Marketing Briefs

Building Your B2B Experience Brand

The key premise of positioning your B2B company as an experiential brand is ensuring your brand values are incorporated into every way you interact with your stakeholders – employees, customers, prospects and shareholders.

 

Many people believe experience brands are consumer brands like Apple and their ability to connect via many different channels including their website and store or BMW that connects on a passionate level with their cars and the ultimate driving experience. However, B2B companies that embed their brand essence into every marketing and communication touch point can become experience brands with greater customer loyalty and more profitable business results.

 

What are four attributes of B2B experience brands? Experience brands:

 

• Enlist employees as brand ambassadors to ensure they understand the B2B brand promise and how that is realized in the company’s vision, culture and day-to-day behavior
• Enable customers and prospects to learn about a company’s products, services and capabilities via the channels they like to use. How customers learn about what you have to offer can’t be a passive experience on your part. B2B marketers need to be vigilant about how the “experience” is for your customers when they interact with your brand.
• Engage customers and prospects before, during and after the sale. Even though technical or customer support may not report into marketing, B2B marketers need to act as though it does and interact with these groups who embody critical customer interaction points on a regular basis. On-going customer satisfaction with the “experience” of interacting with your company is a key driver of not only on-going loyalty, but in delivering referrals of new customers.
• Empower all stakeholders to interact with your company and brand via today’s “water coolers” – social media and mobile platforms – via a digital experience that’s intuitive, easy and that promotes an on-going dialogue between your company and other customers and prospects.

As you think about your on-going marketing activities, don’t miss out on leveraging what you’re already doing to extend your central marketing and brand ideas into compelling conversations at every touch point with your customers, prospects, employees and investors resulting in being a B2B experience brand.

Marketing 2010: Integrate Mobile as a Key Marketing Channel

As you wrap up 2010 planning, ensure you’ve addressed marketing via mobile platforms as part of your annual plan. The impact of mobile communication channels and platforms can’t be underestimated as a way to stay engaged with your user and prospect communities. Mobile encompasses a broad mix of technologies. Blackberries are still the leading device used by business, however research shows that Apple’s iPhone has a more robust level of user engagement. Do you know and understand what the mobile platform mix is with your user and prospect base?

 

Mobile applications will continue to become more tightly integrated into B2B platforms and tools and marketers should be thinking about how this will impact the tactics you have planned. In addition to connecting via the web browser on a computer, social media is increasingly being used via mobile devices, which speeds the flow of communications. Additionally, location-based capabilities are becoming common place and this is another exciting area for B2B marketers to include in your strategizing for next year.

 

In a previous blog post, I wrote about the advantages of incorporating a virtual event hub with physical events and, in some instances, as a substitute. With your event planning, your team should be including a mobile component with your 2010 tradeshow and events execution. Not only can mobile be used for marketing prior to an event to drive attendees to your booth or presentations, but also during an event using social media for real-time conversations or via an opt-in database for regular updates during the event and as a means to follow-up after the events.

 

While adoption of mobile applications and incorporating mobile into existing applications is accelerating, don’t miss out on ways to leverage this powerful communications channel as you put the finishing touches on your marketing roadmap for 2010.

Big Ideas Still Matter

I was having breakfast with a friend and fellow marketer recently and, after covering updates on kids, cars and recent travels, the conversation turned to the marketing world. We started discussing how the rapid growth of social media as communication or interaction channels is changing the way traditional "old school" marketers approach building awareness and generating demand.

I believe that too many organizations are focused on "needing to have a social media strategy" vs. challenging their marketers for the best big ideas. It's true that social media like LInkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and others are revolutionizing the speed at which a message or campaign can go viral. However, it's still about the content and relevancy of the message or idea.

Too many marketers are getting caught up in the mania of having their channels of communication include social media rather than focusing on the big idea that generates buzz without requiring a ton of budget. Think about the resistance movement in other countries who are leveraging Twitter as a way to communicate updates, location of the next protest rally, etc. Yes, engaging via Twitter and other social media channels is a good idea but what MOVES people to ACTION is not the use of Twitter but the BIG IDEA that is being communicated.

An example of applying a modest budget to achieve a measurable result through implementing a creative, big idea happened this summer in Washington, DC.

Blackboard Inc. (Nasdaq: BBBB), a global leader in enterprise technology and innovative solutions that improve the experience of millions of students and learners around the world every day in education, professional, corporate and government organizations, is headquartered in Washington, DC. A major industry conference was being held at the convention center that is just steps away from headquarters. After pursuing some of the creative, but more costly ideas to capture the attendees’ (Blackboard prospects and current clients) attention and to welcome them to Washington (like hanging a multi-story sign on the outside of the Blackboard headquarters), the ProEd Division at Blackboard instead chose to “Think Big” and execute a low-cost, guerilla-style mock protest outside the convention center. The result not only caught the attention of their target audience, but generated measurable results. Check out this YouTube clip to see the protest and results.

Don't forget when incorporating social media into your marketing mix that big ideas still matter!

Keep Your B2B Company Conversation Going with Twitter

As B2B marketing teams crank up the socialmedia mix in their outreach to the key community groups for their company (clients, prospects, partners, industry, analysts, employees, suppliers, etc.), here are five ways to use Twitter in your B2B marketing:

Start the Conversation and Keep It Going: This is a great medium to carry on an interactive and real-time dialogue with the best sources of your company’s revenue, profits, knowledge of real-world ways to improve your service and product, etc. Your clients, prospects, partners and other key constituencies are a tremendous resource to tap for insights and ideas. You’ll need to develop a company policy that fits your culture related to who in your company can post and reply on behalf of the company. Small companies should consider diving in with each employee having a role on Twitter (perhaps segmented by type of audience group to determine who interacts with each audience). Larger companies, if you haven’t already, should dedicate a resource as at least part of their job to be the “social media czar.” If your marketing team has more than a few people, you could appoint multiple people, having a person assigned to each of your social media channels. The key point here is not to post on Twitter and then not keep it up – start the conversation and keep it going!

Real-Time Pulse of Your Community: As you have on-going conversations with members of your community, use the opportunity to ask questions. Think of this as your best way to conduct real-time surveys. Don’t have a list of a dozen questions and ask them in a row. Ask a question and let the dialogue and exchanges between users play out. When it starts to slow down, ask your next question. With the responses to your questions will come new ideas, some complaints (always, always, always follow-up!), and insights you’d never get from a traditional survey.

Nuture Your Community: Twitter gives you a golden opportunity to keep in touch with your community on a regular basis. How many companies large and small still send out quarterly newsletters or monthly e-mail updates? That would be like calling Mom and Dad once a month or a few times a year. Most of us would like to hear from our friends and family on a more frequent basis, even if it’s just to touch base. Think of your community of users, prospects, partners and others in the same way and have a meaningful piece of information to share with them via Twitter on at least a daily basis. (See #1 – Keep the conversation going!)

Grow Your Community: Twitter is a terrific way for B2B marketing teams to grow the community of a company’s users, prospects, partners and industry contacts. Twitter is the most real-time and interactive way for you to do this today. Check out this helpful article on building a community of Twitter followers for your company. http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/4277/How-to-Build-a-Community-of-Twitter-Followers-for-Your-Company.aspx

Content Matters: Last but not least for today’s blog entry, don’t forget that content matters. Just because Twitter posts are a short 140 characters, it doesn’t make what you’re saying any less important. The need to maintain relevancy and interest for your audience remains the same regardless of the short format.