Today, the companies that adopt B2B marketing and are trusted leaders in their fields of expertise must assert this to their target audiences.
The companies of the 21st century must assert their position of dominance on several main axes. In particular, as leaders of trusted products or services and as leaders in expertise and innovation.
They must also proceed as quickly as possible with their own marketing transformation to ensure their dominance and leadership.
As experts in marketing strategies, ExoB2B recommends in some cases to assert themselves as such through an agressive content marketing strategy.
To show enlightened leadership or “Thought Leadership” and to be part of a sound digital transformation process.
That’s what I wrote in our previous life in 2018.
Why do I come back to it in this ‘new’ life almost post-pandemic? Because for the last few weeks, I keep seeing statistics on the “Trust” factor or confidence if you prefer.
As in Trust Agents, do you remember this book published in 2010 under the joint pen of Chris Brogan and Julien Smith?
Trust lies in business
Nowadays, we deal a lot with content marketing but also with curation of information for customers.
In this era of great fatigue on social networks and social media, companies must be better than others or occupy a special niche where they dominate if they wants to establish themselves as a “Thought Leaders”.
And they must prove this by publishing constant and relevant content, but also and above all, to gain the trust of potential customers with an effective curation of the information that interests them.
In doing so, they will be able to assert themselves as «trusted companies». The numbers speak for themselves. See the chart below, taken from a recent post on the TopRank blog.
The confidence index is up for businesses.
Companies, as well as experts, those that the authors of the book rightly call ‘Trust Agents’, are now considered the best sources of information.
They are the most reliable and trustworthy, ahead of politicians and the media.
And as the TopRank author tweets, there’s an opportunity for businesses and marketing experts.
The tweet says «insight and guidance».
Intelligent curation in this time of misinformation and fake news, is a must.
This will help solidify the confidence and position of “Thought Leader”.
The relevance of niche content
Forget the obsession to distinguish yourself with quality content, which brings out the mass produced every day. It is relevance that proves everything. Publish the right content in the right niche:
«If you’re in an unsaturated niche, you have a huge content marketing opportunity before you» – says Mark Schaefer.
Read what the “Father of Shock Content” writes about the myth of quality content:
One of the recurring rebuttals to the Content Shock idea is that the problem isn’t too much content.
I’s too much bad content.
My question to those people is, “says who?”
The problem is not just an explosion of bad content.
There is also an explosion of amazing content — and that is the real problem.
From there lies the importance of positioning yourself in the right niche. The one where the sum of your content can saturate the search engines and thus allow you to occupy a leading position in the results.
This way, it becomes much easier to occupy a dominant position and to be recognized as an enlightened leader.
Which reminds me of another post I once posted about the relevance and power of niche blogs.
Confidence helps sales
The relevant curation of information for customers does not only act on trust.
The position of “enlightened leader” also affects engagement and therefore sales. Do you doubt that?
These figures are taken from a webinar on October 20th, which featured Alex Rynne of LinkedIn. She revealed the results of a recent survey:
Our next «Live with Marketers» will share the results of our new survey.
Alex Rynne
Conducted in partnership with Edelman with nearly 400 B2B Executives, it highlights the state of decision making and strategic opportunity in the new COVID environment
Note the first column on the “sensitization” of decision-makers. To be seen, to arouse interest, to be credible…
However, to produce quality content never hurts.
The opposite, if:
If you have any questions or comments, or you would like to share your experiences of marketing content in B2B with us,
