A 60 Second Content Tip —My favorite story of a company pushing back against content marketing goes like this: A blog platform sales executive was talking to a B2B (business-to-business) CEO about using blogs to lift search results and drive more online leads. The CEO refused the offer by saying, “we’re a wholesale tire company, and we don’t write or produce content.”
The salesman decided to prove him wrong. He asked, “how many salespeople do you have?”
“Around 100,” the CEO replied.
“And how many of them have phones or email addresses?”
“All of them.”
“And how many of them answer questions from customers and prospective customers via those phones or those email accounts?”
“All of them. That’s what they do, all day.”
“About how many questions does the typical sales person answer in a day—let’s make it simple—how many via email?”
The CEO thought for a moment and said, “Probably 10-15.”
So, the salesman concluded, “You have 10-15 pieces of written content per salesperson per day across a team of 100 people? By my count, that’s 100 to 150 pieces of content per day. That’s enough content in a single day to fuel a company blog for five months.”
Soon thereafter the CEO bought the software and launched a company blog.
According to the Content Marketing Institute’s 2015 B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends report, 50% of B2B marketers are concerned with producing content consistently. In other words, they are worried that they don’t have enough content. Not true, you likely have a lot of content.
60 second content tip of the day: Everyone is a content producer. Everyone is a content marketer. Don’t let denial be your excuse and look for content everywhere.
