Is your B2B content choking on red tape?

One of the biggest challenges facing B2B marketers today is content creation. Long term SEO success demands a consistent creation of quality, informative content—blog posts, articles, white papers, webinars and so forth.

Since most B2B marketers seem to constantly struggle with content creation, many are worried their industry might be too “boring” to write much about: it doesn’t make sense to make your content marketing efforts any more complicated and convoluted by adding layers of red tape and multiple chains of command into the process.

I was speaking with an SEO client of mine the other day who is the Marketing Director for a software company. While she completely understands the importance of content and how it helps propel a B2B SEO campaign forward, her management (that doesn’t come from a marketing background) isn’t always on the same page.

Like most higher-ups in just about every company, they want to see the right numbers:

• How many visitors is their site getting each month?
• Where is the site ranking for priority keywords in the SERPs?
• How much new business can be attributed to SEO?

It’s difficult for my client to explain to her management that without a strong content marketing campaign to help push their SEO along their efforts are going to plateau.

Since content creation isn’t a high priority for her management, both her and my hands are kind of tied behind our backs. Their content funnel had dried up to the point where I offered to have my SEO team write blog posts for them, using old white papers and webinars as a guide, which she could have her team approve and publish.

While she was completely behind the idea because it saved her time and effort, it actually added another layer of red tape to the situation. Since my writers aren’t experts in their industry, her management was concerned about the validity of the content; they wanted to be sure we didn’t write anything untrue (even though we were using their previously published material as our source).

So every blog post my team created had to go up various chains of command, get tweaked and edited (a process that sometimes took weeks), then kicked backed to us for revision. Once we made the necessary changes the process began again.

It was taking weeks, if not months, to get a single blog post approved! Since they weren’t publishing content on their own this meant their content marketing efforts were essentially non-existent and their SEO was hurting because of it.

While I completely understand that most businesses have a chain of command, you can’t let that interfere with your content marketing efforts so much that it brings your campaigns to a standstill!

I had a startup client that was so concerned with making every blog post “perfect” that nothing ever got published. Since they were in a demand generation mode, a strong content marketing campaign was critical to helping introduce not only their brand but also their terminology to their target audience.

Without consistent content creation their brand wasn’t getting the attention it deserved. I kept telling this client, at some point you have to let your content out the door. Even if it’s not “perfect,” if it’s well-written and informative it’s worth publishing.

Content marketing is so important for not only your SEO, but also your social media marketing and online marketing efforts as a whole, that you can’t afford to let red tape hold you back! There are enough obstacles to SEO success to overcome without having to worry about internal politics holding your content marketing efforts back.

About the Author ~ Nick Stamoulis

Nick Stamoulis is the President of the Boston Massachusetts SEO firm, Brick Marketing.  With 13 years of experience, Nick Stamoulis shares his knowledge by writing in the Brick Marketing Blog, and publishing the Brick Marketing SEO Newsletter, read by over 150,000 opt-in subscribers. You can find Nick Stamoulis on Twitter at:  http://twitter.com/NickStamoulis  and nick@brickmarketing.com.

Would you like to learn more about SEO copywriting & content marketing? Heather Lloyd-Martin’s SEO Copywriting Certification program is the only online training offering certification, and independently endorsed by the SEO industry!

Photo thanks to frankh (Frank Hebbert)