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

The lure of cheap content in B2B marketing

 An article in MediaWeek on content mills like Demand Media and Seed.com got me thinking about the dangerous lure of cheap content in B2B marketing. The goal of the content mills is to crank out a huge volume of search-oriented content for the web as cheaply as possible and sell advertising against it. Large consumer brands including AT&T, Proctor and Gamble, and General Motors have taken the bait and the model seems to be working. Critics bemoan the implications on multiple levels, including the crowding out of quality editorial and the low wages paid to the freelancers who fill the mills. 

The mills themselves are mainly a B2C issue (at least for now!). But the underlying idea of maximizing content with minimum investment is all too common in B2B as well, especially as business marketers scramble to keep up with the accelerating demands of content creation for lead nurturing and social media.

With B2B, the problem is actually two-fold: insufficient investment of time as well as money in the creation of quality content. The money issues are pretty straightforward:

• Hiring junior marcom staff to produce content when more seasoned experts are really needed
• Outsourcing content production to the cheapest possible resources knowing that quality will suffer
• Making do with general-issue collateral when customization for different audiences would be far more effective
• Short-changing design and rich media when standard-issue text and stock photography scream low-budget to audiences expected to pay top dollar for your products, services, and solutions

The time issues may be even more pernicious:

• Skimping on research that would back up your arguments
• Forgoing competitive review despite the need to differentiate
• Minimizing group review in the rush to meet deadlines
• Racing through internal communication that could ensure alignment and support

The irony of cheap content, of course, is the high cost in damaged reputation and lost opportunities: "Thought leadership" content that is neither thoughtful nor leading; jargon-filled collateral that fails to connect; customer case studies that read like warmed-over brochures. Or, perhaps most common of all, marketing content that is simply ignored by sales before it even has a chance to reach customers and prospects.

Resisting the lure of cheap content is not easy when budgets are tight and time is even tighter. It means taking more time up front to understand customer needs, map out editorial strategy, and think through the true value in each piece of content. It means saying No when colleagues push for sign-off on poorly written and designed drafts. And it may mean sacrificing quantity for quality -- although investing the time to build more compelling Points of View now will actually make it easier to produce both more and better content down the road. 

We all know that competition keeps growing, buyer patience keeps shrinking, and the margin for error is almost zero. In this context, can we really afford cheap content?

Photo credit: FDR Presidential Library

Social media reality check: Predictions for 2009

Amid the inevitable and generally useless flood of predictions for 2009, Peter Kim published a useful e-book today on Social Media Predictions 2009 (pdf). Based on the contributions of 14 other experts, the document covers a wide range of issues, from metrics and mobile to budget and B2B.

What I found most interesting, however, was the relatively sober tone of many of the contributors after the last several years of incredible social media hype. 

Partly this is just economic reality. Even as the advocates expect a greater push toward social media as potentially cheaper than other marketing programs, several also expect a shakeout of Web 2.0 firms as the reality of questionable (or no) business models finally catches up to them. As Chris Brogan noted, "Doors are going to close all over the social web. Why? Because the money didn't come the way people thought it would." 

And from the marketing side, as Jeremiah Owyang states,"The recession will force revenue results out of social technologies--marketing must prove its worth to actually changing the bottom line."

More important, from the large company perspective, is the growing recognition that social media is hard! The contributors themselves are all social media stars, of course, (and mostly consultants ready and able to help), but their success doesn't translate so easily at the enterprise level.

As David Armano explains:

In 2008 we saw many organizations taking Web 2.0 very seriously moving from 'why' to 'how' they should implement these new strategies and tactics. In 2009, reality will set in--big time...

Organizations will come to terms with the reality that although it is now 'cheaper' to launch an initiative leveraging Web 2.0 technology--it requires qualified and passionate people to make them successful. This will not be easy for many businesses/brands as it brings up a host of issues ranging from empowering employees & agencies to have direct contact with customers, to staffing up projects differently.

Meanwhile, as both Pete Blackshaw and Charlene Li argue, the rush to quantity (more, more, more connections on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) may shift the other way. For Blackshaw:

Many of us are going to wake up in 2009 wondering 'what did we eat?' -- everything from hastily assembled friends list to Twitter followers to groups, apps, and widgets that we 'impulse adopted' (usually while shadowing others) yet rarely revisited. Some of us will join the Social Media equivalent of Weight Watchers, eager to trim the excess and rediscover a modicum of 'don't follow everything' discipline.

More people backing away from "following everything" means we marketers will have to work that much harder to get them to follow us.

Todd Defren thinks that many more B2B companies will join the party in 2009. I certainly hope so, but if they do, they'll probably need to follow two other trends:

• Companies Increasingly Crafting Content. For Ann Handley, the important news is that "organizations are increasingly focusing on producing kick-ass content to attract and retain customers, rather than randomly grabbing folks off the street." Moreover, Handley notes, the sad news of a new wave of unemployed journalists and editors might have a silver lining if companies look in their direction for help in creating more compelling content.  
• Velvet Rope Social Networks. For Chris Brogan, "the real interest will be in making targeted networks that aren't 'come one, come all.' Companies instead will focus on narrower networks for specific industry verticals and interest groups. 

All in all, I remain bullish on social media marketing for B2B next year, but it's certainly helpful to have a more realistic attitude about the challenges of doing it well. Huge kudos to Peter Kim for pulling together such a useful guide.

Widget time for B2B?

Bob Garfield has a great long piece in AdAge today asking why more marketers aren't using widgets. Since Garfield is one of the more thoughtful commentators on the state of advertising today, I usually wade through his long pieces, and this one is well worth it. (Meanwhile, if you haven't read them, Garfield also penned seminal pieces back in 2005 on the "Chaos Scenario" facing the marketing industry, and the rise of "Listenomics.") 

Widgets are mini-software applications that sit on your computer, smart phone, home page, or social networking site and provide a simple news feed, video player, interactive game, or simulation. They are typically designed to bring the user back to a full website and often designed to go viral. Apple, among others, helped bring them to life with the Dashboard on OSX and the wildly popular apps and App Store on the iPhone. Facebook and MySpace have also done a great job popularizing the approach, and a number of agencies now specialize in developing widgets for advertising campaigns.

The basic idea is to give people a bit of your brand in the form of digital information or entertainment, and they've begun to catch on big time in the B2C world. For example, Southwest Airlines' "Ding" widget alerts users to special fares, Backcountry.com's Steep and Cheap highlights great new deals, and InStyle's Hollywood Hair Makeover lets users put celebrity do's on their own photos for fun and to help with copycat styling. Garfield, in a memorable turn of phrase, suggests that "branded widgets are the refrigerator magnets of the Brave New World."

But what about B2B? Can widgets work in the more sober world of high-value solutions? I'd say absolutely yes, and Garfield himself suggests a few possible directions. UPS already has a widget to help users schedule and track shipments. Nike has a widget to help users keep up with their running and connect more easily to Nike Plus. Why not borrow the same concept for business users by providing simple, ongoing access to technical support, professional advice, or industry news?

Widgets are just another tool, of course, in a marketing environment overloaded with new tools. Viewed in a B2B context, though, they offer a number of potential advantages as marketers adapt their strategies to the demands of time-starved, buyer-driven markets:

• Enables you to go where the users already spend time, rather than relying on them to come to your site
• Emphasis on providing value to the user, otherwise they'll pay no attention
• Simple and inexpensive to produce and track -- and thus to experiment with
• Potential for ongoing engagement with the user  
• Natural tie-in with other value-providing tactics, including live and online events and publications  

Content, as always, is king in B2B marketing, so any widget promotion should come only as support for a clear and compelling content strategy. That said, however, why not give it a try?

Stop experimenting online? I don't think so.

Today's Wall Street Journal suggests (subscription required) that the financial crisis will likely slow down marketing experimentation with new online approaches:

In recent years, marketers have set aside a portion of their ad budgets to experiment with digital technologies such as Web video, mobile phones, gaming and virtual worlds. But with broader economic turmoil reaching Madison Avenue, these "experimental" budgets are among the first to hit the cutting-room floor.

It's not surprising. Marketing typically gets hit first in a downturn, and cutting new and relatively unproven techniques is a natural reaction. As Peter Kim from the agency Dachis tells the Journal, "When we get into the need to drive results, you can't spend money on experiments and hope to keep your job and get your sales goals."

It's not surprising, but I also think it's dead wrong. I'm not advocating tossing money around randomly on flavor of the month tools or techniques. But the implication of stopping experimentation is that the old methods work best. We know that's not true. We know that many traditional approaches don't work at all anymore, or are decreasingly effective. And we can  be pretty sure that some  of the old ways will be even less effective as the economy goes south. Think about live events, for example. Attendance levels, already under stress from event overload, will only get worse as travel budgets freeze up.

In fact, experimentation is the lifeblood of marketing. Websites and email were experimental in the mid-1990s (or later, in many companies), and considered of marginal value at best. Now they are the center of most companies' marketing programs. Blogging was laughed at just a few years ago; now it has entered the business marketing mainstream.

Consider HP's recent stunning success with its 31 Days of the Dragon campaign to promote a new high-end laptop oriented to users focused on entertainment and gaming (see MarketingProfs' great case study for details). Although the  Dragon laptop received good reviews when it first came out last year, sales were disappointing. Rather than just bump up traditional advertising and other promotional efforts, HP instead tried something very different. HP reached out to 31 bloggers with great influence in the target audience, and offered them a deal: We'll give you a full Dragon package, including all sorts of add-ons, software, games, and video -- valued at over $5,000 -- if you organize and promote a giveaway to your readers. The only strings attached were that the bloggers had to give away the package to a reader, and they had to promote all 31 of the contests, not just their own.

The results were tremendous. Left to their own devices, the bloggers all created interesting and different campaigns (which of course helped their own cause), and generated enormous audience participation:

• More than 50 million impressions across 123 countries, including translations into 40+ languages
• More than 25,000 entries, including more than 10,000 videos posted on YouTube and elsewhere
• Massive traffic increases on the participating blogs
• and, ta da...
• 84% increase in sales of the Dragon

All this for an investment of about $250,000, and zero new marketing materials, advertising, or media buys.

Experimentation won't always generate such great results. That's a given. But you'll never know unless you try.

In thinking about a sober approach to online marketing experimentation, especially for B2B services and solutions, here are a few questions to consider:

• Set time and budget. What about setting aside 5 or 10 percent for experimentation, regardless of what happens to the overall budget? That will ensure you can mostly rely on approaches in which you have most confidence, but still have the discipline to regularly try new approaches that may end up paying off substantially.
• Getting closer to customers. Does the new approach help you get closer to your existing customers and uncover useful insight, develop stronger relationships, and/or identify new opportunities?
• Demonstrating expertise. Are there new ways to demonstrate thought leadership and expertise on critical issues in your market?
  
• Providing value. Does the new approach directly help customer and other influencers with useful content or relationships? Does it provide a new way to test our your service or solution?
  
• Measurement. Can you measure results in useful ways? Can you learn something important, even if immediate sales results don't come through?
• Morale. Are there people on your team or in the organization really excited about the new approach? Especially in a downturn, morale matters! 

Of course, these are pretty important questions to ask about any marketing program or technique, not just the experimental ones. You may just find that it's easier to provide good answers with the new approaches than it is with some of the old.

Marketing leaders desperate for digital know-how

A new survey from Sapient shows that CMOs and other senior marketers are looking anxiously for help from their marketing and advertising agencies with almost all things digital. (Thanks to Marketing Charts for the pointer.)

The survey asked more than 200 marketing execs what they want from their agencies over the next year, and "greater knowledge of the digital space" topped the wish list. Just as important, the top ten on the wish list was rife with digital concerns, including leveraging online communities, more savvy in social media, and, interestingly, evidence that the agencies themselves are using the social media (Facebook, Flickr, etc.) that they recommend to their clients.

Here's the whole list:

1. Greater knowledge of the digital space
2. More use of "pull interactions"
3. Leverage virtual communities
4. Agency executives using the technology they are recommending
5. Chief Digital Officers make agencies more appealing
6. Web 2.0 and social media savvy
7. Agencies that understand consumer behavior
8. Demonstrate strategic thinking
9. Branding and creative capabilities
10. Ability to measure success

For now, according to Sapient, many marketers are looking to change agencies. This is great news if you're an agency with legitimate skills at the cutting edge -- although the frustration marketing leaders have with current agencies suggests this is easier said than proved.

It's not just a question of the agencies, though. Marketing leaders need to find more skilled in-house staff as well. And they need to get more up to speed themselves, if only to make sure they're choosing  the right agency and managing them effectively.

Ultimately, we all need to find even more time to keep up with the accelerating pace of change in digital tools and tactics. That's not easy when we're already stretched to the max. But I can't see another way. Can you?

Can advertising help buyers make the right decisions?

In a buyers market, helping buyers make the right decisions should be a winning strategy, especially when it comes to high-stakes purchases. Buyers have endless choices, and often want and need sound advice to help sort through all their options. Much of today's thought leadership marketing is based on just this approach.

But can advertising alone provide sound advice? The insurance company Mass Mutual just launched a new ad campaign around the idea of helping its customers make the right decisions in the complex world of personal finance and insurance. The campaign came from consumer research suggesting that people wanted more assurance they were making the right decisions, a MassMutual exec told Marketing Daily yesterday. "It's an evolution of our core positioning," said Vic Lippman. "We're still about the central notion of helping people navigate the complexities of the financial environment."

The real issue, of course, is are they actually helping? Ads alone can do little beyond driving traffic to additional material or inspiring other calls to action. MassMutual's website does have all sorts of documents and self-help tools, but the experience is not very intuitive or user-friendly. And while the flash banner ad on the top of the home page promises that "We'll help get you there" with links for individuals, parents, business owners, and so on, a series of clicks through the various pathways ultimately just brings you to a page that prompts you to contact one of their representatives.

Advertising that you can help people make sound decisions in this day and age may have its place in the overall marketing mix, but creating the materials and programs to truly provide the help is much more important