Few people would argue about the power of ‘content marketing’ (or whatever you choose to call it): the importance of sharing the right insight, with the right people, in the right way, at the right time, for the right purpose.

A couple of recent blog posts shed some interesting light on why content marketing can be such a challenge – and, living up to the theory behind the approach, some of the conversations going on in blog comments are as interesting as the posts themselves.

Chris Koch has a great call to arms around the need for a marketing transformation – part of which is about building the ability to plan, create, disseminate and leverage truly insightful content.

Chris believes that there’s an element of fear that is preventing marketers from putting all their energy into making this the success it should be: “I think it’s fear that the hardest aspect of marketing, content development, is ascending to become marketing’s most important role, as advertising, traditional PR, and events shrink and fall away.”

I think there’s an argument that actually all successful marketing should now be thought of as ‘content marketing’. Yes, content can be some great research, or a video, or a podcast, or an interview with a customer, or a new model for understanding a complex problem… But I believe that exactly the same thinking is also at the heart of great events, for example. Like any other content, they need a story, detailed thought on what value they add to which audience, and how that audience best wants to receive that value.

When I made this point in a comment to Chris, he came back with the view that “Buyers aren’t interested in information anymore–they can get that anywhere. They are interested in insights.” I think this is the test we should be applying to all marketing activity – and whether we offer this insight at a face to face event, or online via twitter, it can all be part of a valid plan – but the core challenge of creating great content is still there. As Chris puts it, “Marketing departments are going to have to transform themselves into content development engines.”

So how do you go about building a content engine?

That’s one of the questions we wanted to answer (for the digital world, anyway) in our overview for planning great online content programmes. Paul Dunay also had some strong advice in a post I came across recently. Paul was talking about how important sharing great content is to building brands and relationships – and he raised the point that it’s essential to keep up the momentum once you start. In response to a comment asking how to create a plan for sustained content creation around a blog, he had 6 specific steps to offer:

“1) you need to start thinking like a publisher – what are you going to produce each month
2) once you have that in your mind – now make a publishing calendar out of it – so you have a plan
3) stop asking thought leaders to write stuff for you – get a writer and have the writer interview them and “suck it out of their head”
4) then send them the resulting paper for comments and approval
5) you write up the blog post and get the web page done
6) then launch blog post and send out the email to a data dip of those that have downloaded similar types of content

and bingo you have the makings of a content factory”

The point is that having big content ideas is all well and good – but these need to be supported by doing the basics well. We’ll have more on the different elements you can build into a ‘content factory’ – and how to sustain insightful conversations with customers – in some upcoming posts in the Marketing after the Watershed series…

There seems to be a growing feeling that the priorities behind IT investments are changing once again. Rounding up views from McKinsey and Gartner research, as well as recent stories from major corporations, shines some light on how we may be able to use this to our advantage…

IT budget projections from McKinsey

According to McKinsey’s survey (results available here), while operating budgets are largely expected to continue at the reduced levels of 2009, the story for new investments tells a more cautiously optimistic story. More than 45 percent of respondents expect to increase investments, while about 20 percent see them holding steady. Of course, we shouldn’t get carried away (back in 2007, 69 percent were predicting increased investments for 2008), but it does point to a return to more strategic considerations for IT.

There are some interesting industry variations – with Financial Services leading the pack in making investments (61 percent expecting to increase new investments, up from 40 percent last year).

Reasons why from Gartner

Gartner’s recent CIO research paints a similar picture (”2010 IT budgets are projected to be flat increasing by a weighted global average of 1.3 percent in nominal terms, compared with 2009 levels where IT budgets declined 8.1 percent”). The main thrust of Gartner’s opinion seems to be that we’re moving from cost-cutting priorities to a drive for productivity gains. These gains are about opening up to fresh thinking, smart innovations – but not massive costs…

“These productivity gains will come from collaborative and innovative solutions that take advantage of the new “lighter-weight” services-based and social media technologies, including virtualization, cloud computing and Web 2.0 social computing.”

If we thought that IT decision-makers were open to outside ideas when it came to making massive cost reductions in the IT budget, that may pale to insignificance compared to their thirst for insight around these ‘lighter-weight’ smarter-thinking options.

Change in action at the BBC, Deutsche Bank and Barclays

Three big changes in technology strategy in January seem to support the argument that 2009 was a year of significant strategic thinking going on in the background, and that this year we will see investments begin to catch-up.

First, Computing reports on the BBC’s strategy roadmap for technology over the next two to five years. The BBC’s CTO John Linwood supports Gartner’s recommendation of lighter-weight technology: “broadcast systems need to be increasingly agile, flexible and able to adapt quickly to new demands.” As we’ve seen several times already, standardisation will be one of the buzzwords of 2010, and the BBC report continues this theme: “The BBC must strive for further standardisation in the technology solutions it employs to minimise the overall costs and maximise re-use. The use of commercial off the shelf (COTS) technologies and solutions should be the preferred option. Whilst specific customisation is necessary it must be done consciously and when commercial off the shelf offerings have been evaluated.” 

Next, we have the New Statesman’s coverage of Deutsche Bank’s plans to replace various solutions with a single new core banking system from SAP: “The SAP implementation shall underpin the bank’s strategy to push for a high degree of industrialization and standardization of processes. The bank is also looking to achieve flexibility in its IT infrastructure, building on standardized, modular SAP software functions within a SOA.”

Finally, an interesting report on Barclays from Computer Weekly describes how the bank is taking a number of outsourced contracts back in house. Following the decision in December to bring the management of desktop systems back in house, last week saw the decision not to renew the application development contract with Accenture. It’s open to speculation on which factors were most important of cost, flexibility, business alignment, control…

So three very different stories to start the year – all the combination of a long time thinking and justifying investments that are now coming on-line. We can expect to see more changes in direction as other businesses follow suit and place their bets for the recovery – and by 2011 we may well be sick of the words standardisation, flexibility and productivity…

Smurfs may be great gardeners, but would they make it in B2B marketing? With this whole ’spot the difference’ idea, they’ve clearly bought into the common marketing principle of ‘differentiate or die’. But is that just qualifying them out of potential deals?

[/end tenuous Smurf analogy/]

I’m worried that many people (me included, too often) put too much faith in the ‘differentiate or die’ message. It can lead us to try and create USPs at a point in the sales cycle when we should be concentrating on answering customer needs. Just because competitors also answer these needs, doesn’t necessarily mean we can’t talk about it too.

Take an example: let’s say there are lots of companies acknowledging a need for your kind of solution (some in the sweet spot where you really do have better features than the competition) – but there are two or three big names always getting on the shortlist for the RFP.

Now, do you really need marketing to differentiate yourself from the big three? Or is the issue actually that people see them as exactly placed to answer their needs and perceive you as too different already (or don’t see you at all)?

Perhaps there’s an argument that marketing up to the point of the RFP should be all about ‘me too’ – we have a great client list (like them), we have delivered great results (like them), we have features x,y,z (like them)…

The chances are that knowledge of what one of the big competitors can do is already helping the prospect to shape their RFP  – so the only thing you’re going to achieve with differentiation is to discount yourself from the deal. This obviously isn’t a hard and fast rule (and would I imagine vary according to market and product maturity), but should be food for thought before we jump to look for a USP to market around rather than a clear customer need.

Of course, if the competition is bigger than you, then you will need one kind of differentiation – not necessarily to do with what you say, but all to do with how/where you say it. They’ll own various saturated marketing channels (think Google AdWords, tradeshows/exhibitions, industry publications, analyst activity…) – but it’s your opportunity to get smart and targeted with your direct communications to really deliver that ‘me too’ message in a way that gets ‘me too’ onto the shortlist…

And once you’re on that shortlist and having your sales meetings – that’s the time to really stick it to the competition (and your sales team need all the support they can get to highlight the places where your product/service differentiators meet the pain points of the prospect).

But start the differentiation too soon and you’ll end up needing to create a whole new market before anyone will buy from you (which is a great challenge to have, if you’re up for the fight!).

So, anyway, have you spotted the 5 differences in the smurf picture? Go here to see if you got it right!

December saw the latest session of our Sales & Marketing Forum, inspired by what seems to have been the rallying cry of 2009: “Let’s sell to the CFO as well…”

Speakers included Mark Evans, CFO, Vodafone Group Technology, and Gareth Bailey, Head of Central Services, Logistics & IT Group, Marks & Spencer, and our guests were on good questioning form (possibly inspired by the finest mulled wine the Soho Hotel could provide…).

Our write-up of the event (available to download here) covers four main areas of discussion from the night:

• Understanding Finance’s role in the organisation/process

• What are the key factors influencing Finance decisions?

• How can we reach the Finance decision-maker?

• What content works best? What do suppliers need to prove?

Everyone has an inkling that, for all the obvious reasons, the role of the Finance decision-maker is becoming steadily more important in major enterprise deals. But before adding them as simply another role on a long list to target, we need to immerse ourselves in their world and their language. Doing this can reveal where so many people are going wrong in their attempts to reach such a complex and elusive group of people.

If you have any other questions about the speaker’s views, or if you were at the event and think I’ve missed a vitally important issue, please add your thoughts in a comment…

Are there any suppliers who don’t aspire to a ‘thought leadership’ position? It’s an admirable objective, but fails to deliver on the promise all too often. Meanwhile, a more practical approach seems to be delivering ever-stronger results…

So last week, a colleague proposed the possibility that – with every man and his dog creating a ‘thought leadership’ position – the real thought leaders might be doing just the opposite.

The impulse behind a thought leadership programme is to have something interesting to say to clients and prospects, ideally something that stands a business apart from the competition as more forward-thinking and creating new solutions to existing challenges.

Which is great as a principle, and when it works it can pay massive dividends. But too often, after this great start, people put the ’stand apart from the competition’ before the ‘interesting to clients and prospects’ – which typically means taking an ever more tangential/futuristic view on a subject. And so the thought leading position gets farther and farther away from where the majority of clients/prospects are fighting their day to day battles (and spending the majority of their budgets).

When we researched the people making buying decisions worth millions of pounds, we found that the ones taking the decisions weren’t necessarily in the c-suite, but departmental heads/programme directors – people with day jobs too big to worry about what might be possible in the future and all too concerned with what’s happening today.

There’s also a tightrope to walk between innovation and delivery – at our recent S&M Forum we heard from Finance decision-makers who explained how they prioritise budget for suppliers who can clearly show what they will deliver and how they are capable of delivering (having done the same thing 100 times before being more important than some potential but unproven competitive advantage).

This won’t be true for every proposition or every audience (some companies are less risk-averse than the norm and are typically good target early adopters for new solutions), but the current environment does seem to call for a more practical, pragmatic kind of leadership.

Maybe the really innovative thinking would be to stick to what worries today’s decision-makers – details of where your proposition fits their budgets and priorities, stories about what’s going right and wrong, implementation pot-holes, war stories…

So what would we call the opposite of thought leadership? Well, if the balance is between thinking and doing, perhaps it should be ‘deed leadership’.

In scanning the list of the Harvard Business Review’s “HBR Voices” bloggers recently, I discovered that Gary Hamel was on the list. His most recent, 25 Stretch Goals for Management is worth a read as I think it offers up an interesting model for a relationship campaign that could generate great thought leadership.

Under the banner of a “Management Innovation Lab” Hamel brought together management experts, social commentators and “progressive” CEOs with the goal of laying out the agenda for management in the 21st century. Hamel writes “What drew the participants together was a set of broadly shared beliefs about the importance of management, and a sense of urgency about reinventing management for a new age.” The output of the 2 day session, called “Moon Shots for Management” was a series of interviews and content, as well as a 25 point action plan for innovation around the future of management.

It strikes me that this approach would work well to support a relationship marketing initiative and/or thought leadership campaigns. By identifying the most progressive CIOs, CTOs, CFOs or other relevant group in your client and prospect base, and bringing them together with matching futurologists and management gurus, it would be possible to design and direct a campaign that developed a closer relationship with these people, helped them deliver strategic value within their own businesses, offered real account and market intelligence and output fantastic content with which to further engage your audience.

Whilst the content, approach and tone of any campaign would need to be focused on the market and audience, the model itself is a really interesting one – playing as it does on current appetite for community and the “age of reference“.

IBM has claimed that analytics will be bigger than CRM and ERP combined, heralding a new era of “information led transformation”.

Interviewed by MyCustomer.com, Ovum analyst  Madan Sheina said “The company is now poised to funnel even more of its profits into BI and analytics over the coming years, anticipating that they will be bigger than the ERP market two decades prior – the tipping point being a shift from business automation to business optimisation.” The company’s main “information on demand” products centre around sales analytics, workforce performance and supply chain management.

IBM has released a research piece “The Evolving Role of the CIO” alongside its transcripts of interviews with leading UK CIOs, which I mentioned in yesterday’s post. Some useful trends are highlighted by the white paper. Two of the major areas of interest are the changing nature of the role’s reporting line: the majority of CIOs – 42% of them - report to the CEO, with only 14% now reporting to the CFO. And the longevity of the average CIO is pointing up their increasing role in long-term planning: it is normal for CIOs to remain in their post for 6 years (research by Allan Alter, April 06), which is twice as long as the average CEO.

However, when looking to communicate with, and ultimately build relationships with, this particular beast a few points made in the white paper really resonated:

“The CIO is an idea position to take increasing business responsibility and control.”

“It’s one of the most dynamic and creative roles in a modern company.”

“CIOs are on the way to becoming tomorrow’s CEO”

“Key skills of today’s CIO include the ability to translate Board requirements into solutions. He needs to talk the language of the Board and the investors.”

“All innovation in our industry will be technology-led or technology facilitated.”

All of the above suggest that while the CIO no longer has to “sell the IT philosophy”, he or she is expected to be able to lead people, lead technologically and have acute business acumen. As Acergy’s CIO says in the report “tomorrow’s CIO must have the proficiency to be heir apparent to any senior executive position.” It stands to reason therefore, that the CIO of now and the future will want access to people and content that will satisfy their needs to contribute at the boardroom table.

The white paper suggests that the CIO will need to “understand the possibilities of the future” – any communications programme aiming to paint that picture more clearly for the CIO is at a distinct advantage.

To supplement its recent white paper on the evolving role of the CIO, IBM has just launched a series of downloadable CIO interviews as PDFs. As it’s a feature of  their UK site all these interviews are with UK based CIOs; certainly in my experience, it’s fairly rare to get UK information this freely available, as many previous CIO series are largely US-based.

Interviews are, among others, with the CIOs/CTOs of Waitrose, Wincanton, Network Rail, Dundee City Council, O2 and HSBC. They are downloadable as separate PDFs and provide good insight into the challenges in each of these accounts. We’ll be commenting on the umbrella “Evolving Role of the CIO” report in our next post.

Richard Holway, IT market analyst and guru, has said he’s seeing a narrowing gap between offshore and onshore due to the recession. He made the comments whilst commenting on Logica’s Q3 results, in which he noted that outsourcing was performing well for the company. “Outsourcing was the star driver. Up 11% in both Q3 and YTD. Looks like order intake is strong too as Book to Bill is 103% YTD.” You can see the full detail on his news service site TechMarketView.