You need to get on board with the value exchange revolution in B2B content marketing

Stop. 

Before you read any further, I urge you to go and spend 3 minutes taking Raconteur’s IMPACT assessment. I’ll wait…

Right. Ahem. Now that you know what kind of impact your current content marketing has, let’s get into it.

Decision-makers are busy. That’s a given. In turn capturing their attention comes at a premium: not only is it hard to attract but it’s even harder to retain. And while a short, eye-catching video snippet on Linkedin may give a scrolling finger pause for thought – what can a brand realistically communicate with impact in that brief window? This makes the job of editorial content that much harder. 

While long-form content offers unparalleled opportunities to get under the hood of challenges to explore them in thought-provoking depth, it also asks – and expects – more of the reader. It’s a two-way value exchange.  B2B buyers today aren’t just scrolling through content for fun – they expect something in return.

Marketers need to be bold and cross the rubicon and move from creating shiny,  shallow content to create something of substance. If your content doesn’t immediately deliver value, then your audience is out. That’s not just an arbitrary hunch; it’s backed by my own experience and industry data. Think about the morning doom scroll on linked-in – was it the ‘here are the B2B lessons from my son’s first birthday’ post that stopped you scrolling, or was it the insights from a new piece of agency research?

Further, research from the Content Marketing Institute suggests that (somewhat depressingly) only 40% of B2B marketers have a documented content strategy. In short, far too many brands and their marketers (who don’t come cheap!) are throwing content at the wall and hoping it sticks. 

What’s most frustrating here is that I can speak from first-hand experience as to the impact of powerful, value-adding content. In a former life I headed up the content strategy for a travel risk management brand owned by a private equity firm. When I arrived, we had no content marketing to speak of. 

After little more than a year of regular blogs and monthly in-depth reports that offered proprietary insights to the audience – snippets of what the brand could offer – we’d caught the eye of an industry leader and were duly acquired. While they didn’t acquire us specifically because of the content – without the brand presence and communication of brand substance that our activity created, we’d never have raised our head enough above the pulpit to be noticed.

In short, companies that treat content marketing as a ‘value-producing function’ can unlock myriad benefits. A stronger brand presence, a clearer brand identity, stronger thought-leadership profiles for leaders in the business, better alignment with sales (who can leverage content to kick start conversations, and in time more executive buy-in and stronger revenue impact.

This isn’t just about writing better blog posts (even if this one is pretty damn compelling if I do say so myself). It’s about a fundamental shift in B2B marketing – and there’s where Raconteur’s new Value Dividend thinking comes in. 

We want to challenge our partners and clients. We want you to relish and embrace the creation of engaging, insightful and hyper-relevant content for your audience. Today, the brands that win are the ones that trade insight for attention.

Saying it like that, it does feel simple doesn’t it? Perhaps we’ve become so accustomed to content overload that everything has become saturated. If you’re happy being part of the pack – fine. But if you want to move the dial in any meaningful way, why not take our IMPACT assessment to better understand where your content marketing is today and how we might be able to help?