According to this short piece on MarketingProfs last week, B2B marketers should get ready to move their entire sales process to the mobile phone. At least, that's what the synopsis at the end seems to say. Fortunately, the original post by Robert Lesser goes more in-depth.

It's notable, but not surprising, that inside sales teams are closing bigger B2B deals these days as face-to-face meetings become more costly for vendors, and time-consuming for buyers. Interestingly, this trends indicate something bigger. Since a B2B buyer must come to trust a vendor before spending money, it's clear that buyers have become more open to letting vendors earn their trust through their web browsers, email, and the phone.

B2B buyers are so strapped for time that marketers who can communicate well through the web and smartphones are earning their trust, and closing deals with new efficiency. Note my emphasis on the word "well." That's where content comes in. To make digital marketing work, content must do its part to earn trust. It has to support faster-paced personal relationship--not try to replace the personal relationship.

I'm reminded of the difficult time several friends and family members are having applying for jobs. All the applications are now online. Employers don't want phone calls or emails, so it's impossible for an applicant to gain an edge through personal contact. The result? Applications fall into a void. Job hunters can fill out hundreds of them and never know where they stand.

B2B marketing is no danger of becoming that impersonal, but we do risk missing good leads in a digital void of our own making. Nobody buys anything without trust, and trust is personal. Use the digital connection to support, but not supplant, the personal connection.

A popular video about social media quotes the statistic that YouTube is the #2 search engine after Google. Even though that stat is almost two years old, even with Bing and Twitter in the running now, YouTube by itself maintains a top spot with roughly a quarter of all searches on Google's properties (YouTube is owned by Google, and researchers combine them when they count searches).

Combine YouTube's search dominance with the emergence of SlideShare, Brainshark, Screencast, Prezi--plus photo sharing apps in social media--plus new cool tools every week, it seems--and it's clear that multimedia has reached critical mass in the marketing media mix. Marketers who underuse visual media are being left in the dust.

For the marketing content producer, this means that we need a whole new set of skills in addition to writing straight prose, paragraph by paragraph. Anyone who has sat through a boring PowerPoint or video presentation will tell you that the spoken word and the bulleted word are very different from the traditional written word.

"New" media is another reason for outsourcing work to marketing specialists, which we could add to the list we posted last week. We're fortunate to have writing skills in many media represented on our team (even songwriting), and we have more production talent in our network. But many marketing departments don't have that diversity in their skill set. And the investment in many projects, especially video, is too great to risk it on do-it-yourself execution even though the tools are getting simpler. It still requires a professional eye and ear to produce media that communicate.

Dana Van Heuvel blogs about thought leadership in marketing. His post today defends the concept of "thought leadership" in response to an article in The Economist, "Free Thinking: Why expensive consultancy firms are giving away more research." The author of The Economist's article criticizes consulting firms for putting out a greater number of free research studies:

"...the number of such reports from the top 25 firms has quintupled since 2004. Free reports are expensive to produce: Tom Rodenhauser of Kennedy Information, a firm that monitors consultancies, reckons they cost up to 5% of gross revenues. Are they worth it?"

The author off-handedly dismisses the obvious answer to the question--at least it's obvious if you know B2B marketing. Of course they are worth it. Thought leadership is simply how B2B marketing is done today. It is good content marketing, which has risen from the rise of social media. And the consulting firms cited in the article are too smart to invest 5% of revenues on research without ROI.

It's odd that we who believe in thought leadership as an effective way of promoting--and doing--business find ourselves defending the term and the concept. Is it because it sounds self-aggrandizing to call oneself a "leader"? Let's get over it. "Thought leadership" perfectly describes what we want when we publish new information to our prospects and customers.

Our friend Junta Joe blogged recently about the reasons to outsource, not in-source, your content marketing. The thrust of Joe’s post is that marketing managers need to focus their energy elsewhere. He plugs an upcoming report, but I’d like to elaborate some thoughts in the meantime.

I’ve been on both sides of this question: I have worked as both an in-house content generator and manager, and as a contractor on the outside. In my opinion, Joe left out some compelling reasons for outsourcing—reasons that make sense to me from both sides of the office door. (The list below expands on a previous post about “DIY” (do it yourself) marketing.)

1. No human has all the skills. As we’ve posted, marketing is getting technical. There are lots of techniques, tricks, and toys. Marketing managers—especially in B2B businesses where product knowledge is complex—simply have to take advantage of specialists. Content specialists bring a range of critical skills to the table. Take advantage of them.
    
2. The objective point of view has to come from outside the office. Outsiders take nothing for granted, and they don’t make assumptions about what the reader already knows. Clearer content comes from a fresh source. And even the best companies have culture and politics that color any insider’s writing.
    
3. Marketing’s best subject matter experts are in Sales. Field sales reps know the market, the climate, the winning value props, and the objections first-hand. In my experience, sales reps will share more openly with an outsourced writer than they will with a marketing manager—it’s like being interviewed by a journalist.
    
4. Your CFO doesn’t want FTEs. Since so few companies are hiring full-time employees anyway, outsourcing is typically the only way to add capacity. In a down economy, businesses who keep their marketing strong have the competitive advantage over those who panic and slash the marketing budget. Outsourcing is a low-risk, relatively inexpensive way to gain that advantage.

And what are some reasons to keep it in-house? Except for conserving cash (with the trade-off of using up budgeted in-house resources, i.e., the marketing manager’s precious time), honestly I can’t think of any.

A frequent objection to outsourcing is that a good marketing staffer knows the business better than any outside expert does—so why take the time to transfer that knowledge to another writer? I think the reasons above—and perhaps more that you can name—make a compelling case for making that effort. Once articulated to a content marketing specialist, that knowledge has more power to become great marketing content.

Seth’s recent post titled “Senior Management” got me thinking about how experience can backfire when it gets us in a rut. As a “free agent,” I find myself on either side of the experience paradox, depending on the gig.

Some of my consulting work puts me in new and unpredictable situations where I am learning everything. Although I am not bringing as much experience to the table, I am bringing enough smarts to provide a fresh perspective, and to ask, “Why do we do it that way?”

In my marketing work, however, it can be more challenging to stay open-minded, because experience guides me by default—and my old experience can close me off to new concepts.

Contemplating this paradox reminded me of a chat Paul and I had recently about the promise and the curse of B2B marketing technology. We are inundated with amazing new tools and processes to master, with increasingly sophisticated marketing automation, CRM, web content management, email management, social media management, and analytics. It’s tempting to become a competent B2B marketing technician, while becoming distracted from the practice and objectives of marketing. (As a techie myself, I speak from experience.)

And as we all learn the same tools, we all end up doing the same things—cool things, mind you—but on a playing field leveled by the technology.

We need to step away from our computers, and start thinking like our prospects.

We need to get out into the field with Sales and meet prospects and customers. We need to know the objections Sales encounters, so we can address them in our content. We need to create content strategies around what our prospects want throughout their buying process. We need to understand our competition and our position. In other words, we need to get creative like B2C marketers do. But all this has been said before.

To get this strategic perspective and still cover all the bases, we need the technicians and the creative thinkers. Performing B2B marketing effectively requires a range of skills broader than we could have imagined decade over decade, and now year over year. The “Renaissance” marketing manager is a thing of the past; we avoid specializing—and delegating to specialists—at our peril. 

A simple but important principle of email marketing has emerged from recommendations we are developing with a client. This principle is one of those fundamental techniques that everybody knows but few put into practice. That principle is: Don’t boil the ocean. Allow each element to have one, and only one, purpose.

The purpose of the subject line of the email is not to explain all the benefits of your offer, not to describe your company’s competitive advantage, and not to cement your new tag line into the readers’ memories. The subject line does one thing: it compels recipients to open the email.

The purpose of the headline is to get readers to read the copy below it. The purpose of the copy is to compel readers to follow your call to action. The purpose of the landing page is to give readers a clear understanding of what they can expect from your offer. And so forth.

Moreover, each email should have one, and only one, call to action. Prospects will appreciate the clarity and directness of a singular idea that’s easy to understand, decide upon, and act upon.

There are dozens, maybe hundreds of articles and blog posts counting the rules of email marketing. But I think of the “One Purpose per Element” rule to be the Golden Rule, from which all the other rules follow.