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Why B2B marketers need to embrace deal marketing

December 29, 2009 by

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?

Filed Under: Brand, Reputation, and Positioning, Social Media Tagged With: , , ,

Eight reasons to monitor social media and a list of tools for doing it

December 23, 2009 by

If you read this blog regularly, you know that I think that monitoring social media is one of four key aspects of a social media engagement strategy.

Social media monitoring is a way to figure out what’s being said about your brand and reveals opportunities for engaging in conversations with customers and influencers. At its most basic, social media monitoring starts with what is known as the “vanity search.” Through one of the popular search engines, you set up a recurring search on key terms that will alert you to relevant online discussions of your brand, your competitors, and influencers.

But things can quickly get complicated from there. For example, what if your brand or offering uses a generic term like “Service Oriented Architecture”? How do you separate the specific discussions about your offering from the general conversation?

Furthermore, a vanity search cannot distinguish whether what’s being said about your brand is coming from a blogger with 2000 readers that include your most important customers or from a grad student whose RSS feed goes to his Mom.

The good news is that online conversation is captured forever within the bowels of a server somewhere, just waiting to be analyzed to death. The bad news is that gaining real insight from that data is difficult—though a horde of software developers is working on it.

Social media monitoring software is a fast-growing category of tools designed to slice up online conversations to try to determine things like where conversations about your brand occur most often, or how much you are being talked about versus your competitors.

Since many of the monitoring tools are new, most are available as Software as a Service (SaaS) over the internet, which makes it easy for marketers to try them out. Yet this same newness means that few are integrated with the software that marketers already have, such as CRM.

Here are some of the ways that these tools give marketers more insight into online conversations:

  • Determine tone and sentiment. Some developers are using algorithms and analysis to determine whether conversations are positive or negative and whether the individuals within the conversation are supporters or detractors. But the developers acknowledge that using computers to determine the tone of human conversation is still a work in progress at this point. For example, the tools can’t distinguish between tongue-in-cheek sarcasm and criticism.
  • Assign a response. Some of the tools let you define the types of comments or conversations that deserve a response, flag them, and route them to a designated person for action.
  • See the distribution of conversation. Most of the tools let you segment the different types of social media to determine where conversations are happening—such as blogs vs. Facebook.
  • Trend the conversation. Some of the tools let you analyze the direction and popularity of conversations over time. This is helpful during important periods like new offering launches or in the aftermath of a crisis.
  • Determine share of attention. You can track the amount of conversation about you versus your competitors.
  • Identify influential sources. The tools can determine the popularity of conversations and the sources of those conversations. This helps you decide which blogs you’d like to do outreach with, for example.
  • Locate the conversations. Some of the tools let you see the geographic locations of people involved in the conversation.
  • Track propagation. Track a comment from a blog post all the way through to mainstream media.

Here is a list of companies that do some form of social media monitoring, by category:

Search tools:

Microblogging search:

Discussion Forum Search

Comprehensive (so they say) tools:

Sources: ITSMA research, Ben Barren, Murray Newlands, pier314, socialmediamonitoring.ca, social media monitoring wiki.

What have I left out? Please let me know in the comments.

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

Why B2B marketers hate social media

December 18, 2009 by

In a recent post, I offered some hard research data to support the growing importance of social media to B2B. But this time I want to address the legitimate concerns that ITSMA clients give us when we talk about the wonders of social media. The case for social media isn’t just about showing how buyers are flocking to social media. It’s also about addressing the very real concern that in a time of stretched budgets and lean staffs, social media becomes yet another channel to manage.

What’s really different with social media?

The End of Control
The biggest difference between social media marketing and other forms of marketing is control. Most marketing channels are focused on broadcasting tightly controlled messages to audiences that have little opportunity to talk back.

Social media is different. The focus shifts from messages to conversations. And those conversations cannot be controlled. Giving up control of what is being said about your company is difficult for most marketers.

But it becomes less difficult when we realize that we never had control of these conversations in the first place.

When buyers engage their most important sources of information—their peers—most of those conversations (90%, according to a study by Walter J. Carl, assistant professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Northeastern University) occur in private, far from the ears—and control—of marketers.

A loss of control is nothing to mourn when it was illusory in the first place.

Instead, we should be celebrating a new opportunity. Social media is a way to influence those peer conversations by monitoring them, engaging in them, and managing them through peer-based communities.

Why B2B?
The first hurdle for B2B marketers in developing a social media strategy is presenting a case for why their companies should be involved in social media at all. Social media seems better suited to B2C, with its larger scale and simpler buying process.

B2B companies have fewer, more complex customer relationships and are often conservative and protective of those relationships. With good reason. B2B customers tend to be high on the executive ladder and are usually reluctant to discuss their business strategies in public forums. And while B2C marketers can use social media as a cheap channel for running promotions and driving sales, for B2B, social media does not provide a magic link to sales.

But of course, no B2B marketing strategy does that. B2B marketing lays the path to a sales discussion and supports relationships with existing customers. Social media is another channel for making the connection and building the relationship with customers.

The most important factor in the growth of social media is its potential for collaboration. The most trusted information source for buyers has always been each other. As more buyers participate in social media, and as the tools and possibilities for collaboration continue to improve, social media is becoming an indispensable channel for marketers to help buyers find one another and market to them.

But social media is by no means a silver bullet. It is a new and invaluable channel, but it is not effective unless it is integrated with other marketing channels. ITSMA research shows that B2B marketers are most successful when they use social media to drive prospects and customers to more “traditional” marketing channels such as the website and events.

Yet while social media should not become a separate silo within the marketing organization, it does require some new skills and thinking. For example, it requires a change in the culture of the company—which must accede to social media’s demand for more openness and less control over conversations with customers. Social media also comes with new rules of engagement for both marketers and employees, who will need to become spokespeople for the company and its brand.

Developing these new skills and ways of thinking takes time. This is why every B2B company should be moving into social media to start the process of building the skills and making the broad cultural changes needed to make social media work.

What do you think?

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

Why B2B marketing will become more visual, vocal, and mobile

December 11, 2009 by

The mobile phone has long been an object of affection and obsession for people who like to talk incessantly. But now that mobile phones have become computers that happen to ring, they have become irresistible.

There’s something about having this little device in our pocket that makes it so much more personal—dear, even—than any phone or laptop. (Desktops? I haven’t loved a desktop since my Mac Classic; besides, you can’t even really call them desktops anymore because we do everything we can to hide them from view under our desks, so no love there.)

More than smart
We root for our smart phones to become gifted. I’ve never been as vigilant about new application development as I have since the App Store came along.

And which apps really make us catch our breath? The ones that give us more freedom of time and place. Mobile also drives a craving for immediacy. Inevitably, it’s going to drive us back to our roots as visual storytellers. And that is important for marketers. Increasingly, we are going to have to deliver our messages visually for mobile devices. Here are some reasons why:

  • Mobile drives substitutions for the written word. I’ve often cursed Steve Jobs for not making an external keyboard that would attach to the iPhone (that would be the end of my laptop altogether). But when you see an iPhone app that lets you dictate voice into text with reasonable accuracy (for free), you start to wonder. And when it’s possible to do live, streaming video from your iPhone, you start to realize why Jobs isn’t making the keyboard a priority.
  • The cloud drives mobile to the center of computing. The emergence of the cloud is making these devices more independent. Google is offering offices in the cloud so that corporate IT systems become little more than sync devices for all the work being done away from a desk.
  • Mobile drives an urge for immediacy. The hottest collaboration applications on mobile are those that duplicate the immediacy of a phone call. One of the great lures of Twitter is that we know that it is always changing. IM and texting would be nothing without the real-time dynamic.
  • Mobile makes everything visual. Why have the iPhone and the Droid taken off? Because we can now see into our phones. We can see what others are doing. Even the words are visual now. Would you dream of Twittering without a profile photo or image? And who can resist the river of content that moves before your eyes? Twitter is every bit as visual as it is textual. And nowhere is the visual more dramatic than on your personal mobile device.

What does it mean?
For B2B marketers, this means that video and interactivity are something we need to be thinking about and doing now. Our target audience is ready. For example, a Forbes survey found that C-suite executives are more likely to make the time for a video than other executives. Sure, there are technical issues. Video search isn’t great yet, though it’s improving. But video case studies and interactive product demos—even for B2B services—are going to become more popular on mobile devices. And as mobile devices become our computing devices, that means B2B buyers are going to have a greater appetite for the visual.

What do you think?

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

How to create B2B social media policies

November 24, 2009 by

One of the cornerstones of a social media strategy is having a clear set of corporate social media guidelines or policies. The best documents don’t just tell employees what not to do; they also tell them what they should be doing to further the marketing goals of the company. Here are some recommendations based on a cross-section of social media policies from B2B companies, including social media policy examples from some leading B2B companies. (Thanks to Kent Huffman for giving me a great starting point for this post):

Invite employees into the process. Employees will feel much more comfortable adhering to policies if they feel that they have had a voice in shaping them—as IBM’s and SAP’s employees did. But don’t provide them with a blank slate. Develop a draft that corporate and legal are comfortable with to make sure all the bases are covered. IBM and SAP put their draft guidelines on wikis, where employees were invited to make comments and suggestions.

Reference the employee code of conduct, if you have one. The code of conduct is the “umbrella policy” for your social media policy; it does the heavy lifting for the more serious aspects of employee conduct (e.g., obey your local laws, behave ethically, etc.) so that your social media policy can focus on the specific issues that arise from social media.

Determine a policy for direct contact with key influencers. For example, some companies allow employees to communicate generally to the social sphere but require that any direct communications to analysts, the financial market and/or members of the media must be conducted only through corporate communications.

Require a disclaimer—and provide the boilerplate. “This [Choose. Blog, Space …] is the personal [Blog, Space …] of [Name] and only contains my personal views, thoughts and opinions. It is not endorsed by [X corporation] nor does it constitute any official communication of [X corporation].”

Require that any use of the company logo or name be approved. Disclaimers aren’t enough if the blog is plastered with company logos or the company name is part of the blog title. It should be clear that this is a personal effort, not a corporate one.

Have a “don’t be stupid” clause. Guidelines are not guardrails. People need to know that taking personal responsibility for their actions is the best guideline of all. Here’s an example from one company’s policy: “Please be aware that, although [X Corporation] is providing you with these guidelines, the overall and final legal responsibility for any statement made by you will reside with you personally. Therefore, you should exercise caution and thoughtfulness to statements you make online.”

Spell out what stupid means—both internally and externally. Being sure to include the “including but not limited to” phrase, make sure employees know that blogs are not for communicating policies to other employees, negotiating with third parties, or releasing material information about company strategy or financials (or as Sun puts it in its social media guidelines, “it’s not OK to publish the recipe for one of our secret sauces”).

Encourage openness, honesty and transparency. The social media sphere punishes people who don’t disclose their affiliations or pretend to be someone they aren’t (e.g., the Whole Foods CEO using an alias to bash competitors or the Wal-Mart bloggers who didn’t disclose that they were being paid by the company). Require employees to disclose their affiliation with the company at all times and avoid using aliases.

Encourage community through sharing and attribution. Social media is not just a place for broadcasting opinions. Employees should be encouraged to become part of the community by doing research and linking to other relevant content—not just their own.

Separate opinion from fact. The best retort to criticism is factual evidence to the contrary. But employees need to check those facts for accuracy and attribute them rather than passing along something they aren’t sure about.

Demand respect in all interactions. When people make nasty comments in social media it’s tempting for employees to respond in kind. But bad behavior inevitably makes its way back to the brand, while good behavior demonstrates that a company is able to handle negative feedback gracefully and builds empathy. Make it clear: no disparaging remarks about third parties—ever.

Remind them of their day jobs. Employees are not doing the best thing for the company by letting social media take over their workdays. Emphasize quality rather than quantity in social media interactions.

Encourage them to write what they know. Employees may feel passionately about the possibility of life on other planets, but unless they work for NASA, it’s probably not worth getting into on a blog.

Provide a channel for questions. No matter how good your social media guidelines are, employees are going to have questions—especially those who are new to social media. The guidelines should include a place to go for advice. For example, Cisco has an e-mail alias called “internet postings” where employees can get help.

Ditch the legalese. Social media is supposed to be fun, informal, conversational and open. Take whatever language legal gives you and translate it into English; otherwise, you risk scaring off or offending employees.

Make it public. Nothing demonstrates your openness and commitment to social media more than making your policy publicly available. Big companies like Cisco, HP, IBM, Intel, SAP, and Sun, all do it. Invite comments and update the policy as needed. Making your guidelines public also gives you license to borrow from others (ask permission first and give credit where it is due).

Here are links to the best examples of B2B corporate social media policies that I found:

Also, check out the non-profit Social Media Business Council’s Disclosure Toolkit

Sources: Kent Huffman, Cisco, HP, IBM, Intel, SAP, Sun.

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

Six factors driving B2B social media marketing adoption

November 20, 2009 by

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Filed Under: Social Media Tagged With: , , ,

Social media strategy for B2B: what’s required and what’s optional

November 13, 2009 by

Despite all the breathless hype about social media these days, what I hear most from B2B marketers is frustration. Most of the marketers I talk to are trying to reach a few top executives in big organizations who make buying decisions about big, complex products and services. For these marketers, the pool of customers and prospects is small and many of them do not want to engage publicly in social media or are simply ignoring it altogether.

ITSMA research shows that there are other ways to reach these people that are much more effective than social media, such as small, thought leadership-based events, content-rich websites that are optimized for search, and robust reference programs, to name a few. For these target executives, peer relationships are everything, but for now anyway, most of those relationships are happening offline.

For many companies, this translates into a wait-and-see approach to social media.

I think that’s the right decision—up to a point.

For these companies, there is little reason to twitter into the wind. If you’re strapped for resources (who isn’t?) and you can invest in other things that are more effective for reaching your target audience.

But the mistake I think many companies make is assuming that if there is no reason for actively marketing the company through social media then there is no reason to invest in a social media strategy.

I think that’s short sighted.

Here’s why: In marketing, we have a traditional bias towards being active. After all, that’s how we’ve always done it. We push messages out and try to stir up attention. We could control the public conversation because our audience had few public outlets for giving or receiving information. But social media is a vast public platform where eventually the conversation is going to get around to our companies—if it hasn’t already.

So even if there is no reason to have an active social media strategy, there is every reason to have a passive one. By that, I mean monitoring the cacophony of public conversation on the web to determine whether any of it is applicable to your company—and if it is, what you should do about it. This is why every B2B marketing leader needs a social media participation strategy even if he or she does not intend to actively market through social media.

I divide participation strategy into three pieces (I go into each in more detail in this post):

  1. Monitor. Listen for conversation about your company or about relevant issues for you and your customers.
  2. Engage. Develop a strategy for responding to customers and influencers who talk about your company or relevant business issues.
  3. Manage. Decide whether to take an active role in creating conversations and fostering a community.

Though I will probably get some arguments about this, I think the participation strategy is a linear process—i.e., you need to know how to monitor well before you can engage well, and you certainly need to know how to engage well before you can start building community.

We have reached the point where monitoring is an absolute requirement in any B2B marketing strategy. Even if it doesn’t seem that your customers and prospects are actively conversing on the social web, you need to confirm that fact. And even they aren’t talking, there’s no doubt that someone is having a relevant conversation about business issues that are important to your customers—and that you should be monitoring.

This week, Jeremiah Owyang published a great framework of things that marketers have to do to listen well—including a list of vendors who help marketers listen. The only disagreement I have with his framework is that it is about more than listening. Stages 1-3 of his framework are true passive listening and every B2B marketing group should be doing them—regardless of whether they decide to actively market through social media.

But moving from stage 3 to 4 is moving from passive to active participation. There’s a chasm there that many B2B marketers are unwilling to cross. It seems companies are comfortable (in theory if not yet always in practice) up to Stage 3 but beyond that they are terrified. They see the resource commitment ramping up and the potential for mistakes (risk) amplified because now they have to actively engage with people in social rather than just track and listen.

And there’s good reason to be terrified. As effort increases, resource allocation and ROI become issues. Larger companies can shift budget from dying categories like advertising and trade shows into social media without affecting other programs, but many smaller companies never had much budget in those areas to begin with. So social media becomes a larger strategic decision that some would just rather not make right now—so they don’t do anything.

I think we need to parse that decision more. Listening is a requirement, but active participation remains optional.

What do you think?

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

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.

Filed Under: Customer Relationships Tagged With: , , ,

Where should your corporate blogs live?

October 16, 2009 by

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

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

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

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

Onsite advantages:

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

Onsite disadvantages:

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

Offsite advantages:

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

Offsite disadvantages:

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

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

Filed Under: Blogging, Marketing Strategy 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?

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