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

November 6, 2009 by

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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Filed Under: Customer Relationships Tagged With: , , ,

Want proof that the C-suite is into social media? Here it is.

October 30, 2009 by

There are two rivers of content at conferences. One is the river of planned content—the conference theme, the presentations, etc.; the other is the river of conversation that flows through the event at breaks, meals and receptions. This is where you get the dope on the shared challenges of the attendees.

We just wrapped up our ITSMA Annual Marketing Conference this week and the strongest current driving the river of conversation was social media. Specifically, frustration over how to use social media to reach the C-suite. Most of ITSMA’s clients are B2B marketers from big technology companies that sell big, complex products, services, and solutions. That means that the people buying those services—or at least playing a key role in the decision—tend to be high up on the corporate food chain—the C-suite or just below.

These are not the people we imagine Twittering about their need for complex enterprise IT services. In fact, it’s hard for most of us to imagine these people using social media at all.

CEOs Use Social Media More than Other Buyers
And yet 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 last year 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 that 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.

This has big implications for marketers. It means that social media is taking hold within your biggest, most valuable accounts at the highest levels. Sounds like a business case for investment to me.

Another surprise was that the big shots use all of the different social media tools pretty evenly. However, CEOs did show a specific preference for the range of social networking sites—LinkedIn, Facebook, and Plaxo—over Twitter or blogs.

Use Social Media to Drive Peer Connections
This makes sense when you consider what our IT buyers have been telling us for years: that their peers are by far their most preferred and trusted choice for information during the buying process. This year, our research showed that most buyers go to colleagues inside their own companies for referrals of people to talk to about a purchase. No doubt, they would like to expand that circle beyond the company—30% say they rely on peers from councils and communities they belong to, and 29% say they speak to colleagues at other companies for referrals.

Right now, I have to believe that the biggest potential for social media within this elite audience is as a tool for expanding the circle of trusted peers that they can call upon when they’re about to make a big purchasing decision.

What do you think?

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Filed Under: ITSMA Research, Social Media Tagged With: , , ,

What are your best practices for "recession marketing?"

October 8, 2009 by

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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Filed Under: Marketing Strategy Tagged With: , , , ,

Three steps for B2B marketers to build a personal social media presence

June 26, 2009 by

In my last post, I hope I convinced you why you should establish a personal presence in social media even if your company hasn’t done so yet. That was the why of social media.

This time, I’d like to concentrate on the how. I’m going to attempt to explain it by humbly offering my own initiation into social media as a guide. When I despair at ever mastering all the social media tools that exist out there, I remind myself (as I hope you will) that at its core social media is all about communication and that marketers are all expert communicators. We’ve already mastered the hardest part; the tools are something that anyone can learn.

In pursuing a personal presence in social media, I had it easier than you will. My job is to learn about how to become a better B2B marketer and to share what I learn with others. You may have to adopt a more split business personality (and do more work). You shouldn’t just get involved in social media to the extent necessary to do your day job. To get better, you should think of yourself as part of the emerging guild of B2B marketers in social media. You stand a better chance of learning more about how to accomplish your goals at work if you can engage with a community of people that face all the same challenges you face.

I think of Paul Dunay as one of the model citizens of this online B2B guild. Paul has been a B2B marketer for years for companies like BearingPoint and Avaya and has accomplished quite a bit with social media in those jobs. But his personal presence in social media is based on sharing best practices in B2B and social media generally—there’s nary a mention of his company or his day job.

So now that we have established your personal social media goal—to be a valued member of the online B2B marketing guild—let’s talk about how you go about building your presence.

I approached my initiation by thinking of it broadly in terms of communications rather than specific tools—because the sheer number of social media tools is overwhelming. There are three broad ways that marketers use social media (I go into these in more detail in this post):

Step 1. Monitor

Monitoring is finding and tracking the conversations that are occurring about B2B marketing online. Monitoring is the foundation of your personal presence. Before you can begin talking, you have to listen. You need to identify the most important influencers in you market and track those conversations.

Pick an RSS tool. One of the best ways to start is with RSS. There are a million tools out there for doing this, and you can integrate RSS feeds into your browser but I find that cluttered and distracting. I use SharpReader, which is free and open source and lets you scroll through headlines without having to read individual items, which saves a lot of time.

Now, I have to admit that I’m not a diligent RSS follower. I mostly use it as a platform for determining the blogs I like best and then follow them through good old-fashioned e-mail (the tool that most bloggers use to do this is Feedburner). SharpReader is more a reference database for the blogs that I like rather than a day-to-day tool. But it’s nice to have them all in one place.

Pick blogs to follow. Here are some important B2B blogs that I track:

Here are some important social media blogs that I track:

There are tons more blogs out there, but I’m picky. I’m interested in good guild members who think and are willing to share.

Use Twitter for monitoring. Another way to monitor the online B2B marketing guild is through Twitter. Twitter is a fantastic tool for learning and sharing, as I explain in this post. “Following” is a non-threatening way to build up your network of contacts without having to know any of them. To me, it’s the missing link between monitoring blogs and connecting with people through social networking sites like LinkedIn and Facebook. I’d like to be able to connect with more B2B colleagues through LinkedIn and Facebook, but sending invites to people who I only know through their blog posts or their professional credentials seems incredibly presumptuous. I won’t do it. And the few times I’ve accepted invites from people on this basis I’ve usually lived to regret it. Either we turn out to have nothing in common or they try to hit me up for work.

But Twitter lets you start to build a professional relationship without getting in each other’s face. It’s like being at a cocktail party where you see a circle of people having an interesting conversation that you can just break into—without having to know any of them or having to say something interesting. You can just listen. Even better, you’re able to send those people a signal that you think that what they have to say is interesting enough to follow. And that can be a nice ego stroke for them (if they don’t already have 40,000 followers). If they follow you, then you can start to build ties through re-tweeting and direct messages.

Pick a tool for managing Twitter. As soon as you join Twitter, however, you’ll realize how poor the site is for managing your Twitter presence. You’re better off getting a dedicated tool that lets you manage the flow of information. Here again, there are a bunch of tools available, but the one that works for most people is Tweetdeck. It’s a nicely designed dashboard that lets you create columns for different categories of tweets. For example, I have a column that does a running search for “B2B.” It’s a great source of content and for people that I may want to follow. By default, Tweetdeck has columns for tweets by the people you follow and for any direct messages (messages that only the two of you can see, not your followers) that you receive from people. The best way to figure out how to use Tweetdeck is to hover your mouse over the image that comes with each tweet you receive. You’ll see options for reply (send a message to the twitterer that everyone following you can see), re-tweet (you think the tweet you’ve received is cool so you’re sending it out to all of your followers), or send a direct message.

I started by following the bloggers I like, as well as friends and colleagues. You will find that as you start tweeting (make sure your Twitter bio mentions B2B and marketing somewhere so that people can find you through Twitter search) people will just start following you. You can accept their follows or reject them (there are many spammers out there). But finding people is tedious and time consuming.

Tools for figuring out whom to follow. Of course, there are tools for making searching for people to follow on Twitter less painful. I use a free tool called TwiPing that lets you see who is following others in your network. So for example, if you decide to follow me (@ckochster—Twitter names always have the @ in front of them), you can use TwiPing to show you all the people who follow me. You can “mass follow” my followers to instantly build up your network, or pick through the contacts individually (their bio information is included). Other good tools for bulking up your network include:

  • MrTweet—Recommends people based on direct interactions that your followers have had with others outside your network.
  • WeFollow
  • Twitseeker—Find people based on the subjects they twitter about the most.

For more Twitter tools than you could ever possibly use, check out The Ultimate List of Twitter Tools.

I don’t believe a bigger network is necessarily better. And don’t go nuts with following others. If you follow many more people than follow you, everyone might start to think you’re a spammer. I think following between 100-200 quality B2B twitterers should give you enough to think about. (For more on Twitter etiquette, see Twitter Bible: Everything You Need To Know About Twitter.)

Step 2. Engage

When you are ready to move beyond reading others’ blogs and tweets, you can start to engage as an active member of the online B2B guild.

Use Twitter to engage through linking. Twitter is a great way to engage because the 140-character limit means that Twitter is for linking, not thinking. As you dig through the blogs, newsletters, online publications and other things you read regularly, twitter the stuff you find interesting and add a line or two of commentary. The quality of your followers will go up, because they can see what you’re interested in through your tweets, and you’ll be able to engage in more direct dialog with the members of your Twitter community. Be sure to get an account at Ping.fm so that when you twitter, you can automatically have your tweets show up on the other social networks of your choosing.

Transfer Twitter relationships to LinkedIn and Facebook. After you’ve created a link with someone on Twitter (they follow you, too) and you’ve exchanged a few direct messages, you have an excuse to invite them to connect on LinkedIn or Facebook so that you can getting to know one another better. There are all sorts of opinions about whether LinkedIn or Facebook is better for business contacts. Facebook is quickly crossing over to business from its beginnings as a personal network. But for now, LinkedIn is still considered more appropriate for business networking.

Join LinkedIn and Facebook groups and answer questions. Perhaps more important than building up the number of your connections on LinkedIn and Facebook is joining groups of like-minded professionals and engaging in conversations and answering questions. For example, we just happen to have an ITSMA group on LinkedIn that you can join. You can post news articles, ask questions, and answer other peoples’ questions. Other B2B-oriented groups on LinkedIn include:

Step 3. Manage

Managing means that you take an active role in creating conversations and fostering a community. Here are some ways to do it:

Decide whether to do a blog. I’d recommend against it unless you write regularly as part of your day job. Obviously, writing is hard. Worse, there are a million marketing blogs out there already. To stand out, you really have to think and contribute unique ideas. I’ve been blogging for years, beginning when I was at CIO magazine, and I still find it difficult after all these years.

But there really is no better way to serve the guild than to start a blog. If you’re worried about having enough to say, create a blog designed to be a service to your readers. Some blogs thrive by being filters rather than thought leaders. They summarize content from other blogs and thread multiple external posts on a topic together to add more context and meaning. They also assemble subject-specific lists of content and update them as needed. A good example of this kind of blogging is Junta42, which has a post called 42+ Social Media Tools that is regularly updated with contributions from readers. These lists are great traffic drivers and make their creators very popular among guild members (who often do most of the work in the end!).

If you decide to take the plunge and start a blog, WordPress is the way to go. It’s free, open source, and incredibly rich. It has blossomed from a blogging tool into a full-blown website content management system (in fact, it is now the content management system for ITSMA.com)—though it’s still incredibly easy to use for newbies. WordPress also has a great support community. I was able to get this blog up and running in less than one hour.

Start your own online group. Besides creating online communities in business-oriented third-party hosted social media venues like LinkedIn, you can also start guild-related wikis. Wetpaint offers a nice free wiki.

Regardless of where or how you start your own group, be prepared to invest a lot of time and content. Research shows that even in vibrant online communities, fewer than 10% of members contribute any content and fewer than 2% take an active role in starting and leading discussions. For now, you’re better off taking advantage of the scale of a LinkedIn or Facebook to draw attention to your group and build it than trying to create a community on your own.

If you work in a big company and would like to be a good guild leader for your internal marketing colleagues, you should check out Yammer. Many companies are having great success using Yammer as a kind of guerilla knowledge management system.

I hope this post is helpful. It is offered in the spirit of the guild. I hope you will comment and add in your suggestions to help B2B marketers build their personal presences online. I will update the post with new links as I get them.

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Filed Under: Blogging, Social Media Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Why I'm doing this

March 5, 2008 by

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.

You can see more about me at LinkedIn and Facebook.

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Filed Under: Blogging Tagged With: , , , ,
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