What's the Right Content Mix for B2B?

Apps. Blogs. Case studies. Digital tools. E-books. Events. Games. Graphs. Infographics. Newsletters. Photos. Podcasts. Presentations. Reports. Quizzes. Videos. Webinars. White papers.

What's the right content marketing mix?

Begin with the essentials:

Blogs. The Number 1 source of leads, says Search Engine Journal. Without a blog, your strategy's spineless.

Events and webinars. What's better than blogs? Three of four B2B marketers say events. Webinars are a close second. A single event can pack more punch than 100 blog posts.

Newsletters. Newsletters help you keep customers, and keep prospects interested. Weekly is the best frequency, if you can manage it.

Videos. Six in 10 decision-makers visit a brand’s website after watching a video, according to Inc. And four in 10 contact the company.

White papers. White papers trumpeter your authority, essential to persuading customers to buy from you. 

Case studies. Case studies provide social proof, equally essential to persuading customers.

E-books. E-books can gather repurposed blog posts. They offer an outlet for dazzling design work, inviting to readers turned off by other formats.

Other content. Apps, digital tools, games, graphs, infographics, photos, podcasts, presentations, reports and quizzes are all just icing on the cake.

Admit You're a Hack

In the modern world of business, it is useless to be a creative,
original thinker unless you can also sell what you create.

— David Ogilvy

Jay Baer, president of Convince & Convert, wants you to believe storytelling is hack work.

"I’m absolutely on board with storytelling as a content marketing device," he says. "But just because you understand story arcs and can riff on Joseph Campbell doesn’t mean you’re now Francis Ford Coppola or William Faulkner. Content marketing is a job, not an art form."

I suspect Baer doesn't know that Faulkner, with over a dozen dependents to support, wasn't above sports writing, travel writing, and movie scriptwriting (he's credited for, among other films, The Big Sleep).

But I get Baer's point: marketing's kind of storytelling ain't art-making; it's hack work.

"I see more and more content marketers straying from this perspective," Baer says, "thinking that they are newfangled hybrid players, straddling the line between fine art and commerce. They are not.

"The only job that content marketing has is to create behaviors among target audiences that benefit the business. Content must prod behavior, or it’s a useless exercise."

Or, as my agency's website says, "“It’s not creative unless it sells."

Is Succinct Extinct?

You can argue for long-form content 'til you're blue in the face.

You're still wrong.

In 1647, the Jesuit Baltazar Gracián explained why:

Don't be a bore.

The man of one business or of one topic is apt to be heavy. Brevity flatters and does better business; it gains by courtesy what it loses by curtness. Good things, when short, are twice as good. The quintessence of the matter is more effective than a whole farrago of details. It is a well-known truth that talkative folk rarely have much sense whether in dealing with the matter itself or its formal treatment. There are that serve more for stumbling-stones than centerpieces, useless lumber in everyone's way. The wise avoid being bores, especially to the great, who are fully occupied: it is worse to disturb one of them than all the rest. Well said is soon said.

Write for readers, not Google.

A Clear and Present Danger

Latinos. Germans. Same difference.

President Trump warned last week he's cracking down on MS-13. In his first 100 days in office, he has arrested nearly 42,000 immigrants. Sounds good, except for the fact that 11,000 of those people have no criminal records.

A century ago, Germans were the targets of our government.

When the US declared war on Germany in April 1917, German immigrants came under suspicion—a sentiment that soon spread to all resident foreigners. All German immigrants were labeled "alien enemies" and—among 19 other things—prohibited by executive order from criticizing the federal government.

Within two months, the label “alien enemy” was applied to anyone who dissented.

Prime targets included "Wobblies"—workers enrolled in the union known as the Industrial Workers of the World. Labeled as enemies, rank-and-file union members were rounded up willy-nilly and deported, or taken in cattle cars to remote spots in the Southwestern desert and left to die. The union's leaders, 101 of them, were all arrested, tried en masse, and sentenced to 20 years.

A year later, in May 1918, Congress passed a law imposing a 20-year sentence on anyone tempted to “utter, print, write, or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of government of the United States.”

And in October, it passed a law allowing deportation of “any alien who, at any time after entering the United States, is found to have been at the time of entry, or to have become thereafter, a member of any anarchist organization."

The war with Germany ended in an armistice a month later.

But the laws stayed in force, and all hell broke loose when the Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer and his assistant, J. Edgar Hoover, launched their infamous crusade against the left.

Over a two-year period known as the "Red Scare," Palmer and Hoover arrested 10,000 alien residents without warrants, many of whom were “denaturalized” and deported to the newly formed Soviet Union.

The Supreme Court justified their actions by deciding, when free speech constituted a “clear and present danger” the government could suspend the First Amendment.

All I can say is, it's great to be Irish.

It's a Gift

This is the main question, with what activity one's leisure is filled.

— Aristotle

Judging from friends' Facebook posts, we're amusing ourselves to death.

But that's an illusion.

The fact is, we're working—if we're working—more than ever. Not always by choice, but often.

In Leisure, the Basis of Culture, the philosopher Josef Pieper blamed careerism on our "refusal to accept a gift, no matter where it comes from.”

We've been brainwashed by advertisers to believe everything worth anything you earn, like some goddamn badge. We even treat leisure as something to earn, sharing selfies from our exotic travels like they were medals of achievement.

It's a sign of pride, the worst of the seven deadly sins.

But you don't earn leisure. It's a gift. And it isn't time off to "recharge the battery." As Pieper believed, it is the battery.

"Leisure lives on affirmation," Pieper said.

To be “at leisure” is one of humanity's defining abilities.

You can't really give at work until you're willing to receive the gift of leisure.