Content Marketing is Not a Home Run, It’s Better
We are into the third week of May and not a single Major League Baseball game has been played. For those of us who still love what was once considered America’s national sport, the best we may hope for is televised, fan-less games. Time will tell whether this further drives fans away or makes us long for the return of ballparks filled with beer, hotdogs, and devotees. Despite the critics of baseball’s style and current pandemic-fueled troubles, I remain an ardent follower. Baseball requires a strategic mindset, and its value for me is that it mirrors business, and life too.
Baseball and Business
Baseball is complex, and success requires working with persistence toward long-term outcomes. The season is long, 162 games, and a successful team will win most games, but not all. This year’s team with the best record, the Houston Astros, won 66 percent of their games, meaning they lost 55 times. The chances of offensive success are low: a good batter gets on base only an average of one in three times at bat. And the batter must face all nine members of the opposing team alone. Conversely, defensive success is common, fielding errors are rare, and unlike most sports, the defense controls the pace of play.
The tactics of baseball are intended to support its strategic outcomes. For instance, not every swing of the bat is intended to hit a homerun even though the team with the most runs wins the game. Batters will hit sacrifice flies to advance a runner who is on base, placing them in a position to increase their chances of scoring. The faster a pitch crosses the plate, the more difficult it is to hit, but pitchers deliberately vary the speed of their pitches. This keeps batters guessing and increases the pitchers’ chances of success over the course of a game and even a season.
Business is also complex, and success requires a persistent focus on long-term outcomes. All businesses experience set-backs, but winning most of the time leads to long-term success. Like the lonely batter, who hasn’t walked into a business meeting with a room full of clients wondering when they will hurl a curve ball at you? The customer in business, like the defense in baseball, controls the pace.
Like baseball, businesses must align their tactics with their strategic goals in order to be successful, but misalignments are common. Developing tactics that support strategic business goals is difficult, because market conditions are not static. I think there is no business function more plagued by this challenge than marketing communications. Marketing efforts that do not support strategic goals waste time and money, and can harm businesses in the long-term.
Let’s look at what it takes to align a marketing plan with business outcomes.
Strategies and Tactics
Too often in business, strategy and tactics are used interchangeably and carry little meaning. Marketing teams would be well-served if they understood what each term means, the relationship between the two, and the positive results they can achieve.
Businesses seeking the positive effects of content marketing must be prepared to define long-term goals with more detail than just growing the business. Content marketing by definition requires a strategic mindset. The Content Marketing Institute defines it as “a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”
I recall speaking with a business development (BD) director for a mid-size software design firm who, like most professionals in her role, wanted to grow the business. She spoke about the shift in medical care with patients taking more control of their personal health. Healthcare networks had responded by offering patient portals, now fairly common, where users schedule appointments, view lab results, and even directly message their doctors.
As patient portal technology became popular, major hospital networks were the early adopters of standard, off-the-shelf technology suites that were developed by large design firms. While smaller provider networks wanted the new technology, limited resources made them unaffordable. Instead, they chose to delay their purchases, hoping that the costs would come down over time, like many new technologies. The mid-size software firm’s BD director thought that these smaller organizations offered a market opportunity.
She began with some questions. How can her company satisfy the needs of the smaller healthcare systems now without devaluing her own company’s products and services, and grow her business? The BD director surmised that cost alone was not the issue for the smaller healthcare organizations. She did some research and learned that many of the current solutions lacked customization that would make them more affordable for organizations with smaller budgets. However, smaller provider networks could afford solutions that could be phased-in over several years as their resources permitted. Working with her senior design team, they developed a customized technology solution on a sliding scale aligned with the resources of smaller medical organizations.
Let’s define strategy and tactics in this example. The strategic goal is to deliver patient portal technology to smaller hospital networks in order to grow their software design business. Statements that seek to communicate strategy always have an overall outcome, in this case, to deliver technology to a defined set of buyers and grow the business. How the design company delivers the solution becomes the tactics, and in this case, it is a customized product on a sliding scale based on affordability.
Developing a Content Plan that Supports Business Goals
The BD director was confident she had identified an unmet need in a defined market and had a solid solution. She was less sure about how to communicate their value proposition to the people who it would benefit the most.
Her target audience was looking for a cheaper solution. Offering a more affordable patient portal would absolutely gain their attention, because it was overcoming a known objection. Traditional features and benefits content for the product would be simple and easy to deliver in a short digital message.
However, let’s examine this from the buyer’s perspective. A prospect who reacts positively to a message like this is in the late stages of their buyer’s journey. When they connect with the sales team they will likely expect a solution similar to the market’s current solutions, but for less money, because that’s what the messaging says. Content promising a cheaper solution is a tactic that is not aligned with the BD director’s strategic outcomes: a scalable solution, implemented over several years for a cost that supports the software design company’s growth. This misalignment of marketing communications and business strategy is more common than most of us want to admit.
To support the BD director’s strategy, the content plan must help their prospects reconsider their understanding of the issue they face by not having a patient portal and help them through the buyer’s journey again. I like to start with several questions intended to give DB directors, and marketers, the clarity needed to develop a content plan that will drive business outcomes:
What problem does your prospect have that your product solves better than your competitors?
Is your target audience aware of the problem?
How does your target audience describe the problem?
The software design company’s answers might look like this:
Small healthcare networks cannot purchase a complete patient portal solution because it exceeds their annual budget.
The small healthcare organizations are aware that networks are adopting patient portal technology, but may not have quantified the costs of not having this technology.
The small healthcare organizations believe they cannot afford the technology now and plan to wait for the price to decline like most new technology does.
The next step is for the BD director and marketing team to begin creating content ideas that address each stage of the buyer’s journey to help the prospect recognize their issue, and understand what the software design company can do about it. The content ought to be labeled according to the stage of the buyer’s journey it is addresses.
Here are some content idea examples using the software design company:
Early Buyer’s Journey - Awareness Stage
An article discussing how patients use the healthcare portals and what features are most important to them, e.g. scheduling and lab results.
An article quantifying the savings and efficiencies a healthcare provider achieved in the first year after adopting patient portal technology.
Middle Buyer’s Journey - Consideration Stage
An article or case study introducing the idea of a phased implementation of patient portal technology that addresses the most important features first.
Late Buyer’s Journey - Decision Stage
A description of the customized, phased model aligned with smaller budgets, delivered and paid for over several years.
Strategic Goal Setting to Drive Business Results
In baseball, not every swing of the bat is intended to deliver a home run. While home run hitters are valuable, not every player is one. In business, when communicating your value to a target audience, sprinkling a little content marketing into the mix is not going to deliver a home run lead. Content marketing is a strategic approach to attract a defined target audience to support long term business outcomes. Begin with a well defined business strategy, take time to understand your target audience, and develop content that helps through all phases of their buyer’s journey.
At Mungadai we love helping business leaders develop content marketing plans that are aligned with their strategic business outcomes. Sometimes all that is needed to change the course of a game or season is a relief pitcher or pinch hitter. Put us in coach!