Reputation to Revenue

The four engines of B2B marketing success

A friend recently had the good fortune not only to take over marketing for a successful B2B firm, but to do so with a mandate to build a new strategy that ensures a much greater impact on the business.

He's a bit like a kid in a candy store: he's got budget to spend, executive support for a more ambitious marketing program, and a relatively clean slate upon which to draw the new strategy. 

The existing program has been pretty traditional, focusing mostly on collateral, events, advertising, and direct support for the sales team. He knows that's not enough, and is definitely interested in doing more with thought leadership and social media, but how best to reshape the overall strategy is not entirely clear.

Asked for some advice, I agreed with a stronger emphasis on thought leadership and social media (which I think are appropriate for all B2B  firms), and I questioned the value of putting so much energy into advertising and collateral. 

More generally, though, I suggested that the strategy focus on the four marketing engines that I think all B2B firms need to have running smoothly to ensure business success.

Four Engines for B2B Marketing Success 

Content Engine:

As the need for more and better content continues to grow, marketing leaders have realized that they need an integrated "content engine" that consistently produces compelling content for every stage of the buying cycle. This includes thought leadership content to help build reputation and interest, educational content to support lead generation and nurturing, solutions and customer success content to support sales conversations, and, of course, social media content to support ongoing connections with customers and others.

Relationship Engine:

B2B marketing rises and falls on the strength of the company's relationships with customers, prospects, partners, and market influencers. For many marketing organizations, though, the objective of building, strengthening, and sustaining key relationships has no clear owner or strategy. A "relationship engine" may sound awkward but the idea is to ensure a comprehensive, consistent, and focused approach to strengthening critical stakeholder connections to increase sales, loyalty, and market insight. This should work across such areas as events, customer councils, account management, references, and social media.

Lead Development Engine:

The increasingly long and convoluted purchase processes that B2B marketers face puts a premium on well organized systems for lead nurturing and management. No longer can we focus on just the early stages of generating leads and then throw them over the wall to sales. More and more, we need to stay in the game with longer term programs to develop and sustain opportunities in close coordination with sales. Content and relationship programs contribute substantially to this effort but someone also needs to own the overall system for lead development, including qualification, scoring, nurturing, and assessment.

Solutions Development Engine:

Like many B2B companies, my friend's firm has a long history of successful products, satisfied customers, and productive partners. At the same time, also like many B2B companies, his firm is feeling the heat from increasing competition, margin squeeze on products, and buying decisions moving higher up in their customers' organizations. The result is a need for higher value solutions that respond more specifically to individual customer needs. Doing this efficiently and effectively means moving past the one-off approach based solely in the field. Instead, marketing needs to guide and support the field in determining top priorities for new offer development, crafting the right value propositions, and routinizing the process with the right stage gates and metrics.

The four engines don't cover every last aspect of B2B marketing, but they come pretty close and they provide a clear framework for building a comprehensive strategy that balances short- and longer-term success. Get each of the engines humming smoothly and results are sure to follow.

What do you think? Am I missing something important? Are all of your engines in good working order?

Photo credit: Imnop88a

Two cheers for Eloqua's Content Grid

Actually, I think Eloqua's new Content Grid is fabulous: it crams a complex story and a lot of information into an easy to understand infographic on a critical topic for B2B and solutions marketing. Nice job, folks!

My small beef is with the definition of "content marketing" that underlies the grid. Don't get me wrong: I'm a huge proponent of companies and marketing organizations getting much more serious about creating and executing integrated content strategies to support marketing and sales. Indeed, I make a decent part of my living these days helping companies make this happen.

What I don't agree with, though, is the equation of content marketing with inbound marketing. Perhaps I'm nitpicking at a casual line in Eloqua's blog post introducing the Content Grid, which explains the grid as "a simple framework for content -- or 'inbound' -- marketing." But the grid itself reinforces that equation with its presentation of relevant content types. It's all the fun thought leadership and social media stuff. What's missing are the nitty gritty product and service and solution descriptions and related (horror of horrors!) "promotional" material that, at the end of the day, are still necessary to help make the sale regardless of how effective your inbound marketing is.

Yes, inbound marketing is critical, content marketing is critical, and we all need to keep shifting budgets away from the old push promotion stuff that doesn't work toward educational pull materials and conversations with which our customers and prospects might actually engage. It's just that few of us can yet do away with collateral and promotion entirely -- especially when we're selling complex B2B solutions that require extensive purchase consideration, due diligence, and committee decision making.

I'm not sure Eloqua is even arguing that we should eliminate that stuff entirely, but I think it's a mistake to leave that still-important content out of the grid and the definition. If new directors of content marketing (another trend I support enthusiastically) just manage all the inbound stuff, we're likely to fall short in revamping and refreshing the basic product promotion material that still helps to seal our deal. The last thing we want to create is a great system of thought leadership-driven inbound marketing that collapses in the final phase when prospective buyers see disconnected and inconsistent product and service material.

So, two cheers for the Content Grid and the great intent behind it. Now if we can just broaden its scope a bit more.

What do you think? Do you have a content director? If yes, what's the scope of responsibility?