B2B Content Marketing Case study: IBM

Before diving into the analysis of another efficient and prolific content marketing campaign, let’s start with a quick recap of our previous B2B Content Marketing Case Study on Cisco.

In our previous article, I tried to highlight the strengths of one of the most successful B2B content marketers across the globe namely, Cisco. And, one the key determinants of the triumph of their content marketing strategy was relevancy. Cisco is an international, technology conglomerate which is known for its networking solutions. So, how does an influential name with a service as niche as this establish relevance among smaller businesses? Stories.

Cisco used invigorating and engaging content stories and highlighted them among its target audience in an effortless as well as attractive format all the while ensuring the eliteness of its services. Cisco basically worked on this principle stated by Albert Einstein:

So, one thing that you can do to make your content marketing strategy engaging is making sure it is relatable with your audience. But, what do you do if your audience is in a constant flux and the varied range of services that you provide are employed across organizations of different scale?

As enigmatic as this quandary seems, the solution is quite simple. A multi-channel, targeted B2B content marketing strategy. So, let’s recap, what is B2B Content Marketing? It is a marketing or promotional strategy which focuses on advertising a brand’s core products and services to an audience which is significantly dominated by other businesses.

These businesses may integrate the products of this brand into a vertical of their operations or may use them as groundwork for their own operational model, irrespective of the scale of their operations these audiences can be turned into viable leads for the company. Consider Zebra, an international manufacturer of traceability and vision systems. An apparel manufacturer may need Zebra’s barcode readers to optimize his supply chain management while a software development agency may need a consistent supply of its newer models to develop label software which is specifically optimized for readability by Zebra’s vision systems.

They both categorize as businesses that employ the brand’s products to advance their own operations. However, the personas of both these audiences vary considerably. And, IBM is one of the largest manufacturers of computing systems in the world, holding patents for a vast number of inventions including, Automated Teller Machine (ATM), the PC, the floppy disk and even the hard disk drive, making the scope of its audience really vast and really varied. So, how does it ensure its relevance among its target audience?

Read on to find out:

What is the Campaign?

IBM is known to continually evolve and streamline its content marketing strategy, year over year, to drive attention from businesses all across the globe, operating at different ranges of capital. The IBM B2B Content Marketing strategy that we will focus on is:

IBM Watson

Watson is IBM’s new-era, cognitive computing device that observes, collates, compares and analyzes data to generate fact-based hypothesis and make statistically accurate judgements. Unlike, most other computing devices, Watson doesn’t only collect and quantify data entered in a recognizable format, but instead is capable of understanding dialects, referring to idioms and curating the latest research to generate highly accurate results.

Despite its evident utility for all major industrial operations, what a Michelin star restaurant owner must have probably understood from the above description was – jargon, jargon and jargon. So, how does Watson establish its relevance among professionals from specialized backgrounds whose skill sets do not align with IBM’s core IT expertise? The answer is – Influencers. Why? Because, Seth Godin said so:

So, what is an influencer?

It’s a bird, it’s a plane, no it’s an influencer!

Tortured as the metaphor may sound, influencers are nothing short of superheroes in the B2B content marketing world. They bridge the gap between the audience and the brand by creating winning, high-quality content and adapting the role of a reliable thought leader that delivers precise information among his followers. In short, influencers are capable of building genuine and open relationships with the audience which brands directly cannot.

IBM fully harnesses the potential of these influencers and creates platforms such as the developerWorks India – a content sharing platform precisely tailored to each country which invites contribution from industrial experts enabling them to interact with the brand directly and share this experience organically among their followers.

IBM’s incredible YouTube channels such as IBM Watson and IBM Think Academy also provide their users access to defined, premium and interactive content which is not only easy to understand but highly practical and streamlined.

Their website also includes a feature known as Watson Conversation Service that allows developers to create chat bots across different platforms without necessitating high-level machine learning or coding knowledge. This creates an organic vitality for the brand, impossible to build using traditional marketing methods.

Another notable prong of this multi-channel marketing strategy is the Cognitive cooking with Chef Watson campaign. This campaign aims to illustrate the relevance of cognitive computation for field experts and how they can utilize this computing genius to optimize their own services. The strategy is executed with the help of an easily recognizable vehicle i.e. a food truck and reputed cooking experts from across the globe. These chefs are requested to create recipes using a series of ingredients that sound bizarre to a normal person but can actually create a cuisine of the future. IBM combines the reliability of renowned chefs along with its relatively mysterious technology to create a brand which is relevant as well as valuable for every business owner.

What are its results?

IBM is listed as one of the top contenders among Kapost’s best brands in content marketing. Its synergized content marketing strategies including its Midsize Insider Campaign aimed at medium sized-business owners, the Smarter Planet Initiative and IBM Chef Watson campaign have won numerous accolades over the years including a Digiday Award and a Gold Global Effie. These content platforms have also procured a vast number of client leads and organic engagements for IBM including:

• Generation of over 5,000 professionally crafted, search-optimized articles
• Procurement of  over 425 million search and social impressions
• 1,10,000 social engagements
• Over 1.2 million page views
• In the year of its initiation, the Smarter Planet initiative generated US$3 billion in revenue and a double digit growth for over 6000 client engagements.

What can we learn from this?

I’ll let Scott Cook take this one for me:

Summarizing from the Seth Godin quote above, Cisco used stories, IBM builds relationships. So, what can brands in our developing economy learn from these stellar marketers?

B2B Content Marketing in India is continually evolving. With the rapid influx of social media and content sharing platforms, audience perceptions have become more transitory than ever. In this era of shifting brand dynamics, reputable influencers act as an island of dependability for marketers.

These influencers have garnered trust among their respective audiences by painstakingly building a relationship over a long period of time. Brands opting for B2B content marketing in India need to use superior quality content to connect with these influencers organically and foster long-term relationships. To build a user-driven content sharing platform for your brand and establish its unique identity, reach out to our B2B content marketing experts or leave your query in the comment section below and we will reach out to you.