It’s not a content creation problem — it’s the finishing that’s broken

Weary of the inbound marketing pablum?

You’ve heard it all. You’ve read the annual surveys (or actually probably seen the bar charts) that identify the gap between content marketing aspirations and execution.

Aside from lack of defined strategy, the biggest challenge is said to be content creation.

Based on my experience working with B2B companies — mostly in the industrial manufacturing space — I disagree.

Creating content is easy. Finishing content is an often insurmountable challenge.

Ptolemaic vs. Copernican

For clarity, there’s an important difference between great content and the ocean of average content that floods the ether of the internet.

Poorly conceived articles and ebooks that aren’t woven contextually into a plan are digital chaff. And there’s an abundance of poor writing — not only loaded with gramatical errors, but poorly developed prose that makes reading them feel like work.

Basic writing skill is the table stakes of digital marketing — and many companies have figured out how to leverage contract writers, under-employed journalists and in-house staff to transfer the deep annecdotal and experiential knowledge of internal technical experts into satisfactorily written content. In fact there are even guidelines for doing just that — like Joe Griffin’s post 3 Best Practices to Nurture a Content Writer Into an Industry Expert. No longer are the classic “we’re not writers” and “we don’t have time” arguments legitimate.

Putting the words to paper (or a screen) and functional prose are no longer barriers.

Instead tortuous editing and review now stand between companies and great content. And increasingly I see content so abused during the editing and approval process that potentially great drafts emerge as mediocre, repetitive and uninspired final versions.

As dreadful as that may be, worse yet is the organizational energy that’s expended on the process. It’s enervating — enough in many cases to cause companies to reduce blog publishing frequency and abandon the introduction of substantive new “offers.”

What’s behind this? Certainly there’s always one more comma over which we might quibble. But even the most obsessive recognize there’s a point of diminishing return — and the ability to quickly edit and update digital content even after publishing takes the sting out of that compared to old days of thousands invested in boxes of printed materials.

In my experience the cause is actually culture and mindset. And it’s almost always the product of the C-Suite attitudes.

Execs, especially those that founded or have professionally grown up in companies, see the world as a universe which exists around their company. In this Ptolemaic model, the company and it’s products, expertise and innovation are fundamental to the universe in which they operate.

Content is created from that perspective. It’s obsessively focused on features, benefits and ideas which the company believes are particularly important, and/or it’s limited by strong opinions on that on which the company is qualified to opine. (The latter is particularly common in companies founded and run by engineers.)

The result is simply market noise as Jay Acunzo recently wrote on the Marketing Insiders blog. It’s a constrained and, frankly, narcissistic view which fundamentally clashes with buyers who have their own Ptolemaic model.

Stop driving a wedge

As a brand, it can be tempting to focus on topics that you’re interested in but which aren’t necessarily of interest to your audience. For example, you may be intrigued with industry trends and decide to create blog posts, white papers, infographics, etc., about them. But if they don’t resonate with your audience, you’re going to see little to no effectiveness. In some cases, it can even drive a wedge between you and your audience. Neil Patel via Lisa Beets & Content Marketing Institute

This creates a vicious cycle.

1. Execs skeptical of content marketing, and unwilling to take a full day with their team to participate in a workshop to understand the premise and keys to success, often reject the content that would be successful.
2. Instead they insist on more of the same tired topics, often gussied up to look fresh. The typical rational is the need to protect the brand. This justifies internal hesitance but with little market impact. The brand that industrial buyers care about is the experience of purchase, delivery, commissioning, and especially the long-term operational value. The branding aesthetics often associated with brand are irrelevant to the buyers. It’s the business equivalent of carefully ordering a diet coke with the supersized double quarter pounder meal.
3. Skittish about bringing insightful articles for review, or loathe to consume weeks of marketing staff time in arduous editing projects (that reduce valuable offers to content rubble) marketing teams slowly reduce publishing frequencies.
4. Between inadequate frequency/volume and mediocre or counterproductive content, the effort delivers minimal impact.
5. Execs announce that their instincts were correct — people in their industry just don’t use the internet to research and buy….and then they turn back to Google to go back to their research on their topic du jour.
6. The company goes back to simply blasting out product pitches.

To break this cycle companies must become Copernican in their content creation.

Your own buyer behaviors are no different than your prospects’. They want solutions to their problems, when they want them, in the form that they want. What some company wants to tell them is, well, let’s just say irrelevant.

Execs need to lead or follow — not micromanage

Leadership teams either must participate in a robust content creation workshop, embrace the approach and empower their teams to experiment….or they need to recuse themselves from all decisions regarding content beyond establishing high level brand expectations.

That means no sniping over grammar; no “why’d you say that?”; no “we’re not expert on that!”; no “that’s not the way buyers think of us!”; and especially no “take that post down now!”

The importance of culture in companies isn’t mystery. It’s an incredibly powerful, or corrosive force. And it’s most impacted by managements actions. No frequency of spoken support for digital initiatives and content marketing will trump even just a couple instances of panicked reaction.

The irony in industrial manufacturers

The especially ironic element of this is the dissonance between the way B2B companies often manage their own R&D and the approach to content approvals.

R&D involves experimentation and failure. It involves betas with known shortcomings. Agile models and minimum viable products are increasingly common. The engineers and executives in manufacturing companies instinctively understand and accept this. It’s a badge of honor in many cases rather than a shortcoming.

Put an article on the web, however, and oh my how the perspective changes. (For the record I’m not talking about wrong, misleading or crappy stuff. I’m talking about quality, informative information that covers topics of interest to the company’s potential buyers — but beyond the range of the company’s traditional promotion or from perspectives that are different. Want to visualize the difference? Check out Hugh MacLeod’s brilliant piece here.)

A couple examples will illustrate this dissonance which I’ve seen in companies with vibrant R&D and robust product roadmaps that have, in their content program:

• Seven really, really strong content offers lay nearly complete yet unfinished for more than a year as traffic stagnates and lead gen drops. The only barrier? One final review and blessing.
• Frantically unpublished a blog post which answered a common question — clarifying the difference between two solutions with similar and often conflated names. The rationale? The chairman said “We only make one of those, so we can’t talk about the other!”

Will the horse drink?

That’s why a workshop with management can be so effective. Putting them in the position of the content consumer (which they all are — whether researching and buying capital equipment for their own operations, or searching for insights from which they’ll draw inspiration for their innovations to solve new problems) the light bulb often comes on. They’ll recognize the extensive research they do every day without ever being in the 3% segment of a market that’s ready to buy any given product/service. That’s leading the horse to the water.

Then the key is to vigorously explore the topics that their buyers wrestle with during the 97% of the time they’re looking for insights but disinterested in buying. They visualize themselves searching for information and insights — and more empathetically understand the value they might bring to their buyers.

It may, in fact, be the only real way to help them adapt their perspective and embrace their prospects’.

We are not great reasoners. Most people don’t like to think at all, or like to think as little as possible. And by most, I mean roughly 70 percent of the population. Even the rest seem to devote a lot of their resources to justifying beliefs that they want to hold, as opposed to forming credible beliefs based only on fact. Steven Sloman on Forming Opinions

Beyond Content Marketing Buy-in

Lots has been written about the importance of senior executive buy-in to the concept of content marketing. It’s largely valid.

But the finishing problem illustrates lack of another critical type of buy-in — support of the execution tactics.

Some might argue that senior management should only engage on marketing at the strategic level and leave execution and tactics to the team. I’d fully agree.

The problem is that they don’t. While most don’t explicitly direct how to create content, both the tortuous editing process and the occasional panicked “take that post down” implicitly micro-manage the process.

Therefore executive buy-in needs to be very specifically about the type and breadth of topics to be covered in addition to the principal of content creation.

And that’s a step that’s almost always missed once the high level approach is blessed.

Stop whining about content creation and focus on content completion

Here’s the bottom line.

Marketing departments can’t change this. As your content creation latitude and review become increasingly restricted and laborious, regrettably you’ll have to find another approach. It’s a death spiral.

Want to avoid that? Have clear understandings with management that clarify the scope and type of content. Ideally they’ll be engaged productively, contributing content, ideas, interviews and introductions to industry leaders who will contribute worthwhile insights.

At least they need to be disengaged to let you work.