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
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
