B2B content marketing has changed, especially with the advent of social media. Last week I talked about the first two of six new rules of thought leadership marketing. These rules are primarily about how behaviors and expectations have changed with the advent of new technologies, especially social media - and the changes are substantial. This week, I'll explain rules 3 and 4.
Rule #3: Influencers have become critical marketing targets
Before the era of blogs and Twitter, thought leaders had few opportunities to get opinion leaders such as CEOs, business gurus, and famous authors to endorse their ideas. Public affirmations were limited to substantial publishing accomplishments like books (quotes on book jackets and book advertisements) and prestigious journal articles (e.g., the occasional Harvard Business Review article touted by a newspaper business columnist). But plug someone's article or white paper? Virtually unheard of.
Not today. The explosion in business pundits offering recommendations in their blogs and tweets has considerably increased the supply of key influencers and their need for content to recommend to their viewers. Pick any topic, and you'll find bloggers and tweeters who have built a large following, regularly pointing to other blogs, videos, books, "eBooks," articles and white papers.
If your topic is supply chain for instance, the top six tweeters on the subject have between them more than 25,000 followers. The six biggest LinkedIn supply chain groups have between them more than 120,000 members, and there are dozens of blogs on supply chain, some of which have hundreds of visitors a day.
Getting a popular blogger to mention and link to an article multiplies its readership. For an article that we published in November for instance, the chart below shows what happened to our online readership when the article was promoted on blogs and tweeted by several authorities. (Mentions in Facebook and LinkedIn groups also boosted traffic.)
How Social Media Marketing Boosted Traffic a Recent Bloom Group Article
In fact, we received over three times as much new traffic to our site for the period than we normally would from publishing an article, despite a slow second week because of the Thanksgiving holiday.
Rule #4: Online columns are a potent new channel
Increasingly, the online editors of the leading business publications are opening up their digital editions' editorial space to outsidersâ€"for free. (Of course, business marketers for a long time have been able to buy "advertorial" space in these publications, but that's not what we're talking about here.) As a result, articles in leading publications are no longer the preserve of a very few pundits who beat out the multitudes of would-be writers because of the scarcity of space. Many more top-notch publications that are highly read by your customers will take your content in their online editions.
This is a far cry from the past. It used to be that an outsider's chances of getting an opinion article in a top business or trade publication was remote. The chances of getting an unsolicited op-ed in The New York Times are not much better than 1%; for Harvard Business Review, they are similar. This high rejection rate may be one reason why self-published business white papers have become a cottage industry: It is the outlet of last resort.
But not anymore, at least not online. Opportunities for guest contributions at quality online publications have proliferated. What has not changed, for respected titles such as Forbes.com and BusinessWeek.com, is their need for quality. As Fred Allen, the Leadership editor of Forbes.com recently explained to us in an interview, he will run as much material as he can, provided it has something interesting to say, and is entertaining and provocative.
For thought leadership marketers, this presents a great opportunity to increase readership of their material. They can carve out an article submission from an underlying point of view and as Allen described, focusing it on a recent event in the marketplace may increase the chances of getting accepted.
The deeper the point of view, the more articles can be spun out of it. For example, from a single point of view (and white paper) based on extensive primary research, the consulting firm Kurt Salmon Associates last year placed four op-eds authored by its retailing consultants in leading publications: Forbes.com , BusinessWeek.com, and two in a leading retail publication, Chain Store Age. IT services firm Unisys carved out five white papers from a study it launched in 2005 on the topic of technology support in large organizations, including one in the vaunted journal Sloan Management Review, two in CIO.com, one in Computerworld.com and one in IndustryWeek.com.
This is not unusual, even for firms with tiny marketing budgets. A white paper published by the management consulting firm Quantum Performance Inc. has generated six Quantum-bylined op-eds in key target publications, including one in each of Forbes.com, HR Executive and Workforce Management.
By the way, the online editions of these publications are often better places to appear than the offline ones. The online readership of many leading business publications today is a multiple of their print readership.
Readership of Popular Business Publications: Print vs. Online
The new channels we are talking about - influencers and quality online publications - are not ones that a marketer can control. That's why readers view them as more credible and marketers that can capitalize on them are likely to get a much greater response. Ironically, they may spend a lot less to secure these 'unbiased' channels than they'd have to pay to secure the 'biased' ones: white paper syndicators, email list brokers, and so on. In fact, the major cost in working the unbiased channels is time: pitching content to bloggers, posting informative comments in social networking sites, writing and submitting op-eds to online publications.
However, getting prospects to gravitate to your thought leadership requires great content. Marketers with lackluster material will be forced to continue the direct distribution methods of the past, which means their articles will open fewer and fewer doors in a world where buyers are moving from biased to unbiased channels.
Next week I will explain the new rules, 5 and 6.