Creating Digital Environments Around Content

Last week, I moderated a panel session at the American Business Media (ABM) Boston regional program on the topic of content marketing.  Larry Weber, the PR and marketing strategy guru, kicked off the morning with an inspiring talk about how marketing communications and advertising agencies are changing and how that will impact the future of publishing.  Quotable outtakes included:

“Marketers have to be content creators.”

“Content first, then transactions.”

“The Web is becoming more mobile, more emotive, more experiential.”

Weber set the stage perfectly for our panel that followed: How Content Marketing is Shifting the Role of Publishers. In the changing landscape he described [1], all marketers are becoming publishers, and the content they produce creates new opportunities for publishers to aggregate information. Our panel of three digital publishing leaders provided great examples of how to this can be done.  For most B2B publishers, the ultimate goal of their digital environment (or community) is to bring together the buyers and sellers in their market segment to inform buying decisions and facilitate transactions.  The markets represented on the panel ranged from medical products, non-alcoholic beverages, commercial marine professionals, integrative practitioners , to even brides-to-be.

Some key recommendations for creating digital environments from our session:

• Listen to your customers. This may seem obvious, but most B2B publishers aren’t using social media and the interactive nature of the Web to its full extent to gain understanding of the characteristics and needs of their buyer and seller audiences.

• Facilitate communications between audience members to create a community. Prospects and buyers are more likely to exchange views on a neutral publisher’s site than on an individual vendor company’s website.

• Once you have an engaged community, consider live events that enable the community members to interact in person. The quality of the event is enhanced when attendees have already interacted online.

• Try including video interviews on your site. The shelf-life of video interviews is much longer than that of current news, and video has become much easier to produce. Put them on YouTube and they may go viral!

• Final practical tip: check your company’s profile on LinkedIn. It’s there whether you know it or not; you may as well take control of it.

The many other ideas presented and discussed in the Q&A reflected two mindsets. 1) New media tools are to be feared because they turn marketers into competitors; or 2) content produced by marketers creates new opportunities for publishers to aggregate and add value. However, this session underscored that, instead of fearing and resisting new technologies, publishers should seize the day and use them to improve relationships with customers, suppliers, advertisers, and sponsors.

Note, although this post is written for a general B2B audience, the pharmaceutical sector where pharma-sponsored content is growing at the expense of pharma advertising, would make an excellent case study on how content marketing is affecting publishers.

[1] See Roger Wilson’s summary of the ABM event  for additional perspectives on the program. 

I would like to thank the panelists who participated in the session: Melissa Chang, President, Pure Incubation; John Craven, President, BevNet.com; and Brian Randall, VP, e-media, Diversified Business Communications.