Marketing Briefs

B2B Marketing – Clouds Ahead

As I get back to the blog after a summer hiatus, one of the trends impacting B2B marketers is how B2B buyers are operating with a “cloud” mentality and expectations these days. It isn’t just technology companies like Microsoft figuring out how to move their product offering, business model and pricing to “the cloud.”

Companies providing services to B2B buyers need to adapt to the corporate buyer’s new expectations: that services are “packaged” like products, priced “by the drink,” are available without a long-term contract, and that make an immediate impact on financial results. Packaging services like products isn’t as hard as many marketers make it sound. Making services feel more like products – or “making the invisible visible”— really boils down to understanding who your customers are, how your customers are using your services, what “features” of the service they use the most and find the most valuable, how do they want to buy/pay for the service, and what kind of a commitment do they want to make.

Once you understand these essential elements, you can use them to “package” your services as products that service specific customer needs, delivered in a way they want to consume them, and priced the way they want to buy them. This also makes it fairly straightforward to assign a specific return on investment expectation to each “product” so that your customer can make the connection between what you offer and how they can grow revenue and/or reduce expense. This alone will enable many B2B marketers to help their companies set themselves apart from competitors who make it nearly impossible to connect the investment in the service with a specific outcome. Finally, while some customer segments are interested in long-term contracts because of their specific industry or business model, most companies are looking to make shorter commitments even if your current service offer is not set up to be sold that way. In addition to slowing down your sales cycle, this also results in significantly narrowing the universe of buyers for your service.

Once you understand how your customer would like to buy, you may need to re-think how you can deliver your productized service in a way that allows your customer to buy by the month or year vs. multi-year contracts. There are many ways to do this, depending on your specific service and business model, including increasing the monthly fees for shorter term contracts to cover your upfront costs, having a balloon payment at the end should a customer leave you before you have recouped your start-up costs, or offering financing through a third-party so your customer can avoid having to come up with upfront cash while benefiting from a fixed monthly fee.

At the end of the day, B2B marketers are going continue to have to keep thinking like consumer marketers with an eye for making their company products and services available in a “cloud-like” way.

10 Key Marketing Themes for 2010

Over the last few weeks of 2009, I wrote about various trends and themes to consider as marketers put together 2010 marketing plans and roadmaps. As I turn to new topics for 2010, following is a recap of 10 key themes you should be considering as we begin a new year.

1. Integrated Mobile Marketing (12.20.09)
2. Real-time Search Gains Relevance for B2B Marketers (12.16.09)
3. Aligning Brand and Business Strategies (12.09.09)
4. Ideas and Strategies for Measuring Results (12.07.09)
5. Driving Efficiencies By Thinking Global (12.02.09)
6. Is It Marketing If You Can't Measure It? (12.01.09)
7. Lead The Conversations With Your Customer and Prospect Tribes (11.30.09)
8. Current Customers Hold the Key to Margin Enhancement (11.25.09)
9. Twitter Gains in Popularity for B2B Marketing (11.24.09)
10. Sync Your Marketing Tools with Your Sales Process (11.23.09)

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.

Marketing 2010: Are You Ready for Real-Time Search?

One of the hottest web trends as we head into 2010 is real-time search. Microsoft and Google have both launched real-time search, traffic from Twitter and other real-time engines into search results and Twitter is continuing to enhance its real-time abilities. As a B2B marketer, your 2010 marketing plan should include strategies for harnessing real-time search as a positive development to impact your brand reputation and demand generation.

Real-time search engines are beginning to integrate blog posts, tweets and video clips into search results making it imperative that you're ready to address this in the coming months. You can learn more by skimming Google's blog post: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/relevance-meets-real-time-web.html

Search engines are indexing these real-time posts from Twitter, Facebook and other sites and making them highly visible in search results. Fresh content is prioritized and ranked highest. Keep in mind that your customer fans and competitor foes will be having on-going "conversations" online about your products and services and these will now show up along with what you've considered the traditional search results.

Your 2010 marketing plan and strategies need to address how you will make your products and services appropriately visible in this new real-time search era and how you're going to address "conversations" that are not positive about your service or brand. Real-time search is here now and you need to be ready.

Are you?

Marketing 2010: Is Your Brand and Business Strategy Aligned?

As you put the finishing touches on you 2010 marketing roadmap, answer these three questions to ensure you've aligned your brand strategy with the strategy of your business.

 

1. Are you differentiating the brand by clearly articulating your competitive advantages and establishing one vision and one voice throughout your marketing plans and programs?
2. Have you incorporated initiatives to build internal excitement and momentum with your business colleagues around key product or service launches to encourage buy-in, ensure understanding and facilitate consistent execution across the business?
3. Does your plan include focus on developing marketing tools and programs to sustain leadership and deepen market penetration?

Start with these three fundamental questions to ensure you're plan is lining up the way you expect to support the key strategies of your business in 2010.

Marketing 2010: Simplify. Simplify. Simplify.

Some of the best advice I received was to “simplify, simplify, simplify.” Organizations in the business-to-business world that are not targeting an end-consumer sometimes over complicate program development, program components, and don't do enough program measurement. You need to integrate to make every dollar spent generate five dollars of marketing value. I always advise my team members or consulting clients to take components of a program and integrate them across the marketing mix, because that is where they are going to receive the most leverage. The best programs are often the simplest programs.

Marketing 2010: More Strategies for Measuring Results

In your 2010 marketing planning, measurement isn’t a nice thing to do; it is an essential thing to do. People in the executive suite throughout organizations are talking about driving ROI, delivering ROI, and measuring ROI. In these economic times, you can't escape it.

  

As you plan, incorporate both qualitative and quantitative methods to measure the effectiveness of your marketing programs. For example, you could look at the "health" of your prospect database and at how you are advancing conversations with your targeted prospects. In business-to-business enterprise selling, you can’t deliver your message to a prospect in a five-minute phone call or a one-hour sales visit; you have to deliver it over a series of conversations and continue your dialogue by utilizing a combination of electronic marketing, social media and phased e-mail campaigns that are highly relevant.

 

Are you appropriately leveraging technology to supplement the regular reach-outs from sales representatives? In addition to providing sales support from industry events, local seminars, advertising, and public relations, also monitor your database health, Web stats, time on site, and where visitors are spending time with you in an interactive dialogue with the company.

 

How do you plan to measure whether your campaigns are working? You'll want to know whether people are clicking through and spending time at another part of your site, which can lead to a good news/bad news situation. The good news is that you brought them to your site; the bad news is that they are not moving on to the next step. Plan to measure how many sales leads turn into visits, how many visits turn into proposals, and how many proposals turn into sales. This allows you to apply some method of accountability to every program.

 

It is important to have clear goals that are accepted across the organization. Once you have clear goals, you have to realize that technology is not a cure all. You have to be realistic about what you can measure, how you can measure it, and whether it is timely enough to measure at all. It is great to say that you want to achieve something, but you have to make sure you have the technology tools you need to measure program effectiveness. You also have to make sure you will receive the results early enough to help you adapt. You may have to take an extra step and circle back to the cross-functional people you are working with to adjust how you are going to use your measurement yardstick.

 

It is important to have individual ROI goals for each project. You can find a measurable component in every program. One of the ramifications of not effectively measuring accountability is risking the marketing function being relegated to the tactical sidelines versus acting as a critical strategic partner in shaping the company’s success.

Marketing 2010: Drive Efficiencies By Thinking Global

Marketing leaders at larger enterprises doing business globally can drive further efficiencies in their 2010 marketing budgets by putting in place the right frameworks to foster global planning and concepting. This isn't easy since there exists territorial attitudes related to budgets and staff that "sit" outside the corporate office in regions around the world. This happens even if there is a "solid line" reporting relationship from the regional marketing leaders and teams to the corporate CMO because the allegiance to the local market leader is usually strong.

However, that shouldn't stop global CMOs on insisting on driving global concepting and planning for as many initiatives as appropriate. One way to do this is to work closely with your financial officer counterpart to demonstrate how this will save the corporation money, while delivering a more consistent global approach to customers, prospects and partners. The power of the purse will help make this an imperative for 2010 but ensuring budget dollars for concepting key global programs are removed from regional budgets.

Now I'm not suggesting that there are not specific differences region-by-region that can all be captured by a one size fits all approach. There are, however, many programs that can be concepted and planned centrally and then simply localized. Most companies consider this with basic collateral, business communications and global events, but do not look at how this concept can be driven (with some extra work and pre-planning) through most of the marketing programs a company executes.

I've found the key to success is to institute central planning and execution with a dose of local programs and execution that happens in each region. I've established global strategy teams made up of the senior leaders of the corporate marketing functions, regional marketing heads and a representative from each major external agency partner. I've typically branded these internally, "TeamGevity" or "TeamIomega" for example, and have created a sense of mission and purpose. This way it hasn't turned out to be "corporate" trying to execute one program for every market but a global team planning the major initiatives to eliminate waste and local market re-work. This idea isn't that much different than Ford trying to create several global car platforms versus having every car in every region using all different components.

This "embrace and extend" approach has served me and my teams well at multiple companies. We've planned and strategized on all programs that could be used across regions. The regions would then "embrace" these corporate programs, "extending" them as appropriate into their local markets. Additionally, these would be supplemented with region-specific programs and lead generation programs where a global, corporate program wouldn't make sense.

While the real reason to aim for this approach is to deliver better marketing, a side benefit will be reduced cost to your company. And in this economic environment, that's a real win for marketing.

Marketing 2010: Is It Marketing if You Can't Measure It?

I believe every marketing plan, program and expense can and should be designed with a measurement element built in at the very beginning. After years of leading teams, assembling plans of all descriptions and participating in many budgeting cycles, it's clear to me that every marketing initiative CAN be measured in some way and shouldn't be funded if it isn't measured.

There's the quote I'm sure many have read (attributed to a number of different sources) that says, "I know that half of my advertising budget is wasted, but I'm not sure which half." While that was once probably true, today's marketing teams need to build in measurement as a fundamental requirement before launching new initiatives. Businesses are under tremendous pressure to increase the growth rate of revenue and profits, and marketing has to demonstrate how what it is doing is not a "nice to have" but a value-added partner with sales in delivering on forecasted growth.

Measures used to gauge effectiveness of programs can include things like how many leads are actually converted to qualified pipeline opportunities (as recognized by the sales team), registrations at tradeshows and how these are qualified and moved into the pipeline, and effectiveness at increasing awareness. You may also want to focus on how marketing programs are expanding use of your products or services by the installed base. There are many others and you can be quite specific as you build in measurement components at the program level. You should also consider running your ideas on what is meaningful measurement by both your financial officer and sales officer counterparts to ensure you all agree upfront on what constitutes meaningful indicators of positive results.

As you put the finishing touches on your 2010 marketing plan and budget, think about including a section on measurement ... and then follow-through during the year to ensure your teams are measuring how their marketing initiatives are impacting business results.

 

Current Customers Hold Key to Margin Enhancement

As you prepare your 2010 marketing plans, if you’re like many companies you’re wrestling with how to grow the business while holding the line on margin compression and erosion from current customers. Many businesses find themselves having 25 percent or more of their current customer agreements coming up for renewal each year. In this economic climate, current customers are going to be looking for price reductions to renew. B2B marketers should be looking to their current customers as the way to enhance their margins vs. eroding them.

 

How?

 

Now is the time to review your current product and service portfolio and analyze which customers are currently using which parts of your product portfolio. This segmentation and analysis typically takes some time due to data residing in a myriad of systems. That’s why most marketers focus their time and effort on aiding the sales team in adding new customers. Frankly, from a marketing perspective it is often more glamorous, fun and less analytical to continue to create new lead generation and awareness campaigns.

 

While new customer acquisition must continue to be supported, by focusing on the installed base with targeted marketing campaigns, you can protect your margins at renewal by ensuring your current customers are aware of the breadth of your offering and tailoring specific packages to customer segments. That way at time of renewal perhaps instead of losing margin you’ll be able to maintain or grow price and profits through having your renewed agreements include increased customer consumption of what you have to offer.

 

As you plan 2010 programs, don’t lose sight of tapping your current customers for increased  growth in revenue and margins.