Whoa. Turns out even an email marketing consultant can get a big surprise. Today’s? These numbers really caught me off guard: 37% of surveyed B2B marketers say their content isn’t good enough and 9% say they don’t have enough content:
‘Only one in five B2B marketing and sales professionals (20%) say their demand generation campaigns are fully effective, whereas 80% say they are ineffective to semi-ineffective, according to a survey from Corporate Visions.
‘Among those 80%, content is the biggest challenge. Asked to identify the single most important factor hampering successful demand generation campaigns, a plurality (37%) cite content that “isn’t engaging or provocative,” whereas 31% cite a lack of sales and marketing alignment, and 12% cite budget constraints. Some 9% of B2B professionals say they don’t have enough content.’ (Emphasis added, source: MarketingProfs.com)
Here’s an easy fix for these professionals from this email marketing consultant: Think outside the box. Stop thinking about creating content from scratch.
Try this: Check your email. Chances are, great content is being created every day somewhere within your organization, by salespeople reaching out to leads or responding to inquiries all via email. Customer service folks too can be crafting answers to customer questions, answers you can turn into content for your demand generation campaigns. Maybe get everyone to bcc you whenever they interact with a prospect or customer.
Then there are the emails you’re receiving, whether feedback or praise or complaints. These are possible sources for great, engaging content too.
Also consider past email content, in particular past newsletters. These could very well contain compelling, useful content you can re-purpose and re-use.
Next, mine your blogs: Whether one person at your company blogs or dozens do, consider all that content potential fodder for your demand generation campaigns. These can become guides, ebooks, articles, drip campaigns…all kinds of content can be re-used and repurposed.
Finally, change your thinking. Often in the B2B world, content is still considered something that must be created from scratch, written in a formal, business-like tone. If you restrict your thinking to that kind of content, you miss out on all the free content all around you, like the emails and blogs and past newsletters referenced above.
If your email marketing consultant is telling you to get out there and hire some folks to create original, compelling content for you, he or she is not wrong. But if you’re in need of a lot of great content now, mining your existing resources will save you both time and money, as well as give your content the authentic, real voices of the folks that wrote it.
