As a veteran of two – make that three – start-ups, and a former employee of one of the country’s most successful entrepreneurs, it’s fair to say that Jen Evans thrives on risk.
“I love entrepreneurship,” said Evans, whose newest venture is the business-to-business content marketing firm B2B News Network. “I probably like risk a little bit too much for my own good, but that’s the life I’ve chosen.”
Soft-launched Nov. 1 and housed on the DigitalJournal.com news site, B2B News Network combines business-to-business focused journalism with B2B-focused content marketing.
With up to 2.5 million unique visitors per month – including a robust business audience – Evans said Digital Journal is the ideal launch platform for B2B News Network.
While Digital Journal employs a traditional media model of selling advertising around content, B2B News Network is built around a combination of editorially generated content, and what Evans describes as “very vetted” marketer-supplied content.
“Nothing goes on the site unless we’ve vetted it and in some cases augmented or improved it,” said Evans.
The venture launched via Twitter with the Sept. 19 debut of the @b2bnewsnetwork handle, and gathered nearly 400 targeted followers and more than 45,000 impressions within two weeks. Evans said the success was due to a combination of hashtags, influencers and “lots” of content.
The company has also partnered with the news site TorontoStandard.com on a deal that provides a content channel for more consumer-oriented stories, as well as event space in Toronto.
“One of the things we’ve heard from some of our sponsors is that it’s not always easy to find space for meetings etc. in downtown Toronto, so if they have speakers they want to bring in from their organizations, or they have seminars they want to run, we can provide that,” said Evans.
B2B News Network offers a blend of journalistic content (much of it connected to some kind of lead-generation opportunity for a marketing client) with an additional layer of marketer-supplied content that can be added by the company’s editorial team. It is launching with content plays for two major software companies.
Evans describes it as an “editorially driven” organization – “We are not coming into production of the news with some kind of marketing angle in mind” – with a goal of connecting marketing partners with relevant content.
The company is focused on Canada in the near-term, but Evans said the plan is to add additional news desks in U.S. cities in the first and second quarter of 2015, and add international coverage in key markets.
Evans is a content marketing veteran who started her career as the marketing manager for Dragon’s Den star Robert Herjavec’s internet security software company BRAK Systems in the 1990s.
She was engaged in content marketing before it had a formal name, marketing the likes of intrusion detection systems for financial institutions by creating B2B-oriented content such as tips and newsletters.
In 2002, Evans created the content marketing company Sequentia, which became part of Environics after the PR firm acquired a minority stake in the company in 2008.
More recently, she created a content marketing measurement software platform called SqueezeCMM – used by clients including HP, SAP, Marketwired, TD Canada Trust and KPMG – in 2013. That company remains in start-up mode.
Content marketing continues to gain new followers, but Evans said it’s incumbent on companies to ensure that standards remain high. “The field has gotten so crazy over the past few years, and the quality has gone down,” she said. “We know that what people are looking for is something that’s actually either going to help them make a better purchase decision or understand an industry better.”
