According to the latest study by the Content Marketing Institute, 60 percent of business-to-business (B2B) companies are ramping up their content marketing spending for 2012. The study also found that:

• 90 percent of B2B companies are using some form of content marketing
  
• B2B companies will invest 26 percent of their total budgets on content marketing

The changes to Google Panda have made content marketing a necessity, particularly for B2B companies who need real content to get found in search results. Content marketing includes white papers and case studies, two things that are specialties of mine. If your B2B company is looking for a writer who can also research and interview, contact me. Your competition is already spending money on content marketing, so don't get left behind - or at the bottom of search results.

"May you live in interesting times" is considered to be an old Chinese curse. After all, "interesting," according to the American Heritage Dictionary, means "arousing or holding the attention; absorbing." Nothing in there says that "interesting" translates to "positive." Think of the last car accident you saw; most people slowed down and looked because it was interesting. 

Right now, we live in interesting marketing times. With the advent of social media, marketing seems to get squeezed down to 140-character Tweets and short Facebook updates. But B2B marketers know better. We know that B2B marketing can only use a little bit of this strategy, because our products are complex and require more explanation than a Tweet allows. Content marketing has surfaced as the answer to this conundrum: case studies, white papers, and blog entries are all ways that B2B marketers can cut through the clutter of short information bursts and provide a substantial amount of information to prospects and customers.

The key, then, is to leverage content to appeal to our prospects. We need to do the research on them, find out what their pain points are, and how we can solve them with our products and services. We need to look closely at their organizations to find out what is already working as well as what isn't working at all, and then we need to communicate our solutions clearly.

These are definitely interesting times for B2B marketers as we further split from B2C marketing tactics to appeal to our customers, some of whom still see Tweets and Facebook pages as frivolous and expect more from us. We'll rise to that challenge and provide content that answers their questions.

You’re getting ready to commission a writer to write a white paper or special report for you.  You know your investment in a white paper will more than pay for itself in terms of sales of your product or services, and you’re ready to take your marketing to that next level.  Before you hire a writer, ask yourself these six questions:

1. Who is my audience?  This is who you want the writer to speak to in the paper.  Think about your typical prospective customer, and have the writer aim for that target market.
2. What do you want to accomplish with this white paper? You’re not pushing a hard sell in your white paper.  Instead, you’re educating your customer.  But how much do you want to educate, and how much do you want to push your product?  What would be the desired outcome when your reader is finished?
3. What issues need to be addressed? What problems do your customers face? How can you solve them?
4. Which competitors need to be analyzed? Do you have competitors that do the same thing? Do you want to mention them, or just dance around them?
5. What benefits will my product provide that the competition can’t? See question four.  If you’re dancing around the competition, figure out which features your product has that the competition doesn’t.  Then instruct your writer to mention them in the text.  For example, if you’re selling a smartphone with a QWERTY keyboard, you may want to have the writer weave in how it’s easier for executives to touch-type their email responses on a QWERTY keyboard.
6. Who do I want to write the white paper? Ah, the ultimate question.  You’ve figured out what you want in the white paper, maybe even identified an industry thought leader to have your writer interview, and it's time to choose the writer. You may have an in-house writer, but if she’s swamped or if you don’t have someone in-house to write the white paper, consider hiring a freelance writer. Of course I’m going to tell you to hire me, but there are a lot of great white paper writers out there.  Since white papers require a lot of researching, writing, and interviewing, you’ll want to choose someone with a journalism background. You’ll want someone with good email and verbal communication skills, and you’ll want to know she can get the job done in a reasonable time frame.

Now that you’ve asked yourself these questions, you’re ready to commission your white paper.  Good luck!