[Posted by Kristin Hambelton
Vice President Marketing, Neolane, Inc.]

I had the pleasure of sitting on a webcast last week, “Tackling the Hard Bits in Lead-to-Revenue Management,” as part of the Forrester Tech Marketing Council. In this webcast, Principal Analyst Lori Wizdo talked about some of the challenges facing B2B marketers, in particular, breaking through content barriers.  The focus was on generating, managing and delivering content in a thoughtful way that drives value for prospects and customers.

One of the key take-a-ways was that content does not need to be yours to be effective in meeting your marketing goals.  In fact, sometimes it’s more valuable if it isn’t your original content.  This might be a hard thing for marketers to swallow if they have great pride of ownership, but an easy thing to digest when you look at the effectiveness, efficiency and economics.

A belief in the content marketing world is that, increasingly, brands are becoming more like media companies when it comes to content creation and publishing. In fact, according to recent research from the Altimeter Group, “Content: The New Marketing Equation,” emerging digital technologies, platforms and channels now enable any brand to function as a media company with very real advantages: building branding, awareness, trust, purchase intent, and word-of-mouth, as well as lowering acquisition costs and increasing engagement with target audiences.”

Using a portal to publish content for customers and partners is a great example how brands are adopting strategies traditionally associated with media companies. Actually, the idea of a portal is one that Wizdo suggested in her webcast. A portal is a destination site where your prospects can visit for valuable information that is curated from many industry sources. The idea is to drive traffic to the site – and then take credit for the content later. Ideally, by creating a valuable destination site with information that closely aligns with your market, and your prospects’ business needs, you increase the chances of closing a sale in the future.

Neolane has been doing this for some time with our own portal – Conversational Marketing. Check it out and let me know your thoughts.