The Pros And Cons Of Creating Reader-Inspired Content

By Bill King

One of the biggest conundrums about brand publishing is how to reap the fruit of your reader-focused content marketing efforts.

As many water and wastewater equipment manufacturers have realized, heavily-branded product catalogs, datasheets and brochures are not the ideal content types to engage new prospects with early in their buyer’s journey as they begin researching solutions online.

Realizing that it’s important to engage these readers as early as possible, marketing departments have turned to a new breed of vendor-agnostic content, divorced of brand or product promotion that is designed to engage readers who are not yet looking to purchase.

Recognizing that an overt product-pitch or self-promotion would be counter-productive in providing value to the reader at this early stage, companies are struggling to figure out the appropriate ways to assert themselves into the engagement.

In a recent article for The Drum, Samuel Scott suggested it’s impossible for brands to be informational outlets. He makes an interesting case. Brands by their very nature clamor to be promoted. They don’t exist without promotion. Scott highlights the problem well. To be a publisher of great content, a brand has to be anonymous. The more it’s inserted into the content, the less objective the content becomes. And yet, not inserting the brand at all is useless. Why would you ever pay to create a piece of content that doesn’t connect back to you in anyway?

You wouldn’t.

In my mind, there are three overarching ways that you, as a vendor, can successfully create meaningful content for the water and wastewater audience and get the credit you deserve for publishing it.

The first way is to never lose sight of the fact that you are writing for the audience and not your product or service. This is the Golden Rule. If you stay true to your reader, they will happily forgive (maybe even welcome) the insertion of your brand as an example to highlight the purpose of your content. You should never abuse this privilege (or risk losing them) but the well-positioned anecdote from your experience will be tolerated.

My second suggestion is to write vendor-agnostically but spend some time thinking about how you can insert your brand in the “packaging” around it. An E-Book is a great example of this. Burns & McDonnell are doing this with their “Benchmark” publication. Even your company website can act as the promotional layer if the content itself pulls the reader into your site from a web search.

Finally, recognizing that you might not need to expose your brand up front to reach your outcomes may free you to write uninhibited for the good of your audience. Gating your content in some way so that you capture the reader’s demographic information may be sufficient. With their contact information and permission, nurturing them towards your brand by providing additional information along the path to purchase can be extremely powerful.  

Image credit: "The scales of justice," James Cridland © 2010, used under an Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/