The goal of content marketing in the business-to-business world is not to convince someone who is not in the market for your product or service to buy from you when they’re not in need. B2B decision-making doesn’t happen that way.

Yet too many B2B marketers put too much pressure on themselves to identify success metrics in a way that consumer marketers and advertisers might. The mistake they’re making is applying consumer marketing methodology to an ecosystem with a much longer buying cycle, a much more sophisticated buyer, and likely, a much higher price point than a typical consumer product.

If you have content at the center of your marketing efforts, and it's not actually, you know...DOING the marketing, there might be a few things to double check...

“It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly, one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.”

This is one of favorite lines from one of my favorite literary characters: Sherlock Holmes.

And so it is with marketing strategy.

Joe objected, "But I'm NOT a thought leader. Why would anyone listen to what I have to offer?"

Just because you don't regard yourself as the preeminent voice in your space doesn't mean you can't offer insights. You don't need to be a certified "Thought Leader" to have observations, experiences, theories, command of basic principles, inquiries and perspectives.

Content is working its way down the sales funnel farther than ever before. While we have historically thought of content in terms of “content marketing”—which generally lives near the top of the sales funnel—we should now be thinking in terms of “content business development.”

But if you’re serving your network and people you’d like to include in your network, by providing them with either things of intellectual value or by raising their profiles somehow, that’s not selling...it’s serving.