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.

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?

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.

Physical and Virtual Events Converge

Incorporating a virtual event component concurrent with a physical event is an attractive and cost-effective way to capture more audience participation at your event. Purely standalone physical events have been disappearing for years due to economic downturns, tightening T&E budgets and the ability for anyone to spare enough time to travel to a physical event location.

In fact, an even bigger factor to consider is the cost for a company sponsoring an event to get all of their executives and other presenters in one location at one time. Many companies, maybe even your company, has dropped most of your events and are doing webinars. While this is one way to engage with your target audience, it doesn’t incorporate the networking and community feel of an event.

There are a number of excellent virtual event platforms out there but I recently viewed the demo for Cramer Digital’s Event Hub virtual platform. It’s six minutes and definitely demonstrates how easy it is to integrate a virtual component with your physical event. (http://www.cramereventmedia.com/vblast/EventHub/EventHub.html).

I also like the idea for global corporations to leverage a virtual/digital event platform for launching new products simultaneously in multiple markets. Perhaps the physical event is held in the region where the “push” for the product service is strongest and the virtual event is marketed extensively to include attendees from other regions.  Also, integrating social media between both the physical and virtual event environments extends the reach of the event to networks of social networks.

With budgets continuing to tighten and driving the best ROI a “must-do” instead of just a “goal,” implementing a virtual event strategy in your marketing mix should be top on your list for 2010.