Blogs

We continually look for signs that thought leadership marketing is gaining adherents outside of professional services.  The most recent nugget we’ve seen is one from Borrell Associates, a decade-old company you probably haven’t heard of unless you’re in the newspaper business. (They are a research firm that tracks local advertising spending, especially online.)
 
Here it is: $16 billion will be spent on email marketing in 2011 (up 9% from this year), especially emails that come with white papers attached or linked.  “White paper marketing is a major contributor to its popularity – especially among B2B advertisers,” says a Borrell press release issued in August. (My favorite factoid about white paper marketing was buried in the release.) 
 
Another fact caught my attention: $5.6 billion will be spent on streaming video, which would be a whopping 60% higher than the money U.S. marketers spend this year on online videos. I imagine some of these videos are educational, not pure entertainment. Why are advertisers crazy about online videos? Borrell says it's cheap and many advertisers are rolling their own today.
 
Of course, not all or perhaps even most video is educationally oriented content of the thought leadership type. (I wouldn’t categorize Lady Gaga videos that way unless you wanted to call it sex education.) So perhaps we can’t add the entire $5.6 billion to online thought leadership marketing spending.
 
I'd be interested to know what types of national advertisers are spending heavily on email-based white papers. But I truly doubt they’re all professional firms. But I guess you have to buy the report to know. Maybe later.

In my last post I said that developing fewer but more substantive points of view (sometimes even just one) is much more likely to make the phone ring than letting a hundred points of light shine in your firm. That’s for sure. 

But when you place your bets on fewer but deeper points of view, you will soon need someone who’s responsible for the end-to-end process of developing and selling a big idea.

In an article we published in June we explained why we think that topic microsites will supersede white papers for B2B marketing (see here). In my last couple of posts I showed the many different elements that have been incorporated into some emerging topic microsites (here) and explained which characteristics are essential (here). One of those essential characteristics is an in-depth point of view.

In this post, I’ll go into a little more detail and explain why articles alone aren’t enough and why they need to congregate around an overarching point of view.

Last month I explained the second of five factors behind companies that excel at thought leadership marketing: patience for the time it takes to develop a compelling point of view and attract an audience to it. (The first factor was a huge desire to distinguish one’s offering on the basis of possessing unique expertise.)

I find the third success factor rarer than the first two: focus.  By this I mean a company’s ability to invest its content development and marketing resources in fewer points of view rather than more.  Many fewer, in fact.

 In the last post I listed some of the elements that can feature on a topic microsite including blogs, animated graphics and videos. And I showed how some existing microsites vary widely in the components they include. I don’t think any one of those sites has the right combination of components to maximize traffic and engagement, so in this post, I am going to explain which elements are essential.

We expect that in B2B marketing, white papers are going to be replaced by topic microsites. It won’t happen overnight, but there are so many advantages, both to the reader and to the authors, that it will happen eventually.

Among emerging microsites, each comprises a different assemblage of components. Let's take a closer look.

We believe that topic microsites will ultimately eclipse white papers and other downloadable media as the primary channel for point-of-view dissemination. Among the reasons for this are that a web page is a much more powerful medium to convey information with. Things you can do with a web page that you can’t do with a pdf include:

• Enlargeable, animated and interactive graphics
• Hyperlinks to later articles, as well as to earlier ones
• Readers’ comments and responses to them
• Video and podcast excerpts and supplements
• Live feeds of blogs and articles on the topic from other sites
• Reader polls and surveys

(You can read a fuller explanation of topic microsites here.)

Nonetheless, the market is moving only slowly away from distributed white papers towards these more powerful online destinations. Most topic microsites that have emerged so far take advantage of only a fraction of the tools that can make them more engaging for readers and prospective customers.

I was at MIT the other day listening to the CEO of a small technology company discussing his company's security product when a member of the audience asked him about "cloud governance" and I saw the CEO's head explode.

Good marketing generates many leads. It also gets a firm recognized by companies that don’t need help at the moment but will in the future, what marketers call “market awareness.”

That's the value of good marketing. Great marketing produces an abundance of leads – many more than a firm can handle at the time. It also spawns widespread awareness. But great marketing generates two other things that are even more important: the discretion to work only with clients who share your vision and values, and the dignity of knowing you can stick to your principles. 

We recently pondered the hazards of plagiarism after someone took some of our material for their own blog. Now I think I have a much better understanding of why it’s bad for everyone, especially the reader. And I’d like to share my conclusions.