Leading Lights: Content Marketing Strategist Ardath Albee

As one of the most insightful and prolific strategists in the emerging field of content marketing, Ardath Albee deserves your attention. She is the author of the compelling new book eMarketing Strategies for the Complex Sale.  But she also blogs at Marketing Interactions and appears all over the Web making the case for a new approach to marketing. “Trusted relationships are the prerequisite for complex purchase decisions,” she writes in her new book. “With buyers staying elusive longer, creating an eMarketing strategy to reach, attract, and engage them through digital content and communications is one of the most important ways you can help to build trust.” Britton Manasco interviewed Ardath for her perspectives on how B2B marketers can take performance to new levels by capitalizing on the power of content:

What was behind your decision to write this book?

Well, I wanted to give marketers a way to actually go about creating e-marketing strategies, content-driven strategies. I wanted to do it from the beginning, which is focusing on getting to know your buyer so you can hit the right perspective, all the way through, handing the sales-ready lead off to your sales team.

That was really the core premise and what I really wanted to do was create a guide that kind of walked them through the process from beginning to end.  I wanted to provide tools and insights and ways for marketers to look at what they were doing and figure out how to integrate their efforts.

Why did you believe this was timely?

The key trend is buyers taking control of the buying process. Consider the amount of information that is now available on the Internet that wasn’t previously there.  Buyers used to have to have a conversation with sales people in order to find everything they needed to know to evaluate a product, and that’s no longer true.

They can find information from a variety of places all on their own without ever speaking to the company.  In a lot of cases, they end up knowing more than the sales person does about the product.  What they need from the company in order to buy from them has changed.

I also saw the opening up of social networks.  Buyers are now getting information from peers, colleagues, other companies much more readily than they ever have before.  So there has to be a way to break through that noise and provide value and expertise beyond what your product enables. The product is practically a commodity at this point.

Why isn’t this conventional wisdom by now?

I think what happens is that B2B marketers are still entrenched in company-focused marketing.  They think they’re meeting their buyer’s needs when they’re talking about their products but they haven’t made that shift to flip their focus over to really address what the buyer needs.

I think the difference for me is that everything I talk about and focus on is what delivers value for the buyer.  Quite frankly, it’s not about feeds, or about features.  It’s about what your product enables but your customer couldn’t otherwise accomplish in the absence of your expertise. That’s what needs to shift. We need to focus on what the buyer needs to succeed. 

Why do you think companies struggle to make that shift?