In B2B marketing, when you have many potential buyers who are involved in the buying process, how do you connect with these people in a memorable way?
If you look at most lead generation messages, they often contain industry jargon and abstract ideas. Interestingly, that’s part of the reason many of them don’t work. Our future customers are weary of messages, pitches, hype, buzzwords, and corporate speak, that they quickly forget them.
So how do you create marketing and lead generation messages worth remembering?
According to this ITSMA interview with Chip Heath author of What Makes Things Stick, we need to overcome the curse of knowledge.
Heath say’s, “B2B marketers have a very high standard of communication that they have to impart. A group of psychologists and behavioral economists has called this ‘the Curse of Knowledge.’ As we become experts, it becomes harder to imagine not knowing what we know.”
In other words, as we develop our individual areas of expertise and live it out in our companies, it actually makes it harder to communicate with those outside out company. This could be part of the reason some might struggle explaining their job (i.e. what you do) to family and friends.
Heath’s focus is on this idea of “stickiness” he found that for our ideas to stick in people’s minds, they must be concrete. But the reality is that most of our business language is far from concrete.
I've summarized the 6 themes that Heath covers in his book that are consistent with sticky ideas:
- Simple - get to the essential idea, the most important idea should leap out
- Unexpected -blast preconceived notions causes people to stop, think and remember
- Concrete - use real-world analogies to simplify complex ideas
- Credible - do you have a trust worthy reputation? If not, people will ignore you.
- Emotional - people often decide based on emotion and backfill with logic
- Stories - we're wired to pay attention to stories and stories can be retold
I found this related MarketingProfs article, "How to Use Imagery to Create Memorable Messages" by professor Debbie MacInnis interesting. MacInnis describes new research about combining concrete words with imagery to make more memorable branding messages and “the power of the internal movies that consumers generate themselves.” Please note: this article was written from a B2C perspective but as I think about it I see B2B applications too.
February 20, 2008
A New Role for Corporate Marketing
I’ve been spending most of my time recently deep in the trenches of social media marketing. I’ve been working with marketing teams trying to get their arms around social media and its potential impact on marketing programs.
I’ve been trawling every corner of the web tracking and modeling customer dialogs about my client’s products—in blogs, product review sites, social networks, forums and yes, even virtual worlds and video sites.
I’ve been following the cycle of hype and backlash about Facebook and MySpace and Twitter, and the hand-wringing over Juicy Campus.
I’m learning a lot about the tactical implications of social media. But more important, I’m gaining a very clear picture of what it means for marketing organizations. If you dig below the surface hype in marketing and mainstream media about social networks, there’s clear evidence that marketing is teetering on the verge of a tectonic shift. That shift looks increasingly likely to be accelerated in the US by a deep recession. If you’re not ready for what’s on the horizon, it’s going to be rough ride over the next few years.
I’ve written frequently in the past about the evolution of marketing and the drive toward social media. Simply put, word-of-mouth has been the dominant force shaping consumer purchasing behavior for 7,000 years. The rise of technology driven mass communications only gained a head of steam in the past two centuries. We’ve all grown up in a bubble in which broadcast communications controlled by business flooded the market—and our heads—with messaging. We’ve lived in a collective consumer consciousness in which word-of-mouth was muted. But now the bubble is bursting. The Web has democratized communication, amplifying word-of-mouth to an increasing volume that rapidly blunts the effectiveness of broadcast messaging. Why believe the claims of an ad when you can pop online and listen to the direct experiences of 1000 other people who bought the product you’re considering?
I hear a lot of marketers questioning whether or not this is a real and lasting phenomenon. All I can say is, 15 years ago many marketers were asking the same question about Web sites. Remember all that frothy talk about the “information superhighway”? We all got sick of hearing it. But looking back now, it was true. And yet, it was just a highway. Social Media is the traffic—it’s people using a network to stretch out far beyond their old boundaries. And once a new highways is opened, the traffic only continues to grow.
The problem is, every marketing organization we know today has evolved in the bubble of one-way broadcast communications. That paradigm existed because communications—printing, radio, television, advertising—was incredibly expensive and only wealthy businesses owned the means of transmission. It was a single, large stream of media. Mainstream media. Public relations evolved to influence the stories being told in mainstream media. Advertising evolved to insert special interest stories directly into the stream of media. Even direct mail is an evolution of this paradigm—a mass distribution channel of predominately one-way communication.
Communications channels were not designed to listen or to engage. Marketing organizations developed tools for listening to the market after a fashion, but feedback was massively filtered and reshaped as input for reshaping the broadcast message. Demographics and consumer profiles are not about listening to customers and engaging in dialog, but about tuning the stream of messaging.
So now here we are. We have a monolithic structure of marketing that evolved in the middle of an economic anomaly that is in the early throes of a major correction. Marketers are huddled behind CRM dashboards in order to “know” their customers, trying to devise new programs that treat social media as the same old vehicle of broadcast messaging. If we can only make it viral, the thinking goes, consumers will become the channel of communication. Nice thought. Until you actually try to create a viral campaign and realize that consumers aren’t all that willing to spread your oh so very cool message.
The problem is, marketing has no relevant organization to manage social media engagement. Customers are learning to connect all over the Web, to share their own ideas and impressions about products outside the marketers positioning frame, while marketers are still outside these discussions sitting behind their dashboards. And sadly, most marketing organizations don’t even yet recognize the problem. So for all the interesting things I’m learning about tactical marketing engagement, none of them have a fraction of the value of a simple truth that lies at the heart of the social media challenge for marketers. It’s about the role of marketing, and how that role is changing—and not coincidentally, this is precisely the issue that many marketers are struggling with today as they are increasingly pressed to demonstrate their value to the business.
Simply put, marketing has evolved in our lifetime as the Voice of the Company. All messaging, all positioning, all public contact must be channeled through marketing. In a world of social media, that entire paradigm is turned on its head. Not only is it too slow to respond to social media dialog, it’s too narrow a point of view, and too contrived. Consumers not only want to engage with peers through social media, they want to engage with real people in your company that have real insights and an authentic understanding of what your business is about. Ironically, this is what managers often spout as conventional wisdom—that everyone in the company is an ambassador of the company mission—they just don’t practice it, clamping down on employee communications with the market through strict policies. The transition marketing needs to make is to evolve from being the Voice of the Company to being the Choir Director. Marketing needs to leverage its valuable skills in messaging and positioning, and learn to distribute those skills to effective representatives in every corner of the company. Those representatives, trained by marketing on effective communications skills, can join customer communities in authentic dialog representing the company’s interests more authentically than the packaged and filtered voice of marketing.
This change won’t happen overnight, but I’m convinced we’re on the threshold of transition, and the impending recession is likely to accelerate it by the process of natural selection. Remember the last recession in 2001? Marketing was disproportionately represented in large layoffs compared to other departments, and that pattern will continue. Look at Yahoo’s recent layoffs—disproportionate cuts in marketing staff. The marketers still standing will be those that understand how to leverage new market forces, like social media, to connect with customers, delivering both market insights and actionable leads.
February 19, 2008
Bringing Edge to your Marketing Team
Ask a Sales VP "did you make your quota last quarter?" and you get a "yes/no" answer. Ask a Marketing VP, "did you make your numbers last quarter?" and you get a blank look. Why is that?
Most CEOs don't hold their Marketers and PR firm as accountable as Sales because, presumably and mistakenly, they've been told that you can't really measure Marketing output. I disagree. You can and should hold Marketing's feet to the fire just as much as any other function. Here's how.
First off, I must tell you my bias is that Marketing is here to drive demand that yields profitable sales. Full stop. Therefore, I am not a fan of big ad budgets or of lavish trade show spending just because the competition is there. Rather, I believe in surgically targeted awareness campaigns that condition the target audience for a laser-beam focused lead generation campaign separating out the real buyers.
If you're a CEO of a channel business selling to the SMB, here's what I recommend you do. Take the table below and tell your PR firm and VP of Marketing to complete the "before" column and have them show you the source of every number. Then check back in one quarter and have them do the "after" column (again ask them to prove it). You'll see very clearly if your Marketing spend is having any impact on the two things you should care about: 1) do your prospective customers know about your solution? And, 2) are enough of these prospects turning into Sales?
The table will help you see if Marketing matters. And I have prioritized strategies in the table according to the biggest bang for the buck. I would also recommend three focus areas:
1. Targeted PR: Set specific goals for the number of citations in specific pubs that you know your audience reads. Then Then monitor progress on a monthly basis and make your PR optimize the impact.
2. Lead Generation: I recommend search engine optimization (SEO). Nowadays, your prospects are likely looking for your solution. Make it easier for them to find you. Use permission or "opt-in" email campaigns to alert prospects that are already open to buying a certain solution. Combine these with monthly or bi-weekly webinars. Again, prospects who are thinking about your solution space will be attracted to content rich webinars. Stand out from the noise.
3. Thought leadership: You're either seen as "in the conversation" or you're not. Speaking engagements are excellent ways to be seen as a leader. Pursue speaking spots rather than just exhibiting at trade shows. Give away whitepapers on your website without forcing registrations. You'll be seen as a source of valuable information. And, lastly, leverage all partners by having them link to your site. More links equals more relevance. Make it part of all alliance contracts.
Each of these three strategies is measurable using the table above. Take this to your PR firm and VP of Marketing and see what they think. If they're threatened or dismiss it, that's OK. It's not unlike a VP of Sales during quota setting season. That's the edge you want from your whole executive team.
The ‘White Paper’ Secret Weapon (Don’t Share This!)
Writing persuasive white papers? Trying to sell with your paper?
What I am about to share… is my secret weapon. (Frankly, I cannot believe I am even documenting this.)
If you want to influence your readers buying behavior—especially if you’re targeting business professionals—then you need to make sure your white paper has one of these.
My secret white paper weapon is:
The ‘What to Look for List’
Deep into your paper, after you have described your solution and it benefits, you should always include this kind of a list.
Said another way, this is the ‘Top Considerations When Shopping’ or ‘Key Requirements When Analyzing…’ list.
This is comprised of a carefully crafted list of requirements that the reader must consider when looking for a solution.
Here’s an example:
Let’s presume I worked for Apple and I was talking about what to look for in an MP3 player:
- Song Selection: Seek a company that provides immediate access to millions of songs via an integrated software interface
- Accessory Selection: The ideal player has a large variety of third-party products that add functionality to the player
- Video Rentals: Look for a solution that provides access to low cost video rentals using the Internet
- Longstanding Track Record: Only work with a company that has been developing and innovating MP3 players for at least a decade to ensure the highest quality products
- Intuitive User Interface: Look for a UI that is very intuitive and requires no training of instruction manuals
I just made up the above list. The idea is to fabricate a list that ONLY one company can possibly meet—yours!
These lists are very valuable to readers. In fact, many will use them as the sole criteria when shopping.
The end result is a very persuasive tool that will help you ensure that readers come back to you for their business.
Are you using these lists? What do you think about this approach?