With content marketing exploding onto the scene of mainstream B2B marketing in 2012 marketers everywhere scramble to re-adjust marketing plans to reap the benefits more comprehensive content strategy and content production. But while planning and strategy in itself aren’t easy tasks for many companies not used to the new realities and change in B2B buyer behavior content production apparently is seen as the biggest challenge to executing content strategy in 2012. In recent research amongst international B2B companies 56% of the surveyed marketers admitted that finding the time and producing enough content was the biggest challenge to content marketing. Once again Scandinavian companies might have a thing or two to teach the world about content marketing.
The no-nonsense Danish approach to content production
In a recent post David Hoskin explored the embedded takeaways that content marketers everywhere can learn from the way Scandinavian companies approach B2B marketing. In essence the Scandinavian approach to marketing avoids corporate propaganda and instead relies on letting product performance, corporate culture and high level of expertise within the company drive the marketing effort. By creating a culture that highlights internal expertise and high profile subject matter experts Danish companies build and nurture respect and credibility in ways that any high blown marketing campaign can never do.
Furthermore many Danish companies have already got an important aspect of the content marketing machine in place – smooth running content production.
This is something I think Scandinavian companies do very well compared with their peers in the USA, the UK or other parts of the English-speaking world: the desire to do things in house seldom delays the creation of written content. In the USA in particular, with its strong tradition of writing excellence as a core requirement of most sales and marketing roles, many business people pride themselves on their abilities to craft persuasive texts. But, while many of them are, in fact, good writers, they’re also very busy. So despite their good intentions and wealth of talents, they become a major obstacle to keeping the company’s content marketing machine putting out out fresh and timely items. Here danish companies are far better at developing and relying on relationships with external communicators. When this works really well these external communicators work closely together with top management as well as subject matter experts and other key people within the company in order to identify and craft the best messages in a credible and compelling way.
So really, I’m preaching to a steadily reducing minority of Scandinavian marketers and communicators when I say that, even though you may know your business best, it’s always a good idea to get an external, native-language copywriter to handle the creation of written content. Notice I say “native-language” here. That’s because, believe it or not, there are still people who think that because their second cousin once spent a summer working on a farm in Ohio, he or she is perfectly qualified to write the company’s market-facing texts.
Want to know more about the current changes sweeping through marketing and what forward thinking content marketing can do for your business? Download the first chapter of our book The Death Of Propaganda – B2B Buyer Behavior Has Changed Now It’s Your Turn.
