Wednesday, March 10, 2010
The Call to Action Has Become a Call to Knowledge
As many have said, the B2B "sales cycle" is becoming a "buying cycle" where the prospect has control over the relationship. Although the graphic of the sales funnel will be with us forever, the days are numbered when Marketing and Sales can claim to be the ones moving prospects through the funnel. In the social media world, prospects move when they want to move.
It's time to shift our thinking from "call to action" with a "call to knowledge." (B2B marketing strategist Ardath Albee calls this the "takeaway.") As stated by our friends at Response Mine:
Specifically, the call to knowledge helps the prospect think--and is therefore essential to a content strategy in which thought leadership is a goal. It's a tip or technique with a built-in "it depends on your situation" clause. The reader is then in control to take it or leave it, or adapt the information for her own use, and move on to the next bit of content. The next step might be a more technical white paper, a case study suited to their vertical, or a detailed online demo.
Do your white papers need a registration page? Do they need to say "Call us today" after the company's boilerplate? It depends on your situation. But marketers are building trust by allowing their prospects to move--and think--at their own pace, guided by calls to knowledge.
- If a prospect doesn't want to register for your white paper, he has options online; he will search the blogs and online trade pubs for product reviews.
- Rather than schedule an hour on her calendar to attend your live webinar, she will fast-forward through the on-demand version at her own convenience; or even better, read the attendees' comments in five minutes.
- And before the first sales meeting, the prospect has Googled all your executives, industry blogs, PR pieces, financial data, and the same for your competitors; that meeting is never your company's "first impression."
It's time to shift our thinking from "call to action" with a "call to knowledge." (B2B marketing strategist Ardath Albee calls this the "takeaway.") As stated by our friends at Response Mine:
Put the right content in the right places so that prospects can self-select. By responding to relevant, compelling content, prospects qualify themselves.By answering the call to knowledge, prospects move themselves through the funnel.
Specifically, the call to knowledge helps the prospect think--and is therefore essential to a content strategy in which thought leadership is a goal. It's a tip or technique with a built-in "it depends on your situation" clause. The reader is then in control to take it or leave it, or adapt the information for her own use, and move on to the next bit of content. The next step might be a more technical white paper, a case study suited to their vertical, or a detailed online demo.
Do your white papers need a registration page? Do they need to say "Call us today" after the company's boilerplate? It depends on your situation. But marketers are building trust by allowing their prospects to move--and think--at their own pace, guided by calls to knowledge.
Labels: business to business (B2B), thought leadership
Monday, March 01, 2010
Getting out of the B2B Marketing Manager's Muddle
A year ago, I was a B2B marketing manager in a muddle. I had, at my fingertips, some powerful tools to share my company's message with the world. But I had nothing new to say.
My title as "Manager" gave me authority to drive content down a number of channels: an attractive web site, automated email campaigns, and webinars with full in-house tech support. It was my job to maintain quarterly plans using these channels within my budget.
What I lacked was the authority to devise a content marketing strategy. So I had the tools (hammer, saw), but no new raw materials (wood, nails). To borrow another metaphor, I was shooting blanks.
My job became a case study in marketing repurposing. I pushed out the same old client case studies in articles, white papers, web copy, and sales presentations. The edict "Do More With Less" applied to content, as well as to marketing spend.
The root of the problem? Content is gravely undervalued. (Validation: Kristina Halvorson's presentation, Content Strategy: The Future of Marketing, slides #37-40, "Lies We Tell Ourselves.") Content is expected to spring forth from the ether--or the marketing manager's weekends. But the company's best ideas are trapped in the minds of a few executive subject-matter experts. The effort required to move those ideas out to the market is not reflected in the marketing budget.
I suspect that many marketing managers, especially in B2B, are in the same muddle. What is the way out? After pondering this muddle from both inside and outside the corporation, I have these suggestions:
My title as "Manager" gave me authority to drive content down a number of channels: an attractive web site, automated email campaigns, and webinars with full in-house tech support. It was my job to maintain quarterly plans using these channels within my budget.
What I lacked was the authority to devise a content marketing strategy. So I had the tools (hammer, saw), but no new raw materials (wood, nails). To borrow another metaphor, I was shooting blanks.
My job became a case study in marketing repurposing. I pushed out the same old client case studies in articles, white papers, web copy, and sales presentations. The edict "Do More With Less" applied to content, as well as to marketing spend.
The root of the problem? Content is gravely undervalued. (Validation: Kristina Halvorson's presentation, Content Strategy: The Future of Marketing, slides #37-40, "Lies We Tell Ourselves.") Content is expected to spring forth from the ether--or the marketing manager's weekends. But the company's best ideas are trapped in the minds of a few executive subject-matter experts. The effort required to move those ideas out to the market is not reflected in the marketing budget.
I suspect that many marketing managers, especially in B2B, are in the same muddle. What is the way out? After pondering this muddle from both inside and outside the corporation, I have these suggestions:
- Give your subject matter expert the opportunity to blog regularly, preferably with a regular guest post on a trade magazine's blog. B2B executives love the exposure. As bloggers, they learn quickly that blogs are hungry for compelling content. So they feel the pain and often get on board for the need for content. Even if you, as marketing manager, end up ghost-writing and editing the posts, the blog will be a vehicle to pull the latest thoughts and ideas out of the mind of your executive expert.
- Outside writers and editors can do wonders--but what if there's no budget for them? Squeeze an experienced content professional into one high-profile project, preferably one that gives them exposure to an executive.
- Reorganize the "marketing plan" into a "content strategy." Just using the words "content strategy" will help reset priorities. It's a document or spreadsheet listing your new content ideas, how they are being produced, which marketing channels they feed, with # leads ganerated and $ spent. The content strategy can be simple, even if it consists of relatively few line-items from the overall plan. Just having one is a start.
Labels: business to business (B2B), content strategy
Thursday, February 25, 2010
Social Media: It Has To Have Strategy
Chris Koch wrote an excellent blog post, "There is No Social Media Strategy, Only Marketing Strategy," in which he states:
Social media simply makes starkly plain what we’ve known for some time but haven’t had to face yet: We don’t have a lot of content capable of generating trust and relationships.Chris sees, as I do among clients and prospects, that B2B marketers are eagerly adopting the next-generation tools, but are learning the hard way what it takes to use them properly. That requires feeding them with content--and the right kind of content.
Chris asks, "What do you think? Are we overemphasizing social media strategy at the expense of overall marketing integration?" Yes, many marketers are. As I blogged recently, there are marketers who want to produce content quickly, and social media turns the demand for content into a race. It is easy to rely on what's familiar--the old product pitch--but that isn't effective in social media. What is effective is thought leadership, which requires real strategy and forethought.
Labels: business to business (B2B), content strategy, social media
Friday, February 19, 2010
Social Media Automation: How to Drown the Seeds of Leads
We enjoy a good debate here at The Content Factor, and we're watching one play out on the Demand Gen Report Blog.
- Marketo's Jon Miller blogged on "Seed Nurturing," suggesting some new practices for using social media to "turbo charge" lead nurturing.
Miller writes:
"For example, after identifying a prospect’s Twitter username, follow his or her Twitter conversations that include relevant keywords, and track this data in your marketing automation system." - Malcolm Friedberg of Left Brain Marketing makes an engaging counterpoint in "Seed Nurturing? Not Unless You're Walt Whitman."
Friedberg writes:
"Call me cynical, but I’m not comfortable betting my job on whether anonymous leads will 'likely' surface from the social media world and appear on my front door."
Although on a high level I agree with "seed nurturing," (as stated in a previous post, "Are We Torching Our Leads?" which advocated the registration-free white paper download), the detailed practices that Miller describes in his Demand Gen Report post seem far-fetched to me. The B2B marketers I work with don't have the resources to follow prospects on Twitter, trend their topics, and look for signs that they are in the early stages of a buying cycle.
And, if getting a phone call ten minutes after downloading a white paper wasn't bad enough, a demand generation solution that provides Twitter-trending functionality is even more "Big Brother." (Will I get a phone call from Marketo after I tweet this blog post?)
Social media is the realm of public relations and thought leadership marketing, not of metrics-driven lead generation. There are some amazing tools emerging for marketers to analyze information as it travels through the social media, but is it realistic for these tools to help marketers warm-up prospects for sales? I will side with the cynics for now.
Labels: business to business (B2B), lead generation, marketing automation, thought leadership
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
Your Marketing Content is Not a Commodity
Recently I spoke with a CMO who wanted to market a commoditized IT product. Naturally, his product has its own competitive advantage. But it was clear to me that his target market would be shopping first on price, and that a feature-benefit message would be challenging to push.
Early in our conversation, he asked, "How much will a white paper cost?"
Like his own prospects, he, too, was shopping on price. He was thinking of his marketing message as a commodity, too.
But that's the last thing he can afford to do. Pedestrian, fill-in-the-blank content simply doesn't have enough appeal to sell a commodity product. On the contrary, the message must be that much more compelling to stand out. That is why hard-to-differentiate products, like cola, beer, and wireless service, have the most creative TV ads.
B2B marketers are increasingly tempted to churn out cheap content. They have hungry channels to feed, such as blogs and email newsletters. Meanwhile, budgets are slashed. So the question, "How much will a white paper cost?" tends to be the first question marketers ask.
Relative to other marketing expenses, good content is a great value. B2B marketers can easily waste the budget they have if they push a weak message that sales won't use, and the market won't read. Our job is to make the prospect care--and the harder the product is to differentiate, the more creative we need to be.
Labels: business to business (B2B), content marketing, white papers
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
The Dark Side of Marketing Automation
Back in the 1980s when computer automation first started to make a big impact on business, many people started to realize the truth in the old axiom: Garbage In/Garbage Out. Putting in bad or erroneous inputs, and then processing them faster and more efficiently took its toll on a wide range of businesses, ranging from newly automated dentist offices to numerical punch machines that went awry.
But perhaps nobody saw the paradoxical power of GIGO better than the thousand of business planners who discovered that the speed and dexterity with which they could manipulate Lotus 123 didn’t make their assumptions any more prescient or their forecasts any more exact. Their companies found out as sales forecasts foundered and inventory levels swelled.
We are seeing part of the same scenario play out today with the advent of marketing automation systems. Don’t get me wrong, marketing automation and campaign management are great concepts. Many companies are recognizing breakthroughs in activity levels and prospect touches, but just as many are pumping banal and uninteresting content through these systems. In the process, they may be damaging their reputations and even their brands. Certainly, they are inuring their prospects to this email onslaught and making them wary of these digital touches.
What’s the cure for GIGO in the marketing automation model? Good content. As explained in this MarketingProfs post, expensive inbound linking, SEO, and analytics won't be worth the investment if readers don't have something good to read on your web site.
Good content keeps the audience in mind, which goes slow and doesn’t force everything down their throat. Most importantly marketers need to remember that even though they are feeding information into an automated system, that there is still a human being on the other end.
Labels: business to business (B2B), content strategy, marketing automation
Tuesday, February 02, 2010
Why Your Sales Force Rewrites Your Copy
Ever have the nightmare about standing in front of an audience to speak, and having no idea what to say?
Evidently that's how salespeople feel every day. To stop the nightmares, they are writing their own content, regardless of what marketing provides them. So says a survey covered on MarketingProfs this week, stating that confidence in corporate and sales message is weak. The article states:
The sales force, in their one-on-one conversations with prospects, has specific questions to answer and objections to counter. Their answers can't be commoditized. Imagine this conversation in a sales meeting:
Evidently that's how salespeople feel every day. To stop the nightmares, they are writing their own content, regardless of what marketing provides them. So says a survey covered on MarketingProfs this week, stating that confidence in corporate and sales message is weak. The article states:
Dissatisfaction with sales messaging is so high that many sales teams have taken matters into their own hands: Nearly three-quarters of salespeople (74%) say they rewrite messages and tools created by marketing departments at least sometimes, including 41% who rewrite collateral frequently and 10% who always do it.The reasons are many, beginning with the age-old misalignment between Marketing and Sales. But a growing danger to marketing is commoditized content: the temptation to churn cheap content to drive a quantity (or automated marketing processes), not quality.
The sales force, in their one-on-one conversations with prospects, has specific questions to answer and objections to counter. Their answers can't be commoditized. Imagine this conversation in a sales meeting:
Prospect: Your company is the smallest and least known of the vendors on our short list. How will you convince our CEO that you'll give us the level of service we need?
Sales Rep: We are a global technology company leading how the world connects, interacts and transacts with business. Our assisted- and self-service solutions and comprehensive support services address the needs of retail, financial, travel, healthcare, hospitality, gaming, and public sector organizations in more than 100 countries." [See our Corporate Jargon Quiz for more fun.]
While marketing budgets are tight, it's tempting to churn out copy that doesn't say anything. But the result may be jargony, fluffed-up copy--or very basic stuff that a salesperson would never use.
Successful marketers will avoid the temptation. They will create content, driven by a content strategy, that answers prospects' questions--and stays in the sales representative's slide deck.
Labels: commoditized content, confusing corporate writing, content strategy, sales support
