In my last post, I talked about the challenge marketers face with advancing technology focused on developing customer intimacy. It’s a big and dangerous irony that as businesses spend more and more of their budgets on big technology designed to help them know their customers more intimately, marketers are growing increasingly distanced from meaningful interactions with real, live, walking and talking customers.
It’s not the investment in technology that disconnects us from customers—the wealth of new customer-focused technologies has enormous potential to improve the practice of marketing. But the challenges and demands of learning and integrating complex new systems tend to shift our focus from real human beings, our customers, to abstract profiles, targets and segments designed to represent real human beings. To bring the irony full circle, this distraction from engaging real customers by developing technologies to signify them within the organization is developing at precisely the moment when customers are demanding greater authenticity and meaningful engagement with the companies they patronize.
In fact, the biggest danger marketers face in navigating all the changes reshaping our profession is failing to spend enough time truly understanding what’s driving changes on the customer side. We’re all hearing a lot about Social Media, Web2.0 and Customer Generated Media, but the buzz is far more focused on snappy new technologies and cool widgets than understanding why this revolution is taking place, and what it means for businesses.
Social media—what many are calling the democratization of information—is having an enormous impact on institutions and organizations, from politics to education, from startups to Fortune 500 businesses. The shift in control over how knowledge is shaped and how it's accessed is a significant rebalancing of power between businesses and consumers, and it has a big impact on marketing organizations.
For marketers struggling with the concept of Social Media it helps to understand why this trend is taking place, why it's not just another short-live fad, and why it represents a life-or-death proposition for business. And it's really simple. In the old days, communications channels—print, radio, tv, mail—were limited and expensive. Big companies broadcast a one-way message into the marketplace, while word-of-mouth among consumers rarely extended past the last barstool. Reputations could be established and maintained by blanketing the market with a consistent message—and far too many companies abused this environment by delivering relentless, misleading and sugarcoated messages that made consumers jaded and cynical. But with advancing technology, now everyone can publish from their desktop and easily reach a worldwide audience of anyone who wants to listen. Word-of-mouth is now ubiquitous, tuned in with a simple search on Google, and it often focuses on getting around the corporate message to the truth. If you want to get the dirt on a company, just search on "The Truth about ___".
In a very real sense, your market is now a networked community of customers, and technology has amplified the conversation to the point where people see more value in learning about your product from others like themselves than from your marketing campaigns. So what does it mean in this new environment to be truly customer-centric, and what kind of organization is required to achieve it?
Peter Kim is an analyst at Forrester, and last summer completed a report called Reinventing the Marketing Organization. In a blog post that accompanied the release of the report, he invokes the enduring disconnect between what businesses say and what they do when it comes to building a customer-centric organization, and he sums up the executive summary of the report:
Today's marketing organizations are broken. Three out of four marketing departments have reorganized in the past two years. Almost 80% of marketers don't influence a critical customer interaction like customer service, and 85% don't even own the "four Ps" of marketing anymore. To regain effectiveness, marketers must transition to a Customer-Centric Marketing Organization. Doing so requires: 1) redesigning P&Ls and metrics; 2) shifting culture away from marketing communications; 3) investing in a customer relationship infrastructure; and 4) rethinking agency relationships.Finally, he asks, why is there "so much more talk than action today around being customer-centric?" And this is where a few of the threads came together for me that bring the impact of social media right down to the front line of marketing.
When it comes to customer centricity, I think there's a missing part of the equation that is highly relevant to what's driving social media. It's not just about "customer-centricity" per se, but about what that actually means to an organization. Businesses can be customer-centric in ways that are predatory, empowering, manipulative, supportive, exploitive, collaborative, opportunistic, or even just utilitarian. Unfortunately, the mainstream trend is towards a kind of customer-centricity that consumers mistrust. People are engaging in social media to directly inform purchasing decisions because they feel manipulated and exploited by advertising and marketing, and they want to see behind the spin before they invest their trust in a business or product.
Much of the literature on customer-centric metrics highlights the depersonalization of customers in ways that run in direct opposition to the trends driving social media. You can be incredibly efficient at doing the wrong things, a truth that is hammered home every day by mercenary marketers that drive relentlessly toward a 1.5% campaign conversion rate, while antagonizing the other 98.5% of their prospects—people they'll go back to again and again in the future, but couldn't care less about if they don't convert today.
If you're truly going to be customer-centric, you need to define what that means to your organization. If you want to be customer-centric in a way that resonates with today's highly networked customer communities, then you better define it in terms that actually have meaning for the customer.
This doesn't mean a tectonic shift in the tactical mechanisms of marketing as much as it means a shift in the attitudes companies have toward customers, and how those attitudes shape behaviors. I see many companies call themselves customer-centric while spamming their own customer lists repeatedly in order to squeeze out an extra percentage point in conversion. In a few cases they actually justify their approach by saying they're doing their customers a favor by giving them another shot at an incredible offer. Is that customer-centric? Absolutely. But not in any way that's going to help them sustain their customer base in an age of Word-of-Mouth on steroids.
Social media is an emerging concept that many people are trying to frame in ways that help us understand where all this new communications and networking technology is leading us. What it means in the simplest terms is this: Your customers are comparing notes. So are your partners and suppliers. That means effective transparency about everything you do and say—not just what you wrap up in a pretty bow for consumption—whether you like it or not.
Does that change the way you think about and market to your customers? If not, you're either already well-aligned with your customers, or it will take the market and not a blog to convince you otherwise. If it does change the way you think about customers, then the place to start is by asking what customer-centricity means to them. They're the ones who will be spreading the word about you.
June 11, 2007
'Donating' targeted content attracts users while exposing the content creator's market leadership
In part two of my discussion on the powerful role of content in marketing and community outreach, we show the tremendous paybacks from taking a leadership position on publishing the content your users value most.
In a recent podcast I did with Sam Whitmore, the founder and editor of Sam Whitmore’s Media Survey at www.mediasurvey.com, we delved into the reasons that content is once again king. Part one is here.
As our conversation develops, we show how innovative companies are spending more on their own content creation, and becoming targeted publishers as a core competency. They then have the ability to use that focused content strategically, and in many ways -- from the same initial investment. The content becomes the basis of the discussions they have with their users, for internal evangelism, for marketing, and for search engine marketing.
Take a look at the discussion Sam and I have on the merits of a content strategy. Here are some excerpts:
Gardner: We now have the ability to distribute content far more widely, but at the same time in a more granular sense ... that long tail concept, more widely yet more targeted – and more cheaply than ever. So you can create a 30-minute movie, put it on YouTube, and almost anyone on the planet has access to it. Anyone, by the way, that does a search on perhaps the key issues about your value, your products, your company gets to the content.
I think that more and more companies will be making some pretty high-quality, interesting, 30-minute, maybe 15-minute movies. We are already seeing this. There was a great one on SOA that IBM did not too long ago. Are you as a marketer going to want to have someone else define your messaging for you? Or are you going to start thinking about doing this yourselves?
Again, IBM, I think, is a bellwether in this, at least in the IT space. They’re just creating scads of content. And when you go to Google, when you type in "SOA" or "Services Oriented Architecture," which is an important direction and business opportunity for IBM, the left hand side of the search page, that free content stuff, is just littered with IBM content. It's discussions with developers, it's whitepapers, it's mentions in press – these are the things that get vetted by the search engine algorithms as being relevant.
Any company that has a strategic direction that they are taking their business to should say, “What are the keywords that relate to our future? What is the content we can create that will drive recognition from those keywords of our value, specifically as an individual company? And how can we create an ongoing process by which we’re feeding that algorithm machine over and over again to retain that high ranking?"
That to me is marketing 2.0.
Whitmore: Well, I think that model works hand-in-glove beautifully, in sort of uber search environments like a Yahoo! or YouTube or Google. But in the world that I follow, you have got the IT and the tech media really trying to drive their brand because they don’t want you to go to Google and type in “SOA”; that would be a terrible defeat for them.
Gardner: Yeah, but you don’t want to just limit yourself to one media company’s input. What these media companies should be doing is to do the same thing that their customers are doing, and that is to create the very best possible content on the key subjects of interest of the day, and have them appear high up in the general search ranking. So when I go and do a Google search on “SOA,” I’d just as well see an article up there by InfoWorld as one that is from IBM. But either way, if it's good and valuable information – that’s what I’m going to look at.
Whitmore: But as you get closer to, “I have got to make a decision on a reseller or a solution provider or vendor, then I think that I am not going to trust IBM. They are not going to be my goal because they are going to be omitting the stuff about BEA and the competitors.”
Gardner: Well, we hope that BEA and its competitors are creating content about their value and it’s also available. But obviously buyers will be moving from research, into creating a shortlist, into an RFP process and then into actually getting into weighty, detailed discussions, and then ultimately buying negotiations. And this Marketing 2.0 approach is completely complementary to a traditional sales, research, and then execution process.
Whitmore: It absolutely is; they can work in parallel, and I think that these IT trade titles and these people that are being rapidly disintermediated, they need to figure out how to get some of their content to rank well in generic search environments. And that brings us back to SEO and the fact that you can subscribe to RSS search results and these people really are getting hammered.
Gardner: We're now leveling the playing field – the best content that is vetted through the algorithmic search process is what’s going to be most prominent. We know that when people do searches, they don’t go more than maybe one or two pages in. And so, therefore, the IT media, those companies covering IT, need to come up with great content, great columnists, podcasts, RSS, video, whatever it might be, that would show what is voted on as best and vetted.
Whitmore: I have an editorial bias when I hear the word "content." I think about sort of generic, by-the-pound content. And whitepapers have their place and product documentation, too, but I think increasingly, as the 20-somethings and 30-somethings take over the world – and that’s happening – they are not going to accept the same blandness and sort of pseudo-authority that a lot of content has for us.
Gardner: I agree. I think people need to loosen up, and I have written a number of whitepapers. And the way you go about a whitepaper is you do research, you get information and you do interviews – primary research. And what is an interview? It’s a discussion. Why not just create a great discussion with the experts and put that up, instead of putting it into some sort of a turgid-prose, 80-page tome that people only read the executive summary of?
Why not give the long tail its due and put up a series of five key discussions with the experts you would have interviewed anyway for the whitepaper, and let people either read the transcript or glance at the executive summary of each individual interview or discussion, and then pick and choose? To me that’s just a better way to learn. And it also, by the way, is a lot easier for the experts as well as the authors. So it really is a discussion.
Gardner: There are more young people thinking about community and social networking, and so why not combine all of this into a happy discussion that is also substantive and educates at the same time?
Whitmore: It reflects real people with real attitudes, and not created by the lawyers and the PR people and the conservative forces within companies because that’s simply not going to work. I guess my – one of my last points or questions is, when are we going to see an example of a company relying on "content pyramid" philosophy, and could we prove that they were successful doing so? When are we going to see that?
Gardner: Well, we are seeing dribs and drabs of it. But the idea is to look at what’s effective in terms of engagement with your communities. And if you can engage your community with a whitepaper from the people doing lead generation – if they get 300 or 400 leads, I think it’s a success. But when you put something up on YouTube, you kind of get 30,000 to perhaps hundreds of thousands of potential downloads and click-throughs and looks.
So the scale is much greater and the cost can be comparable or even lower. I think that you are going to start to see what works in the field. When people recognize that search – that is, if they are number one or assumed to be in the top several media outlets, they are going to have to be there. Vendors will cultivate through PR and AR and Investor relations the search option too – operate among different channels or distributions of content to reach their end-users and communities.
I can see "search relations" as another possible definition of people’s approach to this.
Whitmore: Yeah, that’s a very interesting concept I think – very interesting concept. But from a VP of sales perspective, Dana, I don’t want 30,000 leads; I want the 25 that are in an advanced state of consideration for the product that I sell.
Gardner: Then you just vet them. You take that 30,000 potential community and then you bring them down into another level of content that will be able to slough off those who are not interested very much. That’s to say, if they’ll click through and look at a five-minute video, that means there’s mild interest; if they’ll click further down and read a transcript of hear a podcast on a similar topic, but more refined, that shows even more self-selecting and self-interest.
Then if they listen to the podcast and then you get down to the where it’s a lead generation benefit, and that’s where you cut out the wheat from the chaff, and you get real leads. It's also where the content pyramid works; you need the content to walk them down that path of self-selection. But I would rather start with a large universe and work it down, creating brand affinity and relationships with those people, and then find the content and the mechanisms that then bring them right down to the point where they are ready to sign up for the product or service.
So the pyramid is in that case inverse – you start wide and you go narrow. But the content creation process should start specific and narrow and then go wide. I mean, it has to be two-way discussion. But once you engage the people on a discussion, that’s where you have the opportunity to then bring them into a myriad of different opportunities for bringing them into your business.
Whitmore: Are there examples of people that are prospering with this philosophy?
Gardner: The notion of getting people to a sales and marketing activity requires community and affinity and interest, and you have to lure them in there and then get them to click – whether the click is a download or it’s a lead generation form.
I’d look at some companies that are good at that. I would again bring up IBM, but I have also noticed that BMC has a very good page, where you can go for information. And this page has got a listing of all sorts of content that has to do with specific values about what they bring their customers.
And they are saying, "Here’s the content that we have created. Here’s content that we found out there that others have created. Here are links to blogs and podcasts that we think are relevant to this. Here’s a download of whitepapers in the traditional marketing literature." But it really is just a site or a destination around a topic that’s a subset of their business that people can go to, and then they could get an RSS feed from.
In a sense, BMC is doing their community a service through a knowledge triage around a specific topic that then hopefully will engage them. And so I would say BMC is a good example. They still have to populate this; people who come back, the people who have a subscription to RSS are going to need something new and fresh coming down their pipe every week or two.
But again, I think that they're creating this – a sense of a funnel – and then qualifying people and then hopefully getting them into an engagement.
It therefore requires these companies to become publishers themselves.
Whitmore: Yeah, but most companies don’t have the headcount for that.
Gardner: Why not?
Whitmore: Because usually the executives are going to say, “If I had any spare headcount, I'm going to put it in sales and field marketing and they're not going to get into the publishing business.” Now they might subcontract it out to somebody, but I don’t think they're going to bring it in-house, I’d be very surprised.
Gardner: Well, I was thinking the same thing when I started my business, Sam. I thought that I would be one of those subcontractors – and I am. I basically help people figure out how to make content distributed and keep it credible and valuable. But increasingly I'm seeing more and more companies are actually saying, “We're going to create a studio – a video studio inside of our company.”
Whitmore: What kinds of companies?
Gardner: Well, Red Hat, for example, recently had a job posting that they are looking for someone who has experience as a video producer. And they are going to start doing this in-house, I suspect. And I expect to be able to see the same thing from other companies.
Whitmore: That’s interesting; because they live in a viral world. And Apple’s the same way.
Gardner: Their goal is to get people to download the code that then leads to a support and maintenance that interests business.
So I think that will be a mixture. For some companies, they're not going to be interested in being in the content business, they’ll outsource the whole thing. Other companies will say, “Listen, just makes more sense for us to make this a core competency. We will still use traditional media, but we're going to create our own media too.”
Let’s think about the numbers here. Let’s say you're a $5 billion-a-year company, revenue-wise in the IT space. You and I have worked for large IT publications. What was the total editorial budget?
Whitmore: Well, back in my day? It was at least $1 million.
Gardner: Let’s say you could create an entire weekly news publication that’s the best in its field for a couple of million a year, and you're a $5 billion company. Wouldn’t you throw $750,000 or $1 million at a core competency of content creation, and perhaps soon dominate your space for content, and dominate all of the keyword searches because you're putting up the best, precious, more interesting content?
Whitmore: If I had strong enough leadership I would.
Gardner: If I were spending five times that much on just advertising, and half of that advertising was wasted but I didn’t know which half it was – wouldn’t I take some of that money and devote it into my own content creation competencies? I think this is no-brainer. I think that any company, after a certain critical mass of size, should look at their content creation spend, among their marketing spend and advertising spends.
It's time to take from Paul, who may not be delivering the goods, and pay Peter, who can create great content that gets used many powerful ways. That's the content pyramid, that's the strategic method to content.
The Do's and Don'ts of Marketing to Bloggers
Guest entry by Elise Bauer
Why is marketing to bloggers a good idea? Inbound links from blogs improves Google rank, which increases traffic from search engines. Exposure from bloggers can land a company's website on a social bookmarking site like Digg or Del.icio.us, driving thousands of new visitors to the site.
Bloggers are perceived to be more "authentic" than traditional media, making them disproportionately influential given their size. They can also be highly targeted, engaging the very audience that a marketer might want to reach. But bloggers are a more fickle bunch than most traditional media people. Marketing to them appropriately can yield great results; approaching them the wrong way can backfire.
As someone with a well-trafficked blog and a high Google rank I get bombarded with marketing requests every day. "Your site would be great for my SEO, would you please link to it?" "You obviously love food. I would love to send you some of my ice cream for dogs and you could write about it if you wanted to." (Both real examples.) Most pitches receive a cursory glance and get deleted without a second thought. A few get a response from me, especially if the pitch is respectful and polite. Even fewer get the response the marketer was hoping for.
So, what's the trick?
If you are considering reaching out to bloggers, here are a few guidelines that may help you be more effective in your approach. Note that marketing to bloggers is sort of like selling vacuums door-to-door in a neighborhood where almost everyone knows each other, and most are chatting with each other over their fences. In any strong blogging community there is a lot of back-channel talk going on. This can work to your advantage or disadvantage, depending on how you approach the bloggers in the first place. Now for the guidelines, let's start with the "Don'ts".
Marketing to Bloggers Don'ts
1. Do not send obvious form letters. Did you know that we bloggers share the form letters we receive from marketers with each other? We do. This is a great way to get nowhere with the very people you are trying to influence. It also demonstrates that you have done practically no research whatsoever on your audience. Form letters result in promoting pork sausages to vegans or pitches for ready-to-eat cheesecake filling to gourmet scratch cooks.
2. Do not ask for links, unless you are willing to pay for them, at which point the conversation turns to advertising policy and rates. This whole reciprocal link thing might be barely tolerable on a blogger-to-blogger level, but is considered annoying spam when it comes from a company pushing products.
3. Do not leave blog comments plugging your products. Talk about generating ill will! It's called blog spam. As a blogger I don't really care that you think my readers would be interested in your ready-made lemon syrup. I'm not interested in allowing a company to promote its products on my blog without my permission. If you abuse comments, eventually you'll generate such bad feelings that people will start writing in their blogs about how your company is spamming the blogosphere. Then the next time someone looks your company up in Google all they'll see is a litany of complaints. Not exactly the intended result, eh?
4. Do not come on too strong. If you send out product, you can follow up with a "did you receive it?" but not a "when are you going to write about it?" Do not insist on anything. And if someone doesn't want to promote your product, please don't argue with them. Thank them for their time and move on.
5. Do not put the blogger on your mailing list (unless they have requested it.) This should be obvious, shouldn't it? But clearly it isn't as getting put on some random marketer's email newsletter or mailing list happens all the time. Bloggers hate it.
Marketing to Bloggers Do's
1. Start by creating a targeted list of bloggers. Use tools such as Technorati, BlogPulse, or Alexa to help find blogs that speak to your target audience. Note that although the biggest blogs may be more influential, they tend to get hit up all the time for marketing requests and may not be that responsive. So don't ignore a blog just because it has 20 inbound links (as accounted for by Technorati) and not 200. It may be just the blog you want.
2. Know the blogs you are approaching. Before you email a blogger with a pitch, read through the last two months of their posts. Really. At least that. Understand what they care about, what they write about. You'll get a much better feel for how your pitch will be received if you know who it is you are pitching to. Learn the name and gender of the blogger; it may not be immediately obvious. Address the blogger by name instead of just "Hello" or "Dear Webmaster". Check to see if the blogger has posted a review policy. Many bloggers simply will not do product reviews; you risk annoying them if they have a published policy that you have ignored.
3. Treat the blogger with the same respect you would a professional journalist. It's good manners. Many bloggers have a lot more influence than you would imagine, yet they are often treated as if they are inconsequential. If you treat them well, you will be rewarded in kind.
4. Be open to constructive feedback. If you send out a pitch and it's off the mark, most likely you will get more than a few angry emails back. If you are lucky, someone will take the time to offer polite, constructive feedback as to how you could reach out to bloggers more effectively. Listen to this advice. Consider it valuable consulting that you would normally have to pay thousands of dollars for and here this very nice blogger is giving it to you for free. Treat that blogger well. Assume you know nothing about marketing to bloggers, because believe me, unless you are a blogger who gets pitched all the time, you don't.
5. Offer to send product, no strings attached. If you have a book you're promoting, offer to send it to the blogger. Don't suggest that the blogger write a review. If she likes it enough, she might. Or she might recommend it to another blogger who ends up writing about it. Don't underestimate the social power of reciprocity. By giving a gift, if the receiver likes it, he'll likely find ways to make it up to you. This is also why some bloggers don't accept gifts or promotional product. They don't want to be indebted to anyone. So, if a blogger says no, don't take it personally.
At the end of the day it all comes down to the Golden Rule, treat bloggers the way you would like to be treated yourself. Unlike you, the marketing professional, who probably gets paid to reach out to them, most bloggers do what they do purely for the joy of personal self expression. They pour hundreds, if not thousands of hours of their lives into their personal blogging outpost. Respect that and you might get somewhere with them.
Have more examples to add to the list? Please let us know in the comments.
Go Beyond Marketing and Drive Better Lead Generation ROI
Ultimately, the purpose of B2B marketing is to help the sales team sell. But marketers often get so wrapped up in driving activity that they seem to forget it's about driving sales conversion.
For example, ask most executives and marketers what sales people need and they will say, "more leads." Your sales people don’t want more leads actually, what they want is "more effective selling time."
It's not about more activity. It's about helping the sales team achieve better results.
After working with hundreds of sales people and seeing their sales processes first hand, I frequently hear this "stuck point." They often ask, “How do I advance the lead when there isn’t an immediate need?” Sales people are often stuck wondering, “What else can I talk to them about?”
With out your input, sales people often resort to boring or irrelevant messaging that don't position them as trusted advisors. Phone calls such as, “I’m just calling to touch base” or emails that say, “I’m just checking in…” are like saying “Are you ready to buy yet?” This is not because they lack creatively, it a simple matter of time or perspective. Sales people need to spend their time selling, not building content and messaging.
With or without your knowledge, sales reps are altering your messaging and creating their own collateral. Remember: The first impression matters. So does the second. So does every single touch after that. This is especially true with complex sales that require multiple conversations on the phone before you may get your first face to face meeting in the later stages of their buying process.
B2B marketers need to do more for their sales team than just throwing leads over the wall. If marketing wants to view sales as their customer, they need to be much more involved from the customer's perspective to understand their buying process and go beyond the lead. This is an opportunity for marketing leaders to shine.
To do this you need to be thinking strategically, which involves getting more than one perspective. That means that sales must provide input to marketing (and marketing needs to accept and value the input) on the development of things such as sales collateral, white papers, case studies, articles, advertising, e-mail campaigns, value proposition development etc. as a joint team. It also means getting out in the field with your team to really understand how you can help them sell.
Here's 9 ideas to help you go beyond the lead:
- Build a library of selling and nurturing content specifically designed for you sales team. (The content does not have to be flashy, just relevant.)
- Make the content library easily accessible.
- Use the phone to qualify all inquiries before sending them to the sales team.
- Establish a clear process for handling and distributing leads.
- Leverage your CRM system to create a lead management process.
- Distribute leads rapidly.
- Expect your sales team to follow up on each lead promptly.
- Measure sales lead acceptance and follow up by sales team.
- Close the loop with your sales team regularly.