We got a question this week from an ITSMA client asking about developing a business case for creating mobile applications for their website content. I said that I haven’t seen any of those business cases yet. And I don’t think I ever will.
We’re seeing mobile be part of an integrated approach to social media, not as a standalone. In fact, I’m working on two case studies this week of websites that have mobile applications, but the mobile applications are a small part of the whole. And they both lead to content that benefits from being mobile.
The attributes that seem to matter so far are:
Location. Could other users of the application get value from knowing where others are?
Continuity. Do they feel that they will miss something by being away from the content for even a short amount of time?
Timeliness. Will content appear in the application that needs to be acted upon immediately?
One company’s mobile application is tied to a wiki-based sales enablement website that lets salespeople generate actions and updates and get updated information from the road.
The other company has a mobile application for its private, gated online community so that mobile members can keep up with message boards and forums that change frequently (there are over 100 subject-oriented communities within the site).
Creating a mobile application that leads to static content on a website isn’t going to build much interest or loyalty because there’s no real urgency to connect. The only reason I can see for creating a mobile application in this context is if the application makes the content easier to look at and interact with than on a web browser. Apple claims the iPad will make content look better than it does on a web browser. If that’s true, then it will be worth making an application that connects to static content. But not until then.
The era of the sales process beginning with a lead is over. The number of B2B buyers who are ready to buy as soon as they engage with our marketing is small—and social media will make it even smaller.
We have to come to terms with the fact that there is a stage of the buying process that comes before the buyers we are pursuing are ready to become leads.
This is the stage that occurs long before any discussion of products, services, or RFPs—indeed, it occurs before customers have even begun to think about a purchase.
However, there is something important that happens at this stage: It is the point at which customers come to the realization of an important business need.
This is where social media comes in. As social media expands our opportunity to reach people who have never heard of us or our services, we need to be prepared to engage them during the epiphany stage. We are trying to generate demand during this stage, not create leads, because these people aren’t ready to become leads. We have to generate demand before we can generate a lead.
The best way to do this is with thought leadership. We need a content engine capable of gaining the attention and respect of people who have never heard of us before. These people are not leads—they are not ready to be contacted by anyone. But they may be open to building a relationship that could someday lead to a sale.
These people are prospects, not leads. The way we turn prospects into leads is to gain their trust. We gain their trust by reaching out to them with smart, engaging, educational content. The trust leads to a more personal relationship and hopefully, a purchase. As I said in my last post, 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. We need to create that content.
But getting to that realization requires that we first acknowledge that there is a whole world that comes before a lead and before the interest phase of the buying process. We need to see that we are ignoring many people who aren’t leads. If we ignore them, they may never know that they need something that we have to offer.
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.
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.
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?
Okay, so it’s difficult to actually pull money out of buyers for your marketing content (though there are rare exceptions: McKinsey has been doing it for years with the McKinsey Quarterly).
Yet while generally we can’t put a price tag on our content, we do charge for it. The price is the forms we make people fill out to download white papers or sign up for events. Trouble is, we take a one-price-for all approach to our content.
That has to change.
In many cases, we’re charging too much for our content and in other cases not enough. For example, there is no way that the typical Webinar is worth as much as an in-depth research report, yet we make buyers give us the same amount of information for both—we charge them the same price.
Make no mistake; buyers understand the prices behind marketing content. We’re the ones who don’t pay enough attention to it. Here are the components of the price from the buyer’s perspective:
Time. They have to spend time filling out the form and predict the amount of time they will need to absorb the content—and probably deal with the emails and calls from pesky salespeople after the fact.
Privacy. Buyers understand that they give away a piece of their privacy every time they fill out a form and engage with content.
Intention. Buyers want the most valuable content they can get. They decide how to reveal about their intentions based on the value of the content to them. They may also assume that a higher level of intent will net them more valuable content either in terms of quantity or depth.
Hierarchy. Buyers are all-too aware of their positions in the chain of command. Those lower down on the corporate ladder are more willing to “spend” their information because they realize that it has less value than those higher up, whose buying power gives them more information riches combined with less willingness to spend it (kind of like rich people in the real economy).
Access. Buyers understand that there are different levels of access to content depending on certain factors. They don’t always know what those factors are, but they value access enough to lie. For example, many assume that a higher level of buying intent will get them more goodies, so they say they are ready to buy when they aren’t. Many also assume that if they say that they are vice president instead of a director that they will receive better content and probably better treatment overall.
Relationship. This price is one that high-level executives have been calculating for years as providers woo them with memberships in customer councils and invitations to private events. But it’s less familiar to lower-level buyers, who are only beginning to calculate this piece as the economics of social media open up the privileges of relationship from cheesy tchotckes at trade shows to online social networks.
Account history. Buyers assume that the price of content will change depending on the number of times they have engaged with you. Even the most basic lead scoring mechanism raises the price of content as buyers consume more of it—i.e., If you download two white papers a week for a month, you should expect a call from a salesperson. Buyers get that—or at least they will probably see the logic in the pricing.
Culture and location. Culture, both corporate and social, affects the price that buyers are willing to pay for content. For example, research shows that Europeans value their privacy more than Americans—meaning that their information may cost you more. And some companies have disclosure rules that make it hard for their executives to participate on customer advisory boards.
The price will change We should evaluate our content pricing models to see if we’re charging the right amounts. We should expect those prices to change as social media takes hold among buyers. For example, 99.9% of the links I click on in Twitter take me directly to the content advertised in the tweets. And when there is a gate, most Twitterers take the precious real estate needed to say that registration is necessary. Just as the web has gutted the business model of publishing it has also reduced the price of marketing content. It has also changed the scope of our content process, as Jon Miller points out here.
Mobile raises the price But the price can go up, too. That possibility hit home with me this week as I read Steve Woods’ post about the B2B implications of the iPad. Steve points out, among other things, that the richer environment of the iPad could revive the “print” advertising market.
As publishers are able to present content that doesn’t look like crap like it does on a web browser, they can charge more and advertisers can grab more attention. And the multimedia possibilities mean that subscribers to the New York Times might be willing to pay for that embedded video interview with Lady GaGa.
No doubt marketers can also charge a higher price for a white paper that embeds a video case study or a how-to in a great looking media environment. I’m not sure whether the iPad is that environment or not, but we all know that some kind of portable media device will replace our dead-tree publications if the experience is as good or better than we can have with print.
And no doubt the location abilities of mobile devices like the iPad and smartphones will also raise the price we can charge for marketing content. CK Kerley and I went back and forth on this issue as she prepared an excellent piece about how mobile will affect B2B.
My thinking is that we’re so busy assuming that we need to bang down the door to reach buyers that we forget that sometimes they actually want to be found—not necessarily by us but by each other. By acting as a matchmaker at events and perhaps by creating communities with location-based functions, we can help them find each other and get to market to them as the price of fostering the connection.
What are they willing to “pay?” So there is a price for marketing content. Maybe I’m focusing too much on semantics, but I think lead scoring only gets it half right. We assign points to buyers based on their actions, but we don’t think about it from their perspective. Lead scores don’t ask, “But what are they willing (and happy) to pay for our content?
Thinking about a pricing model for content also helps us target our content to the specific segments of the buying process. I talk more about how we need to vary the amount of information we take from buyers in this post, but the idea that there is a price to be charged and paid makes it clearer in my mind.
I don’t hold out much hope for the future of corporate blogs. Most customers won’t read them because they won’t trust them. Companies exist to sell things and make money and the people who work for those companies are paid to further those goals. We humans are tribal, and our tribal loyalties always come first. Readers understand this and operate from the presumption that corporations are going to have a bias toward making themselves look good and getting their agreed upon message out. Discerning exactly how biased a given corporate blog is—and how much of the total puzzle of information the reader may be missing by not going elsewhere—takes too much time and energy.
This is why we have journalism. Readers don’t have to do as much work to determine the motivations of the writers. Regardless of whether you believe that journalists are inherently biased, the business model and the tribal bond that holds journalists together is that they are supposed to sample the entire field and report what they hear. Otherwise, they will earn the wrath of their readers, bosses, and peers. There is tribal pressure not to take one person or company’s word for it. I would much rather read about Microsoft’s corporate strategy in the New York Times or see it on Fox News than read it in a corporate blog from Microsoft.
The relevance of blogs is that they are personal. That’s why corporations can’t do them well. As an employee of the company, you would never want to take a controversial stand on something in the corporate blog without first figuring out whether it accurately represents the opinion of your tribe. That’s why corporate blogs will never be risk-taking enterprises. They will be press releases for broader consumption.
That’s not to say that corporate blogs won’t be controversial. The numbing lack of controversy in the blog posts themselves will be in stark contrast to the comments about the posts. Take for example this innocuous post about GM’s new Pontiac G8. It’s written by one of a number of rotating authors on GM’s blog that include Bob Lutz (yet another issue for readers—whose voice really represents GM here and whom should we trust most?). This time it’s Adam Denison,GM’s Coordinator of New Media. And guess what! He really likes the G8! He congratulates Pontiac on building “an amazing car!” You know, maybe he really believes that. But it’s harder for readers to figure out his genuineness than to go elsewhere—or to point out their concerns in their comments. Like this one:
“Adam Denison said:“So congratulations to Pontiac for a building an amazing car that is sure to be the brand’s flagship performance sedan. Great work Pontiac!”
Mr Denison,
Aren’t your congratulations misplaced? Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t the G8 only a rebadged Holden Commodore SS? Isn’t it a bit of a stretch to congratulate Pontiac for an amazing car when there role was little more than to put different badges on it and move the steering wheel to the left side?Shouldn’t the congratulations go to the Holden team who actually conceived and designed the car?
It’s a smart idea to bring the best models from GM’s overseas partners to the U.S., but credit for the design should go where it’s due. Wouldn’t you agree?Regards,Gary Dikkers”
Denison responds to other comments in the blog, mostly to correct errors in specifications and to urge readers to visit showrooms. But he doesn’t comment on this one. And that’s because he can’t. He may have an opinion, but likely GM hasn’t formed a tribal opinion about how to deal with the Oz issue. At least the comment wasn’t wiped off the blog, as other corporations have done.
For a corporate blog to be effective, it can’t be what we currently conceive of as the corporate blog. There needs to be a layer of separation between the corporation and the blogger or bloggers. The layer of separation gives the blogger and the corporation an out. For example, when the folks at ITSMA asked me to take up the blogging reins of my predecessors, my boss, Julie Schwartz, our senior vice president of Thought Leadership, suggested that I start my own blog rather than an ITSMA-hosted blog. Her suggestion stemmed in part from her knowledge that blogs are a lot of work and that the people doing them deserve some personal recognition for their efforts. She also knew that having a personal blog would motivate me more than doing one hosted by the company.
Julie’s has many smart ideas, but this one really intrigued me. I think blogging about marketing from an independent position benefits everyone involved. It lets me feel more emboldened to be personal and opinionated, and it gives Julie and Dave the ability to rightfully point out that stupid or incorrect things I might say are not necessarily reflections of their or ITSMA’s opinions (that was a shameless disclaimer in case you didn’t notice). I mean, let’s be real here. They don’t have the time to look over my shoulder while I blog through a corporate vehicle, so why not make that clear to everyone from the start?
I think this is where the corporate blog is headed. One of the models for my blog is Paul Dunay’s “Buzz Marketing for Technology” blog. Paul is a marketer for consulting company BearingPoint, but his blog is his own. He blogs on topics that interest him and his follow B2B technology marketers. It’s hard to discern any BearingPoint influence on his blog, and he puts a disclaimer on the front page absolving the company of any link to what he says. My work as a reader is lessened. Sure, Paul may be somehow advancing the corporate goals of BearingPoint through his blog, but as a reader I know he can’t hide behind the corporation or suddenly give way to someone else to do the talking. The result is that he looks smart and genuine, and, by extension, so does BearingPoint.
And that’s all corporations really can ask for from a corporate blog. The point is not to get a message across anymore, it is to engage people who are, or may someday be, customers, peers, or partners in a dialog—not with the corporation, but with smart people who want to help.
I’m viewing this blog as an experiment, as I think anyone blogging these days should. I’m convinced that this stuff is going to change very quickly over time, and I want to keep an attitude of experimentation at all times. Plus, I know that marketers—especially B2B marketers who will be the focus of much of my writing—are just getting started with social media and are confused about how to make it serve the traditional marketing goals of awareness, trust, and loyalty.
So I’m going to beg your indulgence while I write about my experiments with these new media. I will of course also include the research, best practices, and thoughtful opinions of those I encounter as part of my day job—as Associate Director of Research and Thought Leadership at the Information Technology Services Marketing Association, ITSMA.
Pardon more indulgence. Here’s more information about me: I am currently paid to learn and write about B2B marketing in the technology industry. I have a hard time imagining what could be more rewarding than being paid to learn about something—anything. As for writing, the rewards are obvious—50 gazillion bloggers can’t be wrong.
The kind people giving me money to learn are Dave Munn, CEO and president of ITSMA, and my direct boss, Julie Schwartz, senior vice president of Thought Leadership for ITSMA.
This blog will be about what I learn about marketing, my interactions and conversations with marketers in general and ITSMA members in particular. I prefer to think rather than just link, and will try to do that in everything I post. Point of view is more important than frequency. For that reason, I will not be the most prolific blogger in the world, but like my readers, I have a day job.
I have done this before. I blogged for about three years at my previous job, as executive editor at a technology trade magazine called CIO. I had a blog called “Koch’s IT Strategy.” The web people hated me because my blog posts were rarely less than 1500 words. But the longer ones got all the comments and were more fun to write. So I’m going to keep doing it that way.
I have spent most of my career in journalism, but it was interrupted for a few years by a stint as a marketer at a now-defunct consulting firm called CSC/Index. I did what they now call “Thought Leadership Marketing”: Developed and wrote case studies, ghost wrote articles for consultants, helped develop consulting content and edited publications. So I know something of what B2B marketers go through. I’m on a quest to understand the rest.
If you’ve gotten this far, I have earned the right to tell you about my other work experience, which is as a founding editor of a now-defunct consumer magazine about cycling, called Bicycle Guide. It was my first startup experience (my second was starting a bike touring company that took Americans to view the Tour de France bike race-so you can see how cementing I am about this stuff) and gave me a chance to learn and write about a sport I love more than any other. You will probably see postings somewhere on this blog about cycling.
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