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So when an authority like Marketo weighs in on why a steady stream of great content is key to driving B2B revenue today, we’ll pay attention.

Marketo is a leader in marketing automation (MA), the software that more and more companies use today to make their marketing teams more measurable and accountable, more engaged with customers and better enabled to scale time and resources. In other words, it makes the companies that use it better at marketing and selling. And it’s been good for Marketo, and for Eloqua, to name the two biggies in MA.  If the trend continues, according to Gartner, money spent on this type of software is projected to exceed corporate IT budgets by 2015. 

At Write Angle, we were struck by something Marketo had to say via a recent post by Heidi Bullock: “Technology is awesome, but it really is only as good as the people who implement it and manage it on a day-to-day basis. That’s why it is important to think about your team structure when putting software systems in place”.

So what was first on the team list they cited? It was the day-to-day manager of content.

No matter which member of your team is tapped for the job, the skill-set is the same: It must be someone who can conceive and create a steady stream of compelling content, from written web copy, case studies or white papers to engaging video that showcases your value proposition from all angles — and re-purposes this content across all media and platforms. Whether you have the talent on hand for this key task, or choose to outsource to a content writing service, the overarching need for marketing content in today’s content-marketing world is clear.  The question is: How clear is your content today and how do you know for sure?

And good riddance

It’s not often that you sit through a webinar and come away with some real insights.  Fortunately, today’s webinar conducted by Mintigo on improved lead generation through “Content Intelligence” delivered — and hit on some important truisms facing marketers.

As a company that espouses the “power of relevant marketing”, Mintigo struck a chord.  Zeroing in on the content marketing deluge – i.e. “crap” – that is drowning customers and prospects, the Mintigo folks got to the heart of the matter: effective content cannot just entertain and inform, it must contain material that “authentically matters to the people you’re trying to reach”.

So how do you make this determination? It boils down to segmenting your content based on your prospects’ identifiable traits and self-proclaimed areas of interest.   “Content Intelligence” uses more personalized and relevant communication to clusters of targeted prospects based on big data analysis of multiple sources (think websites visited, news preferences, blogs read, social postings and more).  By extracting the needs and interests of prospects, you can segment them into interest groups, clusters and personas.

Make no mistake, this is hard work.  And Mintigo is the first to say so despite the fact they offer up what they declare to be the world’s first Customer Search Engine that automates a lot of the heavy lifting involved.

One of the key challenges of content marketing boils down to producing enough fresh content – and figuring out what topics to communicate – to continually engage targeted prospects with information that is highly relevant in order to trigger more click-throughs.  And this means that engaging the right content development shop to help fulfill this need is becoming one of the most strategic decisions facing marketing departments today.  The days of “spray and pray” marketing are history.  Welcome to the era of content intelligence.

We love this description of outdated web-site content: “Archipelagos”. This should resonate with a lot of B2B marketing people.  Islands disconnected from larger land masses. If you’re like everybody else, you probably have some of your own. Call them orphans, legacies, or whatever, they amount to low-return assets begging to be re-purposed, updated, and/or overhauled. Or just trashed. They are not working as hard as they should — certainly not as hard as you. They need tending.

The operative phrase here is “low-return”. Content, after all, is an asset of value.  You want your visitors exposed to valuable, useful, high-return stuff on your web site. Everything should scream out to customers that you’re a hot company worthy of their attention and interest.  And nothing says “ordinary” faster than dated material. Or, worse, irrelevant content.  Ironically, very often a lot of these vintage pieces — case studies, podcasts, videos, white papers, et. al, — lend themselves quite well to spiffing up. The bones of a once-hot case study may well inspire a whole new generation of them. Same for videos or white papers. The key here is to stay current.  And to remember the three categories of B2B visitors: those who are in basic research mode, those who are narrowing the vendor selection and those who are on the verge of awarding a contract. Have relevant content at the ready for each stage and each state of mind.  And never forget that by the time people call you for a meeting, they’re probably 80% down the selection road already.  Something to think about.

How often do you clear the cobwebs on your site? What’s your process for ensuring your stuff is relevant to what your visitors are search for right now?

We do a lot of work for IT security clients. And the numbers we hear numb the brain. Security researcher Ponemon Institute LLC, (not a client) says that almost nine out of ten U.S. companies have suffered at least one security breach.  Many don’t even know if or when they’ve been hit.  The cost to businesses of exposing data like Social Security and credit-card numbers climbed seven percent between 2010 and 2011 to an average of more than $7 million per incident, according to a study of victim companies.  The most expensive attack of 2010 cost an unidentified company $35.3 million, an increase of 15 percent from the costliest breach a year earlier.  It was so bad the name of the company remains confidential so as not to alarm customers. While government agencies must be notified, attacks on and losses by many large corporations are never publicly revealed.  Costs rise as more states pass laws requiring companies to disclose whenever customers’ personal information is exposed. As of 2011, 46 U.S. states passed such measures, with varying definitions of a breach, deadlines for notifying customers and punishments for failing to comply.  Still, the attacks and the cost of fending them off grow unabated. What’s going on here?

Happily for our clients, business is brisk. Still, one of them admits that the seemingly low return on corporate America’s security dollar is being seen with growing frustration and alarm at the board level.  “Companies who question their return on the millions of dollars they’ve invested in IT defenses have every right to be angry,” he said. Of course, our clients have a vested interest in encouraging the upgrade of aging defenses so easily overcome by cyber-criminals today.

We can’t help noticing the irony here. Computer security is a multi-billion industry employing some of the most brilliant technologists on the planet.  They labor hard to stay a step ahead of the bad guys who, just like terrorists, only have to be successful once, while techno-sleuths and defenders must succeed 100% of the time.  Yet, as found by Verizon and reported yesterday in Network World , in 97% of breaches last year, attackers used remarkably simple methods to break in.  In other words, many organizations are overlooking basic precautions even as their security systems grow more complex. In four out of five attacks on businesses last year, bad guys preyed on so-called victims of opportunity.  Like muggers who look for an unsuspecting or distracted target in crimes of opportunity, cyber-attackers scan for companies who may not be properly utilizing the defenses they have or whose passwords fail the tough-to-guess test.

To us in the business of marketing some truly amazing preventive technology, Verizon’s findings are a real eye-opener.  Here’s hoping they can open more corporate-security eyes as well.  The chain around the company’s digital assets is only as strong as the weakest link.  And the bad guys know how to find it.