Beyond Blogs and White Papers: A Recap of Pawan Deshpande’s Panel at MarketingProf’s B2B Forum

Curation Insights (Jun 17 2011)

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   On Wednesday our CEO, Pawan Deshpande, spoke on a panel at MarketingProf’s B2B Forum, the high-profile B2B marketing conference that took place this week at The Boston Park Plaza Hotel.  Accompanying Pawan on the panel, “Beyond Blogs and White Papers: 7 Approaches for Compelling Content That You Haven’t Thought Of,” was Eloqua’s Vice President of Content Marketing, Joe Chernov and Becki Dilworth, vice president of digital strategy at Bridgeline Digital.  The panel, moderated by MarketingProfs’s own Ann Handley, addressed the content "Circle of Life" for B2B marketers and how emerging content formats and mediums can be leveraged to increase customer engagement and brand ubiquity.

   What knowledge did the audience walk away with? Well, the sea of marketers that filled the room learned new ways to ensure that their brand’s content will resonate with audiences, as well as tips to repurpose, reuse and improve their content already in existence. Above all, we hope they left with a solid belief that content can be one of the best (and easiest) ways to connect with customers and prospects in a deep and meaningful way.

   For those who were unable to attend, there were seven specific approaches discussed by the panelists that we wanted to share here:

   1. Make your customer the hero; when their stories shine, so will your company
   2. Bring in outside (and respected, third-party) voices for your content and align with experts; content curation is an easy way to implement this
   3. Re-imagine and re-invigorate existing content that already exists within your organization
   4. Consider internal assets, like employee communications, as a source of content that can be repurposed for external audiences
   5. Socially brand your output for easy sharing on LinkedIn, Twitter and other properties; those little logos in the corner of a piece of content can go a long way, literally.
   6. Use infographics—they grab attention, but avoid falling victim to IBU (that is…Interesting But Useless ones)
   7. Curate content. As Pawan discussed, finding, organizing, and then sharing original and third-party content across a plethora of media—from RSS feeds and social media, to email newsletters and microsites–ensures your content reaches audiences where(ever) they consume it

   We have several excellent examples of how we’ve helped clients take advantage of the final approach above here, but would love to see what you’ve done to implement the approaches covered. Feel free to share links and details by commenting below.

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