Content Marketing Today

Making Your Customers More Successful: Still Vital after All these Years

B2B Publishing Companies Need to Take Another Daring Step

Publishing veteran and content marketing consultant, Mike Azzara, explains why helping your customers succeed is essential but not enough for the survival of these veteran business-to-business media organizations.

In the October 1, 2008 issue of Publish.com, Mike, a former colleague and long-time friend, explains why trade publishers need to add a new set of content marketing services to make it through the 21st century.

His superb analysis included two core takeaways that point to the future of publishing–and of marketing.

First, Mike reminds us that what made business publications successful at the dawn of the computer era still applies.  He cites recent conference remarks by technology publishing legend, Pat McGovern, the founder of Computerworld and the IDG technology powerhouse:

McGovern, meanwhile, closed the conference with advice that will work in any era: “Your mission is to make your reader more successful.” A media business must figure out how to, “make your audience more powerful and more successful, and you’ll benefit from that success,” McGovern said. That’s the insight a mentor offered him when he founded Computerworld, and he said he still lives by it.

Second, Mike stresses that delivering on this customer-centric mission is necessary but no longer sufficient in a world where business-to-business marketers can easily bypass trade publications and go directly to their target customers.

The particular Web dynamics that lead to this startlingly different future for B2B marketing are:Connecting everyone to everyone else: Companies can connect with prospects without media companies’ help, as long as they develop at least rudimentary audience development and database skills.

According to Mike,new business model needed: Be more than a publisher. Be a content marketing agency.

With or without help from publishing companies marketers are adopting the content marketing approach to connecting with their customers. Therefore, Mike urges business-to-business publishers to become “content marketing” agencies so that they may play a new and even more vital role in helping their customers succeed– help them to create content that they will deliver directly to their own  customers.

In other words, as the fast-moving content marketing parade heads down the street, smart publishers will jump in front and lead it to the future. 

Be sure to check out Mike’s complete article at Publish.com 

As a side note, Mike indicated that our book, Get Content. Get Customers. was an important contributor to the concept that marketers and publishers will be in competition to deliver relevant and valuable content to the advertisers’ own customers.