Reputation to Revenue

The urgency of B2B content marketing

2010-03-16T15:25:08-04:00

Yesterday I wrote about "marketing as media" in B2B and the challenge of becoming a top source of information and ideas for your customers and prospects. It's critical for all the reasons you know: traditional marketing tactics don't work anymore, your potential buyers are actively looking for new ideas, and you'd better jump into the online conversations happening about your brand because they're going on with or without you.

Today's new s from American Business Media adds another note of urgency: Business magazine revenue was down another 24% in 2009 from 2008, and total pages declined almost 29%...and 2008 was a pretty bad year!

I'm certainly rooting for B2B magazines to make the transition they need to make, but it's hard for marketers to count on a lot of support in getting the message out and the conversation started.

Photo credit: back_garage

Marketing as media: Are you in the top five?

2010-03-15T11:19:14-04:00

B2B marketers are getting used to the idea that we have to think of ourselves more as media organizations and publishers than pitchmen and promoters. We need to understand our audiences better, produce more compelling and engaging content on a regular basis, and facilitate ongoing conversation around issues and ideas that matter most to them.

But are we good enough yet that our customers and prospects would include us as a top five information source?

Now that's a challenge!

But it's precisely what comes to mind as I read the new State of the News Media 2010 study from the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism. According to Pew's exhaustive annual review of American journalism, the majority of online readers rely on only two-to-five websites for most of their news. More than 20% rely mainly on just one site, and only 12% regularly use more than six.

I realize that news sites are a different animal than business sites, but I'm confident the same dynamic holds true for readers (i.e., buyers) of B2B information.

Search, of course, is an essential way that buyers find the information they're looking for online, and recommendations from friends and colleagues on Twitter, Facebook, Google Reader, and the like are coming on fast. Beyond that, however (and increasingly because of that crowding out effect), few of us have time to read more than a few trusted sites on a regular basis.

Do you have one of those top trusted sites for your customers and prospects? Are you producing, curating, and sharing enough great content on a regular basis in a variety of compelling and convenient formats to inspire your key stakeholders to keep coming back? What would it take to make that happen?

Photo credit: woodleywonderworks

Social media and thought leadership: The virtuous circle for B2B marketing

2010-03-11T08:00:00-05:00

As B2B marketers invest more money and time in both thought leadership and social media, they risk missing a great deal of potential benefit they can achieve by bringing the two together in a holistic way.

All too often, at least in my experience in the tech sector, marketers investing in thought leadership view social media primarily as a channel for disseminating content.

They get the idea that social media is important, and that relying on traditional media channels (including email and websites) to promote their ideas is no longer enough.

As such, they're beginning to slice and dice thought leadership content into blog posts, tweets, videos, and the like -- and use Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, SlideShare and other platforms to promote that content as widely as possible in the social sphere.

This all seems fine, but I think it's far too limited a view.

In fact, isn't this just a more refined version of the same old one-way broadcast mentality? Ponder big thoughts, maybe do some research, put together a presentation or white paper, and then release it to the world and wait for the acclaim and customer inquiries to come rolling in.

"Going social" with content gives it a better chance of being seen, but a more collaborative approach to understanding customer issues and creating new Points of View before even creating any content greatly raises the chances that customers will actually care.

Socializing every aspect of the thought leadership process requires a more fundamental shift than just reformatting content and creating a longer checklist of places to publish.

It means letting go of the notion that you have all the good thinking locked inside your organization, that you shouldn't publish anything until it provides all the answers, and that thought leadership is about you talking and customers listening.

It means taking the zeitgeist of social media seriously, that it's not a "channel" at all, but a way of thinking and doing business based most of all on listening, sharing, and collaborating.

The reality is that lots of great thinking and experience lie outside your organization (to say the least), customers and partners want to collaborate in developing new approaches and solutions, and the best way to demonstrate expertise is to ask the right questions and facilitate ongoing conversation.

The virtuous circle of social media and thought leadership includes five main elements, discussed below:

Customer and market insight: Tapping social media and networks to dig deeper (and often faster) into the issues your customers and prospects really care about. This can begin as simply as using Google Reader and Google Alerts to follow important online conversations. It can be as sophisticated as using high-end monitoring and analytics services like Radian6 or Nielsen BuzzMetrics, organizing "Innovation Jams" like IBM, or building your own customer communities to ensure a steady flow of deep customer insight.
Collaborative Points of View: Rather than rely on a single expert or a purely internal team, why not work with customers and other stakeholders to craft a more relevant and compelling Point of View to undergird thought leadership content? Executive interviews, client roundtables, external working groups, academic and think tank partnerships can all be part of the thinking process, not simply vehicles to disseminate finished products. Social tools make these collaborations far easier and more affordable to manage.
Relevant routes to market: This is the area of marketers are already digging into, and with good reason. If you're NOT taking advantage of social tools and networks to disseminate your thought leadership content, you're missing an enormous opportunity to reach key stakeholders where they are increasingly spending their time searching for new ideas. The recent Forbes study, The Rise of the Digital C-Suite, is only one of a multitude of survey reports documenting that executives now rely on online search, video, and social networks as a core information source.
Viral leverage: Your customers and prospects trust independent experts far more than company spokespeople, as Edelman's Trust Barometer shows every year, and gaining their support is far more likely to trigger social media sharing than anything you do directly. Identifying and reaching out constructively to the new influencers in your markets (bloggers, analysts, community managers, etc.) is now essential to thought leadership success.
Conversation and community: The old broadcast mode of thought leadership assumed a straight line from polished publication to customer inquiry to sales presentation. In a few rare cases of truly blockbuster ideas, this may even have worked. In today's vastly more networked world, customers want to chew over and debate your ideas at length -- and often without you even present. Inspiring, facilitating, and participating in the conversation is the right goal for thought leadership marketing, and using social platforms and communities is the best way to make this possible. Not incidentally, it's also the best way to gain deep and ongoing customer and market insight, which keeps the whole circle going.

Make sense? What do you think?

TL in 4D: Four dimensions for thought leadership success

2010-03-04T22:58:25-05:00

B2B marketers know that thought leadership is essential, especially when selling high-value solutions. Business buyers tune out most traditional marketing, but they are always looking for new ideas. If we can produce interesting and useful content, and use social media and other platforms to spread the good word, we at least have a chance of getting into the conversations that our customers and prospects actually want to have.

Perhaps not surprisingly, thought leadership topped the list when ITSMA recently asked marketing leaders at big tech and IT services firms which tactics will be more important in 2010. According to ITSMA, 77% of respondents cited thought leadership development as a priority, beating out references and testimonials, senior executive programs, and social media.

For most B2B firms, however, thought leadership is getting a great deal more lip service than investment. Other than top consulting and professional service firms like McKinsey, Deloitte, and Accenture, few B2B firms have yet created a focused and well-organized thought leadership marketing program. My own recent review of 72 corporate members of the Institute for the Study of Business Markets, for example, found that only 24 of these manufacturing, industrial, and technology companies even had a link to thought leadership content on their home page.

All too often, thought leadership in B2B is thinly funded (if at all), episodic, and superficial.

There is no dedicated staff, no editorial calendar for content production, and a heavy reliance on subject matter experts "volunteering" their nights and weekends to bang out a few white papers, articles, and blog posts.
Content tends to overemphasize company promotion and underemphasize customer and market evidence.
Publications typically are one-off productions with little coordinated effort to leverage new thinking into multiple formats, networks, and channels.

To make a real impact with customers and create real distinction in the market, thought leadership needs focus, depth, and continuity.

Consider, for example Accenture's years-long in-depth research on high performing companies. They focus on strategic challenges facing each industry the company serves, orient primary research and publications to different executive roles among their client base, and deliver insights across a wide range of online, face-to-face, and social media platforms.

Not every company has Accenture's deep pockets, to be sure, but the lessons are clear. And it's not just a matter of blogging more and getting more content onto Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube -- although social media clearly IS critical for thought leadership dissemination and engagement.

At a more fundamental level, companies looking for greater impact with thought leadership need to consider four essential dimensions of program development:

Points of View: Effective thought leadership is rooted in compelling, differentiated, and evidence-based points of view on important business challenges -- not product features or quick opinions or the experience of a single client engagement. Companies need to invest the time, research budgets, and analytic expertise it takes to create points of view that really matter. You've got to take a stand, but in ways that are not simply provocative but rooted in primary research and real world experience. (For a guide to developing effective points of view, check out Solutions Insights' Point of View Development Template.)
Internal Education: Especially with the rise of social media, you're relying more and more on a great many employees to tell your story, not just a few executives or subject matter experts. Investing in internal education around your points of view is critical to equipping marketing, sales, and other customer-facing employees (which could be anyone online) to engage constructively on the issues that matter in ways that demonstrate real expertise. It's also a great way to generate more insight and tap more internal experience to feed into Point of View development.
Market Engagement: Publishing and disseminating content is what most people think of when they consider thought leadership marketing. But the traditional reliance on white paper publishing, conference speaking, and pushing for mainstream media coverage is far too limited in today's always-on, socially networked world. Market engagement today is about pervasive presence and ongoing conversation; publishing is just the beginning of the process. And the development of more substantial points of view makes it much easier to produce steadier streams of useful content across multiple platforms.
Program Operations: Making this all work requires dedicated staff, disciplined processes, and clear metrics and accountability. This doesn't have to mean huge staffs or budgets, but it does mean accepting that the "volunteer" work on nights and weekends is unlikely to have a serious impact or create distinction against competitors with a more organized and funded approach. Rather, you need to bring together people, processes and tools that can do the research and analysis, generate compelling points of view, and sustain the internal and market engagement required to reap the benefits effective thought leadership can provide.

Based on our own research and experience working with thought leadership programs across the IT and professional services sectors, Solutions Insights has developed a four stage roadmap for thought leadership program development, as you can see below. It's a simple model that necessarily abstracts a great deal of nuanced reality, but it should be useful in evaluating your own programmatic maturity and considering next steps for improvement. We'd love to know what you think of the roadmap -- and please weigh in with comments on your own approach and experience. We're still learning, too.

Six steps to differentiating your solutions

2010-02-24T14:12:18-05:00

Aargh! Six weeks to launch, and so much to do. The solutions management folks have spent months putting together the new offering, and now we've got about 87 things to do to get ready on the marketing side. Press release...internal webinar for the sales team...customer presentation...special briefings for the top account leads...white paper...update the public site with descriptions...collateral for the trade show. Oh yeah, and all the social media stuff, too: some blog posts, tweet schedule, maybe a few videos.

The real challenge, of course, is getting anyone to care. Your customers are inundated with shiny new offers every day of the week, and they pretty much tune them all out. If they're actually looking for a new solution, sure, they might want to chat or at least check out your stuff, but otherwise...forget it.

Unless, of course, you actually make the new offer relevant, compelling, and truly evocative of real value. We all say our new solutions are important and different, but the sad reality is that the vast majority are me-too offerings that fail to connect or excite.

Some of this is inevitable in a world of intense competition. But a great deal reflects that fact that we simply don't put in the time or energy to identify and communicate the true differentiators that actually matter to prospective buyers. We get so caught up in cranking out the stuff of the launch process that we fail to step back and methodically work through why our solutions are better than those of the competition, and how to connect those differentiation dots to the issues our customers care about the most.

It's not rocket science, but it does take some effort, and a formal process helps. Over at Solutions Insights, we've spent a lot of time with companies that do this the right way (as well as many that don't!). Based on that experience, we've put together a quick six-step guide for defining and demonstrating clear and relevant differentiators for solutions that can make or break the launch process.

Six Steps to Differentiating Your Solutions Offerings

We'd love to know what works for you!

More evidence that give-to-get is the key to success

2009-12-03T23:48:05-05:00

It's pretty much a cliche to say that marketing today is all about give-to-get. You provide customers and prospects with new ideas, new experiences, and new connections in order to earn their attention. You keep at it until they open up to a conversation that, over time, can lead toward an actual sales opportunity.

In B2B, though, I'm constantly surprised at how often marketers pay little more than lip service to this essential idea.

You see it in companies that persist in spending more on promotion and pitch than on interaction and collaboration.

You see it in the cutbacks to customer research and insight (how can you "give" something of value to customers if you don't even pay attention to what they're facing?).

And you see it when marketers hand off the first hint of a "lead" (e.g., a name from a trade show or white paper download) to the inside or outsourced sales team to begin "qualifying" opportunities.

A new survey from B2B agency Doremus and the Financial Times provides yet more evidence that the old ways are of little use. As noted by Doremus president Howard Sherman:

Recently, Doremus and the Financial Times collaborated on a survey called Decision Dynamics in which 470 worldwide senior level executives were asked: Which supplier is most likely to get work from you in tough times as compared to prosperous times?

Interestingly the top answer was not the cheapest or the supplier with the best/longest relationship, or even the one who could prove ROI. The answer was the supplier most proactive in helping you [emphasis in original].

Sherman goes on to list some types of help that marketing agencies in particular might be able to provide, including being more nimble, strengthening internal relationships, and rebuilding trust with investors and customers.

For me, the key point here is that give-to-get is more important than ever. The executives in the survey are saying "help me."

Your customers need help, they want it from you (so long as you have something valuable to offer), but they're typically so stressed out by the daily grind that they barely have time to ask. And they certainly have little tolerance for promotional marketing. As such, the idea of "proactive help" should be front and center.

Practically speaking, this means:

Investing more in understanding your customer's businesses and challenges; you can never have too much customer insight
Putting more energy into developing real thought leadership in the market that demonstrates truly news ways to help customers solve problems
Reaching out to your best customers with offers to provide legitimately useful briefings and demos (i.e., not sales pitches)
Investing in social media skills, tools, and initiatives to help share the wealth of knowledge and experience that lies throughout your organization.

The concept seems easy. Is the execution so hard?

Photo: sekimura

Reengineering the white paper, part 1

2009-11-18T09:00:00-05:00

Several months ago, I began talking with colleagues Bob Buday and Tim Parker about "reengineering the white paper." Our basic idea was that, although white papers have flooded the Web for years, and more and more companies are investing in them to help demonstrate expertise and thought leadership, the reality is that most of them are pretty bad. They're unoriginal, boring, and overly promotional, which pretty much rules out having the intended impact of generating interest and leads.

Despite their common failings, however, we're still firm believers that white papers can be one of the most effective tools in the marketing toolbox...if they are developed and marketed the right way.

Having worked on and marketed countless white papers ourselves, we think we know the right way.

The first part of our three-part series, "Developing a Point of View," explores the aspect of white paper production that is most often lacking: the creation of a powerful, credible, and novel argument about how to address an important business challenge. Subsequent parts will focus on marketing white papers and overcoming the typical organizational obstacles in creating and marketing them effectively.

The first and biggest mistake companies make, we argue, is treating white papers primarily as writing assignments. Instead, they should be viewed as projects to create strong and distinct points of view -- which subsequently can be written up in a white paper. Good writing is obviously important, but the bulk of the work in building an argument, gathering evidence, creating new frameworks and so on should precede the writing.

I don't want to repeat the whole article here, but I do hope you'll give it a look and let me know what you think. Given the amount of time and money spent on white papers these days, the impact of a more effective way to produce them can be substantial indeed.

Photo by kevindooley.

Winning with thought leadership: Six lessons from IBM and Deloitte

2009-11-05T09:00:00-05:00

B2B marketers know they need to invest in thought leadership, and many have indeed invested more during the last few years. Making the most of these investments, however, rests on having the right answers to a set of difficult questions:

What topics should we highlight?
How should we produce and package thought leadership content?
How should we promote it?
How can we measure success?

Absent good answers, thought leadership initiatives quickly fall prey to more traditional priorities around lead generation and sale support. The irony, of course, is that good thought leadership has increasingly become a prerequisite to making lead generation and sales support actually work with high value deals. Absent something interesting to talk about related to core customer issues, would-be buyers pay little attention to straight-on sales pitches.

ITSMA's announcement last week of the winners of its annual M arketing Excellence Awards featured two great examples of thought leadership marketing from IBM and Deloitte. Although few companies have committed to thought leadership investment at anywhere near the level of IBM and Deloitte, the basic lessons from their winning initiatives are totally applicable to any B2B firm that needs thought leadership.

Full disclosure: I served as a judge for this year's awards program and used to run the whole program when I worked for ITSMA. And, yes, I cast my votes for both winning initiatives, so was pleased that the other judges agreed.

The Global CEO Study

IBM's biennial Global CEO Study is a massive undertaking focused on digging deep into top CEO concerns around the world. The 2008 edition, "The Enterprise of the Future," involved face-to-face interviews with 1,130 CEOs and public sector leaders from large organizations in some 40 countries. Released publicly in May 2008, the core report highlighted five strategic attributes that CEOs are trying to build into their organizations:

Hungry for change
Innovative beyond customer imagination
Globally integrated
Disruptive by nature
Genuine, not just generous

Filled with data and analysis by industry, region, and more, the IBM report provides a wonderfully insightful look at how CEOs are dealing with the biggest questions of business strategy, culture, and organization.

The Risk Intelligent Enterprise

Deloitte's Risk Intelligent Enterprise program also addresses some meaty concerns: how companies should think about risk at the most strategic level. Through a series of white papers and other thought leadership publications and activities, Deloitte has taken a strong stand on what "risk intelligence" actually means, how it relates to business strategy, and how to operationalize it across the organization in even the most complex environments.

Perhaps most important, the Deloitte program highlights the idea that risk management is not just about avoiding overly risky behavior, but also about taking intelligent risks in a properly managed way to support growth and change.

Based on ongoing research as well as Deloitte's extensive experience working on risk management with companies of all stripes, the Risk Intelligent Enterprise program helps companies understand one of today's most critical management issues in a thoughtful, creative, and responsible way.

Lessons Learned

Stepping back from the specifics of these two initiatives, I see six general lessons for thought leadership marketers at any level:

Put Customers First. It sounds obvious to say that thought leadership marketing should focus on what your customers really care about, but far too many marketers take a product- or solution-first approach and try to fit some larger issue neatly around their offering. Buyers don't care about your offerings by themselves; they have their own problems to worry about. Engage them where they live. IBM is trying to build relationships with CEOs, so they research and talk about what other CEOs are doing. Deloitte works especially closely with Boards of Directors, CFOs, and other C-level executives; it's hard to think of a C-suite issue more pressing these days than risk management. What do your customers and prospects really are about?
Do the Research. Thought leadership without real research is just opinion, and opinions are a dime a dozen. Show buyers serious research, though, and they're much more likely to pay attention. You might not be able to interview 1,130 CEOs around the world, but you can survey and interview your customers and prospects, produce serious case studies (not puff piece "success stories"), and comb the literature and online conversation to produce new insights.
Say Something New. Thought leadership without a differentiated point of view is just an echo of conventional wisdom. Why should customers listen to your version then they've already heard it before -- or if you're only telling them something they already know. Smart customers want to be challenged. If you're not sparking at least some disagreement and debate, you probably haven't said anything new. None of IBM's five attributes are themselves shockingly new but the synthesis suggests and aggressive and innovative approach that goes well beyond conventional thinking. Deloitte's focus on the upside as well as the downside of risk clearly stands apart from the post-Wall Street collapse mentality of compliance first, last, and always.
Build a Pervasive Presence. Long gone are the days when thought leadership marketing meant publishing a white paper, research report, or journal article and then moving on to the next project. Media fragmentation, information overload, and the power of social media make it critical that thought leadership marketers put substantial energy into getting the word out across a broad range of media and activities. IBM's 360 degree campaign for the CEO study included traditional activities (email, Web, direct mail, advertising, press and analyst briefings, sales enablement, video, etc.) as well as a number of newer approaches (blogs, podcasts, online innovation jams, and branded content). IBM also produced 15 "flavors" of the main report for different industries and C-suite positions. Deloitte has similarly tapped a wide variety of media and activities to engage clients, prospects, and market influencers. For thought leadership marketing today, think multi-media, social media, and complementary online and offline engagement to build a strong presence wherever your stakeholders already spend their time.
Stick with It. IBM's CEO study is a two year project, and the 2008 version is IBM's third such study. To maximize marketing impact, IBM organizes a "teaser phase" (outreach to build awareness before the formal launch), a "reveal phase" (a multi-faceted public launch to build buzz internally and externally), and a "sustain phase" (ongoing engagement to dig more deeply into the issues with customers and others). Deloitte launched the Risk Intelligent Enterprise effort in 2006 and has continued to explore the issues, refine the point of view, publish, and engage. The point is to pick a core issue for your customers and stick with it. Thought leadership takes time. It's better to pick one or two issues and work them hard for several years than to flit from one issue to the next in a more superficial way.
Confirm the metrics. Far from an airy initiative, thought leadership marketing can and should focus on core metrics essential to business development and growth. Objectives for the IBM initiative revolved around relationship building with CEOs, corporate visibility and interest, ongoing engagement with key contacts, and sales leads. Deloitte takes a similar approach, focusing on competitive differentiation, influencer relations, client connections, and business development support. Setting and gaining organizational agreement on clear marketing and business development objectives provides the grounding and accountability that marketers need to justify the necessary investments.

Serious thought leadership marketing is not easy, but taking these six lessons to heart will go a long way toward success. At least that's my opinion! What do you think?

Marketing as service: Samsung and Best Buy put customers first

2009-11-03T12:19:10-05:00

I love this new effort from Samsung to generate helpful user questions and answers on the BestBuy.com. As explained today in Clickz, the "Brand Answers" feature (based on technology from Bazaarvoice) has just finished a five-month trial and almost doubled views of Samsung products on the Best Buy site:

When visitors click a button on the brand's products details pages, a pop-up FAQ feature that's called "Mr. Samsung" appears. Then, visitors can read pages of questions and answers that were previously supplied by other viewers. They can also search the feature to find the content they need or something close to it.

Additionally, users can type in their own questions, which the feature says in a message will be answered within a 16-hour window. The most popular question during the test was, "Can I hang this TV on the wall?"

I love this for three reasons:

It's all about helping customers make better purchase decisions
It taps the wisdom of the crowd to generate more, faster, and often better answers than could easily (and affordably) be provided by Samsung employees
It demonstrates the confidence that both partners share in testing new ideas and opening their doors to put customers first

It's obviously a consumer-focused initiative, but the principals hold true for B2B, don't you think?

Aren't we past random acts of "selling"?

2009-08-28T10:30:11-04:00

Sigh -- another random call this morning from a telemarketer on behalf of a large tech company:

Caller: "Hi, this is [name] from [company name] on behalf of [tech company]. I noticed you downloaded some research. Did you find everything you need?

Me: To be honest, I don't remember.

Caller: Well, it would have been in the last 30 days, or maybe the last two months. Do you have any plans to purchase software in the next 18-24 months?

30 or 60 days ago? I can't remember last week. Do $1 apps for my iPhone count? Given the high-priced enterprise applications this company sells, I'm guessing not!

Me: I'm with a small consulting company. I don't think I fit your audience.

Caller: Well the [tech company's] new division specializes in companies from 5-500 employees. Do you have any plans to purchase...

You get the drift. How is this random calling to "qualify" a "lead" based on white paper download a month or two earlier worth anything?

White papers have their place (heck, I write some of them for clients myself!), and telemarketing, properly applied, can certainly have value. But it's hard for me to imagine that this archaic spray and pray approach to marketing and sales does the slightest good for your reputation, your pipeline, or your bottom line.

Aren't we past these random acts of selling?

Photo credit: vlima.com

Rite Aid impresses with active customer service

2009-07-29T17:53:13-04:00

Little things really do add up.

Like many people, I have several prescriptions with Rite Aid Pharmacy. Refills are easy; you just call the number on the bottle a few days before a prescription runs out, tap your way through the automated voice prompts, and pick it up the next day. Nothing earth-shattering, but it's convenient and a good, simple use of Interactive Voice Response (IVR) technology.

Today, though, I caught the next wave. Coming home and finding a voicemail on my home phone, I listened to an automated message from Rite Aid asking me to call an 800 number about my prescription. When I did, it took me through a several minute IVR session which proceeded by reminding me that my prescription was about to run out, asking me if I wanted to refill it, and then asking if I wanted to sign up for a free service that would automatically refill my prescriptions every month and let me know when they were ready for pickup. No more effort on my part, and I get to save an extra few minutes every month.

Again, it's nothing earth-shattering. The technology has been around for a while. But how many companies are reaching out and touching their customers in a a true service-oriented fashion, not to sell new products or services but simply to improve the customer experience?

Yes, the better companies bend over backwards to respond to problems (although most companies still don't). And yes, it's obvious that Rite Aid is trying to sell me more stuff, prescriptions and otherwise. Most likely they will, too. So it's definitely good marketing.

What's different here is the basic approach: Service matters as much or more than the products themselves, promotion is less important than service delivery, and good things come to those who continually improve the customer experience.

What free services are you adding or changing to improve customer experience and build customer loyalty?

Photo credit: Seattle Municipal Archives

The power of video: Outsourcing reality show illuminates the buying process

2009-07-16T11:18:46-04:00

About a month ago, the good folks at the Outsourcing Institute asked me to contribute some "lessons" for services marketers based on their web-based reality show, The Transaction. No cash involved, but it sounded like an quick PR hit for me while helping out a great organization.

When I checked out the series, however, I realized this was a much bigger deal. Endless "experts" (including, at times, me!) pontificate about what companies need to do to market and sell high-stakes services. Some of the advice is even good. But capturing the real feel for such a complex process is extremely difficult.

The Transaction documents on video the real-life effort of a buyer team from Kodak in its effort to find and hire an outside firm to handle all of Kodak's recruitment, hiring, and on-boarding of new employees. A marketing and sales reality show, no less.

The brainchild of Outsourcing Institute CEO Frank Casale, the video series (each episode is under 15 minutes) documents critical moments throughout the buying process, from initial conception to signing the deal.

Kodak begins with a list of some 50 providers to consider, narrows the list through research and due diligence, creates a finalist pool, and moves to a final decision (spoiler alert: although the final episode is not yet posted, the actual deal went down last year when Kodak signed a three-year contract with HR outsourcer Pinstripe).

Episode 7, the one for which I provided some lessons learned, shows the team debriefing its recent site visits to two finalist candidates.

Overall, it's a wonderful way to provide real insight into the buying process, something that all marketers struggle to understand -- and that the vast majority of case studies, white papers, conference presentations and the like do little to illuminate.

And make no mistake, it's a buying process, not a sales process. The Kodak team is anxious to decide (the whole process in this case was less than two months), but they are firmly in control. Marketers (and sales people) would do well to keep this basic reality at the forefront of their thinking.

So kudos to the Outsourcing Institute for creating the series and to Kodak for being brave enough to allow their buying team to work on camera. A definite thumbs up from this satisfied viewer.

Bad service blowback - United Breaks Guitars

2009-07-10T12:48:56-04:00

Lots of companies are still nervous about participating in social media; they fear negative comments, among other things. The reality, of course, is that if you're providing lousy products or service, the bad comments are coming anyway, and with an ever larger megaphone.

Example 8 million is singer/songwriter Dave Carroll's tuneful blast at United Airlines for breaking his guitar -- and then stonewalling Dave for a year against apologizing and paying damages.

Four days after posting the video, and 1.3 million views later, United is rushing to make amends and even saying they'll use Dave's video for internal customer service training. Obviously the damage is done. And the main lesson here is not actually about social media, it's about customer service. If you're not doing the right thing, expect people to give you grief. Engaging more directly in social media might help, as Comcast is finding out, but the real answer is fix your service and don't give people reasons to shout -- or sing!

Thanks to Marketing Pilgrim for the pointer.

Blog as hub, site as spoke

2009-06-23T20:19:08-04:00

David Berkowitz (@dberkowitz) from the digital marketing agency 360i had a nice article today about building your brand with social media

He used the example of launching the agency's new Social Marketing Playbook earlier this month (which is well worth a look). The launch was a success (10,000 downloads in the first few days), and David stresses the essential back story--the hard work of the last few years building the agency's social presence through blogging, Facebook, Twitter, SlideShare, Scribd, LinkedIn, Flickr, and so on.

It's a good story, and a great reminder that social media marketing is about ongoing and integrated presence, not individual campaigns or discrete tool-based initiatives.

But a single line--and phrase--stuck with me most:

There was also a clear architecture for it [our social media efforts], with the blog as a hub, and all of the spokes, including our corporate site, relating coherently to the hub and to each other.

"With the blog as a hub..."

For readers at small companies or consulting on their own, the idea of the blog as hub is nothing special. You want to demonstrate expertise, regularly refresh content to drive better search performance, and minimize site maintenance workload. A blog makes perfect sense.

What about larger companies? The logic certainly remains the same. Larger companies also want to demonstrate expertise, maximize search, and minimize needless site maintenance. But big companies are too complicated to boil it all down to a blog, right? What about all those offerings, success stories, executive bios, and the rest of the content that fills endless pages on large corporate sites?

Well, maybe. But does "needing" a more traditional site to serve as a corporate archive mean it has sit at the center of marketing?

Most of the people you're trying to connect with care a lot more about your latest thinking than they do about your carefully crafted but static product, service, and solution pages. So why not push the corporate site off to the side and put the blog front and center?

It's a radical notion for a large company, but perhaps it's just the sort of thinking that larger companies need to make a more serious commitment not just to social media, but also to the broader ideas of marketing as education, marketing as service, and marketing as community (three of my current mantras).

Web sites can certainly support all of these ideas, and companies are livening up their sites with blogs, video feeds, and community portals, I wonder, though, if the more radical step is still necessary to make the transformation real, to fully jettison the old ideas of marketing as broadcast, promotion, and persuasion.

What do you think?

Photo credit: poppofatticus

Words and meaning: The power of alignment

2009-06-17T08:22:00-04:00

Suzanne Lowe from Expertise Marketing has a great piece in her June newsletter on the importance of developing a common lexicon for marketing and business development in professional service firms.

Pointing to common misunderstandings between business leaders and partners, on the one hand, and marketers and business developers on the other, about such basic terms as "return on investment," Lowe suggests that PS firms would be well served by investing some time in building common understanding.

Most important, she says, is defining marketing and business development "up" to a more expansive and strategic view:

For example, why should the term "marketing only connote the limited activities of, let's say, "building awareness," or "sales support?" Shouldn't the term "marketing be understood to also include targeting and segmentation? Pricing? Client loyalty? In many professional firms, marketing does not mean these latter terms, only the former.

To which I can only say, Amen.

It's not just professional service firms, of course. Many of the technology firms I work with suffer from the same problems: confusion over key terms and meanings, and a general defining "down" of what marketing is all about. And now that we're all trying to sort out the tangled terms of Web 2.0/social media/social networking/social web/marketing 2.0, the language problem is only getting worse.

But all is not lost, and Lowe is right to suggest that lexiconical alignment (if there is such a phrase!) can be a powerful force.

Just consider the confusion around the word "solutions." If marketing is often misunderstood, the "S" word is subject to near-universal confusion. For companies that have taken the time to work through a solutions lexicon and taxonomy, however, the benefits have been substantial.

My old company ITSMA has been in the forefront of this work in the IT sector, and my colleagues and I at Solutions Insights have continued to work with clients in similar fashion. In a great many cases, progress on the real work of bringing new offerings to market, sharpening marketing messaging to emphasize strategic business problems rather than product features and functions, and reorienting sales forces to sell integrated business "solutions" could only happen after all the relevant stakeholders agreed on a common language.

As it has been with solutions, so it can be with "marketing." In Lowe's own words, "New understandings of terms will foster practitioners' ability to grow the 'right' revenues, gain meaningful market share, and optimally serve clients."

What do you think?

Photo credit: greebile