Do you know what content marketing practices work best? What challenges firms are facing? How well they’re performing?

Discover the answers by taking our brief survey, B2B Content Marketing: Practices, Challenges, Performance. You’ll receive the complete results – free.

Take the survey now: http://bit.ly/B2B-Content

Sponsored by the Philadelphia Chapter of the Business Marketing Association and conducted by Dance Communications, the survey is designed to identify current content marketing practices that have proven successful for high-performing marketing organizations.

As a thank you for your time and effort, you will receive a complete copy of the survey results which can be used to:

• Benchmark your organization against others
• Determine what distinguishes high-performing organizations from low-performers
• Build your business case to justify the value of content marketing to senior management.

The survey should take you less than 10 minutes to complete and all responses will be strictly confidential. The survey will close on Friday, November 19.

Please click the url below to begin the survey. If you have any issues, please cut and paste this url into your browser:

• http://bit.ly/B2B-Content

Thank you in advance for contributing to this research.

Traci Browne
President, Business Marketing Association-Philadelphia

Jim Pennypacker
President, Dance Communications

If you experience technical difficulties accessing or submitting the survey please contact Jim Pennypacker at 610.883.7988 or jpennypacker@dancecommunications.com

You don’t engage in social media activities for the fun of it (although it can be fun). You’re in business, and you have business goals to meet. You think that using social media will help you meet those goals — like making money — but how. You need a clearly defined social media strategy. Strategic clarity will guide you in meeting those goals. Without clarity, your social media activities become scattershot and vague. They lack energy because they lack focus.

Focus on your social media goals

Why are you engaging in social media? To build relationships, to position your company as a thought leader, to better understand your customers’ needs, to build credibility through word of mouth, for direct sales. Whatever your goals, you need to clearly understand them and focus your content on helping you reach those goals. Always ask yourself, what action do we need potential customers to take to help us meet our goals?

Match your content to your audience

Who is your audience. Right now. In the particular social media channel you’re using. Are they people who don’t know you? Show them that you have insights about industry trends. Offer original research, link to other highly regarded sources of information. Are they prospects who know your brand but don’t know that you have a solution to their problem? Use customer stories that demonstrate that you’ve solved similar problems for others. Are they almost ready to buy but aren’t sure who to buy from? Use content that compares you to your competitors or content that implies a recommendation. Include case studies and examples of how your ideas were applied successfully.

Make it clear — it’s not about you!

When considering your content, your audience is asking themselves one question: Why should I care? They are only engaging with you because they believe there’s something in it for them. You need to make it clear that you appreciate that, and that your content has been created specifically because it has something in it for them.

For more information

• Social Media Content: 10 Ways to Energize Your Conversation
• Social Media Examiner: Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle
• Survey of B2B Buyers’ Use of Social Media

When creating a thought leadership marketing strategy, you should focus first on three elements: customers, competition, and content. In this post I’ll give a brief overview on what you need to think about these elements and go into more detail on each one in my next three posts.

Customers

Who are your customers, and what are their information needs? I find that a lot of companies, particularly small and mid-sized companies, don’t have a really clear picture of their customers. By that I mean, what their title is, what their function is, what kind of people they are, what issues keep them awake at night — a really detailed description of their customer. I find that going through the process of developing buyer personas to create a clear picture of your customers to be well worth the effort.

Then once you’ve clearly identified your potential customers, you need to think about their information needs. What do they need to know, and when? There are various ways to determine this, but I find that having conversations with your salespeople (heaven forbid) about it can be a fruitful and inexpensive means for coming up with some answers.

Competition

Thought leadership marketing is actually a competitive positioning technique. By that I mean that what you are trying to do is position your firm as a thought leader on some topic or topics to set yourself apart from your competition in those topic areas. Of course, you want to choose a topic area that’s related to your core business goals. Never forget that your ultimate goal is to grow your business, and that positioning your firm as a thought leader is a technique to help you achieve that goal.

So, in the area you want to be a thought leader, who is your competition, and what are they doing to hold a thought leadership position? If your competitors aren’t doing much, it can be relatively easy to gain that thought leadership position. If they’re doing a lot, you’ll have to be prepared to make a concerted effort, or maybe you need to narrow the topic area in which you’re looking to position yourself. Either way, you need to know what your competition is doing and how they are perceived by the marketplace.

Content

Thought leadership marketing is executed through content. You’re seen as a thought leader by what you’ve written in your blog or on your website or in magazines or books, etc. and by what you’ve said — in webinars or at events or even person-to-person. So, what content do you need to position yourself as a thought leader? The answer, of course, depends on what you’ve learned when you’ve determined what your prospective customer’s informational needs are and what your competition is doing.

Once you clearly understand your customers and your competition you need to determine the following:

• What content choices are possible (check out the Content Marketing Playbook)?
• What content types work best in your marketplace (where do your prospects hang out)?
• What content types are best for achieving your marketing goals?
• What types of content are you capable of producing (budget, effort, skill)?

By focusing on customers, competition, and content you’ll be well on your way to creating a great thought leadership marketing strategy. In our next blog we’ll go into more detail about what you need to do to understand your customer’s information needs.

For more information

• Adele Revella’s Buyer Persona Blog
• The Branding Blog on Brand Positioning
• Junta42′s Content Marketing Playbook

No problem can withstand the assault of sustained thinking. — Voltaire

It may be obvious, but I’ll say it anyway: One of the first things you need to do to build a thought leadership marketing position is think. Now most of us think on occasion, but for you to position yourself as a thought leader, you have to do a fair amount of it. And you can actually practice thinking — there are numerous tools and techniques that can help.

I’ve listed 10 books that offer great techniques for improving your capacity to think. So unless you’re already a great thinker, check out a couple of these. And remember to practice every chance you get.

• Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell
• Cracking Creativity: The Secrets of Creative Genius by Michael Michalko
• Creativity Revealed: Discovering the Source of Inspiration by Scott Jeffrey
• Creativity Unlimited: Thinking Inside the Box for Business Innovation by Micael Dahlen
• How to Get Ideas by Jack Foster
• Innovation to the Core: A Blueprint for Transforming the Way Your Company Innovates by Peter Skarzynski
• Six Thinking Hats by Edward de Bono
• The Innovator’s Toolkit: 50+ Techniques for Predictable and Sustainable Organic Growth by David Silverstein, Philip Samuel, and Neil DeCarlo
• Think Better: An Innovator’s Guide to Productive Thinking by Tim Hurson
• ThinkerToys: A Handbook of Creative Thinking Techniques by Michael Michalko

More Information on Thinking

• Thinking Like a Genius
• The Thinking Page
• Creative Thinking Techniques

Online video is fast becoming a marketing staple. According to research by Unico, fifty-five percent of marketers are currently using videos, with another 20% planning to use them in the next 12 months. Video is a particularly good tool for showcasing brief snippets of thought leadership. It engages your audience in ways that images and words cannot. And for that reason alone, you should add it to your mix of thought leadership marketing methods.

I just came across a fascinating website for creating video slideshows — animoto. You can create a 30-second video for free; for $30 a year you’re not limited to 30 seconds; and for $249 a year you can remove all the references to animoto and make the video totally your own. It’s a great tool for those on a very tight budget or those just learning how to implement video in blogs or websites (yeah, that’s me raising my hand).

The tool takes graphics or slides or even short video clips and creates quick, professional looking videos. You can edit the videos, add text, add music, and even remix to automatically create a different version using the same images.

I created the video above very easily using the automated tools of the animoto software and images that we already had of content we’ve created.

There are other free video tools available that I have yet to try. Screenr lets you record your computer screen. You can easily create a video of a slide presentation or demonstrate how to use an online tool. Pixorial and JayCut are free tools for editing your videos online, adding text or special effects. So take a look at these tools and let me know how they work for you.

More Information on Video

• Eight Ways to Use Video to Boost Your Marketing
• Online Video Best Practices
• Videomaker: Your Guide to Creating and Publishing Great Video
• Video Production Tips

We just launched the first issue of our free monthly newsletter, B2B Content Marketing. The newsletter offers tips that will help you generate and nurture leads, improve customer retention, and position your firm as a thought leader in your market. B2B Content Marketing features include the following:

• Custom Content, where you’ll discover best practices for writing, editing, designing, producing, and distributing great content, both online and in print;
• Content Critique, where you’ll learn what works and what doesn’t with our detailed analysis of a firm’s content marketing practices;
• New Research, where you’ll get the latest information on B2B content marketing best practices; and
• Helpful Links, where you’ll be linked to sources of content marketing best practices, events, blogs, and more.

So be sure to check it out and subscribe today (if you subscribe now we’ll send you a copy of our forthcoming e-book, Building Your Brand with Thought Leadership Marketing as soon as it’s published).

Junta42 has done it again. If you’re not familiar with them, Junta42 is a content marketing firm that publishes some of the best information on content marketing in the profession. And they’ve just released a new white paper on engagement that is must reading. Written by Junta42′s founder, Joe Pulizzi, and Keith Weigold of Nutlug, the white paper tells you why engagement is important to you and your customers and how to use engagement in your marketing strategy and measure whether you’ve succeeded or not.

Engagement: Understanding It, Achieving It, Measuring It outlines a six-step plan for implementing an engagement strategy:

1. Define engagement — first for your customers, then for your brand.
2. List objectives — first for your brand, then for your customers—that can be influenced by engagement.
3. Choose channels that are most likely to achieve your marketing communication objectives via engagement — print media, digital media, social media, speaking, etc.
4. Experiment with different marketing communication efforts to achieve engagement — white papers, newsletters, books, etc.
5. Set metrics in place to measure your engagement efforts — linked to your objectives.
6. Learn, strategize, tweak, experiment, test, refine, repeat.

Engagement and Thought Leadership Marketing

Effective thought leadership marketing requires that you create great content to engage your audience (prospects and customers). Engagement means that your content got their attention. Are you trying to educate them? Maybe you point out an industry trend so they’re better prepared for the future. Or are you trying to demonstrate that you have a certain expertise? Maybe you offer them a solution to a problem they face they hadn’t thought of. How you engage your audience should be determined by what you want to accomplish.

Whatever thought leadership content you publish, your audience will appreciate the value you’ve provided. They’ll usually show this appreciation by engaging with you in various ways—subscribing to your newsletter, downloading your white papers, buying your book, commenting on your blog, retweeting your tweets. You’ll develop a relationship that connects you. Eventually this connection, this engagement, will lead your audience to trust you, rely on you, and cause them to act in your favor (buy from you or recommend you).

Engagement is key to a successful thought leadership marketing strategy. So follow the steps outlined above and you’ll be well on your way toward building that trusted relationship you’re looking for.

More Information on Engagement

• Are We Engaged Yet? — Katie Delahaye Paine
• Get Ready to Engage with the Engagement Metric — Pete Blackshaw
• The Engagement Principles — Tom Chandler