Let Your C-Suite See How
While many B2C companies may not have a documented content marketing strategy, it’s easier for the marketing team to get senior management’s consent and a budget to work with. In the B2B world, this is a bigger challenge and quite a struggle.
The 5 most common objections raised by the C-Suite at these B2B organizations include:
- “It’s yet another expense item and we have a shrinking budget. We don’t have the resources.”
- “We don’t have anything interesting to talk about.”
- “Why should we give away all our trade secrets and let the competition in on our strategy?”
- “Content marketing is too unfamiliar—why burn our fingers doing what we don’t know anything about?”
- “How do we know it will work?”
5 Steps to Convince Senior Management that You Need B2B Content Marketing
Let’s look at how you can handle each of the above objections and get C-Suite buy-in for content marketing within your B2B organization:
- Show How Much You Can Save: Your senior executives have a responsibility to run a tight ship, show revenue growth and maintain a healthy bottom line. It is understandable that they are vary of allowing a budget for content marketing, a tool your company has never used before. The lack of in-house resources means having to pay external providers. Talk to these executives about reducing the cost of paid advertising by driving organic search traffic through quality content on your site, blog and social media channels.
- There is No Boring Content, Only Bored Content Creators: We wrote about this on our blog earlier. Show your senior executives good examples and prove to them that there are thousands of companies producing engaging and stimulating content about seemingly dry and boring subjects. After all, if you run a profitable business, with paying customers who are interested and have a need for what you offer, it’s impossible that you have nothing to say!
- If You Don’t Share Secrets, Your Audience Will Look Elsewhere: Online audiences are bombarded with meaningless content, and a lot of it. They consider this distracting and just “noise”. What they want is education, information and entertainment of true value. If you don’t give it to them, your competitors are only a single click away. When you do offer it, you earn their respect, attention, and over time, loyalty. No C-Suite executive will reject these benefits.
- You Don’t Have to Learn Everything: Do you produce photocopiers, software, automation systems, furniture, carpets, computer hardware and accessories, paper, and everything else that your business needs to function? Yet, you use all of these items and services by simply sourcing them from trusted and experienced providers. Why does content marketing have to be any different? There is merit in partnering with a content marketing agency that can define a suitable B2B content strategy for your company, implement it skilfully and deliver the results at a much lower cost than it would take to do everything in-house.
- You Won’t Know Until You’ve Tried!: How do you know anything works until you have tried it and seen it in action? Now, of course, you can’t ask your CEO or CIO that question without being severely reprimanded—so please don’t! Instead, gather evidence of other organizations within your industry and similar verticals that have seen success with content marketing. Share best practices and educate your C-Suite on what works, what doesn’t, what best-in-class companies do, and so on. Be very clear when explaining:
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- How the content marketing strategy will be implemented, who will do what, what resources are necessary and how much they will cost.
- Create a content blueprint to get their thoughts and pre-approval on topics, types of content, tone and voice that will be used, etc.
- Identify the distribution channels, both external and internal that will be used to publish your content.
- Specify the content measurement benchmarks and metrics that you will use to show ROI—the C-Suite loves that word!
Ready? Now put on a bold, confident smile and go knock on the door! If one were to take a clue from the Sermon on the Mount, “Ask and you shall receive”! :)
Wondering how your B2B company can embark on an effective content marketing strategy with the support of your C-Suite? Give us a call at 888-646-8003 or send us an email.