Content Marketing Today

3 More Reasons Marketers Must Become Publishers

Paradigm Shift Happens. It’s time to remodel your marketing.

When the marketing rules change, the winners will be the early adopters who understand the new breed of buyer, take advantage of better, cheaper technology, and deliver problem-solving content. It’s time for marketers to replace traditional publishers. Make sure you don’t get left behind by building on these new marketing realities. You don’t want to be the last one on your block to remodel your marketing.

1. You can’t sell your prospects anymore. You have to make it easy for them to buy.

The more informed the consumer or buyer is, the more difficult it is to sell them. Smart marketers know this and are creating strong brand relationships by providing good, authoritative, even leadership-type content.

Great advertising still works. Think of the AFLAC duck, the GEICO cavemen or the legendary Absolut vodka print campaign. These are all memorable and effective. The genius of the AFLAC duck for example, is that it is amusing, memorable and still makes a very detailed case for why you would be smart to purchase AFLAC insurance.

Increasingly, however, the old-fashioned stuff is taking a back seat to content marketing in which companies engage in an interactive dialogue with their prospects.

Paul Gillin points out in his book, The New Influencers:

Traditional marketing and traditional media will always have a role to play in commerce. They will morph and can adapt to changing demographic trends. But it is clear that growth will be centered around conversation based tactics. The next generation of customers will want to interact with businesses in very different ways. The new influencers are here to stay. Your challenge, and your opportunity, is in learning how to influence them and becoming an influencer yourself.

Engage in Conversation with Your Customers–Not a Sales Tug of War

As Gillin suggests, content marketing is all about engaging in a conversation with your customers and prospects. You can make this happen just as media companies have done it for decades. The best business-to-business and business to consumer publications delivered must read content for the buyers marketers wanted to reach. These buyers, in turn, became loyal followers of the publications and responded actively to both editorial and advertising messages.

Although media companies are increasingly disappointing these same buyers, they are still hungry for content that offers solutions to their problems — and helps him lead were successful, more productive, and more enjoyable lives.

Therefore, you have the opportunity to transform the way in which you market by providing relevant content that positions you as a trusted source. You begin as a source of information and continue as a source of products and services. It’s neither necessary nor desirable to attempt to sell prospects who don’t want to be sold. Instead, your thought leadership in print and online positions your company as the obvious source of solutions. As you become increasingly customer centric, you will develop an increasingly loyal and lucrative base of repeat customers.

2. Because technology is both cheap and easy to use, even small companies can deliver great content solutions to a targeted customer base. You can now achieve measurable results easily and inexpensively.

Fortune 500 companies have long had the technological resources and the investment capital required to build sophisticated content marketing solutions — and to manage huge amounts of demographic data relating to their prospects and customer base. Many such as Best Buy, Microsoft, and Amazon.com probably know more about us than some of our relatives. They also do a terrific job of delivering relevant and compelling content to different segments of their prospect bases.

Smaller companies, however, have had to rely on media companies to deliver their message to their targeted buyers. This has certainly been true with print publications, and until fairly recently online as well. Affordable technology is now changing all of the rules.

Just a few years ago, it would have been laughable to imagine that a very small organization could create and maintain a website that she could update daily — and which would allow visitors to interact and even to buy products and services. Today, it’s not only possible. It’s pervasive. In fact, a 10 person company may be able to out market a 10,000 person company in a carefully chosen niche.

Three core components underlying the shift in the technological balance of power away from media giants and toward companies of all sizes:

• The ability to create sophisticated online publications, whether website, digital magazine or eNewsletters
• The ability to manage huge amounts of data relating to current and future customers.
• The ability to do both of these simply and inexpensively

A sophisticated website: $500,000 in 2004. $13,000 in 2007?

I’m not going to pay a lot to build this website!

Apple alumnus and serial entrepreneur, Guy Kawasaki recently proved it. In an August 2007 interview for NPR’s TechNation, he described how unbelievable changes in the price and usability of online technology had enabled him to launch a website for less than $13,000. Just a few years before, according to Kawasaki, it would’ve taken $500,000, months of work, and a big team to get the site up and running. Although the website, Truemors.com, may be a lame attempt at social networking, it shows what any small business could accomplish. For example, the underlying content management capability would have cost six figures until very recently. Truemors.com is powered by the free application, WordPress.

Low cost, easy to use web technology now enables medium-sized manufacturers, small insurance companies or one person service firms to build online content solutions that are more sophisticated than what most media companies were putting online just a decade ago. In fact, with focus, creativity, and a little outside help, they may be able to do a better job of providing targeted content to their best customers than some billion-dollar competitors.

Distribution: companies are cutting out the middleman, when it comes to getting their message to their customers

In the past, all but the biggest corporations were powerless to target anyone. Sophisticated customer relationship management software was expensive and hard to manage. Business organizations relied on media companies, because of their sophisticated circulation databases, which included lots of demographic information which would permit precise targeting.

This meant that you could advertise in a magazine or you could choose a direct marketing campaign to an important subset of your buyers. In the early days of the Internet, media companies were also doing the best job of capturing e-mail addresses — which have become an essential part of any corporate customer database. So they would even rent and expensive e-mail list from magazines whose readers matched up with their target audience.

Today, corporations and associations have created powerful databases that in some cases are better than audited trade publications and web sites. Because the software technology required to manage a customer database is now affordable for any size organization, even small companies have less need of the services of trade and consumer publishers.

Moreover, there are plenty of online distribution partners, such as Digg, Del.icio.us, Stumble Upon, etc. that enable you to reach well beyond your current database to prospects who are looking for solutions to their problems. Unlike the media companies, these new Internet buddies work for free.

The result: affordable and easy to use technologies are enabling a broad range of companies to disintermediate trade publications and their media parents, because they can now communicate directly with customers AND prospects. In so doing, companies are both reducing costs and increasing precision. Very importantly, effective and efficient distribution powers the very best content marketing strategies. After all, there is not much point in creating great content if you can deliver it. Now you can do both.

3. High-quality editorial is no longer the sole province of media companies.

The key to successful media programs for corporations is great content. Not just any content. Great content. Buyers know the difference between great content and a blatant sales pitch with no inherent value. Corporations can and do address this issue by, in many cases, establishing editorial standards that exceed those of some media companies. For example, Best Magazine, from Best Buy, targets their very best buyers with high quality content rich in both information and design. They do not compromise quality, because their goal is to strengthen their relationship with those customers who invest the most time and money with them year after year.

Conversely, media companies are often headed in the opposite direction. Media companies serve two masters: the readers and their advertisers. Sadly, as their ad revenues crater, they are caving in more and more to advertiser demands to compromise content, which shortchanges their readers. That weakens the editorial product which ultimately results in lower reader engagement, lower reader response, and an ongoing downward spiral of ad revenues.

Of course, not every media company and not every publication has to make these compromises. But our own experience — and that of many former colleagues — makes it clear that this is an ongoing and almost certainly accelerating trend.

In a parallel trend, much of the best editorial talent has been forced out of media organizations to save money. In addition, hundreds of great editors are leaving voluntarily, because they cannot do good work within the content constraints of the struggling media companies. Many of the very best are moving to corporations where they are given the resources to create great content without severe budget limitations. Because smart companies understand that quality content is a key marketing driver, they are paradoxically less inclined to compromise in the way that formerly pure media organizations are now doing. Writing for Microsoft, Cisco, or Parker Hannifin actually looks good on a resume these days. Not only can corporations afford to create high-quality content, but they are also attracting high-quality journalists as well.

Great content underlies great content marketing. Your buyers want and need great content. They used to receive it from media companies. Today, they can and should be receiving it from your organization. Even if you do not have internal editorial talent, plenty of brilliant editors and reporters will be happy to put their talents to work on behalf of your company.

Developing a Content Marketing Strategy Both Easier and More Important than Ever

The new breed of buyer doesn’t want to be sold. But, the new breed of buyer faces more complex business and life challenges than ever before. Whether it’s a matter of selecting the right HD TV–or selecting the right enterprise software solution, your buyer has problems that need solving. That used to be the province of media company publications. No longer.

You can now deploy content marketing solutions that begin with genuine conversations, continue with deftly applied technology, and finish with solution-centered content. Your company will be the new hero in the minds of your customers–because you both understand and solve their problems.

Click here to read about the other 3 reasons you must become publishers.