When I am at events and seminars many people will say to me does content marketing help B2B lead generation? For me it’s a funny one. I was recently sent a “white paper” on how to generate B2B sales leads. I won’t highlight the author for fear of embarrassing them as it was the biggest pile of naive, thoughtless, ill considered, plagiarised crap that I have ever had the misfortune to read. The fact it was about the industry I am passionate about just makes me angry that people are reading this and possibly following its advice.
Content marketing can be fantastic; 17 years ago I created a guide to selecting and implementing ERP software for the ERP Company I worked for.
This was a 50 + page comprehensive book that went into all details of ERP systems and how to ensure you get ROI from them. We measured the success and 55% of all customers between 1997 and 2000 registered to receive a copy of this and for 22% of all new customers this was the first interaction we had from them.
So in answer to the question does content marketing help B2B lead generation? Yes if done well. The reasons I think our guide was so successful were it was very valuable to the readers, it was unbiased, it was well written, it was information our market wanted and we promoted it well.
The main problems today are that any ill qualified marketer can write and publish content in a matter of minutes, so there is a massive amount of dross out there and your market is being bombarded with this dross making it harder for your useful content to get through.
The other big issue is once you have a well thought out, well researched, well written article how will you publish it?
In a recent survey I read, though I can’t now find it but think this is true, over 60% of all marketing content isn’t read. That is an astounding figure and I really wish I could find the source, 60 % of everything marketers write isn’t read. That doesn’t just mean they can’t measure the effectiveness of it for generating leads it means that their efforts aren’t even being read.
