If you believe you need to change how you market your products and services, but don’t know where to start, David Meerman Scott’s The New Rules of Marketing and PR may just be the perfect place. It’s educational, insightful, and provides real world examples from people who are reaping their benefits.

In the second edition of this book, David goes into great detail and helps you learn how to transform your marketing to attract and engage customers by creating helpful, useful content. It’s time for you to stop talking about your products and humanize your marketing. David walks you through the tools as well as provides and cites numerous examples of B2B and B2C companies successfully employing these tactics to grow their businesses and the communities that matter to them. It’s not rocket science, but it is new. David breaks it down and helps you understand how all the pieces work together.

David graciously spent some time answering my questions about the book and the state of marketing today (thanks David). Enjoy the read!

Jeremy: When was the moment you first realized your success as a marketer was bigger than just you and you were really on to, The New Rules Of Marketing and PR?

David: I always knew I was onto something. Way back in 1999 I had found a better way to market on the Web. It wasn’t until about a year after New Rules of Marketing & PR came out that people started to tell me that I was on to something.

Jeremy: I have a question about this statement, “Guess what? When I arrive at a site, you don’t need to grab my attention, you already have it!” Do you mean with loud bells and whistles, because I certainly have to direct your behavior with a good user interface and design, no?

David: Magazine, radio, TV, newspaper, billboards and the like all want you to go somewhere else to do something (a store to buy for example). However, when you arrive at a Web site, you are at the place where action happens, so you don’t need to coerce people.

Jeremy: Are buyer personas the single most important element of a content strategy? Or better yet, the single most important thing a marketer must do to connect with their customers?

David: I think “buyer personas” are the king of marketing and a focus on buyer personas allows you to create the content. A buyer persona represents a distinct group of potential customers, an archetypal person whom you want your marketing to reach. Targeting your work to buyer personas prevents you from sitting on your butt in your comfortable office just making stuff up about you products, which is the cause of most ineffective marketing.

Incidentally, my use of the word “buyer” applies to any organization’s target customers. A politician’s buyer personas include voters, supporters, and contributors; universities’ buyer personas include prospective students and their parents; a tennis club’s buyer personas are potential members; and nonprofits’ buyer personas include corporate and individual donors. Go ahead and substitute however you refer to your potential customers in the phrase “buyer persona,” but do keep your focus on this concept. It is critical for success online.

By truly understanding the market problems that your products and services solve for your buyer personas, you transform your marketing from mere product-specific, ego-centric gobbledygook that only you understand and care about into valuable information people are eager to consume and that they use to make the choice to do business with your organization.

Jeremy: “Think like a publisher.” Thinking like one may actually be the easy part, as acting like one is the real challenge. What one or two changes should marketers make to their department to make acting like one a reality?

David:

1) Stop talking about your products and services all the time
2) Don’t be egotistical

Instead of creating jargon-filled, hype-based advertising, you can create the kind of online content that your buyers naturally gravitate to—if you take the time to listen to them discuss the problems that you can help them solve. Then you’ll be able to use their words, not your own. You’ll speak in the language of your buyer, not the language of your founder, CEO, product manager, or PR agency staffer. You’ll help your marketing get real.

Jeremy: You talked quite a bit in the book about PR professionals resistance to the new rules. At it is core, is it rooted simply in fear of change?

David: Many company executives and public relations people trace their worries about social media to their belief that “people will say bad things about our company.” This fear leads them to ignore blogs and online forums and to prohibit employees from participating in social media. In every discussion that I’ve had with employees who freely participate in social media, I’ve confirmed that this fear is significantly overblown. Sure, an occasional person might vent frustrations online, and now and then a dissatisfied customer might complain (unless you’re in the airline industry and then it might be more than a few).

But the benefit of this kind of communication is that you can monitor in real-time what’s being said and then respond appropriately. Employees, customers, and other stakeholders are talking about your organization offline anyway, so unless you are participating online, you’ll never know what’s being said at all. The beauty of the Web is that you benefit from instant access to conversations you could never participate in before.

Jeremy: Have any Gatorade lately?

David: Frequently. But not because I am hungover. I like the stuff.

Jeremy: We have a long way to go with the full acceptance and adoption of the new rules, but that’s not gonna stop me from asking, what’s next (for marketing and pr)?

David: I’m interested in GPS enabled iPhone (and other mobile) device applications such as Layar and Foursquare.

Jeremy: Right on, I am too. I love the impact technology is having on the way we connect and market. These certainly are interesting times we live in. Thanks again for your time David.

Buyer Persona development may just be the most important element in a content marketing strategy. Having a deeper, more personal understanding of your customers leads to content creation that not only builds trust, but also demonstrates your willingness to spend the necessary time to learn the actual circumstances that affect your customers.

With well-defined buyer personas, your content suddenly becomes for *someone* versus *everyone*. And that makes all the difference when trying to build a relationship with your customers through your content marketing strategy.

What is a buyer persona? Here is my buyer persona definition:

A buyer persona is a description of a specific person for whom your products and services are intended. It goes beyond statistics and demographics, and defines behaviors, motivations, likes/dislikes, traits, etc. Its intent is to help you reach your customers on a human level.

Ardath’s Albee,, author and B2B marketing strategist, provides a definition in her outstanding book, eMarketing Strategies for the Complex Sale, – (a recommended must read).

A persona is a composite sketch representative of a type of customer you serve. Personas extend beyond the traditional demographic profiles commonly used to summarize an ideal customer.

The common element of these definitions is that they suggest that you see your customers’ challenges through their eyes and begin thinking about your customers as human beings with feelings and emotions, not statistics and metrics in a spreadsheet.

This change in mindset provides you a more detailed answer to the question, “For whom am I creating this content?” It narrows your focus. Your marketing shifts from being product and company centric to useful, customer-centric content that is for a person – not a target audience. Your content begins speaking to what motivates your customers, what their priorities are, and most importantly, the real world problems that you can help them solve.

In addition to directing your future content creation efforts, buyer personas also provide you a tool to evaluate your existing content. Use your it to ask which buyer persona(s) does this content speak to (if any). You then have a guide for how to edit that content to fit the needs of your new buyer personas.

Bottom line, as David Meerman Scott first told us in The Goobledygook Manifesto, we are in desperate need of humanizing marketing … buyer personas are useful tools and are your first step in achieving that outcome.

Remember, we’re all people first. Bring that mindset to your content marketing strategy and you will create meaningful, lasting relationships with your customers.

I am still sometimes haunted by the response I gave to an executive’s question in a strategy meeting a full decade ago. My then-employer was a B2B internet company struggling with its identity as the organization grew at an explosive rate and morphed from a publisher of online trade journals to a combination publisher, builder of B2B communities, and enabler of B2B commerce in the form of auctions, exchanges, and online lead generation.

The executive leading the meeting asked each of us at the table where our content and community efforts best fit into the equation. Should they come under the umbrella of marketing and audience development, reporting up through the CMO, or should they remain in Operations, which encompassed everything from site design to sales fulfillment to product development and IT support, all under the direction of the COO?

The right answer—the answer I was dying to give—was “neither.” Content and community—two sides of the same coin—deserved its own seat at the management table, with decisions made based on what was best for our readers and users. My belief, then and now, was that if we provided truly useful, informative, can’t-get-it-anywhere-else content, as well as the tools with which to rate it, discuss it, and build a community around it, the rest (namely traffic and “stickiness,” as we used to call it) would take care of itself.

Instead, the answer I gave was a waffling, political attempt to please both sides. Content and community remained in the Operations side of the org chart, and the company continued its downward slide. Would a different answer on my part have changed the course of our business, leading us to the Fortune 500 instead of adding to the heap of failed dot-coms? A girl can dream. But the failure of our company to recognize the need for a user advocate at the top levels of our organization meant that the interests of our readers—the all-important buyers in our vision of a buyer-meets-seller B2B marketplace—would always be subordinate to the needs of other departments. Original articles written by knowledgeable industry experts? Too expensive. Community-generated product reviews? Might upset the advertisers. Useful product specs and data sheets, presented in an easily searchable (and findable) fashion? That’s an awfully big project – just throw them up on the site somewhere, and we’ll get to it…maybe.

Fast forward 10 years, and many companies continue to struggle with the question in one form or another: Who “owns” content, and where should its creation and direction lie within the organization?

In today’s world, where content might include blog posts, client testimonials, customer reviews, articles, email newsletters, white papers, and everything in between, it’s neither advisable nor realistic to insist that all of it originate from one ivory-towered department within the company. And I’m not suggesting that our content efforts should be an altruistic attempt to create content for content’s sake or for the good of all humankind: If you weren’t trying to sell something, you wouldn’t be here.

But what I still believe is that every organization would benefit from a true customer advocate right there at the top, ensuring that the needs, interests, and motivations of the customer drive every decision the company makes and making certain that any content created within the company is truly useful and informative—not a thinly veiled infomercial disguised as a white paper, press release, or social media campaign. It seems obvious, but think back to the last meeting you attended. Sales needs more (or better) leads, marketing needs to generate them, IT needs more resources to keep everything humming along. What do your customers need? Is anyone asking?

---

About The B2Bblogger: Beth Brindle is a freelance writer and consultant with more than 12 years’ experience creating content for business-to-business customers and high-value consumer markets including the real estate and residential construction industries. Follow her on Twitter or connect with her
on LinkedIn.

Let’s face it, B2B buying behavior has evolved, it’s time your marketing (and sales) does too. Here’s a list of reasons why and some helpful links to get you started.

1. “Nobody cares about your products.”

Stop talking about them. In this video, David Merrman Scott and Eloqua‘s CTO Steve Woods discuss what to change in B2B marketing.

http://www.metacafe.com/watch/3974062/

Bottom line, stop talking about your products, develop a content marketing strategy, and create compelling content people are willing to SHARE. Oh, and don’t be afraid to start adding FUN to the process.

2. The recession

While the economy may be slowly easing its way out of the recession, don’t think for a minute that the purse strings are all of the sudden gonna get loosened up. My bet, there is going to be an even higher level of scrutiny put on every dollar spent. All the more reason to have remarkable content that will not only EARN the attention of your future customers but also arm them to justify the expense.

3. Caller Id

We all have it and are grateful for it, right? Can you think of the last time you picked up the phone for a number you didn’t recognize? I can’t. Or better yet, when you did pick up the phone (accidentally thinking it was someone else), how it only took you about a nanosecond to realize how big of a mistake you just made. No offense meant toward the sales professionals out there, but you have a thankless job interrupting people all day. It’s high time for a role reversal. Start learning how to utilize inbound marketing strategies to get found and compel your prospects to call you!

4. Your competitors

If you are following your competitors on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook etc, reading their blogs, downloading their eBooks, then guess what…not only do they have your attention, they have your customer’s too.

Get started now, it’s not too late (but soon it may be).

OK, so I am going to admit something that I may not normally admit. Why? I need your help. You see, I’m a bit confused. It started the other day when a colleague asked me, “What is the difference between content marketing and inbound marketing?” After a moment or two of pause, I simply said, great question, let me get back to you.

It was the first time that I really had considered the question and these two terms together. I hear them and see them used all the time. We even just hosted our Twitter #B2Bbookclub on Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media, and Blogs (The New Rules of Social Media) with Dharmesh Shah. But I still felt unsure how to respond appropriately to the question. So I set out to find some data to clarify my understanding.

The first place I turned was Wikipedia. Here are the definitions as found on Wikipedia:

Content marketing is an umbrella term encompassing all marketing formats that involve the creation or sharing of content for the purpose of engaging current and potential consumer bases. In contrast to traditional marketing methods that aim to increase sales or awareness through interruption techniques, content marketing subscribes to the notion that delivering high-quality, relevant and valuable information to prospects and customers drives profitable consumer action.

Inbound marketing and its opposite outbound marketing have various meanings depending on the context. One pair of definitions are:

Inbound marketing is a style of marketing that focuses on getting found by customers. This sense is related to relationship marketing and Seth Godin’s idea of permission marketing. David Meerman Scott recommends that marketers “publish their way in” (via blogs etc.) in contrast to outbound marketing where they used to have to “buy their way in” (via paid advertisements). Next best action marketing can also be applied.

Traditional marketing (outbound marketing) is where companies focus on finding customers by advertising. This sense is related to intrusion marketing and Godin’s term interruption marketing.

Both definitions specifically state that content marketing and inbound marketing are “in contrast” to traditional or outbound marketing methods. So on the surface when I looked at these two definitions, I was learning toward an answer of yes, they are synonyms.

Then I read. And read some more. A couple of articles that were most intriging were The Inbound Marketing / Marketing Content Management Crowd – A Fourth Camp? by Adam Needles and What Is Inbound Marketing? by Clay Schossow. But then I found another article that was really helpful in solidifying my conclusion. It was written in Nov 2008 by Rick Burnes of Hubspot titled, Inbound Marketing & the Next Phase of Marketing on the Web. Again it mentions the contrast to traditional marketing, but a core differentiator appeared in the form of a chart.

As you can see illustrated in the chart, inbound marketing has three components. As Burnes states in the article, “The most successful Inbound Marketing campaigns have three key components: content, seo, and social media.” While all along I have thought about SEO and social media with content, I had not put the three together in this way to holistically define inbound marketing.

That said, I am concluding that content marketing and inbound marketing are NOT synonyms. What do you think?

Remember, I started this article by telling you I need your help, are they synonymous? Kindly share your thoughts in the comments.