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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: , , , ,

Four reasons to stop measuring marketing

July 31, 2009 by

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

So we should just stop. Now.

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

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

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

So here are some simple rules to think about:

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

What would you add to this list?

Filed Under: ITSMA Research, Marketing Automation, Marketing Metrics and Analytics, Sales and Marketing Collaboration Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

We need an app for that

July 24, 2009 by

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What do your process and system look like?

Filed Under: Lead Generation, Marketing Automation, Marketing Metrics and Analytics, Marketing Strategy, Sales and Marketing Collaboration Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Apple's marketing arrogance

June 17, 2009 by

It’s marketing 101: don’t hold your needs above those of your customers—and don’t defy the expectations that you set with them.

Apple has violated both of those rules this week, and I’m sure they could care less—Apple long ago concluded that their products are so much better that customers will overlook the arrogance with which they treat customers. Here’s what happened: Those customers, (like me, ordering my first smart phone ever) who ordered an iPhone 3Gs over the web last week (Apple sent me an email inviting me to order—I didn’t pursue them) were promised that they would receive their phones “by June 19.”

So far, so good. But then Apple sent out confirmation emails to its customers listing a UPS tracking number link to track the progress of the shipment. I love the e-supply chain so I clicked to see UPS’s cool codes and see where they would ship the phone on the way to me (Anchorage, AK—how cool is that?). I was happily surprised when the manifest said I would receive it on June 17.

Then, this morning I saw the TechCrunch story about how Apple is having UPS hold the iPhones at the Louisville, KY hub until Friday—Apple’s official launch date. It makes sense when viewed from the Cupertino Ivory Tower: Why would Apple want customers to get the products they have purchased before we told the world they should have them?

But of course, true to Michael Porter and Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersema’s principle of business strategy: companies only do one thing really well while trying to maintain parity with competitors on the things they don’t. Apple creates great products. The rest? Meh. UPS delivers packages efficiently—it is all about operational efficiency and supply chain.

So you won’t be surprised to learn that UPS took those iPhones and delivered the heck out of them. While Apple, which is all about product, didn’t pay enough attention (as usual) to that part of the business. Which meant that after UPS announced delivery dates to its customers, Apple stepped in to put the brakes on—and ordered UPS to go slower.

Can you imagine the looks on the faces of the folks at UPS central in Louisville as the word spread that they had to mothball the phones for two days and not do what they do best—deliver packages fast?

And can you imagine the arrogance of marketers telling their customers that a launch date matters more than satisfying their needs? I can’t. Can you?

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

The four components of social media management

April 3, 2009 by

Marketers need a simple, clear way to think about deploying a social media strategy that does not start with technology. Here’s my view of the four main components of social media management for marketers:

Monitor
Monitoring is finding and tracking the conversations that are occurring about your company in social media and online. Even companies that have no intention of pursuing a social media marketing strategy must monitor what’s being said about them. It’s important to know who is saying good things about your company but it’s even more important to know who is saying bad things. Negative comments-especially those that expose a legitimate flaw in a company’s products or services-can snowball and be picked up by the trade and business press.

Monitoring is also the foundation of a social media marketing strategy. Before companies begin talking, they have to listen. They need to identify the most important influencers in their markets and track those conversations. Understanding the tone and subject matter of the most popular conversations in the market will help companies develop and fine tune their own social media voices.

Engage
Engaging occurs when companies decide to take an active role in social media by engaging with customers and influencers in the various forums where conversations are taking place. Examples include public blogs, social networks, and industry communities. The goal in social media engagement is to influence participants to have a positive impression of the company through factual, verifiable contributions from company employees and subject matter experts.

Marketing should monitor social media carefully and assign subject matter experts to track particular blogs and influencers. There should be an escalation process for pushing issues around the company to the people most qualified to respond to them (all practitioners, not marketing or PR people).The key to engagement is that providers do not try to control the conversation, as in traditional marketing, but that they influence the conversation in the following ways:

  • Find relevant online communities and blogs and build relationships with discussion leaders and members
  • Become regular contributors to influential blogs and be willing to weigh in on issues not directly related to the company’s products and services
  • Respond to customer complaints
  • Link customers to more information and offer to follow up directly

Manage
Managing means that companies take an active role in creating conversations about the company. Examples include:

  • Corporate blogs. If companies can break their traditional habits of trying to control the conversation and squashing criticism, corporate blogs can help improve perception and awareness. Corporate blogs can be managed by marketing, but shouldn’t be written by marketing. Customers want to hear from subject matter experts and influencers.
  • Public and private online communities. Besides creating online communities in business-oriented third-party hosted social media venues like LinkedIn, companies can start their own communities, both public and private. For example, Indian outsourcing and consulting company Infosys developed points of view about four emerging trends in global business: the growing impact of emerging economies such as India and China, demographic shifts in age and working populations around the world, technology ubiquity, and increased regulations. It then created multiple hosted forums, both public and private (C-level executives often prefer private communities because they fear speaking up about their companies in uncontrolled public communities). These communities have both online and offline components, and Infosys’ marketing group works to build participation by publicizing the communities and inviting key customers and influencers to participate.

Integrate
Social media efforts need to be integrated into a company’s more traditional marketing channels such as conferences, events, reference programs, and websites. Social media is notoriously difficult to measure and ROI is unclear. Therefore, social media should be used as a platform to drive traffic to the channels that are easier to measure and have proven ROI. There should also be a way to get customers and prospects from social media into systems for tracking and managing interactions (e.g., CRM).

As I mentioned in my last post, social media can also become a supply chain for the development of thought leadership.

The integration of social media with more measurable channels—downloads of the white paper that lead to a sale, or the conference presentation that result in a sales call, for example—is the most reliable way to demonstrate the value and ROI of social media.

What do you think?

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

Analytics means looking ahead

December 12, 2008 by

I want you all to throw out whatever definition you have in your heads for analytics—just for a moment—so we can talk about what analytics should mean. If there’s one thing I’d like to bring across to you it’s that analytics is about looking ahead—about being predictive. What most of us do today with analytics is report. We look at what we have already done and report on it. Analytics is much more than that. It is about making future decisions with more certainty of success.

And in these times, we must make the right choices in marketing—choices that will translate into revenue. There simply isn’t any room for mistakes right now. So the timing of the online briefing that I’ll be doing on December 16 about marketing analytics is pretty good.

In our presentation we are going to talk about three things you can do today to start improving your ability to predict. First, we’re going to talk about methodologies for analyzing marketing programs’ success before you have to commit the big bucks. Second, we will talk about why finance is a key player in helping you improve your analytics program. And we will talk about how you can start to shift the culture of marketing and your business from what I call a talent approach to what our friend and colleague Tom Davenport, who recently presented at our annual conference, calls a fact-based culture. By the way, Tom has written a book called Competing on Analytics that you should check out if you haven’t already. I’ll also reveal some selected findings from our recent survey on marketing analytics.

I think it’s important to distinguish analytics from metrics because I see these two get jumbled together a lot. Analytics is essentially gathering data and looking at it to gain insight, while metrics are the descriptive performance measures that we use to gauge progress.

The goal of both metrics and analytics, of course, is not just to track and measure marketing programs, but to build business success. To that end, we have created what we call ITSMA’s Analytics Best Practice Model. I won’t go through all of the elements of it in detail here, but these are the basic goals:

  • One is to find and coordinate the data we need across the organization so that we can start to make better decisions across all of marketing and the business, not just in selected pockets.
  • Second, we want to create a link with finance—where the analytics experts are—to start to look at marketing programs as part of a greater whole. it’s great to optimize within marketing, but as we all know, marketing is just one piece of business success.
  • Third, we want to create a fact-based culture.

We’ve all heard of gut-based decision making, right? I get this vision of a fat guy with a cigar chomped in his mouth and his suspenders between his thumbs barking about how “My gut has never failed me yet!”

That’s not it at all. Marketers don’t operate from the gut, we operate from talent. We rely on our talent to develop creative programs that will, in general, be successful.

What we have not done in our organizations is to make room for the facts before we start to exert our creative energies. We tend to think that we have hired good people and they should simply go forth and do their best.

But we need to create the organizational patience—the time and tolerance—to gather the facts about the prospects of success before we go forward. And that means that we need to change our thinking to be more like financial analysts and engineers.

More left-brained, in other words.

Good car companies don’t skip crash testing of their new models, even if the new model is not much different than the previous ones that have done just fine in testing.

What do you think?

Filed Under: Marketing Metrics and Analytics Tagged With: , , ,

One of the Reasons Marketing Gets No Respect: Lack of Automation

August 8, 2008 by

We’re all like the geek who is consumed by technology but doesn’t own a computer.

Let me explain. In this year’s ITSMA Services Marketing Budgets and Benchmarks Survey, you said that online marketing is the fastest-growing category of spending in your marketing budget this year (79% of you plan to spend more in 2008), yet only 36% of you have a marketing automation system to track marketing programs and results.

This adds up to a dramatic difference between the way you use technology externally with customers and internally in your own operations. This is not a sustainable gap. The good news is that 63% of you say that spending on marketing automation will increase this year—with total spending increasing from 3.1% to 4.2% of your services marketing budget in 2008.

Lots of Data, No Insight

In the meantime, online marketing is generating tons of data, and many of you don’t have automated means of converting it into knowledge and insight. Indeed, there seem to be no plans to change the situation. For example, “Advancing data mining and customer analytics” ranked last on your list of priorities for 2008.

This isn’t just bad for marketing; it’s bad for marketing’s reputation inside the company. In my research into this subject over the past six months, one theme has emerged over and over: Marketing is the least automated major function in the corporation.

While other functions have been automating—and more important, integrating—their operations since the mid-1990s, marketing has been mostly on the outside looking in. Indeed, when it comes to technology, marketing is one of those messy best-of-breed environments that your company might make millions fixing. Talk about the shoemaker’s children.

Automation Equals Accountability

It’s no accident that marketing struggles to prove its ROI. With automation comes accountability and efficiency—the ability to assemble hard numbers and data. Not only does marketing lack this ability, but it trails most other functions that are trying to do the same thing. No wonder that marketing struggles to get the respect of top management in many companies.

But before you get defensive, don’t think I’m blaming you for all this—at least not entirely. Software providers don’t offer an integrated marketing platform that does it all. IT and the business leadership play a role here, too. My sense is that many marketing groups do not have a strategy for IT, in part because leadership changes and reorganizations within marketing are common. I also suspect that IT does not pay as much attention to marketing as it does to the rest of the business. Indeed, I wonder if marketing even controls its own budget in most of your companies.

This month we have a survey out to the membership that will address all these issues and more. I hope you will join us for the September 9 Online Briefing, where we will address the future of marketing automation and offer some best practices for addressing the marketing automation challenge.

In the meantime, please tell me about the state of marketing automation in your company and the challenges you face.

Filed Under: Marketing Automation Tagged With: , , ,

What Habits Do We Want to Instill in B2B Buyers?

July 18, 2008 by

In the West, we tend to think of disease prevention as being all about vaccinations. But that’s because we have institutionalized all the other ways of preventing disease, like clean drinking water, sanitation, and regular bathing. In part, we’re safer from disease than people in other parts of the world because we can afford to do all these things while others can’t.

But according to this article in the New York Times, it’s also because marketers have trained us to be clean. It’s a habit, not necessarily a choice. It is one of many automatic habits that constitute 45% of our actions every day, drilled into us by Consumer Packaged Goods companies like Procter & Gamble. Evidence for this is in the developing world, where diseases and other problems caused by dirty hands kill a child every 15 seconds, according to the Times. And the article claims that about half those deaths could be prevented with the regular use of soap.

But getting people to use soap is hard. Our regular use of it is the result of hundreds of millions of dollars spent by the CPG companies to find the “subtle cues in consumers’ lives that corporations could use to introduce new routines.” The routines are reinforced, of course, by relentless advertising.

Not all the campaigns work. A Vanderbilt study cited by the Times said that some anti-drug campaigns actually made viewers do more drugs, while anti-AIDS commercials raised the rates of unprotected sex.

The trick in getting people to wash their hands, according to researchers, is to get them to associate a specific action with specific places or moods. In places like Africa, that meant getting people to associate going to the bathroom with “a sense of disgust” that would cue people to wash their hands. Since bathrooms replaced open pits for many people, they often didn’t see the act of going there as disgusting but rather an improvement.

So a consortium of advertisers created a series of ads showing people emerging from bathrooms with purple stains on their hands to build the disgusting cue. It worked. Hand washing went up dramatically.

This kind of story reduces marketing to its most elemental level. But it also makes you think. If marketing is all about cues and habits, what kinds of cues and habits are we instilling in B2B buyers?

I know the habit we want to instill: that buyers associate us with learning. Thought leadership is the cue and an association with learning is the habit. In every interaction with our companies, buyers need to believe that they will learn something about their businesses that they didn’t know before.

What are the cues and habits you are instilling?

Filed Under: Marketing Strategy Tagged With: ,
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