The WebMarketCentral Blog

How to Get Bloggers to Write About You

2008-07-16T09:21:00.001-05:00

Getting blog coverage for your product or service is now just as (if not more) important than getting written about in traditional media. Blogs are now mainstream, as almost 80% of Internet users report having read a blog within the last year. Blogs are also influential, trusted sources of information for buyers, particularly in the B2B space; the most recent ITtoolbox/PJA IT Social Media Index Wave II report updates earlier findings and concludes that "IT decision-maker and influencer audiences (now) spend more time consuming or participating in social media than they do consuming editorial media or vendor content." Blog coverage helps increase awareness, build credibility for your brand, and helps with SEO.

Yet many PR people stumble badly when reaching out to bloggers, with blog outreach efforts a mix of good, bad and ugly. As previously noted here and elsewhere, making pitches both personal and relevant is the first step to getting a blogger to write about you. It's also helpful to provide bloggers with useful assets such as images, video, audio and research findings (with original source links if it's not your own material) that they can incorporate into posts.

But how do you get beyond the basics? What really motivates bloggers to write about whatever it is they write about?

It's not about money—at least not primarily, for most bloggers. Therefore, outright bribery is a bad idea all the way around (that generally includes free products too, although there are a few exceptions to this rule, such as books).

Bribery is bad for you because you don't want your company to become known as a firm that has to pay to get coverage. If your product is unique and interesting, it should be blogworthy in its own right.

It's bad for bloggers. The vast majority of bloggers don't want to ruin their credibility by accepting money to write positive reviews. And the minority who are willing to write pretty much anything they're paid to write aren't the ones you really want covering your product or service.

And it's bad for readers. Blog readers want to be able to rely on bloggers for objectivity. Marketing brochures they can get from the vendor.

So what do bloggers want? While there are a wide variety of motivations for blogging, at some level with virtually every blogger it comes down to ego. Bloggers write to be respected and read. Respect is shown by practices such as personalizing communications and providing bloggers with access to key executives and internal experts.

Readership is an even bigger issue. Help bloggers increase their audience through writing about your product or service by linking to posts about your company:

from your website (examples include ON24 In The News and the illuminate Solutions Bloggers page);

in your company newsletter;

in your own corporate blog (if applicable); and

on any social networking sites where your company is active (e.g. Digg, Sphinn or Searchles).

In contrast to bribery, focusing on respect and readership creates a win-win situation. The blogger benefits from increased traffic; has a strong incentive to write a well-crafted piece (which is good for readers); and by helping increase traffic to that blog, you increase valuable third-party exposure for your own company.

*****

B2B Marketing Fast Fixes

2008-07-14T07:19:00.005-05:00

The slowdown across some sectors of the economy is forcing B2B marketers to pull back on spending, yet continue to produce great results (or else). With that in mind, MarketingSherpa last week presented their Top 10 B-to-B Marketing FastFixes: How to Generate & Nurture More Qualified Leads. Here are the highlights from the webinar.

Revisit SEO

Technologies, needs and customers change over time. If your website is still optimized for the same keywords as 18 months ago (or longer), now is a good time to re-validate your key search phrases. Start by looking in your analytics program to identify the top phrases prospects are using to find you.

Next, run those phrases through a keyword tool to find similar phrases and their relative search frequency. Finally, make sure your site is well optimized for those phrases that are both frequently searched and most relevant to your prospects.

In addition, since those phrases resonate with your prospects, make sure to incorporate them in your copywriting and SEM programs as well.

Speak Up

Speaking engagements are an excellent source of high-quality leads. When budgets are tight, focus particularly on local gigs to minimize travel-related expenses. To spread your reach without breaking the bank, seek out opportunities to be interviewed for podcasts by well-known traditional and social media types in your industry.

Optimize Ads for Content and Search

MarketingSherpa recommends setting up completely separate accounts for search and content network ads. At the very least, keep the two in separate campaigns. Why? The environments are completely different—in search, people are looking for relevant ads. They are on a search page and are going to click on something based on the results of their search. Your ad is competing only against the other search results.

On the content network, people are doing other things, such as reading articles, so ad copy has to be punchier and more action-oriented to get someone to click away from the page they are reading.

Also, on content networks, investigate the sites your ads are showing on, particularly those sites which are drawing the best results. This research is excellent for finding new sites for PR, direct advertising buys or blogger outreach.

Test Their Knowledge

Quizzes are a relatively inexpensive, easy and fun way to collect leads. People love to be tested on their knowledge, particularly engineering and IT audiences. In addition, you can mix in "research" type questions that can be used to collect information for later production of a research report / thought-leadership piece.

Small companies can use tools like SurveyMonkey, SurveyGizmo or Zoomerang to create quizzes. Larger enterprises and government agencies may already have an enterprise survey management application such as Vovici or Kinetic Survey in place.

Quizzes can be promoted through PR, blogger outreach, AdWords, home page promotion and through company email.

Give Your Knowledge Away

Studies have shown that dropping registration barriers for content such as white papers, webcasts and podcasts significantly increases the exposure to your materials—according to MarketingSherpa, by about a factor of seven on average.

Still, many marketers are reluctant to do this; "If I give away my white paper, how will I ever capture the lead?"

The answer, again according to MarketingSherpa, is to offer some knowledge of value free and then ask for contact information once you have the prospect's interest. For example, Red Hat software has provided no-registration-required webcasts. At the end of each webcast, prospects are presented with another offer (such as a whitepaper download or live webinar registration) which does require them to provide contact information.

Love the One You're With

Maintaining and even increasing sales during an economic downturn isn't just about generating new leads, but also moving the prospects already in your database along in their buying process. In round numbers, 80% of the leads in your database are people who aren't immediate prospects, but do have longer term potential.

According to MarketingSherpa, about 10% are mid-term prospects who could potentially be converted to more immediate opportunities. The remaining 70% are either long term prospects (who could be converted to mid-term prospects) or influencers (who could help immediately with lead generation).

Follow-Up is Crucial

When you manage to capture a precious lead, handle with care. Make sure your auto-responder email is engaging and interactive. And follow up with a phone call quickly—if you are slow in responding to a sales opportunity, prospects assume you'll be even slower to respond once they are a customer in need of technical assistance or inquiring about a billing issue.

IT staff in particular work all hours and expect fast response. The first vendor to respond to an inquiry—particularly if that response is fast, within the first 30 minutes or so after contact—has an inordinate chance of winning the business.

Use Plain Old Snail Mail

With email burnout increasing and ever-tightening spam filters in place to keep out anything that smacks remotely of marketing, email promotion is becoming less effective. Although physical mail obviously costs more, it can help your offer stand out. First, the medium has become less crowded as more marketing dollars have shifted online. Second, it shows the prospect that you're willing to pay to get their attention; they know as well as you that email is easy and virtually free, while postal mail requires greater effort and expense. Third, it offers unique creative possibilities (and people will almost always open "lumpy" mail, curious about what's in the package).

Evangelists, Branding and Measurement

A few final points from the webinar:

Few companies do a good job at reaching out to evangelists in their industry, such as bloggers. Flag evengelists in your marketing database, court them properly and you'll both increase your credibility and generate more pre-qualified leads.

Even in a downturn, branding is critical. A CEO isn't going to download your whitepaper. But the CEO may very well be asked to sign off on a final purchase, and is likely to question a purchase from a vendor he or she has never heard of. PR, brand advertising, and speaking opportunities are all great ways to go beyond lead generation and increase brand recognition with C-level executives.

Measure the right things. Particularly in a downturn, it's crucial to have metrics that demonstrate the value of marketing to sales and the business. Tracking the right measurements will not only protect existing budgets (and maybe even make room for small experiments), but also ensure that you are focused on the highest value-added activities for the organization.

Again, you can download the Top 10 B-to-B Marketing Fast Fixes slides here.

Update: the audio from the webcast is now available here.

*****

technorati tags: MarketingSherpa, Top 10 B-to-B Marketing FastFixes: How to Generate & Nurture More Qualified Leads, SEO, SEM programs, speaking engagements, b2b lead generation, search and content network ads, blogger outreach, SurveyMonkey, SurveyGizmo, Zoomerang, Vovici, Kinetic Survey, Red Hat software, snail mail, evangelists, branding, metrics

del.icio.us tags: MarketingSherpa, Top 10 B-to-B Marketing FastFixes: How to Generate & Nurture More Qualified Leads, SEO, SEM programs, speaking engagements, b2b lead generation, search and content network ads, blogger outreach, SurveyMonkey, SurveyGizmo, Zoomerang, Vovici, Kinetic Survey, Red Hat software, snail mail, evangelists, branding, metrics

icerocket tags: MarketingSherpa, Top 10 B-to-B Marketing FastFixes: How to Generate & Nurture More Qualified Leads, SEO, SEM programs, speaking engagements, b2b lead generation, search and content network ads, blogger outreach, SurveyMonkey, SurveyGizmo, Zoomerang, Vovici, Kinetic Survey, Red Hat software, snail mail, evangelists, branding, metrics

Contact Tom Pick: tomATwebmarketcentralDOTcom

Book Review: Marketing That Matters

2008-07-11T17:09:00.000-05:00

In writing Marketing That Matters, authors Chip Conley and Eric Friedenwald-Fishman, not content merely to provide an above-average book on marketing strategy, instead wrote an impressive book on marketing strategy—with a point of view.

The book combines guidance on marketing strategy and tactics with a "socially responsible" orientation. The result is best described as an avocado of a book: a solid core of marketing strategy surrounded by a thick layer of politically liberal messaging. As with an avocado, some readers will find this outer layer delightfully tasty, while others will consider it disgusting green mush.

"Socially responsible" has become a charged term. It perhaps shouldn't be; first off, who would want to run a "socially irresponsible" business? (According to the authors, Wal-Mart executives, of course.) Second, many of the management practices that the authors attribute to social responsibility—minimizing energy use, creating a positive work environment for employees, purchasing from local suppliers when possible—would simply be called good business by most entrepreneurs and managers. Keeping energy costs under control and employees happy is good for the bottom line, regardless of broader societal or political ramifications.

But, social responsibility or irresponsibility aside, the authors do provide an excellent treatise on marketing strategy. Some examples:

- Getting it: "Marketing is about creating relationships...people don't want to be marketed to—they want to build a relationship with...New-school marketing is based upon satisfying needs. Pushing product doesn't work anymore, especially in the era of the Internet, when savvy customers can connect with each other and trade stories about your product—and your company—and can easily find alternative choices." This is precisely the message of The Cluetrain Manifesto, and it's always refreshing to read authors who get this.

- Strategy starts with customer understanding: "Strategic marketing is acquiring a deep understanding of the needs and desires of your existing and potential customers and designing your business (products, services, delivery mechanisms, customer experience, branding, outreach, etc.) to meet and exceed their needs and desires. When energy bar leader Clif Bar developed the Luna bar, the core idea for creating the product—active women need an energy bar and have different nutritional needs than men—was a demonstration of the pure definition of strategic marketing. The strategic marketing decision to design an energy bar specifically for active women then led to many other strategic and tactical choices, regarding product design, branding and packaging, product distribution, community partnerships, and, ultimately, promotional and sales strategies."

- Affinity matters: "Consider gathering your leadership team in a room and looking at...a particularly compelling customer experience that can be articulated to the world. Ask each person to talk to two loyal customers about how they describe the company, brand, product, or service to their friends. See what's consistent in their messaging and start to build a story that you can use in all of your communications with the world: on your Web site, in your brochures, in your press releases, in your company orientation with new employees...In Lovemarks: The Future Beyond Brands, Kevin Roberts asks a provocative question: 'How do you get intimate with customers without being invasive or insincere?' This is such a refreshing question in today's world of commoditized brands, where everything feels standardized, distant, and lacking in personal touch. Get this question right and you'll build a fiercely loyal customer base." The challenge of aligning your definition of affinity with that of your customer has been addressed here before.

- Build a community: "Building a community of believers is one of the best pieces of marketing advice we can give to any businessperson...According to consulting giant McKinsey & Company (a company which does virtually no advertising, by the way; the company has an almost 100% referral and reputation-based business), about two-thirds of all economic activity in the U.S. is influenced by people's shared opinions about a product, brand or service...What if you had to tell your story nine times before your best friend acknowledged what you were saying? For one, you'd probably pick a new best friend. But that's a good way of looking at the inherent flaws in traditional advertising. Conventional wisdom suggests that it take nine impressions for a potential customer to retain the information in an ad. One good story from a friend far outweighs the potential of nine expensive ads...The Internet is the perfect medium for furthering the conversation between companies and their most enthusiastic customers. Check out any marketing-savvy...company's eb site and we bet you'll find many ways to engage with the community that orbits around that company or brand."

There is much, much more lucid and valuable strategic advice on topics such as branding, customer-centricity, empowering employees to spread your brand message, the role of emotion in decision making, and the importance of capturing and properly utilizing marketing metrics.

Again, however, these morsels of strategic marketing wisdom are drenched here in copious amounts of social responsibility sauce which won't appeal to all tastes. For example:

- Would you really want to work with people who have no sense of humor (or worse, no sense period)? "We've seen SRBs (socially responsible businesses) with poor marketing campaigns that came about as a result of choosing process over impact. What we mean by this is that they were so tied to their do's (always include all the facts and details, spend your advertising dollars only in publications that support your politics and point of view, only market products and services that are critical to human survival, etc.) and don'ts (never print in full color, never use humor in your marketing, etc.) that they forgot to ask, 'Does this marketing approach have an impact on our customer?'"

- Strange watercoolers. "In media stories, comments on blogs, and discussions at office watercoolers, it's not uncommon to read or hear comments like 'Why wouldn't you pay twenty-five cents more per pound to know that farmers are making a living, that your food is healthy, and that yhour tomato didn't contribute to global warming by flying across the world?' All good questions." First, such conversations are far less common in most of the country that the authors may realize. And second, many readers are likely to feel that anyone who seriously believes that flying tomatoes cause global warming really needs to be reading Bjorn Lomborg, not Conley and Friedenwald-Fishman.

- Government good, markets bad. Considering that marketing is the subject of the book, the authors are at times bizarrely anti-markets. "In fact, when we think of companies taking a stand, we usually think of industry-funded campaigns or individual company-sponsored ads, in which business voice has been used to fight health-care reform, limit tougher air and water quality standards, fight living wage laws...or limit liability for products such as guns."

Again, the authors seem to ignore the likelihood that many business people (the audience for this book) legitimately believe that more competition and less regulation is a better path to reducing health care costs and improving quality than a government takeover and exclusion of the private sector would be; that environmental standards should pass reasonable cost/benefits analysis before implementation; that raising costs on small business owners and reducing employment opportunities for entry level and marginally skilled workers isn't a great idea; and that we're better off without laws designed to enrich trial lawyers while making self defense more difficult and expensive.

- Confusing community involvement with controversy. The authors advise putting "philanthropy at the center of your value/values proposition," and highlight companies that support causes such as finding a cure for breast cancer, helping women escape the international sex trade, and keeping kids safe—all worthy and non-controversial causes.

But when the authors praise the work of groups like the Sierra Club, they are going to alienate readers who place affordable food for developing nations, American jobs, and relief for families from record-high gas prices above enriching thugocratic Middle Eastern despots and avoiding any inconvenience to Alaskan caribou. Even the writers' own local newspaper has picked up on the folly of substituting biofuels for petroleum, noting that "the road to hell is paved with good intentions."

Conley and Friedenwald-Fishman are from San Francisco, and their city's offbeat, left-of-center leanings are clearly on display here. While this book is likely to sell well in a line from Los Angeles to Seattle, its prospects anywhere to the right of the left coast—geographically or politically—are less clear. Perhaps the authors don't care. But it does seem incongruous to write a book about marketing (which is the art of persuasion) while being so enamored with government regulation (pure brute force).

It's unfortunate that the authors have chosen to imply that anyone who believes strongly in supporting philanthropic causes or sensible environmental protection must also be enamored with gun control and socialized healthcare. In placing so much emphasis on controversial political positions, the book needlessly alienates (at least) half of its potential audience. If your political leanings are left of center, you'll like (most of) this book. But if not, you'll have decide if getting to the solid core of worthwhile marketing strategy here is worth the effort of mentally scraping away the thick coating of green mush.

*****

technorati tags: book review, Marketing That Matters, Chip Conley, Eric Friedenwald-Fishman, marketing strategy and tactics, socially responsible businesses, avocado, green mush, The Cluetrain Manifesto, Clif Bar, Luna bar, Lovemarks: The Future Beyond Brands, Kevin Roberts, McKinsey & Company, branding, customer-centricity, SRBs, flying tomatoes, Bjorn Lomborg

del.icio.us tags: book review, Marketing That Matters, Chip Conley, Eric Friedenwald-Fishman, marketing strategy and tactics, socially responsible businesses, avocado, green mush, The Cluetrain Manifesto, Clif Bar, Luna bar, Lovemarks: The Future Beyond Brands, Kevin Roberts, McKinsey & Company, branding, customer-centricity, SRBs, flying tomatoes, Bjorn Lomborg

icerocket tags: book review, Marketing That Matters, Chip Conley, Eric Friedenwald-Fishman, marketing strategy and tactics, socially responsible businesses, avocado, green mush, The Cluetrain Manifesto, Clif Bar, Luna bar, Lovemarks: The Future Beyond Brands, Kevin Roberts, McKinsey & Company, branding, customer-centricity, SRBs, flying tomatoes, Bjorn Lomborg

Contact Tom Pick: tomATwebmarketcentralDOTcom

ON24 Launches Virtual Tradeshow Platform with Real Potential

2008-07-09T08:05:00.000-05:00

The concept of virtual tradeshows has been around since at least 2001. The appeal, to both exhibitors and attendees, is obvious. No travel costs. No lost productive time due to travel. No limit on the number of employees you can use to staff your booth or "send to the show." No need to limit the duration of the show to just a few days. No geographical boundaries (assuming you have a way to staff the odd hours). No environmental concerns. No panic because your booth staff flew to Chicago—but your booth ended up in Atlanta.

Yet in practice, uptake has been very slow. This is partly for cultural reasons (can I buy you a virtual drink?) but also because the technology has never quite delivered a user experience that's a viable substitute for physical presence. Now, the folks at ON24 believe they may have changed that. Their new Virtual Show platform combines the company's expertise in webcasting with rich graphics to create a compelling visual environment with useful tools for presenting information and qualifying online "booth visitors." It's almost like Second Life for trade shows.

Virtual Show is targeted at both individual companies and show organizers/event planners, including trade publications. On the individual company side, the platform could appeal to any company that's large enough to already host its own user group type events, but may be even more attractive to companies who are right on the edge of that—large enough to have a sizable base of engaged users, but not quite large enough to justify the expense of a live event. An online forum could be used in place of a live event for companies at this stage, while enabling firms that already host a live annual event to add supplemental online conferences throughout the year. Companies could also spread out the cost by selling virtual booth space to channel or technology partners.

The platform may have even more value for publishers. It enables them to offer advertisers a much richer and more interactive way to reach subscribers than the usual mix of enewsletter sponsorships, banner ads and white paper syndication. For aggressive publishers willing to get a jump on this, it also provides differentiation in a highly competitive online advertising market.

Virtual visitors to an event can:

network with peers at the show, exhibitors and sponsors (through online chat);

get documents (beyond the normal limited tradeshow marketing collateral, since the booth rep can now provide any document from within their organization);

view a presentation (similar to a webinar) and ask questions;

chat with a booth rep;

have content recommended to you via ON24's patent-pending Smart Booth technology;

engage in group discussion and interact with people; and

upload a cool avatar.

Depending on the number of booths and degree of customization, pricing generally ranges from $20,000-$50,000 per event. For a large enterprise hosting its own user group or other forum, that's competitive with the cost of a live event—and again, with no travel costs or travel-related lost productivity. Publishers should be able to provide advertisers with attractive pricing for an online presence that goes well beyond the standard webcast.

Other recent coverage of ON24 and Virtual Show:

ON24 Announces Virtual Venue Platform from Worlds In Motion

UP Media, ON24 partner for virtual trade show from DMNews

ON24 Enters Virtual Event Space with New Solution; Adds Flash to Webcasts from DemandGen

ON24 Aims to Turn Desktops into Conference Halls with Virtual Show from Streamingmedia.com

Kill the Business Trip from Forbes

*****

technorati tags: virtual tradeshows, ON24, Virtual Show platform, Second Life for trade shows, user group events, publishers, Smart Booth technology, pricing, webcast, ON24 Announces Virtual Venue Platform, Worlds In Motion, UP Media ON24 partner for virtual trade show, DMNews, ON24 Enters Virtual Event Space with New Solution Adds Flash to Webcasts, DemandGen, ON24 Aims to Turn Desktops into Conference Halls with Virtual Show, Streamingmedia.com, Kill the Business Trip, Forbes

del.icio.us tags: virtual tradeshows, ON24, Virtual Show platform, Second Life for trade shows, user group events, publishers, Smart Booth technology, pricing, webcast, ON24 Announces Virtual Venue Platform, Worlds In Motion, UP Media ON24 partner for virtual trade show, DMNews, ON24 Enters Virtual Event Space with New Solution Adds Flash to Webcasts, DemandGen, ON24 Aims to Turn Desktops into Conference Halls with Virtual Show, Streamingmedia.com, Kill the Business Trip, Forbes

icerocket tags: virtual tradeshows, ON24, Virtual Show platform, Second Life for trade shows, user group events, publishers, Smart Booth technology, pricing, webcast, ON24 Announces Virtual Venue Platform, Worlds In Motion, UP Media ON24 partner for virtual trade show, DMNews, ON24 Enters Virtual Event Space with New Solution Adds Flash to Webcasts, DemandGen, ON24 Aims to Turn Desktops into Conference Halls with Virtual Show, Streamingmedia.com, Kill the Business Trip, Forbes

Contact Tom Pick: tomATwebmarketcentralDOTcom

What Works Now in B2B Lead Generation, Part 2

2008-07-07T06:43:00.000-05:00

Part 1 of this review of MarketingSherpa's just-released 2008 B2B Lead Generation Handbook discussed the dramatic changes in B2B marketing practices over the last decade, why SEO and SEM have become critical components of any successful B2B lead generation strategy, and why B2B companies should consider hiring an integrated marketing-PR-online agency to help with these programs. Here are a few more nuggets of wisdom mined from the report.

Blogs and Microsites Can Help with SEO—Eventually

Creating a blog or topic-specific microsite can supplement SEO efforts by providing a venue to share thought-leadership content, in a more casual tone than a corporate site, free from content management or other technological constraints that may apply to a company website. However, as the MarketingSherpa report points out, "This is NOT a short-term strategy. Getting a brand new URL ranked for important keywords can take six months or longer...If you launch a new site for SEO purposes, consider it a permanent part of your online presence."

This is because, as the report notes, it takes time to build external links and a significant body of content, which are critical to establishing credibility with both search engine spiders and human readers (and why persistence is one of the most vital components of effective business blogging).

YouTube and the Paradox of Video Quality

Online video is hot for many reasons: it's engaging, portable, re-usable and increasingly searchable. MarketingSherpa's report provides useful advice for incorporating video into B2B lead generation plans, such as best practices in properly tagging corporate videos uploaded to YouTube.

However, the report authors' advice that "B-to-B videos should employ high-quality, professional techniques to reflect your brand and convey authority" is...not exactly wrong, but too simplistic.

This is where the paradox of video quality comes in. For small companies trying to establish and expand a brand presence in the market, high production values are critical. That's because the objective of a company in this stage is to look bigger than it actually is, and convey a level of credibility that it hasn't yet earned across the market place. It's also more critical the higher the level at which a company sells into its customer organizations (e.g. C-level vs. IT staff) and the larger the target customer organizations.

Ironically, however, the best approach for large organizations may be just the opposite; the "homemade look" that MarketingSherpa considers inappropriate for B2B videos can help to make large corporations seem more human and personal. Microsoft's Robert Scoble became legendary for this, and in this interview with Rodney Rumford of FaceReviews, he talks about how a large corporation like P&G could use very informal video to communicate with their market:

The importance of polished production values also depends on who a company is trying to reach with its message. Software developers, for example, will generally be far more interested in a video perceived as "real" advice from another developer, even with fairly low production values, than a glitzier production perceived as more "commercial." So the key is not so much to produce beautiful video as to produce it in a way appropriate for your objectives and audience.

The Most Interesting B2B Content

B2B marketers don't always understand what kind of information their prospects are looking for (which creates a fabulous opportunity for those who do get it). According to MarketingSherpa's research, B2B marketers believe that case studies, top 10 lists of ways to improve business, and new research on some aspects of an industry are the top three most interesting types of information, with case studies five times as interesting as research.

Their prospective buyers, on the other hand, view case studies, new research, and how-to guides for better using a product or service as the top three, ranking all fairly closely.

B2B marketers and their buyers agree, however, that interviews with analysts or executives on the state of an industry are the least compelling types of content.

It's Always About Your Prospective Customer (Not You)

Finally, the critical importance of relating the benefits provided by your product or service to your customers' interests can't be overstated. While B2B products can't be marketed in the same manner as clothing, sports cars or soft drinks, emotion still plays a vital role in B2B buying. There has to be rationality in the decision, of course, but that doesn't mean any B2B buying decision is purely rational.

Understanding what these emotions are, and shaping communications to address them, is what separates effective B2B marketing messages from self-absorbed noise. The researchers at MarketingSherpa have elegantly encapsulated these B2B buying emotions:

—keep your job, keep your company safe in a risky time, safeguard your department, avoid looking foolish, pick the most careful course of action, peer-vetted, proven, time-tested.

B. Ease

—make your job easier, save time, reduce stress, how-to, assistance, help, quick-and-easy, simplify.

C. Greed

—salary increases/bonuses, wealth, profits, rewards, more of something, stockpiling.

D. Power

—power to convince a boss or committee to agree with you; power to get your budget passed; powerful insights that can change one's direction for the better.

E. Ego

—knowing or proving you are better than other people; being recognized as outstanding in the company of your peers."

There you have it. Once again, the MarketingSherpa B-to-B Lead Generation Handbook exectuive summary is available here.

*****

tomATwebmarketcentralDOTcom

Off Topic: Have the Best 4th of July Ever!

2008-07-02T09:27:00.001-05:00

Since so few people are at work this week (physically in many cases, mentally in many more), it's a great time to go off topic and ponder just how much better life has become over the last three and a half decades. (How's that for a random figure?)

I'm not sure exactly what sparked it, but I got to thinking one recent rainy day as I watching my kids bounce between watching the flat screen TV to listening to their iPods to chatting with friends online to playing video games, how much better life has become since I was their age in the early 1970s. It's not just that we have more stuff (though we certainly do; the size of the world economy has more than tripled since 1970), but that the stuff we have has improved so much—it's smaller (in the case of electronics) or bigger (meals, houses), faster, higher quality and more functional.

Consider music for example (no, not the music itself, which was of course way better in the 1970s—Styx, Van Halen, Boston, REO Speedwagon, Aerosmith, c'mon!—but rather the way we listen to it). Albums provided high fidelity, but were fragile and definitely not portable. 8-track tapes were a disaster; cassettes were smaller and songs didn't break in the middle, but the audio quality was so-so and they had a tendency to wear out and eventually get "eaten" by a player. Now we have MP3s; decent quality, ultimate portability, and you don't have to go to record store to buy them.

Or movies. In the early 1970s, if you missed seeing a movie during its theatre run, you had to wait two to three years. Then one of the networks would finally show it—chopped up by commercials and "reformatted to fit your television screen," which at that time was smallish and so convex you had to sit almost directly in front of it to get a non-distorted view. And they didn't even have remotes! Now we have Netflix and pay-per-view and video stores and cable; we can watch movies, in widescreen high-def format, shortly after they leave theatres, commercial-free, on big flat panel TVs.

Or communications. In the early 1970s, sending a note meant sending a note. On paper, in an envelope, through postal mail which took days to deliver (much longer if overseas). There was one phone company. Unless you were rich, you had only one phone (a black one, rented from the phone company), and it was stationary. Long-distance calls cost a fortune (I remember calling a friend in Spain cost me $1.27 per minute, in mid-1970s dollars; can you even imagine paying the inflated equivalent, which would be about $6.00 per minute today, to make a call to another country now?) and the sound quality was awful. Freedom of the press belonged to those to owned one, and many big city newspapers had a virtual monopoly over local distribution of the written word.

Yuck! But today we have email, IM, Skype, Vonage, Twitter, blogs, cell phones, texting and more. Communication is democratic, cheap, instantaneous and portable.

Not everything has improved with time of course: due to a lack of true choice, our educational system in the U.S. has failed to keep up; progress against cancer has been painfully slow; lawyers have sucked a lot of the fun out of life; and the downfall of communism was unfortunately followed by the rise of a competing ideology even more ruthless, sinister and absolute. But, on the whole, life is a whole lot better, and everything has changed.

Why, back in the early 1970s, we had a presidential election that pitted a veteran politician from the western U.S., who was viewed as too liberal by many of his fellow Republicans, squaring off against a senator from a midwestern state, with no executive experience, who was viewed as too liberal even by many Democrats. Among the most pressing issues of the day were energy policy, relations with China, and an unpopular war halfway around the world.

Hmm, perhaps not everything has changed either. Oh well, Happy Independence Day!

*****

Contact Tom Pick: tomATwebmarketcentralDOTcom