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.

Strike the Right B2B Social Media Balance

Using social media as a key marketing channel is not just for cool consumer brands. Today, even conservative B2B brands are starting to incorporate social media as an essential element of their marketing mix because their customers expect it. B2B marketers are attempting to strike the right balance between too much and too little control as they engage with customers and prospects using social media as a communications channel.

 

Part of the allure of social media for B2B marketers – or any marketer for that matter – is the opportunity to engage on a more personal level with customers, prospects, employees and other key constituencies of the brand. However, unlike traditional marketing approaches that were more likely to be one-way communications channels, social media now offers the ability to have an on-going conversation between a company and its community that has both big upsides and potential risks.

 

The key balancing act marketers must consider is how much control to exert over what content goes out and how a company engages in the social media conversations happening online about their company and products. Attempting to focus on discipline and not control is a tricky balancing act but one that will help ensure the conversations and customer relationships being nurtured via social media interactions are “real” and in tune with your company and brand culture.

 

A positive result of using social media as an important element of a B2B marketing mix is that marketers can achieve results with a fraction of the budget required for more traditional approaches. Additionally, social media allows a company to interact with a pre-built community of customers, prospects and partners in a much more personal and real-time way than other marketing methods. The risk, of course, is ensuring the company maintains the appropriate level of engagement in the on-going dialog. Some level of “debate” via social media conversations is healthy. As in any conversation between a group of friends, there is the time to sit back and listen to all points of view and the point at which you need to inject your opinion or correct a misstatement or inaccuracy. This is the balance that companies must experiment with on an on-going basis to ensure they do no employ too heavy of a hand in the social media conversation.

 

So how do B2B marketers that aren’t the size of an IBM, HP or Microsoft leverage social media since they may not have the most experienced staff or budgets large enough to employ an agency to lean on as their social media guide and facilitator?

 

First, social media isn’t something you “try out” for awhile and then forget about … that’s like making a new friend and then after a few interactions you drop out of site. Your friend is going to expect you to be there on an on-going basis.

 

Second, even the smallest teams with modest marketing budgets needs to engage at some level with their key audiences using social media. One way to do this is to appoint a member of the team as the social media team leader and make your social media footprint only as big as you have the time to actively manage.

 

Finally, consider your role as the B2B marketer in social media to be one of a catalyst that jump starts the conversation with your key audiences by ensuring the content you’re putting out is relevant and honest and engaging. Remember, let discipline, not control, be your guide.

 

The ongoing spread of social media as part of the essential marketing fabric connecting company constituencies will continue to challenge B2B marketers to adapt and change the way they communicate. Be thoughtful as you use social media but don’t miss out on this powerful way to keep your brand relevant in the conversations about your company that are happening every day via the social web.

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: 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: Lead Your Customer and Prospect "Conversations"

My upcoming blog posts will focus on upcoming marketing concepts you should consider as you formulate your marketing strategies and plans for 2010.

Clearly, the advance of social media sites has increased the ability for your existing communities of users to interact with your potential pool of new buyers. This goes for any size company, in any industry, B2B or consumer.

Instead of "direct marketing" for 2010, think about your marketing program in terms of creating programs that create and nurture "conversations" with your current and prospective customers. Focus on what you want at the center of your "conversation" platform -- is it a social media site like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and others? Is this where your current customers "hang out?" Or will you focus on creating opportunities for on-going conversations and interactions through deploying a virtual event hub?

Seth Godin's recent book, "Tribes," explores this concept as it relates to tribes being any group of people who are connected to one another, in big groups or small, by a leader and an idea. While there is much more in the book, which I recommend, one core concept is that while the web and social media and virtual events platforms can do phenomenal things in terms of connecting you with your customers and prospects, the web doesn't provide leadership. That still has to come from you. From your company. From your marketing.

Don't miss the opportunity as your finalize your 2010 marketing initiatives to plan, budget and create opportunities to provide leadership in the conversations your customers and prospects are already having about your company and its products and services. Start with this concept and then focus on building the tactics to support it.

Twitter Increases Relevance for B2B Marketing

While this isn’t “new” news, for those of you B2B marketers who view Twitter as the “social media flavor of the moment,” you may want to take note about the strategic moves underway that continues to increase Twitter’s relevance for B2B marketing. While I am not a personal fan of using Twitter to share updates about the “best fries ever” I just ate or feeling the need to post a picture of my latest pair of new socks or that Ashton Kutcher has over a million followers, B2B companies should care about both being in the conversation going on between their customers on Twitter AND how these posts are now showing up in Google (and Bing) search results.

 

 

Recently, Google announced that they believe Twitter adds value to search and Google is now including Twitter updates in Google search results. Google believes this near real-time data from Tweets can make search more relevant and timely. As an example, the next time someone searches for the product or service your B2B company provides, real-time observations (positive and negative) from your customers who are tweeting about your company will be included in the search results.

 

 

This is a meaningful validation of the Twitter business and the mark it is making on B2B marketing. I believe this agreement between Google and Twitter is a good thing and accelerates the imperative for B2B marketers to embrace Twitter and social media in general as important tools to infuse customer and market dialogue and insights into positioning, messaging and development of marketing programs. With Google and Microsoft partnered up with Twitter on search, Twitter is here to stay and marketers should ignore Twitter and other social media at their peril.

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!

Integrate Social Media With Your B2B Lead Generation Strategies

The “new marketing” must continue to change to adapt to the “new buyer.” All purchasers today have more control than ever by their ability to access information on products and services, coupled with the ability to interact in real-time via social media networks with other users of your solution. For B2B marketers and their companies, engaging in the customer/prospect conversation via social media is an imperative.

Many B2B companies have sales cycles that are long and marketing strategies need to leverage social media opportunities to influence their prospects through a long buying process. Social media isn’t the only step or final step in the selection process for a B2B buyer, but it can help a company to better understand the full buying process from awareness to purchase. Since your current users have a strong influence on your brand, what they are saying on social media networks about your product or service has a direct impact on your marketing efforts to new customers. If you are not engaged in the conversation via social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and others, then you can’t attempt to influence it by adding your points of view.

Social media also drives meaningful website traffic and a successful blog can get nearly as much traffic from social media as it does from search engines. Social media does drive lead conversion, with the potential to achieve impressive B2B conversion rates:

· Twitter   3-5%

· Facebook and Linked In   7-10%

· Blog   10-20%

To learn more about leveraging social media as part of your B2B lead generation strategies, I encourage you to view an @eloqua webinar on this topic I found very helpful. The webinar, “Social Media, Demand Generation and The Evolution of Marketing” is available at www.eloqua.com. This was co-sponsored by B2B Magazine and presenters included @SteveWoods the CTO of Eloqua, Mike Volpe @mvolpe the VP Marketing at HubSpot, and Craig Rosenberg @funnelholic the VP Products and Services at Tippit. Their presentation also covers the new "digital body language" of your customers and prospects. Check it out!

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.

Develop Your B2B Social Media Strategy

Marketing departments at all size companies are in the midst of figuring out if they should use or how best to use social media – sites like Facebook, and LinkedIn, and Twitter. Many of the CEOs and other company execs I’ve spoken with freely admit they are “behind the eight ball” when it comes to executing a social media strategy. And for many their social media “strategy” is simply having a staff member set up a company page on Facebook, establish an account on Twitter, and carve out a company presence on LinkedIn, which isn’t really a strategy. (Re LinkedIn, many companies already have a LinkedIn account, through their HR department, which they use as a way to recruit or check-up on candidates, but the account is not being used for marketing or communications or customer service efforts. This is a mistake.)

 

I believe a good part of the hesitation by many companies to dive into the social media pool is a fear of drowning, or losing control of the conversation, combined with not understanding that they needn’t dive in head first but can test the waters, dipping a toe in and then slowly wading in all the way, i.e., developing and implementing a comprehensive social media strategy over time.

 

The first step is to just create a social media strategy, which simply involves deciding which social media site or sites to use, how, and when. Without a clear strategy – knowing up front what it is you want or hope to accomplish, who the target audience is, and how best to reach that audience – companies run the risk of missing out, on potential new customers, opportunities, and revenue streams.

 

So where to begin? Start by picking the platform/social media site where you think you’ll find your customers and prospects. LinkedIn, for example, is targeted at business professionals. Facebook is geared more toward consumers who aren’t necessarily looking for a product or service but value recommendations from friends. While Twitter, a microblogging site, attracts a mix of professionals and consumers and is a great PR and promotion tool.

 

Then set up an account on the site or sites you feel will provide the most benefit. Not sure which site is right for your company or don’t have the resources or time to invest in or on three sites? Then pick one social media site as your primary site. However, it’s worth the time and effort to set up accounts on the other two social media sites, too, and link them to your primary site. (Each of the “big three” social media players make it easy to push content from their site to other sites and vice versa.). This way as you add content and experiment with your primary social media site, you can push (or have the content automatically pushed for you) to the other two.

 

Once you have established a presence on LinkedIn and/or Facebook and/or Twitter, invite your customers and prospects to join you, either via the invite tool on that site, by providing links on your company website to your social media accounts, and/or via email (or a combination of the above). When you are comfortable using your primary social media site, you can expand your horizons and start spending more time and energy on other sites.

 

The important thing to remember is that social media is a tool to drive conversations with your customers, prospects, and other relevant audiences. And a successful social media strategy is one that will help you better connect with your customers and understand what it is they are looking for, so you can deliver the products, services, and/or solutions they are seeking and ultimately garner new customers and sales.

 

Don’t wait. Now’s the time to develop your social media strategy and join the conversation!