Video 12 - SME Content Marketing - What IT Pre-Sales Engineers Really Think About b2b Content Marketing

What IT Pre-Sales Engineers Really Think About b2b Content Marketing.

Video 12 of 18: SME Content Marketing

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An edited transcript of the conversation is provided below.

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Video 12: Edited Transcript

This question in the pre-sales IT VAR Experience section and is titled "silly question time", but maybe it's not such a silly question.

The idea is, if time, money and resources were not an issue would smaller VARs, regional VARs benefit from their own corporate blogging, social media outreach and content marketing program?
(Acronym Check: 'SME' equals 'Small to Medium Enterprise'.)

I've used a lot buzz words, Matthew, but that's what the b2b marketers are going on about!
What do you say, being down in the VAR trenches and getting customers?

Mark, I would probably say as a general rule that you're not going to benefit a whole lot from that kind of stuff.
Again, where I'm at, in the country, it's 100% relationship-focused.
Getting in front of someone and actually talking to them, figuring out what they need, things like that.

Yes, it (can) help.
Obviously, you want to have a website, if you're using LinkedIn , Twitter, FaceBook's a big one.

The problem is there's so much 'noise' out there and getting the right people to see your message is the hardest thing to do.<

Trusted Online Peers Versus Annonymous Corporate Bloggers

In the space that I run in, as far as Twitter and LinkedIn, and things like that, I'm going to trust one of my peers any day of the week than I am some corporate account or some corporate post.

I'm not saying those don't have value but from a technical perspective, and I'll even be so bold as to say from a managerial perspective, is that when I talk to clients that are IT managers or engineers, they're asking their peers: Hey, what do you think about this company? What do you think about this VAR? What do you think about this vendor?

There's a lot more value when I can talk to an individual and ask them something, versus talking to or trying to glean information from a corporate entity.
I think that's just how we are as humans.
In my neck of the woods, that's how we are. I'm trusting individuals. I'm not necessarily trusting organizations.

Matthew, it's very similar here in Japan. A lot of face-to-face stuff.
And, as you say, it's human nature. You'll tend to want to hand money over to people who you know and trust a little bit more.

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