In our B2B marketing guidebook, Business-to-Business Marketing: A Step-by-Step Guide, published by Penguin Random House, my co-author Mark Eardley and I note that the Internet has fundamentally changed behavior in the buying decision cycle, creating what we term the phenomenon of the self-sold customer.

The fourth and final article in this short series explores how to respond to digitally altered behavior in the buying cycle, deliver content to where it is most needed, and focus on the proven sales-generating power of SEO.

Altered Realities Demand Altered Responses

By empowering purchasers to conduct their own research online, the Web has created a "closed" environment—i.e., one isolated from pushy salespeople—where buying decision-makers are increasingly determining which vendors they want to procure from before the suppliers are even aware they're under consideration.

As Mark Eardley wrote in the second article in this series about the role of content in the buying decision cycle, the fundamentals rules of B2B marketing have not altered since the days of the famous McGraw-Hill advert, "The Man in the Chair."

Buyers continue to look for answers to key questions: They still want to assess market trends, validate their own needs, and establish the credibility of companies and the veracity of their claims about their products and services.

But instead of waiting for a salesman to come calling, they're finding answers by tapping at a keyboard and staring at a screen. Accordingly, it is imperative for businesses both to be visible online and to ensure they coherently present content that provides appropriate answers at each stage of the buying cycle.

The trend toward self-research has contributed to the explosive growth of content marketing: Companies spend 28% of their marketing budget on content marketing. Yet, much of content misses the mark: Just 30% say it delivers effective results.

One of the primary reasons for this dissatisfaction is that content producers simply aren't using digital—the very environment in which their prospects live—to amplify their content effectively.

Of the three environments in which brands can promote content—paid, owned, and earned—there's an over-reliance on paid tactics: Google Ads, promoted social posts, content recommendation/discovery widgets, and native advertising have become the go-to default mechanisms B2B content marketers use to take their ideas to market.

That's bad for two reasons:

1. An over-reliance on the paid channel promulgates a tendency to produce lackluster content. If marketers know that by putting some spend behind their content they can achieve impressive KPIs on reach and visibility (if not sales), it encourages them to release content that might not really speak to the audience's need. Quantity begins to overtake quality as a primary performance metric.
2. More fundamentally, although paid promotion does generate exposure and can bring new leads into the funnel, it lacks authenticity; the audience sees it for what it is—an advertisement. One needs only to compare paid conversion rates to those generated from earned tactics: Paid is clearly less effective.

Anyone seriously considering using native advertising to support content promotion really should watch John Oliver's entertaining polemic on Last Week Tonight. He clearly hit a nerve, considering that the YouTube video of his rant has racked up more than seven million views in the last couple of years.

The Higher Effectiveness of Owned and Earned Content

To maximize their content marketing effort in pursuit of profitable sales, B2Bs must place more emphasis on owned and earned channels.

In the owned space, a website serves one purpose: to expose buying-decision influencers to your proposition and elicit an action from them.