, brand awareness, prospect nurturing, conversion maximization, etc. — so the impact is spread over multiple channels and over a wide time horizon.

Addressing this issue can seem complex. After all, multi-channel attribution is still an emerging area in marketing. However, there are less complicated ways to develop an ROI model for content development. They start with a few simple questions such as: Based on your current site conversion rate, how many more visits would it take to get a new customer? What is one new customer worth?

For many companies, getting one deal a year they wouldn’t have gotten without an aggressive content program will more than pay for costs of a full-time content staff.

Content Creation Requires Time from Critical Senior Resources
You can hire a marketing coordinator to manage your email communications, and you can outsource your search marketing, but addressing content creation isn’t usually so easy.

Thought leadership comes from thought leaders. For most companies, those are senior people, most of whom don’t have a whole lot of time available in their day to publish blog posts, tweet, write white papers, etc. This hurdle may seem a bit haunting. Who wants to ask the senior vice president of product development to drop everything and write a blog post?

The important thing is to get the momentum started — identify your potential thought leaders. What would it take to get their input into content? How much of a time commitment is really needed from them? Can you reduce that commitment by assigning a writer to work with them? Are there ways to incentivize a larger group of employees to participate in content generation? Are there ways to free up their time by shifting some of the current responsibilities?

Of course, you can also go out and develop relationships with outside experts. Many successful B2B marketers use outside experts, whether it’s for simple white paper creation or ongoing consulting. Ultimately though, you’ll want to cultivate thought leadership within your organization. After all, it’s your expertise you’re selling — not your ability to hire it.

The first instinct in most companies is to assume it’s a waste of money to shift a senior resource from a “real task” to content development or to hire an experienced consultant, but if you’ve done your ROI calculations, you’ll know which expenses are justified and which aren’t.

In future posts, I’ll go into more detail about how to build some simple ROI models to justify assigning resources to content development and how to help unlock the thought leadership potential in your organization.