Should I be giving my intellectual capital away?

There's a growing movement in the marketing fraternity around the importance of 'Content Marketing …and my guess is that you're already saying "what's that?"

Content marketing subscribes to the notion that delivering high-quality, relevant and valuable information to prospects and customers can drive profitable customer action.

A globally connected customer means that they are now instantly informed on what happened across the industry — from technology adoption and new contract awards right through to catastrophic events.

A Google search on "upstream oil and gas blog" produced 8,650 results and on linked-in there are 1,900 groups with oil and gas in their titles.

The driver behind content marketing is the belief that educating and openly sharing high value information with customers increases the company's and/or brand's position as a thought leader or industry expert.

The supply chain dynamic in oil production is a complex one. With international and national operators supported by multiple services companies and component suppliers all vying for information disclosure, full transparency across the supply chain can become challenging.

A more open approach to information dissemination I believe would bring you closer to your customer and put you one step ahead of your competitors.

Do we need Content Engineers?

The term "content engineer" could be used to describe a new breed of marketeer who creates, optimizes, and distributes the different types of content required to engage customers.

Take Schlumberger's widely used oilfield glossary for example. Recently they launched the i-phone app so that engineers around the world have 24/7 instance access (and brand recognition) to this intellectual capital.

The purpose of this information is not to spout the virtues of the marketeer's own services, but to inform target customers and prospects about key industry issues and position oneself as thought leaders on targeted subjects.

The critical success is that like any engineering project, the information being seeded is relevant and segmented depending on the reader interest and business challenges.

I was once approached at a leading industry exhibition and was personally thanked for sending through a steady stream of downhole monitoring case studies.

I had never met the guy, up until that point he was subset on my contact database of potential customers. After that interaction he became a valuable purchaser of the monitoring systems.

The moral here is that segmented, targeted and free distribution of relevant information will ultimately bring customers to your door.

Are you ready to start giving information away?

The new marketing science of delivering content in a compelling way does require a step change in philosophy. Companies need to take a long hard look at what they would consider as sales collateral and what information is considered "commercially sensitive".

The question is can the boundaries be changed and can a form of this information used to engage more actively with their customers?

Take your best technical reference case (warts and all). Is this a paper destined for a dark and dusty archive or is this valuable content that should be actively shared with customers through multiple media channels. Try it. The opportunities it creates could just turn you into a content engineer with a valuable role in driving new sales and creating value.

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