My 15 Minutes of Fame: Is Your Content Marketing Keeping Pace with Your Buyers?

Do you remember Moore’s Law?

Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, introduced this simple premise in 1965: transistor and computer-processing power would double every year. You have to admit, what we can do today with an Apple iPad versus computing power in the 1960’s is amazing.

Something similar is going on in the world of content marketing. You need to know about it. The knowledge power of buyers is growing every year. Here is what I believe I have been witnessing in buyer interviews of late:

The ability to consume, discern, assimilate, and make use of content on the part of buyers is doubling every year.

Do you think the vendor referenced has kept paced with this buyer’s knowledge level? This Senior Director’s quote says it all to me.

If content your organization produces is not keeping pace with buyers than your organization will not make the short list.

The Big Shift

A big shift has happened in the last two to three years. The focus initially was on consuming content. After the introduction of such technology as the Apple iPad as well as social platforms, buyers began evolving their abilities in three additional areas:

Discern: buyers today are doubling their ability each year to determine if a piece of content will be useful or not – sometimes in a matter of seconds.
Assimilate: once buyers make the discernment that content is useful, they begin to assimilate it into their environment and become content curators.
Make use of: here is the big shift from my perspective. Buyers are now using content to create new works to get their initiatives on the short list of funding.

Let me expand on this last point. In the 1990’s, I was introduced to the concept of derivative works by Ernst & Young. At this time, E & Y was implementing a Business Information & Knowledge Center. A key function was sending alerts to consultants on relevant journal articles. (Yes, there were alerts before Google!) Consultants would use these published journal articles to create new briefs for their clients – which we called derivative works. What is happening today is that buyers are now doing the same.

Buyers make use of content they have acquired, assimilated, and curated to create new works, which further their efforts.

Here is how one interviewee put it to me:

“What I do is collect and review a lot of information. I spend time making sense of it and taking out the pieces, I need. Then I prepare a report, using the information I gathered, with recommendations to give to the team on how we may want to proceed.”

Vice President, Strategic IT Planning

Are you getting this? This Vice President is not only looking for content, which informs but also to create briefs that support a position or point of view!

How Do We Keep Pace?

In my previous article entitled Content Marketing: Stuck at 36%, I touched upon how only 36% of businesses from a CMI survey believed their content is effective.

One major reason why content is ineffective is due to not keeping pace with the knowledge level of buyers.

This brings us to the question of - how do we keep pace?

There are four key elements to consider:

Understanding of your buyers: insight into the knowledge level of your buyers is best obtained from third party buyer research. My point of view: do not skimp here.
Develop a strategy: in my previous article entitled Content Marketing: Are You Part of the 38%?, I touched upon only 38% of surveyed businesses having a content strategy. My point of view: take time to formulate a content strategy based on buyer research – do not make it up.
Put structure in place: be purposeful by creating an Internal Content Marketing Agency. My point of view : do not make content marketing an orphan child.
Acquire talent: get the right content creation talent with the right skills. Do the proper talent assessment. My point of view: adding a line to an existing job description role and calling someone a content marketer will not work.