Suggested Construct for B2B Lead Nurturing - Content

Content is like air: it's all over the place. But we spoke about the right content for your audience that will help position you as a thought leader, and that content needs to emanate from you. Publishing 3rd party content won't help you to be seen as a thought leader, only a manual source of stuff that can be claimed via RSS. You need to develop and deliver this content internally from your Subject Matter Experts (SMEs), and should be in the form of any of the following three categories: Deep Content, Light Content, and Response Content.

Deep Content comes from heavy lifting. That's the content that results from research (primary and/or secondary), surveys, studies, etc., and it's content that is quoted in press releases, by journalists, by analysts, and (hopefully) by the general public. It's designed to shape internal policy and direction, train internal staff (especially Sales) and influence outside decisions regarding your organization and your industry. It's usually not developed overnight by your SMEs, in fact, it's probably the content that your SMEs love to create. The end product is usually a white paper which sometimes gets delivered as a web seminar, but more often recently it's delivered as an online video.

Light Content requires far less of an effort from your SMEs than Deep Content, yet still has strong collateral impact. Light Content is often less detailed, and comes from your SMEs learned insight regarding a trend or an industry occurrence, and is used as a quick update internal and external constituents. It's usually distributed in the form of a brief, and can act as a blog entry or an email attachment to a targeted audience.

Your SMEs quite often act as a resource for internal and external queries, and as a result of those queries, create intelligent responses that are both compelling and actionable. We refer to this content as Response Content: brief but powerful, market-driven content that your audience perceives as valuable. This is not the fodder for FAQs, but just the opposite as these are questions that are floating out there representing common concerns/curiosities. The questions can come from anywhere: via a member of the Sales team, the press, analysts, through a Contact Us form, or even a form specially-designed to capture these types of questions.

Think about it for a second: most likely you've got all three sources of Content available in your organization. As individual units of "useful information", it's strong, but as a collective, it's very, very powerful. So when collecting this valuable content, what do you do with it, i.e., how do you convert it into PUI that positions you as a thought leader and acts as the foundation for Lead Nurturing? We need to talk about personalized blogs...