In 1885, William Lever of Lever, Bros. said,  “half of the marketing money that you spend is wasted-trouble is you don’t know which half.” We have found that more than half of your $$$ might be wasted because marketing and sales just do not connect on lead generation. Sales doesn’t follow up, or neglects to consider qualified leads as an opportunity. There are legitimate and non-legitimate reasons for this lack of follow up.

1. Legitimate – wrong vertical, too small, wrong title.
2. Non-Legitimate – I already called three times – basically if the lead is hard to work it was dismissed. Fewer than 5% of long-term leads are not followed up by sales.

Time Frame on leads should be ignored. Long term leads are often more valuable than short term opportunities:

• 1/3 of short term leads are actually hot opportunities.
  • Many of these leads are already sold and are just looking for a end of the buying cycle price comparison
• Short term leads that are within 1-2 sales cycles of decision making that aren’t Hot are better opportunities because it gives you time to position your offer.
• Long Term Leads are even better because not only do you position the offer, but in the worst case you are short listed for future consideration.

The changes in sales cycles and company decision making since the Great Recession a few years ago shows that it is more important than ever that smart companies ensure follow up on every lead, and infuse within the company the value of long term leads. Capitalizing on long term leads is the best way to ensure the future of your organization.

They say that content is king…the Yin to social media’s Yang. In today’s complex buyer landscape, you have to produce thought leadership content in order to draw your prospects in and prompt them to share your messaging across their networks. Content feeds the beast! You need content to fuel your social marketing, email marketing, lead nurturing, and scoring.Your content needs to be thought provoking, inspiring, and it needs to have the right ingredients to incite an emotional response from your audience.

Most marketers understand the need for high quality content and they know that businesses today are being asked to become publishers. And with such a demand for content, you need to make sure that you have the right people in place that can create content. If you are a smaller company, than one or two people could suffice. But a larger company really needs a team of content creation.  Because content marketing roles are relatively new to B2B marketing, a lot of marketers don’t know where to start.

I thought I would give you some tips on where to start when it comes to hiring a content marketer and what you can expect from them.

What does a content marketer do?
Ok, so you know that you need content. But what kind of content? And what should you have your content marketer working on? Here is a list of my top level key priorities:

• Creating thought leadership pieces (from initial copy development to asset production)
  • Definitive Guides
  • Whitepapers
  • Checklists/Tip sheets
  • Partner ebook co-creation
• Blog management, curation, and contribution
• Webinar program planning and production (this is key, since webinars spin off so many other forms of content, including Slideshare presentations, podcasts, videos, and sometimes blog posts and ebooks)
• Copy editing all contributed content
• Ensure all content is on-brand, consistent in terms of style, quality and tone of voice, and optimized for search and social promotion

Of course there are many other individual projects that come up, but those are core responsibilities. Note that many companies handle the creation of content in different ways. At some companies, marketers employ outside contracted copywriters to create entire pieces or assist the content marketer with creation. We typically create our own content without the aid of outside contractors. We like to keep the thought leadership in-house. I also get contributions from other subject matter experts on our team.

How do you hire for a content marketer?
Specializing in content marketing is something relatively new, so you might have trouble finding someone with the exact requisite experience. But there are certainly some key things to look out for when hiring for a content marketer. Look for someone that is a great writer. Since the core of most content marketing roles is writing, you will want to make sure that this is the area that your potential hire excels in. Have him or her send writing samples that vary in length and voice. Blog posts, marketing collateral, whitepapers, etc. The writing samples do not necessarily even need to be work related, they just have to be representative of the person’s writing skills. Additionally, look for someone that is good at project management and is execution oriented. Your content creator should be able to multi-task and produce high quality results in a timely fashion. They also will need to coordinate with many people, departments, and agencies to make sure that a content piece gets produced—that is where the project management comes in.

What does a typical day look like?
My days are extremely diverse, but I will give an example of what a day could look like for me. Right now, we are working on getting a new Definitive Guide completed, so that is a top priority and takes up a lot of my time.

• Definitive Guide
  • Complete sections and add additional copy
  • Copy edit contributions from team
  • Work with design firm on design concepts
  • Coordinate with internal demand gen teams on promotions
• Webinars
  • Work on coordinating webinars for the next quarter
  • Manage webinar calendar
  • Schedule dry runs and webinar times
  • Create abstracts for landing page promotion
  • Coordinate with internal stakeholders on webinar content
• Blog
  • Create 1-2 blogs per week (I carve out time during the day to write blogs)
  • Manage editorial calendar
  • Curate and edit contributor blog content from internal subject matter experts and external guest posts
  • Help configure blogs in wordpress and create SEO optimization
  • Schedule blogs to post the next morning
• Other content pieces
  • Work on updating old content pieces and send them to design
  • Copy edit and coordinate production of partner contributed content

Do you have a Content Marketer on your team? Have you considered creating headcount for one?

In order to market a successful blog, it is important to know that writing solid content is not the only factor.  As always, content is king, but SEO is an art.  You don’t have to be an SEO professional or genius to get your rankings up, even though it wouldn’t hurt.  You need to remember a few SEO principles in order to build a successful website and push your rankings higher.  Take advantage of search engines for your content and follow these SEO principles:

• Link Equity – Make sure your link equity is spread out by having your pages link to one another.  Each page or post will help each other out by helping them all rank better.  Remember, backlinks are one of most powerful tools that help your page get indexed by Google.
• Site Architecture – Your site architecture is how your categories, pages, and subpages are all organized and linked.  A deep site architecture means that your link equity is wasted because Google sees your higher level pages as more important.  Google recognizes pages that are closer to your homepage easier because it only takes them a click to get there.  The index crawlers see pages that are more clicks away as less important and won’t even index them.
• Delete Old Articles – If you have articles that are over two years old then delete them.  They probably are seldom read with poor link equity.  Get over your sentimental attachment and get rid of them because they are taking away from your stronger articles.
• Valuable Keyword – It is important to put the most valuable keyword in your article at the beginning of your post title.  Tagging the title is the most important element on the page for optimization.  This will give your post the best chance of ranking for a specific keyword.  Other posts that link to this post with the same keyword will help your optimization also.
• Reciprocal Links – Get rid of all your reciprocal links because they have zero SEO value.  Instead, use a blogroll to get quality off-site links that are relevant to your blog.

Author: Michael Whartnaby, Prospectr Marketing

Marketers are constantly searching for ways to add channels where their investments will pay off with content that sells.  Content marketing continues to evolve and mature while also being able to solve some of the world’s toughest challenges.  Specifically, this idea was seen when Burt Rutan and Scaled Composites launched SpaceShip One into orbit to win the $10 million Ansari X Prize.  The goal was to build and launch the spacecraft with three people twice in two weeks.  It is safe to say that if an online community can help build and launch a rocket, then it can also solve your content marketing challenges.  Crowdsourcing can play a crucial role with your content marketing.  It doesn’t just explore the cheapest and fastest ways, but it finds the most absolute and efficient solution.  I have listed ways crowdsourcing is impacting content marketing:

• Speed – Time is value as most of us know.  In fact, it is one of today’s hottest commodities.  There is never enough time in the day to create the amount of that you want to create.  Different occasions come up that prevent us from easily staying on schedule with content creation.  Sites like Crowdsource.com can employ a crowd of workers that can create your content for you.  Using a crowdsourcing site speeds up the content creation process and frees up your own time so that you can be efficient in other areas of business as well.
• Invested Target Audience – When a customer or potential prospect gets involved in some way with your business they tell everyone.  Involvement equals investment.  Once a customer or prospect is involved they become invested as well.
• Diversity and Creativity – Crowdsourcing offers diversity and creativity when it comes to content marketing.  Using a site like Genius Rocket provides your company with many options when it comes to choosing your content marketing.  Diversity, creativity, and the number of options available naturally occur when 30 or 40 totally different individuals are working on your content, as opposed to a couple from the same company.  Within your own marketing team, the content tends to look the same and uniform throughout because there isn’t as much diversity as there is in crowdsourcing.

Author: Michael Whartnaby, Prospectr Marketing  

1. Facebook Studio – Facebook Studio’s goal is to create a community where agencies can be inspired to develop marketing strategies that are inherently social. There is gallery of marketing efforts as well as its own Studio Awards for campaigns that were labeled exceptional.

2. Success Stories – Use this tool to get inspiration for your own marketing campaigns. This tool is a supplement to Facebook Studio, it highlights the innovative campaigns on Facebook from all over the world. The individual goals and results of each marketing campaign is broken down for you to see, so you can learn and apply from these innovative efforts.

3. Brand Resource and Permission Center – This ensures that your brand is abiding by the social network’s requests. It is very important to visit and pay attention to the permission center because if you miss something then your Facebook Page could be suspended.

4. Facebook Demo Tool – Use the demo tool to preview the appearance for your Premium or Sponsored Story ad placements. You will be able to see a template the displays the page post content as seen by the user, helping to eliminate the guesswork from your social marketing campaign.

5. Facebook Marketing Page – Facebook’s official marketing page shares tips and resources to guide your business, and help them become more savvy in their marketing efforts on their platform. You can post events and updates so users are connected with the latest marketing news. Also, there are webinars and live Q & A announcements that helpful in training you in how to successfully engage with your fans as well as expand to a broader audience.

Facebook is an excellent resource for your business to take advantage of. Most of these tools go unused by businesses and they miss out on educational opportunities for their marketing campaigns.

Author: Michael Whartnaby, Prospectr Marketing