Guest blogger Chris Bagnall, managing director for DWA, questions whether there is the right share on the time, effort and budget spent creating content versus promoting it

What content can do
The Internet has fundamentally changed the traditional B2B sales and marketing process. Prospective customers for a huge percentage of products and services can access a wide range of information to aid their purchasing decisions often without learning about a company through direct dialogue. The amount of content available online to aid decisions is vast but is it necessarily in the right format to be consumed by your audience and can they find it easily?

New age marketing puts content at the core of a marketing programme and the level of measurable response generated from a campaign is directly related to the usefulness and relevance to prospects. It must address their needs by showing them how a company can solve their business problems. And it needs to position a company as a unique and preferred player in its market.

Is it in the right format?
Historically, the format that content is created in has, on the whole, not taken into account how all users want to consume information. For example, a company conducts some research into a relevant issue within their market and posts the results on their website in the form of a downloadable written document. This format forces the reader to read it but what if they would prefer to listen to a synopsis of key results through a downloadable audio podcast? Why not create a short webcast of the results featuring a couple of company execs? These additional content formats open up the possibilities for further syndication and promotional opportunities. If you always produce content in one or two formats then you will alienate a percentage of your audience.

Promoting content
Traditional methods of promoting content have relied on the likes of direct mail, email to prospect databases and PR. However, this is not enough for today’s web 2.0 needs. The promotional aspects to consider nowadays are vast. Areas such as search, social, content syndication and aggregator engines, the trade media and their routes to their online market, mobile and email combined with the explosion of video content online multiplies the choices even further.

Another important aspect to consider is the balance of how much time and budget is assigned to the creation of content versus the promotion of it. Again I see a huge amount of great content produced and then the promotional aspect of a campaign is limited to something like a prospect email campaign and a press release. This simply isn’t enough in today’s world.

By thinking about the content first, creating it and then finding places to promote it, we are ignoring where people are sourcing their information and their preferences of consumption. If we think about these aspects first, where people are going, how they consume and their preferred method of delivery, we can then create something that is tailored and fits multiple scenarios.

One final point of importance to mention is how you can leverage the relationship that the media has with its audience and your prospects to build credibility for your own messaging. By creating content in conjunction with one of these you are exploiting this relationship, piggy backing their credibility and also giving yourself
a more cost efficient route to both creation and promotion.

Chrisb@dwamedia.com