Tag: Marketing Strategy

There is no social media strategy, only marketing strategy

February 24, 2010 by Chris Koch

: Image via Wikipedia

I’ve been working with my colleagues at ITSMA on another survey on social media for B2B marketers that I hope you’ll take by going here.

As we put together the questions, we struggled with the issue of social media strategy. I resisted treating it as a standalone in the survey. I’m hoping that all the articles, books, and blogs I’m seeing that look at B2B social media strategy in isolation are a function of our excitement over this new channel (and don’t get me wrong; it is really, really exciting).

I’m also hoping that the excitement (and the needs of social media consultants and authors to drive their businesses) will not drive us to distraction. B2B marketing lays the path to a sales discussion and supports relationships with existing customers. Social media is another channel—one of many—for making the connection and building the relationship with customers.

Social media is no silver bullet. Other channels are more effective for reaching high-level B2B buyers—and that situation may never change. I say this even after discounting ITSMA’s recent research showing that marketers don’t see social media as being very effective components in their marketing strategies. It’s clear that social media are still new and most B2B marketing groups haven’t gotten the hang of them yet. It’s too early to reach any definitive conclusions on effectiveness.

It’s tempting to say that because B2B sales are highly dependent on relationships, social media will eventually reign supreme. But I think the nature of B2B makes it harder for companies and customers to have a satisfying relationship that’s entirely virtual than it is for B2C companies.

We all know that B2B decisions take a long time and are made by committee and logic rather than individuals and impulse. It’s hard to imagine that kind of a complex, long-term, multi-person relationship ever happening entirely or even mostly in social media. At the C-level especially, face-to-face remains the killer app for everyone involved.

What’s been proven to work in B2B is for marketers to reach out to prospects with smart, engaging, educational content that leads to trust. The trust leads to a more personal relationship and hopefully, a purchase.

Looking at social media in isolation distracts us from the real revolutionary trend, which is that marketing strategies need to shift to an emphasis on content and relationships.

Social media simply makes starkly plain what we’ve known for some time but haven’t had to face yet: We don’t have a lot of content capable of generating trust and relationships.

Trust comes from buyers deciding that providers are as interested in their concerns and needs as they are in selling stuff. The only way we can do that is by providing a range of different content—thought leadership, news, education, training, support—in a range of different channels—events, white papers, communities, private meetings—at all phases of the buying cycle.

If you look at social media in isolation, you’re not going to see the larger strategic issues until they slap you in the face—blogs with nothing to write about; LinkedIn groups with no substantive conversation; Twitter streams that link to nothing but brochures and press releases.

That’s why I’d love to see the social media conversation turn more towards integrating social media into the overall marketing mix and arming marketers with the additional skills they need to make it happen. It’s why I left strategy and metrics out of the four components of social media management. The strategy is a marketing strategy and the metrics should happen across everything you do. I’m trying to get at the issues of integration in our survey, and will report on our findings.

What do you think? Are we overemphasizing social media strategy at the expense of overall marketing integration? Please let me know.

Social media isn’t enough. We need a marketing transformation. (christopherakoch.com)
Why B2B marketers hate social media (christopherakoch.com)

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Tags: B2B marketing, Business, Business-to-consumer, ITSMA Research, LinkedIn, marketing, Marketing and Advertising, Marketing Strategy, Mass media, social media strategy, Twitter
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Thought leadership is still dead; long live idea marketing

February 5, 2010 by Chris Koch

So much of what passes for thought leadership these days is little more than warmed over brochures. It may look better and read better than a brochure, but it’s still a brochure because it emphasizes our products and services over the needs of the people we are trying to reach.

Last year, I wrote a piece that talked about why thought leadership is dead and why we needed a new term to describe it.

This week, Gartner proved why we need to make the change. Proclaiming that thought leadership isn’t just for consulting firms anymore, Gartner said in this press release that thought leadership has emerged as an “organized discipline.”

Phew. Glad that we now have permission to finally get ourselves organized and go forth and do what we’ve already been doing for years.

Then Gartner did what it always does; it coined an acronym: TLM, or Thought Leadership Marketing.

Gartner has a peculiar habit of trying to lay an intellectual claim through acronyms—perhaps it’s the firm’s heritage in IT. Regardless, it’s a twist on an old consultant’s trick: Gain attention and credibility with press, customers, and influencers by creating your own definition, which gives you the ability to insert the “what we call x…” phrase into descriptions of otherwise basic things.

Having been a journalist for years, I know that these acronyms lead even the most feeble-minded of us journos to the next obvious question: What do you mean when you say (insert acronym here)? That gives the analyst an opening to define what’s behind the acronym and establish intellectual ownership of the subject area.

Now, I don’t mean to single out Gartner here. Like I said, this is an old consulting trick—everybody does it. And in Gartner’s defense, sometimes IT can be so complex and confusing that it really does help to have an acronym for talking about things.

I guess I’m a little bitter, through. At CIO magazine, I spent years writing about one of those Gartner-coined acronyms: Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software. The more I learned about it, the more I realized how little the acronym had to do with what the stuff really did.

So I’d like to try, with your help, to nip TLM in the bud before it gains the power to make us all miserable.

Gartner’s definition of thought leadership marketing is this:

“The giving—for free or at a nominal charge—of information or advice that a client will value so as to create awareness of the outcome that a company’s product or service can deliver, in order to position and differentiate that offering and stimulate demand for it.”

Yikes. What a mouthful. But beyond the awkward language, I think that the definition is just plain wrong. Or at least, as some colleagues who also write thought leadership marketing have told me this week, too narrow.

I think that this definition will lead to the perpetuation of the brochure-on-steroids interpretation of thought leadership. It is not about positioning your offerings at all. It is about selling a point of view that educates the audience. The education is the exchange of value that begins a relationship between the customer and the deliverer—whether that deliverer is a salesperson, a marketer, or a subject matter expert. That relationship is deepened through a coordinated, multistep campaign with successively more intimate communications over time.

At some point that relationship will include describing your offerings, but at that point it ceases to be thought leadership. It will be a case study of your offerings in use, or it will in fact be a brochure. But it won’t be thought leadership, because it will no longer be about ideas.

That’s why I suggested last year that we ditch thought leadership and use the phrase idea marketing instead. I even developed an acronym: IM. (Damn, guess that one’s already taken.)

Idea marketing isn’t easy. It presupposes that we have something to talk about besides our products and services. And the truth is that as marketers we don’t have anything else to talk about. Idea marketing means we need to do more. We need to do research. We need help from subject matter experts and salespeople with their ears to the ground in the market. The difficulty of lining up those other pieces is why we often wind up creating expensive brochures rather than ideas.

Idea marketing is not purely about the nature of the content (Gartner’s definition sounds like it intends the output to be white paper to me). It is a process for developing and disseminating ideas through various channels that build a relationship with prospects and customers. It is designed to move them through the marketing funnel more quickly.

True idea marketing (or, if you insist, thought leadership marketing) requires more than marketing. Here are the five important pieces:

Research the need for ideas. Idea marketing will be an expensive waste of time if your customers aren’t looking for it or don’t see you as an acceptable source for it. Doing research first allows you to set goals using reliable, objective data. Then when people start to question your strategy (and they will), you can show them the numbers. Survey internal sales and marketing staff, customers, target markets, and influencers to determine what they are looking for. Here are some questions to ask:
- Do customers view of you as a thought leader? If not, can they envision you moving into that role—i.e., give you permission to be a thought leader?
- What are customers’ areas of interest?
- What types of vehicles (councils, conferences, white papers, social media, etc.) are target customers most interested in?
- How can idea marketing influence customers’ buying behavior?

Answers to these questions will drive the structure of the program and its ROI goals.

Determine the readiness of the organization. Professional services firms expect their consultants to have new ideas, and that expectation flows through everything those firms do, from recruiting and training to marketing. Idea marketing requires a cultural commitment to creating an internal idea supply chain and strong executive support.
Build an idea network. There are two parts to idea marketing: idea development and content dissemination. Marketing is potentially great at the latter, but it needs help with the former. An idea network provides a reliable source of content for marketers to package and disseminate. The idea network focuses on identifying internal thought leaders and building alliances with external academics and customers who can help develop and test ideas. Primary and secondary research provide the inspiration for some ideas and the objective justification for others. Internal knowledge share sessions and reward-and-recognition programs provide the motivation for idea generators to step forward and help imbue the idea supply chain into the culture of the organization. (ITSMA clients can download a detailed example of a network here.)
Create a content development process. Marketing needs to develop vehicles for disseminating ideas to customers and salespeople. The key components of the program are:
- Develop a publishing process. Marketers must become publishers, with a process for refining and presenting content through various vehicles (such as conference presentations, white papers, social media, etc.).
- Create a calendar. A calendar helps marketing plan the frequency and focus of its output.
- Align content with the buying process. Marketing needs to develop materials that are appropriate to each stage of the buying process so that customers and salespeople can get the right information at the right time. Marketing and sales need to agree on the alignment of content to the various buying stages so that sales will get the right signals about when and how to approach customers for a sale.
- Install systems and metrics for supporting idea marketing. The goal of idea marketing is not simply to raise awareness of the company; it is to help move buyers through the sales funnel and to make a sale. For that reason, the program needs to be tightly integrated into the company’s IT systems—and particularly its CRM systems—so that the impact of thought leadership can be tracked all the way through to the sale. These are the key components:
- Install a lead tracking and nurturing system. Marketers can use the consumption of idea marketing to track the readiness of prospects to buy if they have a system for tracking a prospect’s activities. For example, if a prospect downloads a piece of content targeted to the interest phase of the buying process and reads it thoroughly, a lead tracking and nurturing system can track that activity and send a signal to salespeople that the prospect is most likely ready for a call. As the lead is passed over to sales for follow-through, the idea content is tagged as part of the sale. If a sale doesn’t result, the lead can be put back into the nurturing process while keeping track of the content he or she has already consumed. This lead tracking system should be integrated with the company’s CRM system (most traditional CRM systems are not set up to handle lead nurturing) so that leads can be handed back and forth between marketing and sales without losing anyone along the way.
- Agree with sales on the definition of a sales-ready lead. The benefits of the program will be lost if sales and marketing can’t agree on the point at which the consumption of the content provides a reliable signal of intent to buy. There needs to be a smooth handoff of prospects between marketing and sales for idea marketing to have the fullest possible impact on a sale.

So I think we need a clearer and broader definition of thought leadership marketing than the acronym gives us. What do you think?

There is only one objective in social media: create learning networks (christopherakoch.com)
Whose Reputation is Your Marketing Content Building? (myventurepad.com)
What’s the Cost When Sales Tries to Do it All? (thecustomercollective.com)

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Tags: Add new tag, B2B marketing, Gartner, marketing, Marketing Strategy, Thought Leadership
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Social media isn’t enough. We need a marketing transformation.

January 15, 2010 by Chris Koch

During one of the first few days I went to work at CIO magazine in 1995, I had what we called a “vendor visit”—one of many I would have in the coming years. The idea behind the visits was to avoid having us journos become isolated in our ivory tower. We needed to hear from marketers who were out there day-to-day listening to CIOs’ problems and aspirations. Plus, many were advertisers, so the visits made it seem like we weren’t completely ignoring what they had to say.

But mostly we were.

Back then what marketers had to say was all about their offerings. And why not? The IT industry was on fire and the stuff was flying out the doors. Marketers and salespeople didn’t have to do much coaxing to get CIOs to buy, so why get complicated?

But a quick read of our magazine showed that we didn’t write about products. We wrote about the typical concerns of a C-level executive, such as strategy, leadership, organizational design, and change management. Kind of a Fortune magazine for IT executives.

Bibles, vacuums, and boxes
But the vendors had little need to engage with CIOs at that kind of level. And the guy that showed up to see me that day was a representation of the times. Big, stony-faced and intimidating, with a lapsed football player’s gut and a big school ring buried into one of his fingers. He wasn’t a marketer, but he had been sent by a marketer, who hadn’t bothered to accompany him or even send an agency PR person for translation and kind supplication. So much for hearing about the latest strategic trends affecting CIOs.

This guy was a salesman. Could have been bibles or vacuum cleaners, but they didn’t need sales guys for that stuff anymore. They needed guys to take orders for these boxes. He swung his expanded briefcase up onto the table, pulled out a media kit bulging with press releases about speeds and feeds and plunked it down on the table in front of me. “That’s for you,” he said. Then he launched into a pitch, delivered in a tone and with an expression that made it clear that this time could be money in his pocket if it wasn’t for me.

For my part, I made sure I conveyed the same body language, while choosing the chair nearest the door. I counted the minutes (these things go even more slowly when you have to listen).

Michael Jordan and the baseball bat
When it finally ended he said something that I’ve never forgotten. As he grandiosely snapped the buckles on the briefcase and dragged it off the table, he snorted, “CIO magazine, huh? Why don’t you have CIOs writing it?”

At that moment, I realized that I wasn’t just wasting his time. In his mind, I shouldn’t even have been working there. Given my minimal knowledge of IT at the time, I guess he had a point.

But it was clear that he had no concept of how difficult it is to write clear, compelling content about complex subjects. Assuming CIOs would be willing to accept the pay cut, and smart and determined as they are, I’m certain that few have the talent for or interest in the publishing process.

What am I paying for?
Marketers today are in the same position I was with that sales guy in 1995: Wondering how to explain the value and difficulty of creating clear, compelling content about a complex subject.

Except that today many of those sales guys are gone. Today, more salespeople are able to have business and strategy discussions with customers and take the time to listen to their needs. Thus, their skepticism becomes sharper and more justified. If I can do all this in a sales call now, why do I need you?

At ITSMA, we’ve seen investments in the things that we used to identify as the key contributions of marketing—like advertising, brochures, events, and trade shows—shrink consistently. And today we’re seeing marketing budgets as a percentage of revenue dipping to their lowest levels ever—at or below 1%.

Businesses are asking if you’re not doing all these things you used to do anymore, why should I give you more budget? And if I do, what am I paying for?

The model needs transforming
Pledging to do more with social media isn’t the answer. What we need to be telling the business is that we’re going to transform marketing completely. Getting into social media really means getting into publishing. It means creating a constant stream of idea-based content that keeps buyers interested and engaged. That’s hard, and it means a real shift in skills for many marketing departments.

I think the suspicion that we see of social media, which is justified, is mixed with fear. Let’s identify that fear so that marketers will have an easier time making the transition. I think it’s fear that the hardest aspect of marketing, content development, is ascending to become marketing’s most important role, as advertising, traditional PR, and events shrink and fall away.

The content engine
Marketing departments are going to have to transform themselves into content development engines. And just as important, they are going to have to sell the value of that engine to their businesses to prevent further cuts to the budget. As McKinsey consultant David Edelman said at the ITSMA annual conference last November, we can’t make social media an add-on to a system that isn’t adding the value that it once did. We need to look at how to do things differently.

Here are some of the key aspects of that transformation:

Marketing is becoming data. We couldn’t measure the effectiveness of ads in the old days, but the CEO saw the ads and signed off on them, so that made it okay. We couldn’t measure the effectiveness of events and trade shows, but sales people saw the crowds at the booth and the bar and so it didn’t matter. But as we shift to a content focus, it is all online and its impact is invisible. There is no visual, visceral confirmation of its impact. But a white paper isn’t just content; it is data. It can be tracked and measured.
Automation creates metrics. We tear our hair out trying to devise metrics that we can’t report on because we don’t have the data. If we automate the processes that matter, the metrics we need will be staring us in the face.
The funnel becomes electric. The impact of our content will be visible if that content is linked to an automated, closed-loop lead process. Getting agreement with sales on a sales-ready lead is critical. And with all the SaaS-enabled software available today, there’s no excuse for not automating the lead management process—at least up to the point where marketing hands over sales-ready leads. You don’t even need to involve IT anymore. And the excuse that these systems don’t integrate with old CRM systems is becoming less and less valid. If the vendors can’t help with the integration, IT can. Marketing needs a better relationship with IT.
Content creates relationships. It isn’t enough to develop idea-driven content and ship it out; we have to redesign the creation and dissemination processes so that readers are lured into conversations and relationships. This is where social media tools are helpful. But developing and disseminating content that builds relationships—think publishers and subscribers—takes different skills.
Buyers become approachable. After consolidating their power for years through internet search, B2B buyers are beginning to emerge from behind their firewalls and show up in places where marketers can find them. We have to meet them halfway. That requires a culture shift in the company and new skills for marketers and employees.
PR becomes conversation. We’re all PR now. Employees, subject matter experts and marketers all need to represent the company, but in a way that is transparent, constructive, and cordial. PR people meanwhile should use their thick skins and relationship skills to help build the conversation in social media. But it means shaking up the PR department and our relationships with PR agencies.

At ITSMA, we’re calling 2010 the year of marketing transformation. We wouldn’t use such grandiose terms if we didn’t see a real need for change. When she saw the trend in the numbers that we prepare our annual budget study, my colleague Julie Schwartz asked an important question: “Do we want to spend another year doing more with less? Marketing has to do things differently.”

We’re going to offer more specific on how marketers should make this transformation backed up by selected data from the 2010 survey at our webcast, The Year of Marketing Transformation: ITSMA’s 2010 State of the Profession Address on January 26.

In the meantime, do you agree that marketing needs a complete transformation? If so, how would you do it?

Advanced Lead Nurturing Tactics with Ardath Albee (slideshare.net)

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Tags: Add new tag, Advertising, B2B marketing, Customer relationship management, ITSMA, ITSMA Research, Marketing and Advertising, Marketing Automation, Marketing Processes, Marketing Strategy, Sales, social media strategy, Software as a service, Thought Leadership
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Why B2B marketers need to embrace deal marketing

December 29, 2009 by Chris Koch

Honestly, why do we think that sophisticated B2B buyers are going to follow our brands on Twitter or become our fans on Facebook?

The answer is we don’t.

Even if we believe deeply in the power of social media, we all have that gnawing feeling deep in our guts that says that there’s little reason for a busy, intelligent person to want to receive frequent updates about our brands when those brands produce complex services and products with two-year sales cycles.

Once again, the answer is they don’t.

The research confirms it. A survey of 1000 consumers by marketing agency Razorfish found that just 3.5% of consumers follow a brand on Twitter for “service, support, or product news.”

We don’t follow brands, we follow deals
What drives consumers to follow brands on Twitter? Deals. According to Razorfish, 44% of respondents said they were looking for exclusive deals or offers, while 24% said they followed the brand because they were customers and 23% said they followed in the hopes of getting interesting or entertaining content.

That would seem enough to end the debate about B2B social media participation right there. What, are we going to send out coupons for 15% percent off an enterprise software installation? (Actually, B2B buyers would probably love that but we’d lose millions and get fired.)

We can’t do deals. That’s a B2C thing.

The expectation of value
But let’s dissect what’s really going on with these deals. Consumers follow brands because they have an expectation that they will get value from the relationship. But to use a famous example, how many Dell PCs can we expect a follower of Dell on Twitter to buy? To keep those followers interested, Dell needs to offer other, lesser things of value like deals on accessories, warranties, etc. At the heart of the relationship is the expectation of continuing value.

B2B marketers can create that same expectation of value—of deals—through content. Consumers show us that in a world where everything should be about deals, they are looking beyond the coupon as the sole definition of value. I’m actually shocked at the number of people who said they follow brands because they are customers. That’s a gimme for marketers to deepen the relationship with them. And another 23% said that they see enough value exchange in content alone to warrant a follow.

We have to understand that in B2B, content—in the form of ideas, education, research and support—are our deals. Social media like Twitter are the offer engines for the valuable thought leadership content that we offer through our other channels like the website and events. If we can offer a steady stream of these deals through social media, we give B2B buyers as much reason to follow us as consumers have to chase coupons.

What do you think?

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Tags: B2B marketing, Brand Management, Marketing Strategy, social media strategy, Thought Leadership
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Six factors driving B2B social media marketing adoption

November 20, 2009 by Chris Koch

We’re all getting constant advice—hectoring, even—about how we need to make social media a key part of our B2B marketing strategies right now. Two main threads underpin the logic behind these urgings:

Your customers are becoming more active in social media, so you’d better get with it.
Your competitors are adopting social in their marketing strategies, so if you don’t do it, they will.

While I believe that these two threads are accurate, I haven’t seen compelling data to back them up—at least as it relates to B2B. So I’ve assembled some research, from both ITSMA and other sources that examines the case for social media. How strong do you think the arguments are?

Customer factors
Customers (the younger ones, anyway) are adopting social media. IT and business buyers are flocking to social media more rapidly than anyone would have imagined even a few years ago. Our latest annual survey of 355 buyers of complex IT solutions, How Customers Choose Solution Providers, 2009: The Importance of Personalization, Epiphanies, and Social Media, shows that the door to the C-suite is opening up. (You can download an abbreviated summary here.)

We found that usage of social media among IT and business buyers of technology rose 50% over 2008 and finally pushed to majority status—55% said they use social media as part of the technology buying process in 2009 versus just 37% in 2008. More importantly, we found that executives in large organizations use social media more than in smaller organizations, and C-suite executives actually use social media more than their lower-level buying peers. Just 15% of CEOs and directors said they did not use any form of social media at all, while 34% of manager/directors and 26% of VPs/Assistant vice presidents said they ignore the stuff.

However, age trumps rank in terms of social media usage. For example, a Forbes/Google survey of 354 top executives found that more than 50% of executives under 40 maintain a work-related blog, Twitter their thoughts, and visit online social networks frequently. Meanwhile, fewer than 5% of executives over 50 share their thoughts via social media and a whopping 38% said they have never been to a social networking site.

Search is becoming increasingly dominant in the buying process. Even for buyers who fear stepping across the social media threshold, search will draw them in through the back door. ITSMA research shows that 63% of buyers proactively seek information about providers themselves, and the Forbes/Google survey found that 79% of executives perform at least three web searches per day. The pool of information they are sifting through contains an increasing amount of social media content.

The trade press is dying. Trade magazines are imploding as marketers continue to pull out of print advertising. Revenues for B2B publishers for the first five months of 2009 were down a total of 26.3% and ad pages by 30.3%, according to American Business Media, a B2B trade association. Meanwhile, revenues from online advertising are doing little to stanch the bleeding. For example, when you add in digital revenues, total advertising revenues for the first half of 2009 are still down by 19%.

B2B magazines are shuttering by the hundreds–literally: 137 in 2007, 120 in 2008, and 130 through the third quarter of 2009—twice the rate of new startups (yes, they still do start print trade magazines), according to MediaFinder, a database of magazines. Those titles that remain have cut staff and have many fewer pages to fill.

Online-only publications don’t have it much better. The need to maximize page hits means that trade journalists are being pushed to create more shorter stories that appeal to the largest possible audience—not a fertile ground for in-depth analysis of complex B2B products and services. Customers and prospects looking for content are going to see more of it coming from social media by default.

Marketing factors
Social media requires fewer hard dollars. In ITSMA’s social media survey in April 2009, 42% of marketers cited “reduced cost of marketing” as a top benefit of social media—second only to “increased website traffic.” Though the degree of cost savings of social media is controversial—many of the tools may be free but the labor to manage them certainly is not—marketers tell us that social media costs less to manage than most other programs.

Digital marketing has reached the budget tipping point—with help from the recession. B2B marketers have been shifting dollars away from offline programs (mostly trade shows, print advertising, and print collateral) to digital marketing in eight of the last nine years, according to ITSMA’s Annual Budget and Trends survey. But digital has always been a relatively small component of the overall marcom budget—until now. By the end of 2009, marketers predict that digital (which, besides social media, also includes more traditional categories like e-mail newsletters and the website) will become the largest category of their marcom budgets at 13%.

And the recession is speeding up the shift to online. For example, in early 2009, 44% of marketers said they were responding to the recession by shifting dollars online. By October, 77% were using online as a recession fighter. Overall, more than 77% of marketers say they plan to increase their online spending in 2009-2010, according to ITSMA’s Marketing Pulse survey.

Marketers are building online communities—fast. We’ve seen a dramatic rise in the percentage of B2B marketers that say they’ve built online communities themselves or through third parties such as LinkedIn and Facebook. In ITSMA’s social media survey in April, 43% said they had built their own communities and 54% had built group pages on Facebook or LinkedIn. By October, the percentages were 70 and 79, respectively.

Does this research make the case for social media in B2B marketing, or are you skeptical?

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Tags: B2B marketing, Marketing Strategy, Social Media, social media strategy
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Where should your corporate blogs live?

October 16, 2009 by Chris Koch

Earlier this year I surveyed B2B marketers about their approaches to corporate blogging. Their strategies take two basic approaches.

Onsite. These marketers take a direct role in finding and supporting internal bloggers and in helping them develop content. The blogs are an integrated part of the corporate marketing strategy and are usually hosted on the corporate website. Most say that they try to suggest topic areas that fit with the company’s overall thought leadership strategy.

Offsite. Whether through choice or through necessity, these marketers take a more hands-off approach—the “let a thousand flowers bloom” approach. They encourage subject matter experts to blog, track what they write about, and offer blogging guidelines and help when needed. They do not set up or tend corporate blogs. The subject matter experts have independent blogs or speak through third-party platforms like Linked-In, etc.

I don’t think that one approach is necessarily better than the other. But I’d like to hear your opinions. Here are some strengths and weaknesses of both approaches.

Onsite advantages:

Built-in traffic. It can takes years to build enough word-of-mouth to build a marketing worthy audience for a blog. The corporate homepage can direct a fire hose of traffic to the blog from the start.
Integration with other marketing. Blogs are only part of a thought leadership marketing program. Surrounding the blog with links to other sections of the site gives the blog credibility and helps build interest.
Brand respect. Impress visitors by having a summary page of your blogs set against the corporate backdrop.
Incentives for bloggers. Being on the corporate site is a good way for bloggers to raise their visibility inside the company and promote their careers. It’s also easier for marketers to justify spending their time supporting bloggers when the blogs are on the corporate site.

Onsite disadvantages:

Suspicion. You can’t have a disclaimer on your corporate-hosted blogs. Readers will assume that corporate bloggers will sanitize their opinions and do what they can to promote their companies. That runs counter to the spirit of the best blogs. Of course, a good blogger can break through that suspicion with content that is interesting, unbiased and altruistic.
Content inflexibility. Bloggers will feel more irresponsible taking flights of fancy on their corporate-sponsored blogs than on their own personal blogs. And visitors will frame their expectations of the blogs through the expectations they have of the company. For example, visitors may not feel that an executive from a computer networking company should be writing about tangential topics, even if he or she is qualified to do so.
Technology inflexibility. Corporate websites are complex beasts that are difficult and expensive to change and require going to another department, IT. Meanwhile, social media technology is changing constantly. Corporate-hosted blogs won’t be able to take advantage of the latest social tools that complement blogs without going to IT and getting some custom coding.
Life sentence. It looks bad when corporate-hosted blogs shut down unless there are others to take their place.
Failure runs deep. A bad blog with little traffic and no comments reflects badly not just on the blog but on the corporation hosting it.

Offsite advantages:

Resource savings. Letting bloggers do their own thing requires little support from marketing. A blogging policy is generally enough.
A degree of separation from mistakes. Gaffes by independent bloggers generally don’t lead back to their employers.
Thought leadership farm team. Marketers can spot and encourage budding subject matter experts and re-purpose their content as thought leadership.
Half-life is less important. Independent blogs can appear and disappear without reflecting badly on the blogger’s company.
Technology flexibility. Independent blogs can take advantage of new technology quickly and easily, because most independent platforms are built on standard internet technologies.

Offsite disadvantages:

Building traffic takes longer. The search engines don’t pay much attention to blogs with little content. Building up that foundation of content takes time.
No integration with marketing goals. You take what you get with independent bloggers. You can’t pick the topics.
Limited incentives. Marketers won’t be able to do much for their independent bloggers.

What do you think? How are you handling your corporate blogging strategy?

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Tags: B2B marketing, Blogging, blogs, Marketing Processes, Marketing Strategy, social media strategy, social media technology
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What are your best practices for "recession marketing?"

October 8, 2009 by Chris Koch

Okay, so I’m not an “A-list” blogger. But I’ve been at it long enough that I’ve earned the right to call in a favor now and then. My web analytics tell me that there are at least 100 people who care enough to let me into their e-mail boxes before deleting me. So I’m going to go all Chris Brogan on you (I mean that in a nice way) and talk to you directly and ask you to be part of my community and talk to me.

If nothing else, do it because you feel sorry for me. My CEO at ITSMA, Dave Munn is looking for stories about how marketers have come up with innovative ways to actually do things better during these tough times. And he wants me, Mr. Research, to find them. Now we do have some research data about the impact that the recession is having on marketers and actions they are taking. And we have lists of marketing best practices that we can rattle off.

But we’re looking for something more human. We need stories.

I’m taking up your time with this because I’m also looking for these stories to be in context. This has been an awful year for a lot of people. I don’t know a friend who hasn’t experienced some kind of loss—whether it be layoffs or job cuts. (Most of my friends are or recently were in journalism.) So I’m looking for two things: stories about ways to do things better and stories about how you’ve kept your sanity and sense of humor at work during these times.

I’ll give you our working proposition: This recession is part of a trajectory that began in 1999, when the dotcom crash set us on a course of cost cutting that seemed temporary until last Fall. Until last Fall, I think many of us thought that somehow those wonderful days of the 90s were going to return: Fat bonuses, full staffs, discretionary options. But now we know that the sense of the temporary that had us looking back to 1998 for our definition of normal is gone for good. Worse, the fat that existed in 1999 did not exist last Fall when companies made more big cuts on top of all the incremental cuts we’ve seen over the years.

The “new normal” as Dave calls it, is one of very small marketing staffs and a network of offshore support. On the one hand, it’s depressing. But there’s also something perversely liberating about it. We can shake off the sense of limbo that comes with the expectation of regaining past losses. We can stop waiting now. And there’s some comfort in that.

And there’s something positive in the idea that we can view this as a clean slate to do things differently. We won’t have the resources of the past anytime soon, so we can look for new ways to do things.

Social media is one new way. Many of the tools are free so the time we devote to them becomes the thing that we need to innovate on and improve.

How are you doing that? What else are you doing to improve marketing? How are you surviving these times?

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Tags: B2B marketing, ITSMA, Marketing Processes, Marketing Strategy, social media strategy
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Four reasons to stop measuring marketing

July 31, 2009 by Chris Koch

It’s time to declare marketing metrics a failure once and for all. ITSMA research has long showed that when we do it at all, we do it poorly. It’s difficult to parse out the contribution that marketing makes to a sale and it’s even more difficult to get salespeople to spend the time figuring out/checking the box/giving credit in the quest to determine whether marketing played a role in making the sale.

So we should just stop. Now.

I’ve had some good conversations this week with ITSMA’s Julie Schwartz and with lead management guru Brian Carroll and we all agree that in the broadest sense, measuring marketing misses the point. We should be measuring revenue and what Julie calls the Cost per Order Dollar (CPOD). Both marketing and sales should work together to reduce CPOD because that’s what really matters in terms of marketing’s contribution to the business. In this report (free with guest registration), Julie points out that marketing’s primary role is to make sales more efficient. Period.

Stop apportioning blame
So why do we continue to measure marketing separately from sales? If we started measuring CPOD and tracked it year over year, we would know that marketing was doing its job without forcing the annual showdown between marketing and the business in which marketing stands before the firing squad to justify its mere existence.

As Brian pointed out to me this week, this is all about growing revenue. It’s time to measure sales and marketing together in that process.

So here are some simple rules to think about:

Stop measuring marketing in isolation. Marketing and sales are both part of the same process: raising revenue. Measure CPOD instead.
Create a unified lead process. You need a closed-loop lead process that tracks prospect activity from beginning to end (and back again, in the case of lead nurturing) that is supported by a system (see this post for more on that).
Get adult supervision. In working with companies to develop lead management programs, Brian has found that the most successful companies have a CEO who does not try to parse marketing from sales and assign credit/blame to each. He or she emphasizes one revenue generating process that both groups contribute to.
Create content that is tied to (and signals) the different stages of the buying process. As we in B2B focus more and more on trying to pull in prospects through thought leadership, we need to understand that our life’s blood is the Epiphany Stage of the buying process. We need marketing content specifically targeted at that stage, as well as the more traditional stages like awareness and interest. When we create content targeted to specific buying stages—and get sales to agree to that categorization—we no longer need to get salespeople to check off the box for marketing’s contribution; that contribution will become implicit.

What would you add to this list?

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Tags: B2B marketing, Epiphany Stage, Lead Generation, Marketing and Sales Collaboration, Marketing Automation, Marketing Processes, Marketing ROI, Marketing Strategy
Categories: ITSMA Research, Marketing Automation, Marketing Metrics and Analytics, Sales and Marketing Collaboration • View Comments

We need an app for that

July 24, 2009 by Chris Koch

I’ve been working on a report for ITSMA clients this week about analytics and it got me thinking about the proverbial bigger picture of B2B marketing.

We know from our research that we in marketing don’t do much with analytics—i.e., using data to determine and predict customer buying patterns. Only 50% of marketers in our survey said they had analytics programs, and of these, few were focused on predicting behavior; most were simply reporting past behavior. Even rarer is the ability to carry those analytics all the way through to a sale.

But we need to start doing that. Two of the companies I spoke to for my report use analytics to determine which marketing tactics are working and which ones aren’t. That lets them be more productive in marketing, by focusing effort and budget on the good stuff, and it lets them reduce the time to a sale by giving salespeople better tools to work with. One of them told me that it had used these analytics to reduce the average number of interactions needed to schedule a sales appointment in half.

So what are the rest of us to do? I’ve said before that this isn’t just a problem with the issues that come back to us in the surveys: lack of budget, clean data, and unified IT systems. We also have a cultural problem: numbers and metrics just aren’t in our bones; we’re the creative types, what others might refer to derisively as the English majors (yep, me too).

Make the analytics come to us
This is why we have to automate our way out of this problem. The metrics and analytics have to come to us; we can’t continue to expect to dive in and pull them out because we just don’t do it. The things we do and the content we produce need to be contained within an IT system that can watch what we do and tell us about it. This is especially important as more of our work moves online.

But I don’t think you can just start with an IT system, because we’re not much more inclined to be IT geeks than we are to being analysts. So you have to start with the bigger process picture.

I haven’t seen a better articulation of what marketing should be doing in B2B than Brian Carroll’s marketing funnel concept. He differentiates between a marketing funnel and a sales funnel because so many leads are lost in the handover between marketing and sales—94%, according to this report. The marketing funnel helps focus attention on a number of important issues:

Qualify leads. Marketing can’t send every lead to sales, nor can it spend too much time qualifying leads.
Universal lead definition. A lead that both sales and marketing agree is ready to be pursued.
Lead scoring. You can’t call everybody who downloads a whitepaper. You need a system for determining who is ready to talk. And as I discussed in this post, the qualification process needs to be gradual and non-invasive, what Brian has since christened “micro-conversion.” Steve Woods of marketing automation vendor Eloqua has an excellent list of questions to ask about lead scoring here, but I wonder if they rely too much on making people fill out forms.
Lead nurturing. There needs to be agreement on when and how a lead will come back to marketing if sales doesn’t pursue it or if the prospect turns out not to be interested.

But what about the fact that sales and marketing don’t talk to each other?
The key to this process is getting sales and marketing to work together create an integrated process. Suzanne Lowe makes the radical assertion that marketing and sales must be integrated together. Eliminate the silos, imbue people with both sales and marketing skills, and eliminate the problem. Once again, however, we have a cultural issue: Sales and marketing people are just different.

The system we’d like to see
In organizations where sales and marketing are forever destined to be separate, processes and systems have to do the integration work. At its foundation, it is a system that sees that the lead process is a loop, not a linear progression—especially considering the length and complexity of the B2B buying process—and is capable of tracking every interaction with a lead over the course of this torturous route.

The system needs to house every bit of content marketing creates, for both customers and sales, and integrates with the lead management system, so that marketers and sales people can use content, not qualification forms, to gauge progress towards a sale. For example, if sales has visibility into the content that prospects are downloading, and both marketing and sales have agreed on the pieces of content that indicate serious buyer interest, the system can signal salespeople to make the call, rather than waiting for marketing to ship the lead to them.

The system needs to be interactive with both prospects and salespeople so that they can rate and comment on the content. And finally, the system needs to integrate with whatever salespeople use (CRM, most likely), so that marketing’s impact on a sale can be automatically tracked from beginning to end.

If marketers had such a foundational system, we wouldn’t need to “create” analytics programs, all we’d need to do is look at what our customers and prospects are doing.

What do your process and system look like?

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Tags: Lead Generation, Lead Nurturing, Lead Qualification, Lead Scoring, Marketing Automation, Marketing Processes, Marketing Strategy
Categories: Lead Generation, Marketing Automation, Marketing Metrics and Analytics, Marketing Strategy, Sales and Marketing Collaboration • View Comments

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