Good article on Content Marketing

I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Jim Burns, CEO of Avitage, in a podcast.  I asked Jim for an example of why great content is so important.  ”Can you share an example, Jim?”  Jim calls content the bait on the your hook.  Or the gas in your sports car. Without it you catch no fish and your sports car won’t move.

Jim’s well-crafted response makes a key point.  Great, compelling and remarkable content is much more important than which marketing automation platform you choose.

JB:   Sure.  This is a specific example, but frankly it’s so universal I think it’s extremely relevant.

Most people think that the marketing automation technology itself is going to start to address the problems of generating leads and tracking that lead activity.

Working with a company that implemented this almost two years ago, but they did not have a defined program in place.  They didn’t define what a lead was, for example.  They didn’t define a nurturing plan, they did not define even a scoring plan.  In fact, what they said was when we send something out if a buyer clicks that’s a lead.  And that lead was instantly dumped into salesforce.com and the little bell rang for the salesperson, you’ve got a lead, and as you can imagine salesperson came to realize that those were not what we would call sales ready leads.  As a result, a little over 14 months later they had virtually no pipeline for new business.

In the last six months we’ve been helping them with a series of efforts around producing content — first defining what leads are and what it means to be a sales ready lead, secondly defining a nurturing process that also involved inserting a telesales group in the middle between the click from some campaign and the handoff to sales, but also mapping out a seven-step nurturing process and building out the content.  And now they’re starting to get to a point where they’ll have 10 to 12 marketing qualified leads a week and building.  So this is a dramatic change from just a few months ago after 14 months of — really of drought despite the investment.  And I think that’s very, very common.

We think the technology’s going to solve the problem and it isn’t.  It requires a process, it requires a program, and that I think of marketing automation and fishing with a hook, but the content is the bait.  And that’s the key.  Without the content, you’re not going to get people clicking on your various links to give you the information you need.

Jeff Ogden, the Fearless Competitor, is the President of Find New Customers.  He’s been called the guru of lead generation and his white paper, How to Find New Customers has received universal acclaim.  He can be reached at 516-284-4930 or [email protected]