Content needs to be more engaging than your social media, or you have wasted your prospects time – – and yours.
Social media invites the prospect to dinner, but content is the meal. Inviting someone to your site with obsolete content is like serving stale food. Worse still, that “under construction” note where your white papers should be tells them you only have a partial menu.
In the grand scheme of things the Internet age is still pre-adolescent and social media is still in the toddler years. While social media experts try to figure how best to incorporate that new tactic into the marketing mix, marketing managers must remain mindful about the quality of the information new prospects will find when they accept the social media invitation.
Content quality will determine whether they click for more or leave.
Back in the late 1990’s businesses couldn’t build websites fast enough, all for the sake of getting online as fast as possible. The resulting websites looked like speed trumped content, with a great many ending up simply being digital versions of their existing paper brochures, the ones gathering dust in the storeroom.
But hey, at least they had a website! As the use of yellow pages declined along with the rise of web browsing, the under developed websites were, if not good, at least adequate. Adequate was fine if all you wanted was another version of a marginally effective brochure. Yes, the web’s immediacy, economy, flexibility and above all interactivity, are all superior to print, but none of that means much if your content sucks.
Here we Go Again
Social media is the “shiny new thing” in marketing and it appears that the same dynamic is playing out. According to a report by eMarketer: “Only a quarter of all U.S. small businesses (20-99 employees) and a third of midsized companies say they use social media to engage with customers and prospects in a strategic and structured way.” So like the website building rush a generation ago everybody is scrambling to get on the social media bandwagon with the same fire now, aim later approach.
Like the Internet, social media has exceeded expectations in terms of usage, but the jury is still out when it comes to effectiveness. A recent study by Insidesales.com states it rather bluntly here:
“Social media showed very poor lead generating effectiveness. Even though LinkedIn was rated the most effective social media tool in the survey, it barely reached above the bottom quartile in marketing method effectiveness. LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter are all over-utilized considering their poor effectiveness.”
Those who consider content king also harbor rational reservations about social media. What of meaning, for example, could possibly be credibly dealt with in a paltry 146 character twitter post? The answer is not much all by itself, but on the other hand, if those 146 characters compel someone to click through to your website it just outperformed those paper brochures.
Your content mix should be consistent with the image reflected in your social media. Granted, social media is typically less formal than your traditional content, but at the very least they should look like they came from the same place in both tone and appearance. Ideally, the reader should end up believing their decision to click through was a good idea. Engaging, informative, useful content is key in determining whether your website gets bookmarked or forgotten.
Today more than ever, tried and true B2B content needs to be top notch. Exposure is greater than ever. A technical white paper a generation ago might have a lifetime total circulation of thousands, maybe tens of thousands for a huge company with a worldwide sales and distribution network. Today that same piece uploaded on the internet can reach literally millions in a matter of hours. Everybody knows this, so the amount of information is exploding. The best hedge against your content getting lost is to make sure it is outstanding. To summarize, every business should have a respectable cache of content that marries the social media presence to the overall marketing message. The Content Marketing Institute 2013 B2B Marketing Benchmark Survey states that writing is the most outsourced function. And yes, you can take that as a hint.