Ardath Albee

Arguably, content strategy is most often thought of as a marketing application. That's a great start, but it doesn't do the practice justice. In fact, that view tends to cause siloed efforts and limit the potential of content strategy.

Content is a part of everything a business does in regards to communicating with prospects, customers, and the industries their offerings serve.

Content is anything that says something about your company, brand, expertise, or point of view that forms an impression, including:

• email
• video
• articles
• white papers
• blog posts
• blog comments
• conversations
• trade show swag
• call scripts
• sales collateral
• webinars
• advertising
• conference presentations
• newsletters
• direct mail
• solution briefs
• Tweets
• status updates
• discussion forum participation
• infographics
• ...

During my keynote at the B2B Content 2 Conversion conference on Tuesday, one of the questions the audience asked was about a slide I used when discussing how to create a content flow. To sum it up, I suggested that each "touch" should be based on three components:

• The question your content will answer for a persona.
• The answer to the question that becomes the content asset.
• A call to action (CTA)

I was asked to elaborate on what I meant by a call to action.

The normal response to the "call to action" mandate is inserting a "have a sales rep call me" or some other version of pushing the sales conversation. But, this is not helpful during much of the marketing process.

Marketers need to reframe the way they think about the CTA, flipping it from what they ultimately want (qualified leads that will buy from their sales team) to what will be helpful to their...

When B2B companies develop and implement a content marketing strategy it should be obvious that big change is afoot. Not just for marketers, but for everyone involved in the demand-to-revenue generation process. The most pivotal thing that needs to change in parallel across roles is the "conversation."

There are at least 3 types of conversations that will change in the marketing-to-sales process when a full-bodied, buyer-focused content strategy is put in place.

Content Conversations: These are the conversations that are generated by the valuable ideas that marketing content shares to answer questions buyers have during each stage of buying.

In fact, when a content marketing strategy is implemented, the word "campaign" should be stricken from the company's lexicon. It's no longer a stop and start endeavor, but a...

One of the beautiful things about digital B2B marketing is the ability to attribute behavior and engagement for prospects across a variety of channels that may be included in our marketing mix. Where things get a bit sticky is determining how attribution figures into revenue generation. For a simple transactional sale, this may be easier as sales cycles are shorter and less clicks are usually required. But, for a complex sale, attribution becomes a bigger challenge.

The mandate for B2B marketers today is to prove that their online marketing programs are contributing to downstream revenues. Determining how attribution is used can vary those results by quite a bit.

Take the example that Adobe uncovered in their recent report, Why Marketers Aren't Giving Social the Recognition it Deserves. [PDF] The difference for retail companies that...