Is B2B Content Marketing Dead?

B2B content marketing is evolving, not dying.  The media is obsessed with treating content marketing like a terminally ill business strategy on life support.  Consider that since 2014 announcing, the demise of content marketing has been trumpeted on such outlets as INC, The Guardian, and Huffington Post.  It simply isn’t true, content marketing is nowhere near dead, in fact, it isn’t even close to being widely adopted, especially in the B2B world.  But it will be dead to those seeking to employ a B2B content marketing strategy if they continue to just nibble at the edges of the practice. 

What passes as content marketing right now is, more often than not, a transfer of fiscal and employee assets from one traditional marketing outlet to another.  For instance, marketing leaders move dollars from something like event marketing and invest more heavily in online events integrated with some level of marketing automation. This tacit move will not inject the sort of transformative growth of demand and sales that the approach promises.  And sadly, mistaking a movement of activity from bucket A to bucket B will do more to alienate the sales force instead of enabling them.

It almost makes me wish there was another name for B2B content marketing because the term doesn’t capture the nuance of what it means to use content to engage a marketplace.  Content isn’t about SEO, or converting a visitor to your site into a lead, and it isn’t about pushing such a lead down through the marketing funnel.  These are important tactics, but what content marketing must be about is a commitment to the emotional drama that surrounds your products or services. 

It is about the narrative, the story arc, the hero overcoming challenges to arrive at an unlikely victory.

Too much?  No it is absolutely not too much. 

It is the reality of what it means to sell today in B2B.  Especially when our sales cycles are more than transactional and last over several weeks or months.  In those situations, we absolutely positively have to accept that we are more in the business of accompanying our targeted buyer along their journey of discovery for NO OTHER REASON than to assist. 

We also have to understand that we are responsible for supporting our sales colleagues in a new way.  Our sales account executives do not have the luxury of massive amounts of support.  They can’t load up a bus of experts to show up to help sell to an account, and they aren’t taking down massive license deals these days.  They are hunting to secure monthly recurring revenue more often than not.  And they win when they are helpful and prescriptive.

B2B content marketing has to offer that prescription and enable the sales rep to own the ability to prescribe like they are the top doc in the land of the industry in which they are selling.  Content marketing in B2B isn’t JUST about the marketing funnel.  Ever.  Period.  Full stop.  And while this is not intended to diminish the marketing funnel or mitigate its importance, it is absolutely intended to highlight that if our B2B content marketing doesn’t place the story and sales enablement central to the effort then our content marketing dies. 

B2B content marketing isn’t dead, it has barely started to live.  But content marketing is in jeopardy of becoming  an endangered species.  Content marketing must evolve, and it does evolve though two critical steps. 

A relentless focus on story.

Complete alignment to the entirety of the sales process.