By Frank Dale, CEO and President at Compendium
Content marketing is a new discipline that’s gaining a lot of attention for its ability to drive product demand and shorten the sales cycle. By developing and marketing information that is easily found by prospects, companies can educate customers and demonstrate how their product or service solves customer problems.
By Frank Dale, CEO and President at Compendium
Content marketing is a new discipline that’s gaining a lot of attention for its ability to drive product demand and shorten the sales cycle. By developing and marketing information that is easily found by prospects, companies can educate customers and demonstrate how their product or service solves customer problems.
While marketers are still learning how to tap content marketing to drive demand, they clearly understand its potential. Today’s buyer knows more about the products and services they purchase than ever before. A 2011 Google study determined that the average consumer accesses 10.4 sources of information before making a purchase decision. Research from PEW shows that 58 percent of Americans have researched a product or service online.
Armed with this information, marketers look to content marketing as a means to differentiate their organization from competitors, maintain a close relationship with customers and shorten the sales cycle.
Because content marketing is new, marketers may have difficulty convincing the C-suite to buy into it. The key is in understanding the challenges of C-level executives and demonstrating how content marketing can help.
Here are some tips for selling content marketing to the C-level executives:
Chief Executive Officer. With markets getting more competitive and margins taking a hit, CEOs want a way to differentiate the company so buyers are more likely to choose their product or service over the competition. At the same time, they are interested in holding marketing budgets steady.
When talking with the CEO, make the case that content marketing aligns with the way buyers want to learn about your products or services. This translates into a better buyer experience, lower cost of acquisition over time, and an opportunity to differentiate your organization in a changing environment. Explain how you can measure the program by looking at engagement with your content, sales lift, conversion, and overall awareness of your organization.
Chief Marketing Officer. It is a challenging time to be a CMO. Marketing departments have to navigate change at a faster pace than ever before. Marketing is more measurable thanks to new technology. Since buyers can learn a lot about your company before they choose to contact you, the buyer expects a high degree of transparency and information availability.
While CMOs may be open to implementing a content marketing program, the challenge for marketers is helping the CMO understand what it takes to manage and execute a successful program that supports the brand. Show the CMO the daily, weekly and monthly tasks and workflow associated with running your content marketing program. Include time and budget estimates for planning content, assigning content to writers, editing articles and blog posts, publishing posts, promoting posts to social media sites, and repurposing content in other channels, such as email.
Chief Financial Officer. Finance is concerned with how to grow the business while controlling expenses. A good content marketing program is an asset that increases in value over time, so it’s important to convey this message. In fact, when employed correctly, content marketing campaigns have been shown to generate more leads than paid search, while costing about 30% less.
An existing article, blog post, or video can be also reused or repurposed multiple times, which lowers operating expenses. In addition, a content marketing program provides an opportunity to differentiate your product or service, which is the only way to maintain margins. A recent McKinsey study found that prices drop by 10% or more when buyers do online research and can’t see a meaningful difference between options. Help your CFO understand how good content can make your products or services stand out, educate buyers about your differentiated options, and maintain margins.
Chief Information Officer. Given the constraints under which the average IT department operates, it’s easy to see why IT can be skeptical when you want to implement a new content marketing solution. They know that the burden of implementation and maintenance usually falls on them. IT departments get particularly frustrated when you involve them late in the process of a purchase decision and then ask for an accelerated timeline. Be prepared to give details about your content marketing platform: is it hosted on-premise or as a cloud solution, where is the data stored and how is it backed up, what security is in place, what kind of support you need, etc.
While C-level executives have different daily challenges, they all have the same goal of propelling the company forward in a difficult environment. Content marketing can be an effective and cost-efficient path to achieving this goal.
More detailed information and conversation scenarios can be found at http://www.slideshare.net/compendium/selling-content-marketing-software-to-the-csuite
Frank Dale is CEO and president at Compendium, a content marketing platform that helps organizations capture and create original content in a branded hub for distribution to any marketing channel. He can be reached at info@compendium.com or on Twitter at @frankcdale.
