Create your very own Auto Publish News/Blog Site and Earn Passive Income in Just 4 Easy Steps
When is your audience NOT your end customer?
If you are a B2B marketer, you know the answer.
Your job is to attract distributors, resellers, retailers, brokers, and even influencers to promote and sell your products and services. This is a key focus of good content marketing.
This month, one of the world's biggest brands showed why this continues to be true.
Coca-Cola has launched a new B2B content platform and newsletter called Coca-Cola Lens, which provides industry trends, data-driven insights and other innovative ideas to its network of current and prospective retailers, foodservice operators and other sellers of its beverage brands.
Why would a big brand like Coca-Cola launch a B2B content platform? What does it really mean?
We have Robert Rose, CMI's chief strategy advisor, to get his take. Watch the video or read on. (Quick note: Robert has a newsletter called “Lens.” He's not saying Coca-Cola stole the name, but he's not saying they didn't, either.)
Looking through the Coca-Cola lens
Coca-Cola aptly announced its new content marketing platform at the National Restaurant Association Show. Coca-Cola Lens isn't for consumers, but for retailers and restaurant partners who sell Coca-Cola products in their establishments. It's a great example of how you can use content marketing to differentiate your brand for a specific audience.
Coca-Cola Lens offers a library of articles from leading thought leaders who examine shopper behavior and provide economic context to help restaurants and retailers run their businesses better.
In addition, the company publishes its own and proprietary research, third-party resources and news on topics such as multicultural consumers and the growth of products like premium water, as well as offering tips on managing inventory and optimizing other business elements.
Coca-Cola has clearly launched this initiative to build a deeper relationship of trust and give retailers and restaurants another reason to join the global beverage brand.
3 things you should consider
If you think I'm promoting Coca-Cola, you're wrong. I haven't spoken to anyone at the company, but I'm excited about some of the ideas that are evident in this product launch.
First, Coca-Cola, one of the world's most experienced marketers, has made its B2B strategy a visible and notable part of its branding and marketing strategy. The company announced the launch of the site with a press release and a session at the National Restaurant Association Show. It's not just any private project.
Second, with only 16 items to launch and a simple site design, Coca-Cola doesn't seem to have dipped into anyone's piggy bank to make this happen. The budget for this was probably the equivalent of a rounding error on the rounding error of the entire marketing budget.
People can subscribe to the content via email, so Coca-Cola seems to be interested in it for the long term. And the release shows that the company not only wants existing customers to see it as a good partner, but also wants to build relationships with potential retailers and restaurants. In fact, the subscription form includes calls to action for non-customers, suggesting a strategy to raise awareness of the platform.
In closing, I might be getting a little too excited about Coca-Cola Lens because it shows how eagerly it is embracing new content marketing platforms. Even established brands can see the value in doing something innovative that is small in scale but mightily ambitious.
Over the past few months, I've seen a decline in these types of experiments in small to medium-sized campaigns. Brands unhappy with organic search efforts aren't nurturing their blogs, resource centers, social strategies, and thought leadership programs as they could be. Ideas for new content platforms are being rejected because they're not big enough to make a difference, or because they're too big and risky to implement. With AI and paid ads available, it begs the question: why bother with a hard and long-term initiative like an organic content marketing platform?
Whether Coca-Cola Lens will be successful remains to be seen. But that's OK.
Coca-Cola didn't make it too complicated. They didn't make it so big that they would have taken a big risk if their restaurant and retail customers didn't find it valuable. But they also didn't neglect the site and make it a landing page for the trade show presentation.
Be flexible and dimensioned
As I've said many times, with today's marketing technologies and processes, launching a new content marketing platform like this should be easy, fast, and right-sized.
I recently spoke with a global technology company that was denied approval for a thought leadership program. The rejection was because integrating it with their enterprise content management and marketing automation systems would drive up the cost to seven figures and eight months of engineering development. Clearly, it wasn't worth the risk.
Your own media platforms should be as flexible as anything else you want to do. The time frame should be in days, weeks and maybe months, not quarters or years.
Yes, Coca-Cola may limit the usefulness of Coca-Cola Lens to a few months, a few quarters, or many years. But by doing the interesting thing, they have shown that despite its size, Coca-Cola is open to new things, without guaranteeing success.
When Joe Pulizzi and I wrote Killing Marketing, we started from the premise of launching content platforms that could provide so much value that they become a profitable aspect of the business. We started with a quote attributed to Mark Twain (though he probably never said it):
“It's not what you don't know that gets you in trouble. It's what you know for sure, but that's just not true.”
That's why I like the Coca-Cola launch so much. If Lens works, it will probably surprise them as much as it surprised the rest of us. They don't know what's going to happen, and frankly, that's a more exciting way to do marketing.
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Cover photo by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute
Create your very own Auto Publish News/Blog Site and Earn Passive Income in Just 4 Easy Steps
