Tag: Thought Leadership

How social media will change lead generation in B2B

February 26, 2010 by Chris Koch

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.

We call it the epiphany stage.

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.

What do you think?

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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?

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How much do you “charge” for your content?

January 29, 2010 by Chris Koch

Lady Gaga at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards.
Image via Wikipedia

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.

How about you?

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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?

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There is only one objective in social media: create learning networks

January 8, 2010 by Chris Koch

There is too much wringing of hands and gnashing of teeth about social media objectives and strategy these days. We all assume that our organizations are unique and that we must devote great sums of time and money to figuring out what our particular motivation is for social media and how we will carry it out.

We’re wired as humans to believe that we are each unique and different—indeed, this perception shoulders the bulk of our self-esteem. And yes, we are all unique. A little. But in most things, we’re the same and we can usually acknowledge that.

Not in our businesses, though. In the course of hundreds of interviews with companies over my career, the “yes but we’re different” mantra was a familiar refrain. Companies that made commodity products would tell me with straight faces that even their financial processes were unique—GAAP be damned—and that they needed to customize their software to fit “our ways of doing things.” This also meant they paid millions extra in consulting fees to change the software and millions more the next time they wanted to upgrade their software.

I find that we’re applying the same logic to social media. Let’s sit down and figure out our unique objectives and strategies before we do anything.

Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying we shouldn’t have objectives and strategies for social media. I’m just saying that we shouldn’t assume, as we do by default, that ours are much different from anyone else’s.

There is only one objective in social media and it is common across all companies—even across the infamous divide between B2B and B2C: Create learning networks.

And there is only one strategy for carrying out this objective: Find people who are good at developing and disseminating ideas to contribute to and facilitate those networks.

That’s it.

What is a learning network?
The reason I say this is that another hard-wired part of us is the desire to learn. And learning is integral to buying—especially in B2B. Recommend products and services that you haven’t thoroughly researched and you will most likely be out of a job.

But it also applies in B2C. Toyota’s market share wasn’t built by Toyota’s marketing; it was built by Consumer Reports.

Every buyer wants to learn at all stages of the buying process. But no buyer wants to be sold during all stages of the buying cycle.

The purpose of social media is to create learning networks that buyers want to join. The enticements are ideas and education. That means social media are extensions of our content development and dissemination processes. By creating content that offers relevant, timely, and useful ideas and education for buyers at all stages of the buying process, we create the incentives for buyers to engage with us in conversation and community. Whether it’s blogs, Twitter, LinkedIn, or private communities that we build ourselves, the common thread is that by focusing on learning we build and retain buyers’ interest.

Here are the key elements of learning networks:

  • Create an internal learning network. You need to build an internal network that 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 provides the inspiration for some ideas and the objective justification for others. Internal knowledge share sessions and reward and recognition programs provide the motivation for thought leaders to emerge inside the organization and help imbue a thought leadership mindset into the culture.
  • Create a content development process. Using ideas from the learning network, marketing needs to develop content. Marketers must become publishers, with a process for refining and presenting thought leadership content through various vehicles, (such as conference presentations, white papers, social media, etc.). Marketing needs professional content developers who know how to collaborate with thought leaders to develop clear, compelling packages. A calendar helps marketing plan out the frequency and focus of its output. 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 different buying stages so that sales will get the right signals about when and how to approach customers for a sale.
  • Integrate the internal learning network and content processes with social media. Your internal learning network should integrate with the ones you want to build for customers. Internal thought leaders should use social media as a test bed and developing ground for ideas that they later disseminate in more polished form. So for example, a tweet or a posting in a LinkedIn forum leads to blog post, which leads to a video, which leads to a conference presentation, white paper, or private event for top customers.

If learning is the objective, the rest falls into place. Idea- and education-based content is the fuel for building community. The rest is promotion.

What do you think?

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Top B2B marketing posts for 2009 (hint: social media)

December 30, 2009 by Chris Koch

Who says B2B marketers are lagging in social media? If they are out there, they aren’t reading this blog. Of the top ten posts on my blog this year, only one did not involve social media. Though I’m supposed to be an objective researcher, I have to admit bias here. I think the social media phenomenon is the most exciting and important thing to hit communications in my lifetime. So writing about this stuff is fun. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I do writing it.

Thank you so much for your comments, links, and tweets this year. I’m happy to say that traffic to my blog has quadrupled (I’ve gone from a D-list blogger to a C-list, I think) in 2009 thanks to you. I look forward to collaborating even more in 2010. Have a happy and safe New Year!

Check out these top posts if you haven’t already:

  1. Six factors driving B2B social media marketing adoption
  2. The four components of social media management
  3. Want proof that the C-suite is into social media? Here it is.
  4. How to create B2B social media policies
  5. Why B2B marketers hate social media
  6. Social media strategy for B2B: what’s required and what’s optional
  7. Why bother with thought leadership? Five questions and answers.
  8. Eight reasons to monitor social media and a list of tools for doing it
  9. Where should your corporate blogs live?
  10. Why B2B marketing will become more visual, vocal, and mobile

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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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Want to understand your customers’ business needs? Give them an award.

November 6, 2009 by Chris Koch

Like most marketers, I spend most of my time desperately seeking to understand my target audience (B2B marketers) and delivering content that they find relevant and engaging. It’s a struggle.

But once a year around June, my life gets a little easier. That’s when I get to sit back and watch the submissions for our Marketing Excellence Awards (MEA) roll in. It’s a beautiful thing. Marketers from around the world tell us in great detail about the campaigns and programs that have netted them the most business results.

We have five different categories for the awards that cover important areas of focus for B2B marketers. The number of entries we receive in each category and the quality of those entries give us a sense of marketers’ shifting priorities from year to year and reveal general strengths and weaknesses of the profession (for example, we’re great at sales enablement and demand generation; we suck at metrics—just not in our blood, it seems).

Everybody wins with the MEAs. For us, it’s an opportunity to build a closer relationship with the winners and generate some great thought leadership. The winners get serious recognition for their work that helps their companies and their careers. If you haven’t considered creating an awards program for your target customers, you should.

I wish I could take credit for the MEAs, but it was developed long before I got to ITSMA. I also wish I could take credit for the excellent eBook that oozes with best practices from this year’s winners. You have to check it out. It was developed by my ITSMA colleagues Pam O’Rourke and Maria Lindberg.

However, I can share some of the best practices we’ve developed for separating the wheat from the chaff in the MEAs. The guiding principles we use to determine the winners are the same ones that guide the success of any marketing program: innovation, execution, and business results. We ask a series of questions designed to reveal how well the entrants have fulfilled those three key principles:

  1. What is the story? We humans are wired for stories. What is the narrative that explains what you are trying to accomplish with this program? Creating the narrative helps project members focus their efforts and will help sell the effort to others inside the business and with customers.
  2. What are the motivating factors? Successful marketing programs always have a compelling call to action. But marketing programs are themselves calls to action. There should be an important business justification that causes marketing to create the program. That justification can come from inside, such as wanting to enter a new market or shore up sagging sales, or outside, such as a new competitor entering the market.
  3. What is the customer need? The depth and creativity of your research can be the deciding factor in whether the program rises above the noise in the marketplace. Research provides the supporting evidence for a new insight into customer or market needs. For example, segmentation could reveal a market that you never knew existed. Role-based research can help personalize your message to the needs of the specific buyers and influencers involved in the purchasing decision.
  4. How do you quantify the need? Research also provides the quantification of the need and the benefits of your solution that are most worth highlighting for customers, such as:
    • Improve efficiency
    • Increase customer satisfaction
    • Increase profitable revenue
  5. Where is the innovation? To be sure, one of marketing’s primary roles is to support sales. But marketing should also be helping drive the business strategy and execution of the company. One of the ways to do this is through programs that challenge the current ways of doing things, both internally and with customers. Marketing programs should help the business stand apart from competitors in the segment. The best signal of success is when competitors feel compelled to respond.
  6. What are the constraints? Of course, all marketing programs come with constraints. Budget is the overriding limiter, but it’s important to quantify as many constraints as possible because the limiters help define the ambition of the project.
  7. How do you measure success? Establishing clear metrics before you start provides guard rails for the project and makes it easier to provide progress reports. Of course, knowing the metrics before you start also makes the data gathering process much easier.

Do you have an awards program with your customers? If you already have one, are you asking the right questions to find the best of the best (and make your life as a marketer easier)? Please comment with a link to your awards program and tips for making the most of them.

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Why marketers must become the new publishers

October 6, 2009 by Chris Koch

One of the great trends were seeing at ITSMA is increased automation of the lead process. It’s great because the software acts as a battering ram for alignment between marketing and sales.

But this trend has an unintended side effect: it exposes our content development processes (or lack thereof). If we now have a system measuring how long it takes marketing to nurture a lead until it is sales ready, we will now also have a measure of whether the nurturing period increases or decreases over time.

That metric is going to be critically important as we automate the lead process because nurturing is marketing’s special sauce. It’s how we move people tantalizingly close to a sale—without ever putting a salesperson in front of them.

We accomplish this feat through content. And if our nurturing metric is going to improve over time, so must our content.

Improvement through relevance
By improve I don’t mean that we all have to learn to write like Tolstoy. By improve I mostly mean that we need to make the content more and more relevant to target buyers. I’ve spent the last two days as a guest at Marketing Sherpa’s B2B conference in Boston and the many excellent speakers used publishing metaphors constantly. And I think those metaphors are useful for simplifying the content process (and for improving it) because most of us are familiar with the publishing model.

The publishing model is also relevant because as a business model, it is dying—especially for trade magazines. The ad revenues that once funded coverage of every arcane niche of technology have dried up, and so has the content that could have mentioned our companies. Demand for that content hasn’t gone away however, and companies that can provide an adequate alternative will grow their businesses more than those that can’t.

How to adapt the publishing process to marketing
To fulfill an ever-increasing demand for content you need a process. And the publishing process works better than the marketing content development process because the publishing process developed without an overlord (e.g., salespeople screaming for a brochure today or an event tomorrow). The publishing process is intended to identify a target audience, develop an understanding of that audience, and deliver targeted, relevant content. To consistently beat competitors, that content needs to remain relevant and targeted. If it doesn’t, circulation drops, ad revenue drops, and the publication goes out of business.

In other words, relevance is the primary measure of success.

That’s how we should think about our marketing content process. Here are some aspects of the publishing process that drive relevance:

  • Identify the target reader. Publications fail if they don’t grasp exactly whom they are trying to reach and why. Marketers need to do a similar kind of segmentation.
  • Create an editorial calendar. Every good publication has an editorial calendar. When I was at CIO, we despised the calendar process because it was the primary instrument that our salespeople used to demonstrate relevance with potential advertisers (and our competitors could see it). But looking back on it I think we despised it more because it revealed the gaps in our coverage and in our knowledge of readers and their needs. The calendar planning exercise always gave us a ton of ideas that wound up driving much of our coverage for the year—especially since we weren’t a newsmagazine and most of the topics were evergreen. Much of the content we offer as marketers is also evergreen, so there’s no reason not to have a plan for content. If nothing else, it gives you something to wave in salespeople’ faces the next time they come screaming about a brochure.
  • Research the reader. Most magazines do annual reader surveys to ask subscribers what they think of the magazine and what could be improved. Through these surveys, they construct archetypes of the typical reader. Marketers can replace offers with survey questions once in awhile to help build an understanding of timely issues to drive future content.
  • Interview the players and the experts. Journalists aren’t experts in the fields they cover, but they’re experts at finding those that are. They’re also good at finding the people who live the stuff they’re writing about every day. All good journalism comes from expert insight and real-world examples. Marketers need to talk to subject matter experts inside the company, influencers outside the company (analysts, academics, bloggers, journalists), and customers. All you need to do is ask questions and the content will flow out of these people.
  • Audit content. When surveying readers, magazines also ask whether readers like specific articles and subject areas covered in the magazine. Marketers need the same feedback from customers and from salespeople. If you don’t have the money to do research, consider adding a review button or comment feature to content.
  • Diversify content. Most magazines are a mixture of long and short, graphic and text-heavy stories. Marketing content needs to be similarly diverse.
  • Cycle through top reader interests. Magazines develop a short list of topic areas that matter most to their readers and hit those topics regularly as part of the issue planning process. Marketers need to develop a similar list as they plan their content calendars.
  • Be timely. Editors always try to leave room in the planning process for the timely, exclusive scoop—the story that identifies an important trend before others do. For marketers, being timely means having content that matches every stage of the buying cycle, so that you have a chance for an “exclusive” at each stage.

What’s your publishing process for content? What have I left out?

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The five components of a successful thought leadership program

August 21, 2009 by Chris Koch

Recently, I was asked by a former ITSMA client to help put together a plan for a thought leadership program for a B2B technology company that sells both products and services. It forced me to think about all the components necessary to build and sustain a thought leadership strategy. Here are my thoughts on the big pieces. Please tell me what I’ve gotten wrong or left out.

1. Research the need. Most people start with strategy. But starting with strategy assumes a need that may not be there. 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?
  • What are customers’ areas of interest?
  • What types of thought leadership vehicles (councils, conferences, white papers, social media, etc.) are target customers most interested in?
  • How can thought leadership influence their buying behavior?

Answers to these questions will help drive the structure of the program and provide a foundation for achieving ROI goals.

2. Determine the readiness of the organization. Professional services firms expect their consultants to be thought leaders and that expectation flows through everything those firms do, from recruiting, to training, to marketing. Thought leadership requires a cultural commitment to the development of ideas and strong executive support. If those pieces are missing, thought leadership will be left to marketing, where it will either mutate into thinly veiled sales content or die out altogether. Marketing can manage a thought leadership program and disseminate content, but it cannot be expected to supply the ideas that form the basis of the content.

3. Build a thought leadership network. I go into more details on a thought leadership network in this post, but the basic idea is that there are two parts to thought leadership: idea development and content dissemination. Marketing is great at the latter, but needs help with the former. A thought leadership network provides a reliable source of content for marketers to package and disseminate. The thought leadership 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 thought leaders to emerge inside the organization and help imbue a thought leadership mindset into the culture.

4. Create a content development process. Using ideas from the thought leadership network, marketing needs to develop vehicles for disseminating that content to customers and salespeople. The key components of the program are:

  • Create a publishing process and calendar. Marketers must become publishers, with a process for refining and presenting thought leadership content through various vehicles, (such as conference presentations, white papers, social media, etc.). A calendar helps marketing plan out the frequency and focus of its output.
  • Align thought leadership vehicles to 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 different buying stages so that sales will get the right signals about when and how to approach customers for a sale.

5. Install systems and metrics for supporting thought leadership. The goal of thought leadership is not just to raise awareness of the company; it is to help make a sale. For that reason, thought leadership programs need 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 thought leadership 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 thought leadership 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.
  • Get agreement with sales on a sales-ready lead. The benefits of a thought leadership 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 hand off of prospects between marketing and sales for thought leadership to have the fullest possible impact on a sale.

What do you think?

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