Reputation to Revenue

Master narratives and framing the debate with B2B marketing

Years ago, when I was a lowly graduate student at MIT, I learned an essential lesson about communications while taking a course on "framing" the news. The lesson, as my professor Bill Gamson so ably taught, was that he who frames the terms of the discussion is halfway home with a public debate before it even begins. 

Politicians understand this the best. They (and their marketing consultants) spend lots of time crafting simple narratives with the goal of framing the debate. Back when I was in graduate school, the most obvious example was Ronald Reagan, who dominated the politics of the 1980s with the simple idea that government was "the problem." Most recently, it was the health care debate with dueling narratives about "government takeovers" and "universal coverage."

It's critical with B2B marketing, too. While trying to promote the value of our products, services, and solutions, we need to focus as well on the master narratives that frame the relevant market conversation. For example, technology and consulting companies pushing Green IT need to worry about the larger debate about the value of going green. Regardless of the merits of their offers, if the dominant narrative frame is skeptical, they'll have a much tougher job winning new business.  

Ideally, you're leading that discussion or changing the terms of the debate. IBM did this recently with its Smarter Planet initiative. The company defined a new way of thinking about the role of technology in a whole host of social and economic issues. Others are now jumping on board, but if you buy into the frame, you're probably going to favor IBM.

Thought leadership marketing is supposed to create a master narrative for B2B organizations. It's the intellectual substance behind the basic brand promise. 

Accenture does this with "High Performance. Delivered." The brand promise is helping clients become high performing companies; Accenture's thought leadership research and publications flesh out the story with data and case studies of how this actually happens.

HubSpot does this extremely well, too. The fast-growing provider of "inbound marketing" tools promotes the concept relentlessly with a daily dose of useful content for marketers on how to build awareness and generate leads through search engine marketing and social media. For small business marketers and consultants focused on social media and search, HubSpot's master narrative about the why and how of inbound marketing is beginning to frame the whole conversation.

The problem with so many B2B marketing programs, however, is that the master narrative is lacking. Even when companies invest in thought leadership, it's often with a fragmented collection of disconnected articles, white papers, videos, blogs, etc. There is no connecting tissue, or at least none that stands out from the competition and helps frame the larger industry conversation. 

Topical consistency is the first challenge, but that is just a start. It's better to have a consistent flow of thought leadership content on the same basic subject than not, but if there is not a compelling and differentiated point of view to drive a sustained and integrated program, you stand little chance of framing the debate.

Here are two simple questions you might ask yourself to gauge progress with your master narrative:

• To what extent is there a "big idea" that animates your thought leadership marketing?
• To what extent does that idea currently drive the larger industry dialogue around a key customer concern?

If your answers are "not much," it may be time to step back from the crush of daily deadlines and ponder the possibilities.

Make sense?

Photo credit: jonny goldstein

Aligning marketing and sales...with what?

Marketing folks in B2B are obsessed with aligning marketing and sales. It's a longstanding pain point, and it always comes to the fore in a down economy. The problem, at least from my humble perspective, is that the discussion tends to rotate around the idea that marketing needs to align more fully with sales.

Four years ago, I wrote this:

The typical approach to marketing-sales alignment emphasizes getting marketing closer to sales through initiatives such as tighter alignment of marketing activities with the sales cycle, better coordination around demand generation and lead management, and allowing sales to have more input into marketing programs and materials. These types of initiatives certainly can be useful, but they risk reinforcing the standard industry view that marketing is ultimately the junior partner of sales and that the alignment problem is mainly one of marketers straying too far from the daily and quarterly demands of the sales force.

Has the discussion really changed? 

Beyond the junior partner idea, another common, unspoken assumption is that sales is just fine where it is. But we know that B2B sales is undergoing changes at least as dramatic as marketing. Globalization, transparency, ecosystem collaboration, the demand for custom solutions, and more are wreaking havoc with the traditional sales process just as they are with marketing. I didn't cover social media and communities in that 2006 article, but clearly they have an enormous impact on sales, too. Witness the seemingly endless number of "sales 2.0" conferences, consultants, and tools flying.

The real challenge is transformation, not just alignment. Of course marketing and sales need to work more closely together, but most of all they need to figure out how to collaborate in serving and attracting customers when their customers are: 

• Overwhelmed with information and choice
• Skeptical of any marketing or sales pitches
• Fully capable of researching solutions on their own
• Actively tapping social networks for insight and reviews far beyond what you can provide

I'm all for more agreement between marketing and sales on which leads matter, how to map marketing to the sales cycle, and where marketing can help most with key accounts. And I'm "traditional" enough to believe that face-to-face marketing and selling continue to be essential even as social media and online communities take center stage for both sales and marketing.

But if we don't look for a larger transformation in how both marketing and sales work -- and work together -- we run the risk of building alignment around a process that no longer fits the real world environment.  

What do you think?

Photo credit: Bill Ward's Brickpile

The urgency of B2B content marketing

 Yesterday I wrote about "marketing as media" in B2B and the challenge of becoming a top source of information and ideas for your customers and prospects. It's critical for all the reasons you know: traditional marketing tactics don't work anymore, your potential buyers are actively looking for new ideas, and you'd better jump into the online conversations happening about your brand because they're going on with or without you.

Today's news from American Business Media adds another note of urgency: Business magazine revenue was down another 24% in 2009 from 2008, and total pages declined almost 29%...and 2008 was a pretty bad year!

I'm certainly rooting for B2B magazines to make the transition they need to make, but it's hard for marketers to count on a lot of support in getting the message out and the conversation started. 

Photo credit: back_garage

Marketing as media: Are you in the top five?

 B2B marketers are getting used to the idea that we have to think of ourselves more as media organizations and publishers than pitchmen and promoters. We need to understand our audiences better, produce more compelling and engaging content on a regular basis, and facilitate ongoing conversation around issues and ideas that matter most to them.

But are we good enough yet that our customers and prospects would include us as a top five information source?

Now that's a challenge!

But it's precisely what comes to mind as I read the new State of the News Media 2010 study from the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism. According to Pew's exhaustive annual review of American journalism, the majority of online readers rely on only two-to-five websites for most of their news. More than 20% rely mainly on just one site, and only 12% regularly use more than six.

I realize that news sites are a different animal than business sites, but I'm confident the same dynamic holds true for readers (i.e., buyers) of B2B information. 

Search, of course, is an essential way that buyers find the information they're looking for online, and recommendations from friends and colleagues on Twitter, Facebook, Google Reader, and the like are coming on fast. Beyond that, however (and increasingly because of that crowding out effect), few of us have time to read more than a few trusted sites on a regular basis.

Do you have one of those top trusted sites for your customers and prospects? Are you producing, curating, and sharing enough great content on a regular basis in a variety of compelling and convenient formats to inspire your key stakeholders to keep coming back? What would it take to make that happen?

Photo credit: woodleywonderworks

Social media and thought leadership: The virtuous circle for B2B marketing

As B2B marketers invest more money and time in both thought leadership and social media, they risk missing a great deal of potential benefit they can achieve by bringing the two together in a holistic way.

All too often, at least in my experience in the tech sector, marketers investing in thought leadership view social media primarily as a channel for disseminating content. 

They get the idea that social media is important, and that relying on traditional media channels (including email and websites) to promote their ideas is no longer enough. 

As such, they're beginning to slice and dice thought leadership content into blog posts, tweets, videos, and the like -- and use Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, SlideShare and other platforms to promote that content as widely as possible in the social sphere.

This all seems fine, but I think it's far too limited a view.

In fact, isn't this just a more refined version of the same old one-way broadcast mentality? Ponder big thoughts, maybe do some research, put together a presentation or white paper, and then release it to the world and wait for the acclaim and customer inquiries to come rolling in. 

"Going social" with content gives it a better chance of being seen, but a more collaborative approach to understanding customer issues and creating new Points of View before even creating any content greatly raises the chances that customers will actually care.

Socializing every aspect of the thought leadership process requires a more fundamental shift than just reformatting content and creating a longer checklist of places to publish. 

It means letting go of the notion that you have all the good thinking locked inside your organization, that you shouldn't publish anything until it provides all the answers, and that thought leadership is about you talking and customers listening. 

It means taking the zeitgeist of social media seriously, that it's not a "channel" at all, but a way of thinking and doing business based most of all on listening, sharing, and collaborating.

The reality is that lots of great thinking and experience lie outside your organization (to say the least), customers and partners want to collaborate in developing new approaches and solutions, and the best way to demonstrate expertise is to ask the right questions and facilitate ongoing conversation.

The virtuous circle of social media and thought leadership includes five main elements, discussed below:

 

1. Customer and market insight: Tapping social media and networks to dig deeper (and often faster) into the issues your customers and prospects really care about. This can begin as simply as using Google Reader and Google Alerts to follow important online conversations. It can be as sophisticated as using high-end monitoring and analytics services like Radian6 or Nielsen BuzzMetrics, organizing "Innovation Jams" like IBM, or building your own customer communities to ensure a steady flow of deep customer insight.
2. Collaborative Points of View: Rather than rely on a single expert or a purely internal team, why not work with customers and other stakeholders to craft a more relevant and compelling Point of View to undergird thought leadership content? Executive interviews, client roundtables, external working groups, academic and think tank partnerships can all be part of the thinking process, not simply vehicles to disseminate finished products. Social tools make these collaborations far easier and more affordable to manage.
3. Relevant routes to market: This is the area of marketers are already digging into, and with good reason. If you're NOT taking advantage of social tools and networks to disseminate your thought leadership content, you're missing an enormous opportunity to reach key stakeholders where they are increasingly spending their time searching for new ideas. The recent Forbes study, The Rise of the Digital C-Suite, is only one of a multitude of survey reports documenting that executives now rely on online search, video, and social networks as a core information source.  
4. Viral leverage: Your customers and prospects trust independent experts far more than company spokespeople, as Edelman's Trust Barometer shows every year, and gaining their support is far more likely to trigger social media sharing than anything you do directly. Identifying and reaching out constructively to the new influencers in your markets (bloggers, analysts, community managers, etc.) is now essential to thought leadership success.
5. Conversation and community: The old broadcast mode of thought leadership assumed a straight line from polished publication to customer inquiry to sales presentation. In a few rare cases of truly blockbuster ideas, this may even have worked. In today's vastly more networked world, customers want to chew over and debate your ideas at length -- and often without you even present. Inspiring, facilitating, and participating in the conversation is the right goal for thought leadership marketing, and using social platforms and communities is the best way to make this possible. Not incidentally, it's also the best way to gain deep and ongoing customer and market insight, which keeps the whole circle going.

Make sense? What do you think?

TL in 4D: Four dimensions for thought leadership success

B2B marketers know that thought leadership is essential, especially when selling high-value solutions. Business buyers tune out most traditional marketing, but they are always looking for new ideas. If we can produce interesting and useful content, and use social media and other platforms to spread the good word, we at least have a chance of getting into the conversations that our customers and prospects actually want to have. 

Perhaps not surprisingly, thought leadership topped the list when ITSMA recently asked marketing leaders at big tech and IT services firms which tactics will be more important in 2010. According to ITSMA, 77% of respondents cited thought leadership development as a priority, beating out references and testimonials, senior executive programs, and social media. 

For most B2B firms, however, thought leadership is getting a great deal more lip service than investment. Other than top consulting and professional service firms like McKinsey, Deloitte, and Accenture, few B2B firms have yet created a focused and well-organized thought leadership marketing program. My own recent review of 72 corporate members of the Institute for the Study of Business Markets, for example, found that only 24 of these manufacturing, industrial, and technology companies even had a link to thought leadership content on their home page.

All too often, thought leadership in B2B is thinly funded (if at all), episodic, and superficial. 

• There is no dedicated staff, no editorial calendar for content production, and a heavy reliance on subject matter experts "volunteering" their nights and weekends to bang out a few white papers, articles, and blog posts. 
• Content tends to overemphasize company promotion and underemphasize customer and market evidence. 
• Publications typically are one-off productions with little coordinated effort to leverage new thinking into multiple formats, networks, and channels.  

To make a real impact with customers and create real distinction in the market, thought leadership needs focus, depth, and continuity.

Consider, for example Accenture's years-long in-depth research on high performing companies. They focus on strategic challenges facing each industry the company serves, orient primary research and publications to different executive roles among their client base, and deliver insights across a wide range of online, face-to-face, and social media platforms.

Not every company has Accenture's deep pockets, to be sure, but the lessons are clear. And it's not just a matter of blogging more and getting more content onto Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube -- although social media clearly IS critical for thought leadership dissemination and engagement. 

At a more fundamental level, companies looking for greater impact with thought leadership need to consider four essential dimensions of program development:

1. Points of View: Effective thought leadership is rooted in compelling, differentiated, and evidence-based points of view on important business challenges -- not product features or quick opinions or the experience of a single client engagement. Companies need to invest the time, research budgets, and analytic expertise it takes to create points of view that really matter. You've got to take a stand, but in ways that are not simply provocative but rooted in primary research and real world experience. (For a guide to developing effective points of view, check out Solutions Insights' Point of View Development Template.)
2. Internal Education: Especially with the rise of social media, you're relying more and more on a great many employees to tell your story, not just a few executives or subject matter experts. Investing in internal education around your points of view is critical to equipping marketing, sales, and other customer-facing employees (which could be anyone online) to engage constructively on the issues that matter in ways that demonstrate real expertise. It's also a great way to generate more insight and tap more internal experience to feed into Point of View development.
3. Market Engagement: Publishing and disseminating content is what most people think of when they consider thought leadership marketing. But the traditional reliance on white paper publishing, conference speaking, and pushing for mainstream media coverage is far too limited in today's always-on, socially networked world. Market engagement today is about pervasive presence and ongoing conversation; publishing is just the beginning of the process. And the development of more substantial points of view makes it much easier to produce steadier streams of useful content across multiple platforms.
4. Program Operations: Making this all work requires dedicated staff, disciplined processes, and clear metrics and accountability. This doesn't have to mean huge staffs or budgets, but it does mean accepting that the "volunteer" work on nights and weekends is unlikely to have a serious impact or create distinction against competitors with a more organized and funded approach. Rather, you need to bring together people, processes and tools that can do the research and analysis, generate compelling points of view, and sustain the internal and market engagement required to reap the benefits effective thought leadership can provide.

Based on our own research and experience working with thought leadership programs across the IT and professional services sectors, Solutions Insights has developed a four stage roadmap for thought leadership program development, as you can see below. It's a simple model that necessarily abstracts a great deal of nuanced reality, but it should be useful in evaluating your own programmatic maturity and considering next steps for improvement. We'd love to know what you think of the roadmap -- and please weigh in with comments on your own approach and experience. We're still learning, too.