A guest post by Maria Pergolino, Director of Marketing, Marketo.

Today, more B2B companies are thinking like media companies. They realize it isn’t about traditional selling or interrupting people, it’s about connecting with their audience and building permission.

But what do audiences actually want? They want useful, actionable information that helps solve problems, answer questions and make connections. To that end, valuable B2B content helps companies increase trust and ultimately boost lead generation in a way that scales. To achieve this, follow the steps outlined next to build your brand with valuable content:

1. Planning. The key to thinking like a media company is to add a solid content strategy to your overall B2B marketing plan. Once this is established, you have a clear and decisive direction for your content. Part of the planning process should involve a deep dive into the content that matters to your audience. The planning phase should address buyer personas, understanding potential audiences, what problems they have and how they can be solved. Once you set clear and definable goals for your content, it’s time to start creating that content.

2. Content creation. Traditional push marketing tactics and sales-like pitches are only half the battle. Smart companies are using inbound approaches by marketing with powerful and engaging B2B content. Carefully crafted, genuinely useful content with valuable information bring prospects in organically and gets them thinking—generating higher qualified leads. Sample content formats to leverage include:

1. B2B blogs
2. Video content
3. Audio content (e.g., podcasts)
4. White papers
5. B2B case studies
6. Guest posting on other industry-relevant blogs
7. Creative and shared content through B2B social media

3. Promotion. Building the right content is not enough. To read it, your audience needs to find the content. Making it as simple as possible for your prospects to find, share and consume is vital.To get your content seen and shared, develop a promotion process for each piece of content in order for it to have the highest propensity to spread across the web. This process should be tailored to your category and include both search and social tactics.

Every company is a media company. Today, B2B companies connect faster and easier with audiences of prospective customers—and powerful content is the key to attracting new business. Harnessing it can bring in more fans and ultimately more sales.

Last week, Andrew Spoeth of Marketo was kind enough to guest host #TechChat with us. Andrew is also co-moderator of #B2BChat, and he was previously director of Marketing at B2B search firm Enquiro. We were thrilled to have him join us!

Andrew and I chatted with attendees about social media measurement (transcript available here). And within 10 minutes, it was clear: Many marketers aren’t measuring social media. However, even though social media measurement is relatively new territory, our savvy attendees and guest host brought many golden nuggets of wisdom to the chat. From last week’s #TechChat, here are my 3 favorite social media measurement tips:

1. The first step in social media measurement is to define why you want to measure something. (via @AndrewSpoeth)
While it may seem obvious, you must decide why you want to measure something. And then if you don’t know or have a good answer, don’t waste time measuring it. Because measurement for measurement’s sake is a waste of time.

2. Track reach but identify insights and understand quality of the connection or engagement. (via @robpetersen)
Tracking reach is important, but as Rob pointed out, quality is important too. Are the people you’re engaging with influencers? Or are they bots that auto-follow?

3. Making friends with the “cool kids” isn’t the shortest distance. Build your own base to become a “cool kid.” (via @RLMadMan)
Always the wise attendee, Marjorie pointed out that just wooing the “cool” kids isn’t enough. As a marketer, you must build your own band of followers. Sure, they may not have 20,000 followers and a Technorati Top 100 blog, but their loyalty can snowball into a tribe that’s bigger than just two or three cool kids.

Thanks again to Andrew, Rob, Marjorie, and the rest of the #TechChat attendees for your insights. To learn more about B2B social media marketing, join us October 26 for SocialTech 2010. SocialTech is our new conference about social media for the high-tech industry, featuring three keynotes, 14 sessions, and more than 30 B2B social media experts. You can attend live in San Jose or from the comfort of your own computer. See you in San Jose.