Everything Technology Marketing

Take the Survey: B2B Marketing Trends in 2012

noreply@blogger.com (Holger Schulze) — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 01:10:00 +0000

With 2011 coming to a close, what do you think will be the major trends and priority shifts for B2B marketers in 2012?

Take the 2-minute survey to share your thoughts:
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/Marketing2012

You will receive a copy of the survey report as a thank you!

New Report: 2011 B2B Content Marketing Trends

noreply@blogger.com (Holger Schulze) — Tue, 31 May 2011 19:36:00 +0000

SlideShare views for the new report "2011 B2B Content Marketing Trends" are off the charts - looks like we have a topic that is really resonating with B2B marketers.

This new report is the result of a survey I conducted with the 20,000 member B2B Technology Marketing Community on LinkedIn to better understand the current state of content marketing, and to identify key challenges as well as best practices.

Survey Results

Here is a quick snapshot of the survey findings:

Content marketing is growing dramatically in popularity with over 71 percent of respondents doing more of it than a year ago (in contrast, only 2 percent are doing less).
The biggest motivator for content marketing is its ability to drive awareness, leads, and engagement with prospects to compensate where where traditional tactics are falling short.
The most popular content formats: case studies, presentations at live events, white papers, online articles and videos.
The biggest challenge: producing truly engaging content.
Companies spend an average of 20 percent of their budgets on content marketing.
The most popular channels to deliver content: website, live events, email.
The top performance metric for content marketers is leads.

Follow this link to read the complete 2011 B2B Content Marketing Trends report with lots of charts and data that will help you benchmark your own content marketing initiative (and don't forget to share the report with your friends and colleagues): http://www.slideshare.net/hschulze/b2b-content-marketing-report

Thanks to everyone who participated in the survey. Please share your content marketing ideas and questions with our readers in the comments section below.

Is Your Content Marketing Program a Success?

noreply@blogger.com (Holger Schulze) — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 01:05:00 +0000

Content marketing is one of the most popular strategies deployed by today's B2B marketers to attract and engage prospects, and guide them through the buying process.

But how do marketers measure content marketing success? We asked 20,000 members of the B2B Technology Marketing Community on LinkedIn what metrics they use to measure the success of their content marketing initiatives. Over 500 people responded - and here is a preview of the results.

Leads, leads, leads
With 73 percent of all responses, leads are the number one metric used to gauge content marketing success. This is followed by content views and downloads with 53 percent, and inquiries with 52 percent of responses respectively (multiple selections were allowed).

No social metrics
Surprisingly, the lowest responses came in for social media engagement and SEO impact. I assume this is partly due to the difficulty in precisely measuring these metrics and their intermediate rather than direct impact on pipeline results.

Who owns content marketing strategy?
Another question we asked is looking to identify ownership of content marketing strategy within the organization. No surprises here: 67 percent of content marketing strategies are owned by corporate marketing, followed at a distant 41 percent for product marketing, and 20 percent for field marketing. Very few respondents rely on product management (16 percent) or external agencies (8 percent) for content strategy.

This wraps up our content marketing survey preview for today. Stay tuned for more survey results! What metrics do you use in your content marketing initiative?

Related Resources:

Most popular B2B content marketing formats & channels

Why care about content marketing?

Top-3 B2B Content Marketing Formats & Channels

noreply@blogger.com (Holger Schulze) — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 00:53:00 +0000

In our last post we reviewed the key objectives of B2B content marketing initiatives as indicated by our 20,000 member survey.

Now, let's take a look at popular content formats and delivery channels. How well are they performing for B2B marketers?

What Content Formats Are Most Effective?

The chart below shows a blended ranking of the most popular content formats (BTW, not only the "effective" but also the "neutral" ratings influence the overall blended ranking).

Leading the ranking are case studies, live presentations (one could argue this is a content format as well as a channel), white papers, and online articles - these formats are most effective in engaging prospects (all other things being equal).

In contrast, the survey respondents consider podcasts, print articles, and infographics the least effective content formats.

What Content Delivery Channels Are Most Effective?

Now, let's take a look at the perceived effectiveness of delivery channels used by B2B marketers to get content in front of the target audience (either outbound or inbound). Again, this chart shows a blended ranking of the most effective content delivery channels.

The highest rated channels are website, live in-person event, and email. Newer channels such as social media and blogs are considered only moderately effective in comparison. At the bottom of the list we find online directories, online ads, and paid search. Not surprising as the effectiveness of these channels has been declining steadily over the last few years.

Do these findings reflect what you see in your marketing role? Looking forward to hear from you.

Now that we better understand what B2B marketers expect to get out of content marketing, and what formats and channels perform well, our next post will take a closer look at survey results regarding content performance metrics and key challenges - so stay tuned.

Related content:

Why care about B2B Content Marketing?

Take the 2011 B2B Content Marketing Survey

5 Steps to B2B Marketing Success

Why care about B2B Content Marketing?

noreply@blogger.com (Holger Schulze) — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 00:53:00 +0000

Our B2B content marketing survey is the most popular survey we have produced to date. We asked over 20,000 B2B marketing professionals to share their collective insight on B2B content marketing issues, trends, and preferences.

After the first couple of hundred responses, patterns and trends have stabilized - a clear sign that we are getting close to a representative sample size. Time to share some preliminary survey results!

The first survey question is designed to better understand the motivation of organizations engaging in content marketing as a B2B marketing strategy. In short: why do we care about content marketing? What are the main objectives? Let's take a look at the chart below.

Leads, leads, leads ...
By far the most mentioned objective for content marketing is lead generation (62 percent), followed by lead nurturing (39 percent). This finding doesn't come as a surprise considering that content marketing has emerged as a B2B strategy primarily to drive inbound lead generation (in response to outbound B2B tactics becoming increasingly ineffective). Lead generation and nurturing is the promise of content marketing, in conjunction with marketing automation tools to deliver compelling content in a targeted fashion, and to move buyers though their buying stages and to influence their decisions (our next sneak preview will explore the reality of content marketing in terms of outcomes and results.)

The next highest ranked objectives are thought leadership and brand awareness with 37 percent and 34 percent of responses, respectively. This is also consistent with the promise of content marketing as a strategy to educate and influence buyer behavior in the vendor's favor.

Content not critical for social media engagement?
The survey result I found most surprising, however, is how low (only 13 percent) social media engagement ranks as a main objective for content marketing. I believe content marketing is an ideal strategy to attract and engage audiences on social media platforms. It is also ideal for spreading your message by having great content shared across multiple social vectors. Perhaps in this context, our survey participants don't consider social media engagement a primary objective but a means to an end, i.e. lead generation/nurturing, thought leadership, and brand awareness - our top ranked objectives. I am curious to learn what you think about the results (especially if you participated in the survey).

Our next sneak preview will look at the effectiveness of content marketing - so stay tuned. The 2011 B2B content marketing survey is still open - take the survey and be among the first to receive a copy of the results!

Take the 2011 B2B Content Marketing Survey

noreply@blogger.com (Holger Schulze) — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 01:28:00 +0000

B2B buyer behavior has been changing dramatically over the last few years as buyers increasingly refuse to be interrupted by outbound marketing tactics. Content marketing has emerged as a highly effective strategy to engage the reluctant B2B buyer who is actively searching for guidance and information online before making a complex purchase decision.

The purpose of content marketing is to engage B2B buyers with compelling content (in the form of webcasts, videos, eBooks, white papers, blog posts, etc) to educate, inform, entertain, and guide them through each step in the buying cycle. And while you want to help buyers make pragmatic, informed decisions, your ultimate goal is to persuade buyers to select your solution over competing alternatives.

Take the 2011 B2B Content Marketing Survey

It may sound easy to create crisp definitions of market segments, buyer personas, and buying stages, and then to build compelling content for each relevant intersection of these three (or more) dimensions. However, the reality of implementing content marketing initiatives is a bit more complicated.

The 20,000 member B2B Technology Marketing Community on LinkedIn is conducting the 2011 B2B Content Marketing Survey to better understand the current state of content marketing in the B2B space, and to identify key challenges as well as best practices.

All survey participants will receive an exclusive, free copy of the survey results before they are published to a broader audience. I will also share sneak previews of the survey results on this blog.

The 2011 B2B Content Marketing Survey takes less than 5 minutes to complete - take it now.

Thank you!

Holger Schulze
hhschulze@gmail.com

8 Tips for Marketing SaaS and Software in the Cloud

noreply@blogger.com (Holger Schulze) — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 02:34:00 +0000

The cloud is all the rage these days. Saugatuck Technology's Bruce Guptill released some interesting market research predicting that by 2014 the majority of new corporate B2B software purchases will be in the form of cloud software solutions (SaaS) rather than traditional on-premise software. This is a significant tipping point, after which adoption of cloud services is expected to further accelerate. What does this mean for B2B marketers selling cloud solutions and software as a service? I think it will pretty much change the rules of the game, and in ways that are somewhat unpredictable today. Here is why.

Why SaaS Marketing Rocks
After having taken to market both SaaS (starting in 2002) as well as traditional on-premise software solutions, I observed first hand some of the significant differences between the two models as it relates to marketing. And I also learned a few lessons along the way (some were learned the hard way, but I guess that’s how you learn best). You will see quickly in the following sections that I have a bias towards cloud software solutions, mostly because, if done right, the on-demand cloud model provides much faster, more direct and immediate feedback cycles on how your market is responding to your solution and marketing stimuli - a marketer's dream! In many cases, it also allows for much more compelling value propositions compared to traditional on-premise solutions. But let's take a closer look.

(1) Focus on the business buyer
One of the biggest changes in marketing SaaS vs on-premise software is the makeup of your target audience. While IT departments traditionally had a lot of influence over the software buying decision and acted as gate keepers, cloud solutions today often allow you to deal directly with the business problem owner and end user to make the decision and subscribe to your service (this obviously depends a great deal on the complexity, integration and scope of the solution). One of the biggest factors in the adoption of cloud solutions is that business users can activate the solution quickly, often without having to rely on slow IT resources.

For many applications, this will allow you to bypass IT in the early stages of adoption or altogether, depending on your solution. This is especially true for stand-alone, point solutions that don't require integration into on-premise or other cloud solutions. Also, be aware of IT pushback. I have seen many IT departments that have a strong on-premise bias to justify keeping their budgets and headcounts required for running the entire IT stack in-house.

(2) Re-focus messaging from product to buyer
While more direct access to the decision maker and buying authority may simplify the decision process to some extent, it requires marketing to better understand the underlying business problem the cloud solution is solving. Technical specs, speeds and feeds are now much less important, even irrelevant, to the buyer as they are often entirely encapsulated and "hidden" in the cloud.

What matters to the business user is the business value the solution delivers, the process it helps automate or enable, the cost it reduces or the opportunity it unlocks. In addition to your unique business and functional message, make sure to also embed a unique version of the “generic” cloud value proposition (lower cost and complexity, higher flexibility, faster on-boarding, seamless scalability, etc) into your marketing message and make them relevant and specific to your offering.

(3) Create buyer personas
For many software vendors who have been selling traditional on-premise solutions to customers, this focus on the business buyer and their unique requirements should not be new. The move to the cloud, in combination with dramatically changing buyer behaviors, however, requires a more sophisticated approach to marketing. It requires a crystal clear definition of your target segments, target buyer personas, and the typical journey your buyers take from problem to buying decision to actual purchase. This path needs to be made painfully easy for prospects to travel along. With powerful content assets that lead, just like breadcrumbs, from problem to solution.

(4) Simplify content marketing
Content marketing (combined with robust marketing automation) allows you to scale and put much of your inbound marketing efforts on "auto pilot", and "cherry pick" the leads you want to engage with directly, when they are ready to talk to you. While there are many steps in the decision process and many buyer personas that influence it, I have found that simplification is key to success. Especially if your marketing and sales organization is new to content and buyer centric marketing, don't be tempted to build the perfect system that, for example, captures 8 granular buying stages, 5 buyer personas, across, 5 market segments. Creating compelling content for the intersections of all these dimensions, you might be looking at hundreds of assets to be produced and deployed. This will easily overwhelm even the most sophisticated marketing teams.
Instead of attempting perfection, take a simplified crawl-walk-run approach, starting with as few as three buying stages (for example: “Awareness”, “Discovery”, “Decision”), one or two key buyer personas, and one target segment. Once this pilot model is designed and implemented with all content assets and associated programs, then you can move on to more sophisticated models applying the lessons learned earlier on.

(5) Highlight pricing model advantages
Pay as you go or subscription models enabled by cloud services allow buyers to adopt your solution much more quickly as they don't have huge upfront license fees to worry about that are often Capex, require justification, and many levels of sign-off. Instead, the monthly subscription payments can often fly under the radar and get paid without the intense scrutiny of big, lump sum payments, making it easier for buyers to pull the trigger.

(6) Mind the adoption gap
In market categories where cloud solutions are disrupting the way an existing problem is solved, make sure to revisit Geoffrey Moore's Chasm framework. If your SaaS category is in its early stages of adoption (for example marketing automation) market dynamics and buyer preferences will be dramatically different from segments that are in later stages in the technology adoption cycle (for example CRM). Innovators and early adopters are willing to take a lot of risk for a potentially big payoff. Early majority buyers will want to see references from companies just like them to reduce risk and ensure economic and technical success. Late majority and laggard buyers are the most risk averse bunch and will require strong cost and risk reduction benefits to be persuaded to move away from their existing solution. Pick the predominant segment in your market and focus on growing it instead of trying to be all things to all people – that hardly ever works.

(7) Highlight SaaS trial advantages
Cloud solutions make it easy for you to showcase your solution and make Trial or Freemium versions available as an offer and call to action that can be immediately provisioned. You can, for example, make a time limited (e.g. 1 month), concurrency limited, (e.g. number of parallel projects) or feature limited (e.g. disable premium features) version of the solution available in a self-service provisioning model and upsell later.

With software as a service, you can even see what features your trial users are actually using and are most interested in, and incorporate this information into your marketing and sales response (at the individual user level, leveraging marketing automation - you can even build feature usage into your lead scoring model to indicate sales readiness).

This insight into actual usage patterns allows you to fine-tune and reality-test your marketing message in a way that was previously impossible or cost prohibitive with packaged software. These insights, by the way, also enable you to create different, more granular subsets of your offering that you can provide to different segments in a way that was economically not feasible in the traditional on-prem model. There are great solutions available that let you do that granular packaging with minimum effort (contact me at hhschulze@gmail.com if you are interested in learning more).

(8) Address SaaS related concerns proactively
Cloud applications often face objections regarding data privacy (for example with companies in Europe), regulatory compliance, legal concerns, service availability, and other issues (especially with prospects in the late majority segment). Don't gloss over these concerns in your marketing and sales engagements. Instead, address issues upfront and outline your solution for each concern, before your on-premise competitors exploit them for you.

Embrace Cloud Marketing
In summary, SaaS and cloud software solutions are a very different animal compared to on-premise software. They offer new and exciting ways to deliver value to your customers. But don't treat the cloud the same way as your traditional software offering as the dynamics are profoundly different. And you may have to unlearn some things you thought to be tried and true. Also, make sure to embrace experimentation until you find the right mix of message, offers, and tactics. This market is still very new and constantly changing. Nobody has the right answers and best practices, so try new things and see what works. The cloud environment makes it easier for you than ever to test your approach in real time and make tweaks - take advantage of it!

What is your experience with marketing and selling SaaS?

Don’t forget to join the B2B Technology Marketing Community on LinkedIn to network with 20,000 of your B2B marketing peers and learn about the latest trends in tech marketing.

5 Steps to Social Media Leads with Content Marketing

noreply@blogger.com (Holger Schulze) — Sat, 19 Feb 2011 21:07:00 +0000

One of my recent posts (“The Top-10 B2B Marketing Trends for 2011”) received a lot of great comments. The number one marketing trend for 2011, according to the 17,000 member B2B technology marketing group on LinkedIn, is the increasing integration of social media with traditional marketing tactics to drive qualified leads. John Cook’s comment to the blog post got straight to the point: "How do you accomplish this”?

Conversion Metrics More Important
This question is being asked more frequently. Now that a majority of B2B marketers have been experimenting with social media for a while, 2011 will be the year social media evolves from the experimental stage into a more mature practice. It will become an established marketing tactic that will be more tightly integrated with traditional tactics such as email, webcasts, live events, mobile marketing, and content marketing. And as social media matures, demands for proving social media ROI will inevitably increase.

A recent eMarketer study confirms that metrics for measuring social media performance are already changing dramatically to reflect this new reality. While site traffic is still the #1 social media metric, according to eMarketer, the #2 spot is now occupied by conversion metrics. To put this in perspective, conversion metrics ranked only #8 a year ago, rising from 32.6% of respondents using this metric in 2010 to 65.7% in 2011 - the most dramatic change for any social media metric in the survey.

Generating Leads with Social Media
Going back to the original question: how do you leverage social media to deliver conversions? How do you go beyond posting interesting and entertaining updates on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and beyond basic tactics like placing social sharing buttons on your B2B website and emails?

Capturing someone’s attention while they are in social media mode can be tough, but there are many great ways for B2B marketers to turn social media interest into qualified leads. One of my favorites is a content-centric approach. Remember that social media is all about conversations, and sharing interesting information with people you trust.

Nobody wants to be sold on social platforms. At the same time B2B buyers are actively seeking guidance and information on how to solve specific problems, how to evaluate available solution options, and to learn about peers’ experiences with a vendor. Filling this need for information with compelling, high-value content, a vendor can not only have successful social conversations with prospects, but also high-quality leads that fill the funnel. How?

Step 1 - Social Content Marketing
One way to generate attention and leads is to create compelling assets that attract your audience and provide a launching pad for further engagement with your organization. This can be an eBook or a great white paper, for example, that showcases your expertise, solves a specific problem, or fills a critical knowledge gap for your audience.

This content is then placed in your most effective social channels (ideally in response to a relevant post or question) in the form of a short, compelling message and a short link pointing directly to the asset.

Step 2 - Set your Content Free
The trick (and I know this is hard for many traditional marketers to adopt) is NOT to hide this premium content asset behind a registration form. But how do I get a prospect's contact information to nurture and further engage them, you ask?

Great question. Sure, you can ask for this information, but only AFTER you delivered value and established credibility with your free eBook (I am using eBook as a placeholder here, you may have other asset types that make more sense for you to share).

Remember your goal is to get your valuable information in front of the right target audience. After your eBook so impressed your prospects, they are now eager to learn more about what you have to say and how you can help them solve their specific problem (if they aren't asking for more, they may not be qualified and ready to engage, or maybe your content isn't all that compelling).

Step 3 - Embed Strong Calls to Action
To help buyers take the next step in their journey from problem to solution (ideally in your direction), you need to embed calls to action into your content piece. This can be simple links placed within copy pointing to additional relevant content (for example, the sequel to your ebook or companion webcasts, videos, demos, self-diagnosis guides, competitive comparisons, etc). Or it can be a well designed banner in the sidebar with a compelling call to action.

This call to action then links to a form page people have to complete before gaining access to the next content asset. Or it can link to a "content hub page" (for lack of a better phrase) where you present your most relevant and compelling content assets to the prospect in one view. I am a strong advocate of presenting content in the context of the buyer's role and buying stages. This allows buyers to pick and choose the right asset they are most interested in to continue their buyer’s journey and engage with you digitally. And always make sure to include your contact information (phone, email, etc) in case a buyer is ready to engage directly.

Step 4 - Make Content Assets Easy to Share
Also, make sure that your free content piece itself is easily shareable by prospects. Build social sharing buttons right into your PDF document, in the sidebar for example, to maximize sharing and viral effects. The effects of easy sharing and exposure to a much broader audience, by the way, will more than make up for your "loss" of registrations for the primary, free asset.

Step 5 - Nurture Leads Along the Buyer’s Journey
Follow-up content pieces, such as webcast #2 and #3 in a series of 3 webcasts, require the buyer to complete a lightweight registration form - as they enter your marketing system with lead scoring, routing, and nurturing processes. Ideally you have a marketing automation platform (like Eloqua, Marketo, SilverPop, etc) in place that lets you nurture your new prospects with content tailored to their demographic profile and behavioral patterns, and helps prospects move along the buyers journey with content mapped to each stage. Until the marketing automation system indicates that your lead is qualified and ready for direct sales engagement.

This is only one example of how you can use social media to drive lead generation. What tactics do you use to convert social media interest into leads?

More information

Survey Report “Social Media in B2B Marketing”

The Brave New World of B2B Marketing

How to Use Social Media for Lead Generation

5 Steps to b2B Marketing Success

What Are the Top-10 Marketing Books?

noreply@blogger.com (Holger Schulze) — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 03:11:00 +0000

There are literally thousands of marketing books available today. A handful of them stand out as most influential on the art and science of marketing. But which books should be in the top-10 list of "must read" marketing books?

To get an answer, I conducted a quick survey among the 17,000+ members of the B2B marketing community on LinkedIn. After collecting and analyzing hundreds of your survey responses, here is the "ultimate" top-10 list:

The Top-10 List of Marketing Books

Crossing the Chasm
(Geoffrey A. Moore)
Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind
(Al Ries, Jack Trout)
Marketing Management
(Philip Kotler, Kevin Keller)
Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant
(W. Chan Kim, Renée Mauborgne)
Inside the Tornado
(Geoffrey A. Moore)
The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing
(Al Ries, Jack Trout)
The New Rules of Marketing and PR
(David Meerman Scott)
Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion
(Robert B. Cialdini )
SPIN Selling
(Neil Rackham)
Confessions of an Advertising Man
(David Ogilvie)

Other suggestions by the B2B Marketing Community that didn't make the top-10 include:

Competitive Strategy (Michael Porter) | Marketing High Technology (William Davidow) | eMarketing Strategies for the Complex Sale (Ardath Albee) | Groundswell (Josh Bernoff, Charlene Li) | Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die (Chip Heath and Dan Heath) | Marketing Metrics: The Definitive Guide to Measuring Marketing Performance (Paul Farris, Neil Bendle, Phillip Pfeifer, David Reibstein) | All Marketers Are Liars (Seth Godin) | Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media, and Blogs (Brian Halligan, Dharmesh Shah) | Writing White Papers: How to Capture Readers and Keep Them Engaged (Michael A. Stelzner ) | Product Strategy for High Technology Companies (Michael McGrath) | The Leaky Funnel (Hugh Macfarlane) | Word of Mouth Marketing (Andy Sernovitz) | Influencer Marketing (Brown and Hayes) | The Chasm Companion (Geoffrey A. Moore) | Diffusion of Innovations (Everett M. Rogers) | Marketing ROI (Jim Lenskold).

I am sure there are many of your favorite marketing books missing here (there are simply too many good ones out there). What are your personal favorites? Please share in the comments section below.

The Top-10 B2B Marketing Trends for 2011

noreply@blogger.com (Holger Schulze) — Sat, 01 Jan 2011 20:05:00 +0000

Happy New Year! It is January and time again for the obligatory 2011 predictions. Many marketing experts have strong opinions on what they think will happen in 2011.

Instead of coming up with what I think is going to change in the B2B marketing world in 2011, I decided to ask you and tap into the combined wisdom of over 17,000 marketing professionals in the B2B Technology Marketing Community on LinkedIn. I asked you to rank the marketing areas you think will become more important in 2011.

Here are the key trends that B2B marketing professionals think are shaping B2B marketing in 2011.

1 - Integration of social media into lead generation programs
2011 will be the year social media evolves from the experimental stage to become an established marketing tactic. Social media will be more tightly integrated into traditional tactics such as email, webcasts, and content assets as another channel to broaden the reach of messages and drive conversions. This also means that more stringent demands for proof of ROI and revenue impact will be placed on social media investment.

2 – Focus on content marketing (content mapped to personas, buyer's journey, vertical, etc)
Content marketing is going mainstream in 2011. If you are not thinking about (and implementing) a strategy that puts your buyers (with their persona and industry driven pain points, preferences, and buying stages) in the center of your marketing efforts - and create compelling content as the currency of your engagement with buyers that influences decisions along the buying process - chances are you will get left behind by more content savvy competitors. With content moving to the center of attention, marketers often struggle to create magnetic content in the right formats and quantities. Sophisticated marketers will apply systematic ways to re-purpose existing content, create bite-sized content for the short attention span executive, and design an efficient content waterfall that accelerates production times, quality, and consistency.

3 - Focus on new business generation & revenue
With many markets making a modest recovery, which is expected to accelerate somewhat in 2011, marketing focus turns away from cost cutting and customer retention and towards growth and new customer wins. Marketing will be expected to show how it impacts new revenue generation. "Last click attribution" alone won’t cut it anymore and will need to make room for more comprehensive ways to show the combined impact of marketing tactics on buyer decisions.

4 - Focus on lead quality
In the past, marketing focus has often been on generating increasing quantities of leads. It was difficult to tell lead quality and impact on sales pipeline, so in the absence of real quality indicators, more was considered better. This flood of leads overwhelmed sales and distracted from the selling part of their jobs. And marketing received the blame for creating poor leads and wasting valuable selling time. Now, with the emergence of marketing automation tools and lead scoring technologies on one side, and tougher requirements for demonstrating program ROI on the other side, look for lead quality to become a critical performance metric in 2011.

5 - Focus on sales enablement
The best leads and nurturing strategy, however, doesn’t help much if sales can't close the deal. Our B2B marketing community agrees that providing sales with not only the right leads, but compelling content, sales tools, and education is going to be more critical as a competitive weapon in 2011. Your competitors are catching up on the latest lead generation and nurturing tactics. And all other things being equal, an educated and motivated sales force and their consultative selling skills will be the ultimate differentiator.
Tom Pisello added a great comment to our B2B Technology Marketing Community, highlighting that a recent survey by IDC found that 24% of B2B buyers found that the sales reps are not prepared for presentations at all, 30% indicate that they are somewhat prepared , and only 29% indicate that they are well prepared. An empowered buyer means that the role of sales will dramatically be impacted, requiring sales enablement and marketing to help redefine and drive a new breed of value selling professional in 2011.

6 - Focus on pull/inbound marketing tactics
This reflects the continued power shift of buyers moving firmly into the driver’s seat, initiating, and controlling the buying process. As traditional interruption style marketing techniques are being blocked and filtered out by buyers, marketers need to shift to inbound tactics using magnetic content that enables buyers to educate themselves about the nature of their problem, available solutions, vendors, and products long before the first personal engagement with a vendor takes place. You want to be the source buyers are flocking to for this high-value content.

7 - Focus on customer retention
Customer retention has provided the much needed revenue stream that enabled many companies to survive the recession as new customer wins dried up. While the economy is slowly improving, many markets are still anemic and it remains critical in 2011 to nurture and grow existing customer relationships.

8 – Focus on marketing intelligence
Marketing automation, online marketing, and CRM systems create tons of data that is revealing buying patterns, customer preferences, and insight into what is working and what is not. Let's put this data into insight and action with better marketing intelligence in 2011.

9 – Focus on marketing automation
Marketing automation is going mainstream in 2011 as companies are taking their online campaigns, lead scoring, and email automation to the next level and integrate social media with traditional tactics. It will be interesting to watch how the decline of email usage by buyers and overall lower conversion rates will impact marketing automation effectiveness going forward.

10 - Focus on branding and awareness
Branding and awareness tactics took a backseat to marketing programs that could demonstrate an immediate and direct impact on revenue. This is slowly changing as budgets are improving and a long term view is taking hold again in 2011, recognizing the importance of a strong brand to influence buyer preference.

What marketing areas are less important in 2011?

As telling as the areas of increased focus are the areas B2B marketers consider less important in 2011:

Marketing cost reduction (is there much more to squeeze out of marketing without cutting into substance and choking off growth?)
Outsourcing (along the same lines as cost reduction, and can we afford to outsource even more without losing core competencies?)
Lead quantity (see increased focus on lead quality in the top 10 list)
Push marketing tactics (see focus on pull marketing in the top 10 list)
Marketing asset management (while still important, many marketers have solved this problem with asset and content management tools)

What are your thoughts? Does this reflect the reality in your organization going into 2011? What of these focus areas match your priorities, which don’t?

Thank you for following and contributing to this blog. I hope the new year will treat you well and that you have much success in your B2B marketing efforts in 2011!

Top-10 B2B Marketing Topics of 2010

noreply@blogger.com (Holger Schulze) — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 03:39:00 +0000

With 2010 coming to an end, it is time for a quick review of the most popular B2B marketing posts on the Everything Technology Marketing blog.

The 10 Most Popular Blog Posts (by number of re-tweets)

1 - 5 Steps to B2B Marketing Success (100)

2 - The Brave New World of B2B Marketing - Are You Ready? (98)

3 - Is Traditional B2B Marketing Dead? (87)

4 - What B2B Marekting tactics are Up, Down, Flat? (79)

5 - A Simple B2B Marketing Framework (75)

6 - Social Media in B2B Marketing - Survey Results (47)

7 - Is B2B Marketing Ready for Social Media? (44)

8 - Is the In-House B2B Marketing Department Going Away? (39)

9 - It's Budget Season - B2B Marketing Budget Trends (39)

10 - You Have No Metrics for B2B Social Media Measurement? (36)

I hope you had a successful and productive 2010. Thank you all for participating in this blog - I learned a lot from our discussions this year. See you in 2011!

B2B Market Segmentation – Part 3: How to Prioritize

noreply@blogger.com (Holger Schulze) — Tue, 23 Nov 2010 22:22:00 +0000

The previous B2B market segmentation exercises (Part 1 | Part 2) likely produced a large number of potential target segments. If focus is one of the reasons for segmentation in the first place, then having too many segments will obviously distract from this goal. To narrow down our list of segments, we need to create a handful of criteria to assess and evaluate the candidate segments in order to prioritize and filter out the non-viable segments.

Segment Scoring
A weighted scoring model can be helpful where we define a list of evaluation criteria, assign a relative weight to each, and then score by assigning points for each criterion across each segment. I suggest starting with the same criteria you used to define the segments and also use them to score your segments. In the next step, we need to add criteria to capture the segments’ strength of demand, growth rates, barriers to entry, competitive situation, etc. Upon closer examination you may notice that some segments aren't really all that different, and maybe they can be collapsed into one.

Segment Map
Also, it might be helpful to plot the segments against a chart with two dimensions: 1) “Segment Attractiveness” (use the relevant criteria from the scoring exercise) and 2) “Relative Competitive Advantage” in order to prioritize target segments. Then plot your segments against this chart using the two dimensions. Segments that end up in the upper right are clear favorites (highly attractive and with a strong competitive advantage), lower left segments (unattractive, no competitive advantage) should be abandoned.

And always watch out for surprises like new, unexpected customers that are enthusiastically adopting your product but don't fall into traditional segment definition. They might be a bluebird / black swan event, a less than ideal customer for other reasons, or they might be an early signal of a new market segment worth pursuing.

What segmentation approach worked for you?

Additional Resources on Market Segmentation

Market Segmentation and Best Customers
http://www.information-management.com/news/5659-1.html

B2B Discovers Market Segmentation
http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/consumer/b2b-discovers-market-segmentation

Business to Business Segmentation
http://www.greenbook.org/marketing-research.cfm/business-to-business-segmentation

B2B Segmentation Strategies
http://www.washingtonsquareconsulting.com/wordpress/?p=95

Segmenting Customers: How to do it efficiently to improve enterprise products
http://www.pragmaticmarketing.com/publications/topics/10/segmenting-customers-how-to-do-it-efficiently-to-improve-enterprise-products

Social Media in B2B Marketing - Survey Results

noreply@blogger.com (Holger Schulze) — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 01:11:00 +0000

The B2B Technology Marketing Community on LinkedIn conducted a survey earlier this year to explore the rapidly changing landscape of social media in the context of B2B marketing. The survey generated over 270 responses from B2B marketers - and the results are in!

SURVEY HIGHLIGHTS

Social media shows the biggest increase in use among all B2B marketing tactics over the last 3 years
B2B marketers cite using social media primarily for raising awareness (76 percent), then for lead generation (58 percent)
The single largest roadblock to social media success is the inability to measure results
The most effective social platform for B2B marketers is LinkedIn, followed by Twitter, and then blogs

Download the complete social media survey report here.

What is your experience with social media in B2B?

It's Budget Season - B2B Marketing Budget Trends for 2011

noreply@blogger.com (Holger Schulze) — Sat, 23 Oct 2010 00:22:00 +0000

MarketingSherpa asked more than 900 B2B marketers how they expect their marketing budgets to change for 2011.

The results are in: The majority of B2B organizations are increasing marketing budgets for inbound marketing tactics, including social media, virtual events and webinars, SEO and PPC. When considering outbound marketing tactics such as telemarketing, direct mail and print advertising, the majority of B2B organizations are either not changing or decreasing budgets.

The growing trend of utilizing inbound marketing tactics is a result of the changed buying behaviors of B2B buyers and the perceived cost effectiveness of these marketing channels.

IDC Reports Slow Growth of B2B Tech Marketing Budgets

On the same topic, IDC reports in the “2010 Tech Marketing Benchmark” study that technology marketing budgets are up 3.7% this year over 2009. It looks like we are bouncing back from the recession compared to last year when tech companies slashed marketing budgets by over 8%.

This year, IDC says, tech companies will allocate 19.3% of their total marketing budget to digital, up from 12.6% last year. Within digital marketing, the largest share of the budget will go toward company websites (26.7%), followed by display ads (21.0%), email marketing (18.6%), search ads (13.6%), search engine optimization (7.6%), digital events (7.1%) and social networks (5.4%).

Traditional advertising, including TV, print, out-of-home and sponsorships, has dropped to 11.9% of the total marketing mix this year from 20.9% last year.

Marketers will spend the largest share of their budget this year on events (20.2%), up from 17.2% last year. They will spend 19.0% on marketing support materials, compared with 17.8% last year.

IDC also asked tech marketers what their primary go-to-market orientation is this year. The top response was product line (25.1%), followed by customer segment (19.6%), solution (16.4%), campaign or theme (16.0%), industry (15.8%), job role (5.8%) and other (1.3%).

Related posts:

- Top-7 Challenges for B2B Marketers
- What B2B Marketing Tactics are Up, Down, Flat?

Top-7 Challenges for B2B Marketers

noreply@blogger.com (Holger Schulze) — Tue, 19 Oct 2010 01:00:00 +0000

According to MarketingSherpa, the top challenges for B2B marketers are becoming, well, more challenging.

Especially the top-3 challenges have grown significantly from 2009 to 2010:

1) Generating high-quality leads (from 69% in 2009 to 78% today) - Today's B2B marketers are tackling this issue with processes and technologies such as marketing automation and lead scoring in an attempt to only deliver qualified, truly sales ready leads. Don't underestimate the need to fuel marketing automation with compelling content to engage with your audiences in a meaningful way along the buyer's journey.

2) Generating a high volume of leads (35% to 44%) - Certainly a big challenge in an environment of shrinking marketing budgets and declining productivity of traditional marketing tactics.

3) Marketing to a lengthening sales cycle (39% to 41%) - Also a function of the economic environment. B2B buyers don't trust the slow recovery and and take their time before pulling the trigger. This situation makes persona-based content marketing more critical than ever.

Here are the top-7 B2B marketing challenges:

What are your biggest B2B marketing challenges?

B2B Market Segmentation – Part 2: How to Approach Segmentation

noreply@blogger.com (Holger Schulze) — Sun, 10 Oct 2010 23:47:00 +0000

In part one of our segmentation series, we discussed the importance of and rationale behind market segmentation.

Let's take a closer look at actual implementation of market segmentation. The biggest segmentation error that people make is to start with the "who" or "what" and segmenting the market using criteria such as industry verticals, company size or geography and other dimensions because this data is easy to gather.

Focusing on WHO a buyer is makes for more easily observable and actionable data that can be used to define segments and their boundaries. But it doesn't get to the core of why companies are buying and what problem they are looking to solve (don’t get me wrong, demographics are still an important factor in the segmentation process, but they shouldn't drive the first steps of segmentation). Also, this approach often fails to identify new, un-served, profitable segments formed around buyer problems, needs and behavioral patterns that cut across "traditional" demographic segments.

As markets are changing rapidly and segments are disappearing and new ones are forming, it becomes more important to look at WHY companies are buying, and segmenting markets along motivational attributes.

A better segmentation strategy is to start with why companies purchase a solution. Understand what is driving demand and what distinct pockets of demand can be profitably served by your organization. Because there are so many attributes and dimensions of motivation and behavior based segmentation (such as business pains, adoption patterns, compelling external events such as introduction of new regulatory legislation, etc), it is important to find the most critical dimensions to use as a pivot point and build your segmentation framework around.

SEGMENTATION CRITERIA
Here are some examples of dimensions that can be used for segmentation:

Value Drivers
Are companies using your solution to reduce cost, increase revenues, comply with mandates, protect assets, improve agility, reduce risk? Especially for solutions that can solve different problems and meet different objectives. What value driver represents your best opportunities? What are the specific use cases of your product to realize the value customers are looking to unlock? Are there innovative or "exotic" uses of your products that you observe with new customers that might indicate a new or bigger market segment that is currently untapped?
Adoption Patterns
One of the best known market segmentation frameworks is the technology adoption model that segments markets into innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority and laggards based on buyers' different needs and psychographic patterns at each phase of the adoption cycle. The challenge however is that this model segments markets over time, not necessarily across concurrent segments (although there is overlap between segments). This makes adoption valuable as one dimension of describing your segments, but it is not sufficient.
Price Sensitivity
Do you position your product in segments that are price sensitive and invite vendors to complete on price or segments that pay a premium for a solution that is highly differentiated?
Go to Market / Buying Preference
What is your target markets' preference in procuring solutions, channel/direct preference?
Event Triggers
What events impact your target markets' business such as compliance with legislative mandates that are going into effect, mergers that cause operational or competitive problems which need to be resolved, new executive hired that need to demonstrate quick results, a disruptive product launched that impacts your customers' competitors, etc.

HOW DO I MARKET TO SEGMENTS?
One of the first questions that arises is how do I segment markets based on attributes I cannot easily observe from the outside? For example, how do I know whether an organization is an early adopter or laggard without investing a tremendous amount of research (that often leads to ambiguous answers anyway)? How do I know how price sensitive a company's buying center is? Or what really drives value in a certain organization?

While company size or industry SIC/NAICS classifications are easy to gather for demographics-based segmentation, behavioral data is not that easy to come by. This is a significant problem for outbound marketing tactics where you need to identify your specific targets and contact information prior to executing a campaign.

Inbound tactics on the other hand provide an opportunity for "ideal-fit prospects" in the right segment to find you and your offering through compelling content. Content marketing is therefore an ideal approach for use in motivation-based market segments where you can create keyword rich content that is closely mapped to your buyer's specific business problem and decision chain.

In other words, motivation-based marketing enables buyers to find you rather than the other way around. This resonates with B2B marketing trends where buyer behavior has changed dramatically over the last decade - 80 percent of B2B purchases today result from buyers identifying and reaching out to vendors first, not the other way around.

Motivation-based segmentation also needs to inform and shape the scoring model you use for marketing automation. Many automation platforms score along two dimensions: demographics and behavior. Behavior is how users interact with your content and website and what marketing stimulus they respond to. But in a broader sense you can incorporate the dimensions and values from your segmentation efforts, and use behavior and interaction with your website content for lead scoring early in the engagement process.

DEMOGRAPHIC SEGMENTATION ATTRIBUTES
While we said earlier that you should not START your segmentation efforts with demographic attributes, demographic dimensions are still important as segmentation criteria as they often correlate with reasons why customers buy. Or they correlate with the expected profitability of a customer (for example as a function of company size or revenue).

For example:

Vertical
Are certain verticals more likely to have the problem you solve, a higher sense of urgency, more to gain by solving the problem? Regulatory drivers?
Company Size
Does your solution require a minimum number of users or budget to be sold profitably, does it solve a problem that correlates with the size of an organization (complexity, scale, process automation, etc)?
Location
Are customers in certain locations more likely to buy, based on ease of access, local market conditions, regulatory environments?

This wraps up part 2 of our segmentation blog series. Part 3 will explore ideas on how to prioritize the identified segments to focus on the most profitable ones first. How do you approach B2B market segmentation?

A Framework for B2B Customer Segmentation – Part 1: Why Segment Your Market?

noreply@blogger.com (Holger Schulze) — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 16:48:00 +0000

Marketing segmentation is about subdividing markets into segments of customers that have similar needs and behaviors. This way, vendors can optimize their product offering, marketing, and sales approach to meet the specific requirements of the segment better and more cost efficiently than the competition.

But the craft of identifying and selecting the right segments is too often rushed and under-appreciated. Many companies don't segment at all, segment only superficially, or copy segments that seem to be working for their competitors but without really understanding the rationale for selecting target segments.

In complex markets, segmentation is not trivial. And many companies simply don't allocate sufficient resources for defining the right segments. Often, segmentation is seen as "artificially" reducing the addressable market. Why go after only a few target segments when there are so many buyers outside of these segments to be converted? This argument is a fallacy that doesn't recognize the impact of dramatically higher conversion rates and capture of higher value customers within target segments, or the opportunity cost of deviating from your strategy and core competencies by going after less than ideal prospects outside of the target segment.

Benefits of Segmentation
The benefits of segmentation are substantial. With tighter segmentation, vendors can better satisfy customers and produce more revenue in shorter amounts of time, at lower cost. Segmentation is critical as vendors evolve from technology-focused business models to customer-needs driven engineering and development, sales, marketing, and operations.

Because prospects in defined, targeted segments are a better fit with the vendor’s offering, prospects are more likely to buy, they close faster, produce bigger deals, and remain more loyal. In short, they are more profitable. For marketing, well-defined segments means more targeted messages and programs that resonate with buyers. This results in higher response rates, better engagements, shorter conversion cycles, and overall better return on marketing investment.

Marketing Automation Drives Renewed Focus on Segmentation
Market segmentation is experiencing a renaissance. A key driver for this renewed focus on segmentation is marketing automation. Why? Because B2B marketing teams needs to have a sound understanding and definition of the target market segments first in order to create compelling messages and content that addresses segment-specific business drivers and pain points, guides buyers through the buying process, and enables mass customized marketing and automated email nurturing campaigns that execute based on prospects' demographics and behaviors.

Part 2 of this series will explore how to go about segmentation and why the reasons customers buy (motivations) are often more important than who they are (demographics).

How do you approach segmentation in your organization?

Top 5 Social Media Challenges in B2B Marketing (Survey)

noreply@blogger.com (Holger Schulze) — Sun, 01 Aug 2010 14:38:00 +0000

We are conducting a survey of B2B marketing professionals. One of the questions is asking participants to select the biggest challenges B2B marketers face when it comes to social media.

Here is a summary of the top-5 challenges the survey identified so far (n = 253). The most selected answer with 56 percent is (1) measuring the results. Not surprising considering that the right metrics and goals associated with social media are still evolving. The challenge of measuring results was followed by (2) identifying where to participate in terms of platforms, forums, blogs, etc (46 percent). Finding out (3) who the communities and influencers are that social media managers need to connect with and keep track of was the third most mentioned challenge with 45 percent. 40 percent of survey participants selected (4) coordination of social media activities as a challenge, and 33 percent found that (5) keeping track of conversations is an issue.

Does this picture reflect the challenges you face using social media in your organization?

Stay tuned for more sneak peaks and the complete survey report to be available soon. If you would like to receive a copy, please participate in the survey: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/socialmediasurvey2010

A Simple B2B Marketing Framework

noreply@blogger.com (Holger Schulze) — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 03:16:00 +0000

We often discuss in this blog how B2B marketing is becoming more complex, and how to manage this complexity. Marketing is getting involved in many more areas that touch the customer along the buying process, multiplied by a dizzying variety of new tactics, online communications and engagement platforms. I have always liked frameworks to make sense of this complexity, and add some structure to identify focus areas and value drivers, dependencies and hierarchies - all to make complexity a bit easier to manage.

Pragmatic Marketing Framework
One of the best known frameworks in product marketing is from Pragmatic Marketing. Very clean and structured, it lists all major areas that need to be designed, built, and managed by product marketing and product management.

My problem with the framework is that while it shows a neat hierarchy (from market to programs and support) it only loosely links its components along a common thread. In my mind, this common thread should be the customer’s buying process (instead of the vendor’s planning hierarchy). This way you increase customer centricity and make sure that strategy and tactics are mapped to the buying process your customers perform (stages: unawareness, pain recognition, understanding how to solve the problem, identifying and selecting the right solution and vendor, validating the choice and acting on it).

RocketWatcher Marketing Framework
April Dunford at RocketWatcher has recently published a modified version of the marketing framework that I think is excellent because it simplifies things and focuses on the marketing aspects rather than the product management side of the business.

A Simple B2B Marketing Framework
So taking this general concept a step further, I created a simple B2B marketing framework that depicts the hierarchy of B2B marketing strategy and tactics. It builds upon April's framework and comprises a stack of marketing "layers" that build upon each other, each centered around the customer’s buying process.

The framework starts at the bottom with the “Market Knowledge Layer” - the foundational aspects of understanding the market opportunity and customer problem - and then works its way up to tactical execution of marketing programs along the customer life cycle.

Market Knowledge Layer
The "Market Knowledge" layer captures key information and develops organizational knowledge about target market segments, market needs, the drivers of value (cost reduction, revenue increase, efficiency improvements, etc), and what competing alternatives exist to capture this value.

Business Strategy Layer
The next layer up is "Business Strategy", taking into account the insight derived from the Market Knowledge layer below and deciding what business model is best suited for generating value in the market environment, what products and configurations to take to market, how to go to market from a marketing and sales perspective, etc.

Buyer Centric Tools & Content Layer
The next layer "Buyer Centric Tools & Content" aims at creating deeper insight into the buyer to create the tools that inform message creation, marketing content, education of sales and marketing teams, creation of campaigns, etc. This includes the definition of the buyer personas, how buyers approach buying decisions (buying process) and what messages will influence their perception and decisions at each step (message maps).

Marketing Tactics Layer
Finally, the top layer "Marketing Tactics" is concerned with tactical execution of marketing strategy, the push/pull, outbound/inbound delivery of messages that influence buyers’ decision making. The tactics are informed by a deep understanding of the target segments, buyer personas, and their pain and approach to solving it (buyer’s journey) – all derived from the underlying layers.

I see the marketing tactics layer divided into four phases mapped to the stages of customer development:

(1) Segment Marketing - In the customer life cycle, this is the very first attempt to reach your target audience and attract potential buyers to further engage with you in a conversation. Initially, you may not have any information about the buyer other than generic segment and persona profiles. The goal is to attract interest that converts into qualified leads which you can follow up with and/or nurture over time.

(2) Lead Nurturing – Leads that are not sales ready need to be nurtured with the goal of guiding prospects through their buying decision process with educational and actionable content. Marketing automation tools can help with targeted and event based outreach to prospects, offering opportunities for digital engagement and interaction that provides more insight into the buyer's general fit with the target profile and readiness for taking the next step.

(3) Sales Enablement – At this point your sales team is actively engaged with the prospect. Your marketing activities for this phase focus on providing your sales team with the tools that help them in the discovery process to better understand the prospect’s true needs and to create and present a solution that the buyer finds attractive and selects over competing alternatives.

(4) Customer Marketing – Many marketing teams focus their attention and resources on new lead generation, often neglecting the ongoing nurturing of existing customers. Here is where you have an opportunity to delight your customers, truly understand why and how they use your products or services, and identify additional opportunities to maximize the lifetime value of your customer (not to mention the lower cost of incremental revenue from existing customers).

Goal Setting and Performance Measurement
To make matters more complete, I added “goal setting and metric definition” to the left of the marketing stack, driving the direction of every marketing layer and its components. On the right hand side is the "measurement" aspect that looks at the marketing outcomes using the metrics defined for each layer. Here we can compare results against the original marketing goals to identify deviations, ideally using leading as well as lagging performance indicators.

To close the loop, and ensure continuous improvement, the feedback process (bottom) loops back to inform changes to strategy or adjustment of goals and tactics to more closely reflect the reality of external market dynamics as well as internal company resources and competencies. The idea is to create frequent feedback cycles and adjust as often as feasible (the challenge is to strike a balance between the incremental cost incurred by making changes and the benefits derived from these changes).

Planning and Execution Cycles
Another way to look at the layers of the B2B marketing stack is to think of them as "spinning disks" where each disk revolution represents a planning or execution cycle. For example, the business strategy layer typically has longer planning cycles (a full cycle can take many months or quarters). The tactical layer at the very top, in contrast, is characterized by very fast execution and adaptation cycles (sometimes only days or weeks).

Cycles for planning and knowledge gathering take longer to execute and receive market feedback to validate or invalidate your assumptions of the market (at this layer, your macro environment also changes more slowly). Rapid cycles at the top of the stack, on the other hand, provide almost immediate feedback (for example, what keywords are performing for paid search, reports on open rates of email campaigns, popularity of a content asset) and allow you to adjust quickly.

The feedback collected in real time at the top of the stack not only informs the tactic itself in order to optimize it, but it also cascades down to inform underlying strategy adjustments at the bottom of the marketing stack.

Operationalizing the B2B Marketing Framework
The next iteration of the B2B marketing framework will map out the buyers journey in greater detail. But that's content for another blog post. This framework reflects the marketing view but can be easily expanded to link into the sales perspective (deeper view into the sales cycle). My next posts will dive deeper into the topic and also pick up where I left off with the post “5 Steps to B2B Marketing Success”.

Let me know your thoughts about this framework. What frameworks help you organize and structure your B2B marketing efforts?

You Have No Metrics for B2B Social Media Measurement? (Survey Sneak Peek)

noreply@blogger.com (Holger Schulze) — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 02:21:00 +0000

Here is another interesting result from the B2B social media survey. I was surprised to learn that a plurality of B2B marketers (45%) say they don't have ANY metrics in place for measuring social media effectiveness. None. Something tells me that B2B marketers will get away with this only for a short time until investment in social media comes under increased scrutiny.

Take a look the chart below to see the popularity of various social media metrics for measuring activity, followership, engagement, leads, and sales results (click chart to enlarge | n = 210).

Resources to learn more about social media metrics

Take the social media survey now and receive the complete survey report before it is officially published. Feel free to share the survey link with your B2B marketing colleagues and friends: http://bit.ly/socsurvey

What B2B Marketing Tactics Are Up, Down, Flat? (Survey Sneak Peek)

noreply@blogger.com (Holger Schulze) — Sun, 20 Jun 2010 01:14:00 +0000

Last week, we talked about the changing B2B marketing mix ("Is Traditional B2B Marketing Dead?" which caused a heated debate about whether these changes are real and consequential). Let's take a look at some data. We are currently conducting a social media survey among B2B marketing professionals, and one of the questions is aimed at better understanding what activities marketing teams are doing more or less of than 3 years ago. Here are the preliminary results for this question (click chart to enlarge | n = 176).

Marketing tactics that are trending up
The biggest increase in marketing activity over the last 3 years is reported for social media where 81% of respondents say that they are doing more of it (not surprising considering social media use in B2B was still nascent 3 years ago). The next big jump is in content creation - 68% of respondents have increased this tactic in their marketing mix.

This supports the observation that companies are increasingly using content marketing to influence and guide prospects through the buying cycle. Website activity is also up, with 56% of people using it more aggressively than 3 years ago. Email marketing is slightly up - likely a reflection of the increasing adoption of marketing automation platforms that heavily rely on email to communicate targeted, customized, and behavior driven messages.

Marketing tactics that are trending down
Now let's look at the activities that are down over the last 3 years. A usual suspect, direct mailings, is used less by 55% of the people who responded to the survey. Not surprising considering the often low response rates and difficulties tracking conversions, in addition to the comparatively higher cost of direct mail. Same with print advertising, which is used less by 62% of respondents.

Marketing tactics that are flat
A couple of tactics have maintained their share in the marketing mix over the years. Events and Webinars, for example, are still executed at about the same level as 3 years ago by 50% of the marketers polled in the survey (although Webinars are trending up, and so is online advertising with 42% of respondents keeping it a about the same level and 37 percent increasing investment compared to three years ago).

Want to read the survey report?
If you are interested in receiving the survey report, please contribute to the survey.

Please feel free to share the link with your B2B marketing colleagues and friends - here is the link to forward: http://bit.ly/socsurvey.

Is the In-House B2B Marketing Department Going Away?

noreply@blogger.com (Holger Schulze) — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 14:22:00 +0000

My last post triggered a heated debate (mostly in the LinkedIn B2B Technology Marketing Community) about the dramatic changes we see in the B2B marketing function. One of the interesting topics that came up was outsourcing. As you know, more and more corporate functions are moving to a service and subscription based model where companies aggressively outsource everything that is not core to the business in order to gain advantages related to cost, scalability, and agility. This trend is nothing new, it has been building for a long time and many corporate functions like manufacturing have been outsourcing for decades. It seems as if the marketing function has only recently caught on to this trend in a major way, though.

Is marketing moving to a subscription based model?
We sure see this trend in the marketing automation platforms we use on a daily basis – webcasts, email campaigns, lead management, and many more. Many applications and services are not residing in-house on some server in the datacenter but are instead delivered in the cloud, provided as Software as a Service. This not only reduces fixed cost and enables pay as you go models; it also helps marketing to get the job done more quickly, without having to rely on the IT department (which in too many companies is becoming a bottleneck instead of a business enabler – which is further accelerating the push towards SaaS). The next phase I see is that SaaS vendors are partnering to provide end-to-end solutions that span multiple platforms so you can basically run all of your marketing automation in the cloud through a single interface (Salesforce.com is leading the way here with a myriad of 3rd party apps linked into the Salesforce.com ecosystem that expand the value chain step by step).

Outsourcing marketing talent
Do we see the same trend developing for outsourcing of talent? Sure, marketing departments have always outsourced campaigns, creative services, and projects to ad/PR/creative agencies. But it seems to me - observing what is going on in many companies and talking to a lot of people in the B2B marketing space - that the marketing outsourcing trend has dramatically accelerated over the last 12 months. Talent outsourcing is also moving up the value chain to projects that have traditionally remained in house.

What do you see happening?
Do you see the same trends? Is B2B marketing moving to a virtual model where a company only has a minimum core staff of true marketing experts that define strategy and programs, and then orchestrate a complex array of vendors, freelancers, and platforms to deliver on marketing goals? Is the future for the majority of marketing professionals a freelance model of working for dozens of clients at the same time? What is the barrier where the required level of domain expertise and coordination cost are outweighing the incremental savings and flexibility benefits?

Is the classic marketing department dead? Looking forward to your thoughts and observations on the topic.

Is Traditional B2B Marketing Dead?

noreply@blogger.com (Holger Schulze) — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 14:25:00 +0000

Earlier this week, I was on a panel at the WIT event "The Intersection of Marketing & Technology" in McLean, VA. One of the discussions was about the dramatic changes happening in B2B marketing today and what the future will hold. The question "Is traditional B2B marketing dead?" ignited a lively discussion.

I think we are experiencing nothing short of a major disruption in marketing today. New technologies and marketing automation are just one expression and a driver of this change, but it goes much deeper, affecting the way we organize marketing, engage with customers, find new business opportunities, and deliver value to the stakeholders inside and outside our organizations.

It is easy to not see the forest for the trees when you are focused on the daily challenges of program execution. So let's take a step back and look at the big picture. I put together an overview of the key dimensions of B2B marketing that I see changing (see below, click image to enlarge). Every dimension (including balance of power, audience focus and presence) has significant implications on the way we plan, organize, and execute B2B marketing going forward. And before you say "wait a minute", of course this isn't a binary, all or nothing switch from one model to the next. Instead we are seeing a classic adoption pattern with early adopters and laggards, false starts, and a mix of "traditional" best practices that are still applicable combined with new methods. What are your observations on the changes in B2B marketing? Please share your thoughts using the comments section below.

Is B2B Marketing Ready for Social Media? Take the Survey to Find Out...

noreply@blogger.com (Holger Schulze) — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 01:15:00 +0000

B2B marketing is undergoing dramatic change. Traditional marketing tactics are losing effectiveness, and new tactics such as social media are still perceived as unproven. And while social media is a success story in consumer markets, adoption in B2B markets is still lagging.

The LinkedIn B2B Technology Marketing Community is conducting a comprehensive, vendor neutral survey of B2B marketing executives and professionals to better understand the state of social media in the evolving B2B marketing mix. The survey will answer questions about the latest social media trends in B2B marketing, what challenges managers face, what platforms and tools are considered effective, how companies measure success, and more.

The survey takes less than 10 minutes to complete. If you would like to receive a summary of the survey results to find out what your peers are doing with social media, please make sure to provide your name and email address at the end of the survey.

Follow this link to get started: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/socialmediasurvey2010

Also, please feel free to forward the survey link to your marketing colleagues and friends (or just use the re-tweet button at the top of this post).

The Brave New World of B2B Marketing - Are You Ready?

noreply@blogger.com (Holger Schulze) — Tue, 25 May 2010 00:53:00 +0000

Your B2B markets are changing rapidly. It is now harder than ever for B2B vendors to get the attention of our audiences. The effectiveness of traditional push marketing is rapidly declining, marketing budgets and headcounts have been slashed over the last few years (while output expectations have increased), and the availability of new technologies for marketing automation is leaving many B2B marketing professionals scratching their heads.

Power Shift
Knowledge is power, and the balance of power is clearly shifting from vendors to the customer. B2B buyers are more sophisticated than ever. They educate themselves on the nature of their business problem, possible solution options, available vendors and products. Today's prospects filter out most attempts by companies to interrupt them with vendor and product focused marketing messages and sales pitches. As a result, many vendors don't show up on prospects' radars anymore - unless they are actively sought out, they are often simply not invited to the party anymore.

Adapt to Stay Relevant
Our entire approach to marketing has to change if we want to stay relevant and add value to the business in this new environment. While this situation can create a crisis in many marketing and sales organizations, it also offers a great opportunity. Remember that today's prospects are actively searching for high-value information to help them better understand problems and solutions, make sense of available solutions, select the best fit for their requirements, and ultimately make an informed purchase decision? Now imagine the information customers are finding is yours. Clearly presented, educating the reader along every step of their decision making process. With compelling content that is relevant, valuable, and of high quality. Remarkable content that leaves a lasting impression and engages the reader to take action such as requesting access to your Webcast or asking to get in touch with you to learn more about your solution.

Brave New B2B Marketing World
Welcome to the brave new world of marketing. This new world is at the intersection of (1) valuable content that carries your message to the prospect, (2) the social and online media that prospects are increasingly using to find information and ask peers for their opinion, and (3) the marketing automation platforms to manage all of this complexity (campaigns, content, leads, etc) without losing your mind.

This intersection of content marketing, social media, and automation is where innovative marketing teams can help their companies gain traction and develop ongoing relationships and customer engagements. I mention "ongoing" because I believe the days of linear, one-dimensional, time-limited "campaigns" on the marketing side and transactional selling on the sales side are for the most part over. The effectiveness of these traditional tactics is declining steadily, and if you are in the marketing profession you'd better pay attention because we are looking at nothing less than a fundamental shift in the way companies engage with prospects.

What we need in this new environment are ongoing, parallel conversations with target audiences that lead to engagements with qualified prospects which in turn lead to value exchanges between both parties. Content marketing is rapidly gaining traction as a truly customer centric marketing tactic that aims at educating prospects and guiding them along their journey towards an educated decision in your favor - exchanging their money for your solution.

Steps to Surviving the Transition - And Thriving in the New Marketing World
So while the idea is pretty simple, execution is not all that trivial in complex B2B environments. After my article on the 5 Steps to B2B Marketing Success, I was asked to provide more guidance on how to actually implement this new approach to marketing. So I have spent some time thinking about how to approach this new world of marketing and developed a simple 7-step framework.

Here are the key components of the framework that I see, and I will spend the next few weeks covering each in greater detail. Interestingly enough, the "new marketing world" will put more emphasis on traditional marketing concepts as they are now truly the foundation for the success of your business - so many of the concepts below will not be new to you. The focus of this article is on content marketing as I believe it to be one of the most effective approaches available to marketers today. Other tactics are still relevant and effective.

Here are the seven steps to B2B marketing success in this new era:

1 - Segmentation & Profiling
Sound familiar? While the concept is not new, the majority of B2B vendors do a poor job at properly segmenting their markets and identifying the most profitable ones they want to compete in. In my opinion, this step determines success or failure on a strategic level, as simple as that. Segmentation as a way to identify target markets that are an ideal fit and allow you to compete successfully while focusing your resources is the first step to understanding your strengths and weaknesses relative to the opportunities and threats in a market. Only with this knowledge will an intelligent marketing approach become possible. Profiling of ideal companies and everything else follows from here.

2 - Buyer Persona
After establishing your target segments at the macro level, and defining your ideal customer profile, let's look at the people within those target organizations that influence and make buying decisions for the type of products or services you offer. What are their roles, goals, motivations, frustrations? How do they impact the buying process? Have you mapped out buyer personas and built profiles in order to align your messages and content with their needs? Where are these buyers looking for information to guide their decisions?

3 - Buyer's Journey
Once we understand who we are trying to influence, let's take a look at their buyer’s journey, from status quo to ultimate purchase of a product or service. What stages do your buyers go through? What are the decisions or outcomes you want to influence at each step of the way? What messages and information do you want to convey? By the way, mapping your entire marketing approach to the customer lifecycle is one way to become a truly customer-centric organization and impact prospects behavior and decisions. More on this later.

4 - Mapping Content to Buyer's Journey
After understanding the world from our prospects' perspectives, let's look at how we adapt to it to better engage and provide value. In this section I will talk about classes of content that map to the various stages of the buying cycle. It is much less complicated than it sounds :)

5 - Content Planning & Creation
At this point, it is time to clearly plan what pieces of content you want to offer specific to your segments, audiences, personas, and buying cycle stages. If not earlier, by now you will likely have a panic moment, realizing that you would need to employ dozens of domain experts and writers to create all the content assets you have identified. Time to take a step back and think about smart strategies to re-purpose and leverage existing content. Perform a content audit to identify gaps and overlap with existing assets. Also, consider how you will make sure that your content is on message and consistent (this is not trivial when you have multiple writers) - for example, do you have message maps that capture your key messages, differentiators, value proposition and positioning - by audience and segment?

Now is also a good time to think about focus as lack of focus has consequences. The further you stretch your resources and attention span (and your understanding of your markets), the less impact you will have on any of your target segments and people, reducing your demand generation and conversion rates significantly. So prioritize and rank your markets, audiences and content assets, and cut back everything that doesn't move the needle, starting from the bottom of your list. Pareto would probably suggest that only 20 percent of your market segments, decision maker personas, content assets, and programs contribute 80 percent of your impact on revenue. Identify those 20 percent - remember the goal is to work smarter, not harder :)

6 - Content Delivery to Engage Audiences
Now that you have planned and created compelling content, how are you going to get it in front of your target audience? Are your buyers frequenting certain online communities, are they searching Google with specific keyword and phrases, do they subscribe to your newsletters? Here you have an opportunity to map out how prospects will receive your information and how you increase your odds of it actually happening. Do you hide all of your content behind registration forms? Do you set it free and make it easily shareable via Email, Twitter, Facebook? Are you building specific calls to action into your content to drive prospects to your next piece of content or interaction with you?

7 - Performance Measurement
With regular reviews of actual performance against goals, you can quickly identify areas for improvement, opportunities for resource re-allocation, process changes, and further education. Dashboards, as the "glue" between strategy and execution, can provide leading and lagging indicators and metrics to correct issues and take action before they grow into bigger problems downstream.

While this approach looks like a neat sequence of steps that can be planned and executed in a waterfall type of fashion, in reality things are often much less clear cut. In analogy to agile programming, we are looking at a highly iterative process that at each step needs to be tested, validated, and tweaked before moving on to the next step. Yes, this is messy, it requires a lot of "hypothesis testing". Don't listen to anybody who tells you they have all the answers already, they don’t. And worse, be prepared to repeat this exercise frequently as your external and internal environment is in constant flux and you will need to adapt. Start with baby steps, learn and improve. This will become easier as you develop frameworks on how to do this so you can build best practices and don’t have to reinvent the wheel with every iteration. Again, welcome to the brave new world of marketing.

Let me know what your experience in this brave new world has been so far. I will spend the next weeks to dive deeper into each of the 7 steps outlined here, and I would like to incorporate your ideas and best practices. So send me your feedback using the comment feature below or send an email to hhschulze@gmail.com.