Brain Vibe

marketing muses to stay engaged

June 25, 2011 • 2:59 pm 0

Digital Conversationalist

As a B2B marketer, social media success may still be allusive.  You blog, tweet, post on LinkedIn and Facebook. You are vested in the conversation.  But, are you really ready? How are you executing?

I am no expert.  By far, this is my most vexing question to date.  What I have done is really to start looking at what other companies seem to do, talk to fellow marketers, and try to figure out what works to build a vibrant community.  Here is what I’ve seen and taken away in my quest.

Entry level marketers and interns have typically been tasked to take on the social media effort.  In B2B, this can be a real challenge and barrier to realizing value from your initiative.  There is significant finesse, knowledge, and networking ability that is required.  Simply putting your brand, subject matter expertise, and yes, promotion out there is not for the inexperienced.

You can leverage a PR agency.  However, do they really know your business?  They do a great job of triangulating your message with experts and media.  They may even be there to ghost write.  This approach can get your effort up and running more effectively.  Over time, it is costly and slows the conversation.  Conversation is not sustained or maybe not achieved at all because of the bureaucracy to produce and eventually turns the social media effort into direct marketing and promotion or worse yet, the promotion and branding of external experts, not you.

You may have created a social media or blogging bureau and established a set of social media guidelines.  Subject matter experts are tasked with writing blogs and tweeting.  How is this working for you?  Do you have the steady stream of content?  Many times it is difficult to get people to commit to contributing if they are busy (I admit to this trap) or don’t see the value and return.

My conclusion is that what B2B companies need to start thinking about is how to be the Digital Conversationalist. Don’t just pay this lip service.  The best social media efforts are balanced between thought leadership and a vibrant customer driven community.

Here is my Digital Conversationalist job description:

This person is already versed and experienced in what you offer, is a good writer, but can also “pass the beer test” with a wide audience in your customer base.  This person can work the digital room and get discussion going.  They can balance thought provoking contribution with the ability to ask questions and get responses.  They utilize and test social media tools to illicit the most and best discussions.  They can turn lemons into lemonade, addressing discordant views and complaints in ways that promote your brand and give you insight you didn’t have.  A Digital Conversationalist knows they are only part of the conversation and not the center of attention.

Filed under: blogging, networking, social media, social media marketing, ,

June 21, 2011 • 12:43 am 1

Social Media Marketing and Sales Alignment

Incorporating social media into your B2B go to market strategy is a no brainer. Done correctly you get the conversation you want, the connections to customers you need, and position as a trusted advisor. Now it is time to nurture your new found groupies into engagements with sales. Again, all a part of the social media experience. Lastly, you get the all important meeting. You’ve done your job Marketing. Bring it home Sales!

It seemed pretty logical until I had a conversation with some colleagues about what the sales engagement looks like. The customer experience with social media is marketing to sales, not a starting point with sales. Disconnects can and will occur in the engagement with sales if the customer feels a distinct pass off and turn in the conversation from dialogue to promotion.

In the social media realm, it is a dialogue with the customer, not a one sided conversation with the provider doing all the talking. The conversation needs to continue in a more intimate and specific manner when Sales engages. The crux of Marketing and Sales alignment now has to be tighter than ever so as not to interrupt the conversation and continue to build credibility and value in the relationship. Failing to do so can disrupt and lend itself to disengagement.

A you bring on new products, solutions, and services, have you considered your conversation from the first Tweet or blog comment, to getting down to the business of solving your customer’s need?

Filed under: social media, ,

February 26, 2011 • 1:21 am 1

Death of a Landing Page

Let’s talk landing page optimization.  At it’s essence you optimize for the acquisition – lead capture, purchase.  Why does a landing page only have to be optimized for bottom of the funnel results?

That’s what I’ve been toying with of late for our b2b marketing efforts.  When I’ve bounced this off my fellow marketers they either look at me like I’m crazy, or nod their heads pretending to agree but, they think I’m crazy.

I’m looking at ways to engage the market along their buying process, not my sales engagement model.  Sometimes, people that gather information just aren’t ready to speak with a telemarketer or sales person. Why ruin the beginnings of a great relationship with a hard sell?

So, now I’m looking at our online marketing efforts (ppc and display) and thinking about killing landing pages.  Not in all cases, they are still useful for those that are ready to talk.  But, for campaigns that are aimed as top of the funnel engagement, why bother?

Here is my thinking, if I’m working a campaign that is top of the funnel, why not leverage a portal page design within my company’s website that are content rich with lots of interaction points, including bottom of the funnel captures.  How about designing the entry point to my products, solutions, and services areas so that they have landing page qualities positioning content options based on the visitor need – education, evaluation, community.  I should be doing this anyway, so why not leverage within the context of my online advertising efforts?

If done right,

  • visitors have options to engage with my company to build and deepen the relationship with us, increasing the chances they remain a customer or eventually buy our solutions and services
  • retargeting efforts for bottom of the funnel investment should improve in effectiveness and efficiency
  • I can track visitor behavior and improve my lead scoring providing higher quality leads to sales

The other reason I’m considering moving forward with this is that it provides a more integrated and consistent approach to communicating and interacting with the market.  It forces online advertising to better assimilate and integrate with marketing campaigns, improving overall effectiveness.  It also creates a seamlessness between online ads, social media, and the website.

The biggest push back I’m getting is from inside sales who think I’m going to dry up their lead queue.  I think that is nonsense.  If anything, it should not only increase the quality that is passed, but by building relationships vs. going in for the kill we have the opportunity not to loose leads in our process.  By thinking about the buying process overall, online advertising becomes richer in its ability to attract and interact across a wider audience increasing lead volume and producing a larger and more long term pool of customers for near and long term sales.

Have you tried this out in your b2b online marketing strategy?  Did it work?  Or, am I really crazy?

Filed under: Lead management, marketing/advertising, social media, , , , ,

June 5, 2010 • 3:14 pm 0

Social Media, Program or Vehicle for B2B?

Social media is only one way to connect to customer and should be treated as a vehicle, not a program.  There, I said it.  I know it is heresy, but it is the truth.

I was talking with a lot of colleagues and friends in the 30 something range and found that social media for them was more effort than it produced.  They were too busy to tweet.  They didn’t get much value from Facebook other than keeping up with a small group of friends they couldn’t see all the time.  The rest of the time Facebook was annoying and they didn’t frequent it, and now the privacy issues made it even less desireable.  LinkedIn was mostly a way to maintain a contact database with professional colleagues.  YouTube was entertainment.  What they did use religiously was email and texting.  Two things I got out of this were:

1) These 30 somethings were successful professionals with decision make authority and spending capacity both personally and professionally.  Social media has only limited value to them.

2) Social media was hype and comprised only a portion of their communication and social time.  It did not fundamentally change the way they were communicating with friends and colleagues.

One of the things I see companies and marketers do when they get the social media bug is to approach social media as a separate program.  This really misses the point.  Marketers have a multitude of communication vehicles available and instead of thinking about the best way to converse with customers, they think about what is the best new shiny method they can use and focus all their energy there.  Teams are even split by vehicle (social media, email, search, web, online display, etc) making marketers experts in a narrow band of communication.  What’s the point in that?  I don’t know about you, but I’d rather be thought of as a great marketer building relationships and business.  I don’t want to be known only for my ability to communicate in 140 characters.

We all know the social media avenues available to us so why over analyze at this point.  Most of us have used them personally and its either become our sole means of touching the world or, on the other hand, we are burnt out or driven out by the social media outlets and the ‘why did I friend this person?’.  In many ways, social media just is and we don’t think about it much anymore.  This is where marketing needs to be.  We shouldn’t think about social media anymore, we should just use it.

Ask yourself these questions:

  • Who are my customers?
  • How do my customers learn about what I provide?
  • Where do my customers go to learn about what I provide?
  • What vehicle provides the best venue to show my value?
  • What level of trust do my customers have with my product and brand?

Notice that there is not one mention of social media or any other marketing vehicle.  It is all about how to market your company and product the best way to get people interested and to purchase.  Social media may just be that venue either as a leading component, an aspect, or not at all.  It may also depend on the research and decision cycle of the customer for your product.  The key is how you position.

The way to make social media work is through discipline and integration with our existing communication vehicles.  Treating it as its own separate effort will not get you the biggest benefits and return on investment and effort you could.  You need a varied tool kit for marketing that includes social media in it.  It provides lift, it doesn’t provide all.

Filed under: b2b, marketing/advertising, social media, social media marketing, , , ,

December 6, 2009 • 9:13 pm 0

Pirate Google

Originally I considered Ruper Murdoch a blow hard in his attacks on Google.  I mean, give me a break.  Almost 15 years into the world wide web and search engines bringing content free to seekers, the tide seems to have already turned. It is like Britain taking up the cause to bring the US back into its fold over 234 years after the revolution. Though, there is a bit of a point to be made that is finally coming to the surface outside the Australian mud slinging.  Content produced is an asset for news organizations. In any other media industry such as TV, movies, and music, copyright protection laws preserve the asset. Why not news content?

Compare online media to television media.  TV is not free as consumers have to pay for the connection on average of $600 per year and as high as $2000 depending on the service.  Fees are pushed back to service providers from the content network of about 3¢ to 25¢ per subscriber which is included in this subscription service.  Google on the other hand acts as a service provider like a cable tv company and pays nothing.  In fact, it makes money off servicing advertisers both in delivery of advertising though PPC  and through Doublclick by placing ads on content provider sites such as News Corp’s.  MSN/Bing and Yahoo! are the same.

Now you can say that News Corp makes money by selling placements on their websites but as we see, this doesn’t pay the bills.  Revenue from subscriptions dwindles and isn’t re-cooped through fee collected from Google or any other search engine or advertising network.  They can add more placement space but this diminishes the experience and dissuades visitors in the long run that can actually hurt their advertising revenue stream with reduced visitation.

There are a few ways to alleviate the issue:

  • Google and other search engines pay fees to content networks.  However, how do you distinguish a News Corp from a blogger?  At least in tv there are limited number of content creators.  The web has millions.
  • Internet service providers collect fees in their subscriptions related to “premium” content and manage access to sites similarly to cable or satellite services.  Although today, ISPs are not necessarily set up or have the infrastructure to do so.
  • Google is looking at limiting search results to content on sites like those of News Corp.  This will only go so far and may actually hurt ad revenue in the long run.
  • Content providers can add code to block search engines but again, this can hurt ad sales by blocking ad networks and PPC.
  • News sites can turn their websites into paid sites to recoup subscriptions.  While sites like the Wall St. Journal, Harvard Business Review, and others do this, revenue is modest and may not ultimately sustain the industry.

Balancing fairness of access to asset content is not an easy proposition.  On one hand the access to news consumers have today is a huge benefit.  On the other, quality news content costs money to produce.  I may not buy a paper or magazine to get my news anymore, but I still highly value quality unbiased information.  I will pay for my news, but news should be widely available to keep us educated and informed.

Tough call.  For now, I’ll rely on Google “pirating” content.  What else is there to do?

Filed under: communication, news media, , , , , ,

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