A Deep(er) Dive Into Content Marketing Basics — Webinar and Q&A with Joe Pulizzi of Junta42
By Adam Needles, on March 26th, 2010
We’ve recently expanded the popular B2B Marketing University series to include a monthly Webinar component — which we’re calling our ‘Virtual 201′ sessions. In these sessions, we take a deeper dive into specific topics that both a.) build on the B2B marketing basics and b.) can help you take your skill set as a B2B marketer to the next level.
The first webinar in this new series — held earlier this week — was titled, “Content Marketing Basics: Improving the Success of Your B2B Marketing Campaign.” It focused in part on the context surrounding the evolution and importance of having a ‘holistic’ content marketing strategy (i.e., why ‘all eyes’ are on B2B content marketing). It also identified key strategies for finding success with content marketing.
Joe Pulizzi, founder and Chief Content Officer of Junta42, as well as co-author of Get Content Get Customers, joined me for this Webinar. His recommendations and the dialogue with Joe were great, and so I wanted to share with you some of the highlights.
We also had many great audience questions — so many that we weren’t able to tackle all of them in the timeframe — so Joe and I took notes on the questions and are presenting an even deep(er) dive here.
Webinar Highlights
First, a quick overview of the core presentations, which we delivered in two parts:
> Context for content marketing: I opened the session with several slides that explain why the average B2B marketer increased his/her budget for custom content to nearly 32% of total budget in 2009, according to a report by the Custom Publishing council. I highlighted the fact that a changing B2B marketing environment — where the buyer is more empowered and in control than ever before — is pushing marketers to adopt new approaches, especially content marketing. There is a growing body of research that suggests that B2B buyers are doing more of the education for their buying cycles online and on their own time, versus calling a live salesperson. Thus, they are consuming large amounts of substantive content — particularly peer-authored content — to form initial opinions and to conduct early assessment of where they might find solutions to their problems. “[I]t’s common to take … partially defined need and flesh it out through online research,” explained Canadian Web firm Enquiro in a 2009 report as part of The Buyersphere Project. “The result of the research is fundamental in determining potential candidates, defining comparison criteria and formalizing the purchase plan.” I also highlighted how content marketing, lead management and marketing automation work together as critical elements in building buyer-centric demand generation programs.
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