B2B vs. B2C Article Writing?
Trish writes, “Is this marketing approach more beneficial for a B2B company, a B2C company, or pretty much good for both types?”
Answer: Article writing, marketing, syndication/distribution is beneficial for both types of articles. Wherever/whenever people from any industry or personal interest have questions left unanswered, you can be assured that article marketing can meet the demand.
Trish asked, “How “commercial” can an article be in terms of promoting a company’s products or services? Is it best to stay away from any kind of pitch?”
Answer: The body of the article should not contain any pitch whatsoever. You “GIVE” in the article BODY and you “TAKE” in the RESOURCE BOX.
Trish asked, “Now be honest: Are there certain types of companies/industries that wouldn’t see much benefit from offering articles through ezinearticles.com?”
Answer: Fair question. :-) First time that I’ve heard this one. You might be surprised by my answer:
Easy answer: No. Every industry and niche can benefit.
More complex answer: Highly competitive niches (finance topics for example) will have to exert a much higher force of energy (in terms of quantity of quality articles) in order to get a benefit from attracting a slice of the traffic that is high in demand.
Conversely, a very narrow topic may only have a very small amount of market demand for that subject… in which case it’s easy to dominate an entire niche or industry by applying the same amount of depth required to get a slice of a highly competitive niche’s traffic for a very small niche’s attention. Hope that makes sense.
Let me give you an argument against EzineArticles.com for B2B content:
Content that requires in depth footnotes is not right for us… nor is any content that has to be explained over and over again so that a novice can comprehend what they are talking about. If you have to cite references to validate your arguments, this is probably not the right medium for you.
Some B2B enterprise executives would probably argue with me that there is no way they are going to base a multi-million dollar product (such as a paper mill press or something on that order) purchase based on a 450 word article found on EzineArticles.com… and that they would trust a PDF-based research report instead of some unconfirmed advice-based article found on a site like ours.
However, it’s not always about giving information to close a deal or help a customer complete a sale… and thanks to the way our content is found, if we had 100k+ articles about some very rare B2B topics that no consumer in their right mind could care about; it would never impact the consumer-user because of the way our content is found.
In conclusion, only the savvy B2B marketer will reap the spoils of article syndication while the typical B2B corporate marketer will probably take the safe route by buying expensive advertising because they rarely get fired for doing that… even if it’s the most ridiculous thing they could do with a marketing budget.
Your thoughts?
I can see technical and business articles could thrive and they could be a paid service, paying writers for the content and charging businesses and individuals subscription fees. If they grew large enough, they might be able to adopt the free content model as they could attract the big bucks advertisers. If they could do noth as commercial magazines and newspapers do, why wouldn’t they?
When consumers weary of overt and subtle sales techniques, they will again become customers and demand some respect. At that point they will deserve it. Yet, I suspect those who will treat consumers as if they were customers or potential customers, will have a substantiail competitive advantage in the marketplace.
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