Britton Manasco, author of the Illuminating the Future blog, and I recently sat down to chat about my new book, the current state of content marketing and where the future might be headed.

If you'd like to know what I have to say in response to these questions, go read the interview.

• What was behind your decision to write this book?


• Why did you believe this was timely?


• Why isn't this conventional wisdom by now?


• Why do you think companies struggle to make that shift?


• What's stopping marketers, more specifically, from more aggressively investing in content-driven marketing programs?


• So there are big returns to be gained by guiding the buyer through an extended decision process. You are nurturing them and cultivating them.


• Let’s talk about the economics of this.  What are you seeing in terms of how marketers are looking at their investment in and their budgeting of content?  What’s your thought in terms of how they can justify these investments?


• Do you see a distinction here between companies selling something with far larger deal sizes and ones that have smaller deal sizes?


• Now, if you were to gaze out maybe five years into the future and try to imagine how practice in the marketplace will have evolved with respect to content-driven marketing, what would you expect?


• I’m curious. What have you learned since you released your book and began getting feedback from readers? What are some of you latest findings?

You can read the full interview here

Customer engagement is a hot topic these days. From a marketing perspective we tend to focus on what's in it for our companies, not necessarily from our prospects' persepctives. eMarketing is about creating mutually-beneficial engagement. Both for us and for them.

In my book I call this engagement bling. I define engagement bling as "...the positive results your company gains from sustaining trusted engagement with prospects and customers throughout their buying journeys."

The interesting thing about bling is that the more you share it, the more you have. And, that's because your prospects and customers get bling of their own from their interactions with you.

Take a look at some of the bling your prospects and customers get:

Valuable Knowledge: Solving a complex problem requires insights and knowledge your prospects probably don't have—especially if they haven't had to solve this kind of problem in a while, or ever. The more informed they become, the easier it is to make a purchase decision. And the less time spent doing so.

Increased Confidence: This is the result of becoming more informed. But it's not just about building their confidence in your company, it's about increasing the confidence their companies have in them to make the best choice to achieve the desired outcome.

Useful Conversations: Once they have the first two, they can enter into conversations with you to validate their beliefs. But, beyond that, they can invite conversations with the other members of the buying committee, sharing your ideas and gaining consensus with people you may never interact with personally. And, that's critical in shortening the time to purchase.

All of this bling leads to higher credibility for your company and for the decision maker who becomes empowered to choose your company as a strategic partner to help them do the hard work of solving their complex problems. And that's a good thing all the way around.

But that's not all. You get even more bling when you work to build engagement with your prospects and customers by making every impression and interaction relevant to them.

You also get things like:

• more interactive dialogue,
• intelligence-enhanced listening
• increased demand due to higher trust

These increase based on the value your prospects and customers ascribe to every interaction and impression your company exchanges with them.

What company couldn't benefit from all these rewards?

I say, bring on the engagement bling!

This is a slidecast of the discussion I had with Kim Albee of Genoo about the differences in online web properties, why it's important to have tools that enable business users to post and update content and the value of giving your online audience an experience, not just text on a web page.

One of the drawbacks of living in Palm Desert is that there's not much local market for my book. And, unfortunately, during my travels the last few months I haven't had time to stop into a bookstore elsewhere. So, imagine my joy when my friend, Jill Konrath, called from a Barnes and Noble in Minnesota to tell me she was staring at my book on the shelf!

Naturally, I asked her to send me a picture. So, here's proof that my book exists beyond the online booksellers. And, notice it's sitting right next to Joe Pulizzi and Newt Barrett's book, Get Content. Get Customers. It's keeping very good company.

Last week I sat down with Kim Albee, from Genoo, to have a conversation about how to map content to the buying process - as discussed in my book, eMarketing Strategies for the Complex Sale.

She's graciously allowed me to post the screencast here for all of you.
(25 minutes)

In my book, eMarketing Strategies for the Complex Sale, I talk about how B2B marketers need to really get to know their customers in order to improve their marketing effectiveness. One of the exercises presented in the book is The Customer Focus Tune-up. This eBook expands upon that exercise.

In the eBook, I present:

• A breakdown of the steps in the complex buying process.
• 4 Steps to improving your customer intelligence.
• How to apply those insights to content development.
• Applications for putting your customer focus to work.

Download the complementary eBook.

To learn more about creating buyer-centric content that produces quantifiable eMarketing results, you can always buy the book...

Buyers of complex sales are taking control of their buying process and deciding how they want to buy. The better you know your B2B personas, the better you can engage prospects with marketing content and lead nurturing. Take a look at a day in a buyer's life and learn what it takes to catch and keep their attention.

In addition to my book, I've written a guide for B2B marketers who are charged with getting the best results from their investment in Marketing Automation technology. Genius.com is the publisher - I just love working with people who "get" what this is all about!

In the guide, I provide 15 steps that address:

–How to help organizations come up to speed with Marketing Automation techniques
–What takes the mystery and complexity out of Marketing Automation
–How B2B pros can walk through a 15 point, step-by-step process, including hands-on tools and worksheets
–How to Arm B2B Marketers with the goods to drive continuous prospect and customer engagement
–What an outline for a strategy and tactics for execution can look like for holistic nurturing programs and more immediate, measurable sales results
–How to enable Marketers to get qualified leads to Sales for joint success - that's consistent and repeatble!

You can download the first 5 steps on Lead Scoring for free, or you can complete a simple registration and get the whole guide essentially for free - yep, right now.

Hopefully, this will guide will provide enough value that you'll just be unable to stop yourself from buying my book! Either way, I'd love to hear your feedback. And, if you have any questions, let them rip right here and I'll answer them.

Marketing content comes in a variety of flavors - website, nurturing, blog, Social Media, etc. We can talk about early stage, mid-stage, late-stage and customer content as well. There are educational, expertise and evidence versions to build engagement in different ways. Then we can go farther and list all the different formats, such as white papers, eBooks, articles, success stories, data sheets, video, podcasts etc.

The question is - Are you using the same type of writing for all of them?

Content is not meant to be all the same with the only difference being where or how it is used. It needs variety, a varying amount of meatiness and some spice thrown in to set it apart. How much of each and how these ingredients are applied depends on intention, audience and takeaway.

But you also have to consider your company's brand, personality and culture.

Confused yet? That's a lot of stuff!

This is why you need to start with audience. Your audience rules when it comes to content design.

• If your content is too low-level or too difficult, you miss.


• If you go for humor but your audience is serious about the subject, you miss.


• If you write about technical product features and your audience is interested in business value, you miss.


• If your content is online but too densely packed to be easily scanned and assimilated, you miss.

The problem is that quite often marketers developing content make assumptions based on personal preference. You have to kick personal preference out the door and base your decisions on your buyers' and customers' preferences.

I get a lot of pushback about why this won't or can't happen. Usually it's because marketers don't get face time with prospects or customers.

Hogwash.

There are resources all over the place at your company — salespeople, account managers, customer service and support staff — and I'd like to be so bold as to suggest that we could actually speak with our customers.

One of the first things I discuss in my book, eMarketing Strategies for the Complex Sale, is buyers. I talk about a framework I call the buyer synopsis. This is a combination of buyer persona with a problem-to-solution scenario. I include exercises to help you create a styleguide to map content to the buying process dependent on what's important to those specific buyers.

Once you have that, you can develop content to suit intention, takeaway - and of course, your audience.

The biggest thing to remember is to try to meet them on common ground. Let your content fly and pay careful attention to their response. Then tune and tweak your content to target your audience more closely.

If you aim for perfection, you'll end up second guessing yourself and modifying your content based on what you think, not what you know. The trick is to make content development a fluid process that becomes instinctive because you've become well-versed with what matters to your buyers.

I see a lot of posts lately about content strategy. In fact, I saw a nice one the other day that included everything from discovering what others were doing to developing a style guide to auditing and tracking ownership of all the content.

But one thing not mentioned was a storyline.

Content for content's sake alone won't get your marketing results where you need them to be. Not in a complex sale situation.

Think about the goal of your content marketing...what is it you're driving toward?

Here are a couple of things to consider:

• Awareness - naturally
• Engagement - of course
• High enough interest, involvement and trust to have a sales conversation.
  Yep - that's the one.

If you're selling a considered offering, your marketing content alone will not complete the sale. Getting the deal still requires human interface (e.g. sales involvement).

This means that your content strategy needs to be focused on creating momentum with prospects to move them through the steps of their buying process to the point of the sales conversation.

A storyline will help you achieve that outcome.

A storyline:

• Catches and keeps attention over time.


• Allows you to unveil bite-sized pieces of the story in a way that allows your prospects to engage, ingest and understand — without overwhelming.


• Pulls them forward a step at a time, at a pace they can handle, given their other responsibilities that don't diminish just because a new project hits their priority list.


• Enables prospects to build confidence as they accumulate knowledge.


• Promotes those behind-the-scene conversations you'll never be privy to. And does so around the concepts you help to evolve, keeping the focus on your company.

For some reason, people think of stories as only anecdotes, novels and fairytales. But if you learn to flip your focus to develop your content from your buyers' perspective, you'll pull them into the scenarios you share about what the issue is, why it should be solved and how people like them are doing just that.

That type of engagement is the goal of a content strategy. In the end, it's all about revenues. That won't happen unless your content strategy gets them into meaningful conversation with your salespeople.