B-to-B Marketing: 10th Idea for 2014

Allocating more budget to content creation. A friend began a marketing automation campaign, installed the software, was ready to go, and came to a screeching stop. ‘I didn’t realize,’ he said to me later, ‘how much content I really needed to make these programs effective.’ Although that’s true, that’s not necessarily new to engineering marketing. We’ve always known that engineers crave information. They love app notes, tutorials, handbooks, white papers, because there’s so much to learn, and technology evolves so rapidly. It just means that sending out catalogs can’t be our primary lead generation tool any longer, and that we have to devote more time and effort to creating other content, white papers, videos, infographics, etc. that’s educational and engaging. So companies will be devoting more budget allocation to those items, and less to traditional marketing like print advertising. And that’s been taking place for quite a while now, of course.

However, a word of caution: content quality is still important. Some companies have begun to hire low quality bloggers to generate reams of content for a penny a word. That’s not going to work in an engineering world. The quality of what you publish speaks to the quality of your product or service. Don’t take shortcuts. It hasn’t worked before, and it won’t reflect well on your brand.