So, what needs to change? Because something needs to change in the way-- here's the way we see, most often, content marketing getting rolled out into a business, and maybe this will ring true for your particular business.
So what happens is, we have this thing called marketing, and we're all in marketing, right? We start in marketing, maybe we report into marketing, maybe marketing is something that we have to deal with. But there's this thing called marketing, and it provides advertising and brochures and all kinds of different ways to persuade customers that our solution is best.
And then somebody goes to a conference or they hear Joe Pulizzi talk, or they hear something and they go, hey, this content marketing idea might be something we want to explore.
So we go great, we're going to create a content marketing team, or we're going to create a content marketing approach within our marketing group.
And then here's what happens. Marketing says I have a campaign, and I'm going to create this wonderful campaign. And they say we need assets, Mr. Content Marketing Person and the content marketing team goes, OK well, we'll create some assets for you.
We'll create a blog post, we'll create a white paper, we'll create an info-graphic, we'll have the agency do that. And they create those assets to support that campaign. And then what happens is the marketing team says, hey, we're going to build a new website.
We need assets, content marketing team. And the content marketing team says, OK well we'll create some more blog posts, and we'll create this interview with a customer, and we'll create this calculator that the agency's been bugging me to do all this time.
We'll create these assets for you to support the new website design because it'll look pretty in the new section of the website. And then the marketing team says, hey we're going to do this other campaign in the third quarter, we need some assets. And the content marketing team goes,
OK, and they're tired at this point. They say, OK, well we'll create this wonderful blog post, because we need to create another blog post, and we'll create yet another white paper,
and we'll create this e-mail thing that we try and create, and maybe we'll do this weird thing with the cloud or something like that. And everybody goes, yay, that's going to support the campaign in the third quarter.
And then by the time the fourth quarter campaign rolls around, everybody is really tired, and so we'll say OK, we'll create two more white papers, and we'll create another blog post, and we'll create an interview with the CEO, and that's our year. And so look at what you have on the screen there, what is it?
This is what we've done. We've submitted and basically supported campaign-based marketing, and created what? A disconnected pile of assets. None of them are connected, because why? We just haven't been able to connect them. The one white paper we created in the first quarter, it was really good. The rest, not so much. The blog that we created? Yeah, it was good. But it was one blog post, and we never reran it. There's no strategic effect.
There's no strategic effect. And the reason is, is because it's not a program. It's merely a different way of producing different kinds of marketing collateral for our organization. So, therefore, it's not a program, and thus it's not a process, and thus we find difficulty in measuring it. This is the reason that most content marketing initiatives fail, is because we look at it as an alternative form of sales and marketing collateral rather than an approach to build an asset or an audience.
And what do we do with all those assets? Well quite frankly, if we're in B2B, we put them into a resource that's neither. It's neither resource nor really a center of anything.
We build this, right? We put all those assets in because we have a CMS system, we dump them all into a resource center. And this resource center is quite lovely in fact. It's got a guy who's leaning back, because of course you have to have a stock footage image of a guy leaning back in his chair, and you-- we are the experts, you have to have a call to action in this resource center because sales want a call to action in the resource center.
And of course, we have resources and it conforms to our website design, and basically, we organize it by content type. Check out our white papers. You need to check out our white papers, they're not sales at all,
and our webinars are like minutes long, and all of that, and we don't know why we have a link to the social channels, but the social people will be mad if we don't have a link to the social channels, so we put one in there and we make it orange because, you know, for the honor of Joe or something like that. And then because we can, we pull in the content from the blog into an RSS feed, and we put it in the right rail because that will look way better from a design perspective. And this is the way we approach content marketing, and it's not working.
It's not working, because what does it do? It leaves us with questions. Questions such as, should we gate and ungate our content?
If you're asking yourself if you should gate or ungate content, you do not have a content marketing strategy. You have a collateral strategy in which you're trying to figure out how much of your content is worth extracting data from, and you're probably struggling with that decision. And we're asking ourselves, why do we have a blog? What is it even for? Is it good, is it adding value?
We're asking ourselves does social matter? We're asking if anything is working? What's the ROI, we're saying to ourselves, what is the ROI of this particular program, and it's not a program. And so what if we can change-- and by the way, B2C is no different.
B2C doesn't have the resource center, what they have is the microsite, the campaign microsite, where, yay, we're storytellers now. And if you're looking for our TV ads, yeah, so are we, our agency hasn't told us where it is. We're trying to figure out what's connected. How do we connect these microsites to a bigger story? How do we create purpose? How do we actually measure what we're doing? Again, the same question that B2B is asking, which is where's the ROI?
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