Brain Vibe

marketing muses to stay engaged

March 25, 2009 • 1:28 pm 1

B2B Social Media is Not One-Size-Fits-All Part 1

Social media opens up a wide array of possibilities for marketers as well as cost savings.  However, how or if it is used for marketing will look entirely different depending on the company, industry, and products and solutions sold.  Social media marketing is not “one-size-fits-all”.

The hype of late has really told the story of social media marketing within the consumer arena.  The picture is quite different in business-to-business.  When Forrester talks about 50% of marketers increasing their spend in social media, take out business-to-consumer and you get a very different perspective.  Supporting this, agencies see the big push in social media spending is really still from consumer focused companies.

In a recent Q&A session on LinkedIn, I asked marketers what percentage of marketing spend was for social media marketing and what that number was last year.  So, even if everyone said they were increasing spend, this could provide a perspective on how committed they were.  One reply provided an article from from eMarketer and included a graphic on social network advertising spend.  To my surprise, the biggest increase of spend was not this year (2009) 17% but last year (2008) 46%. No wonder all the hype over the past year.

But, this still doesn’t show what is happening in B2B.  That came from responses from marketing and business development.  The B2B social media marketing spend answer: no marketing spend.  None. Zero. However, that doesn’t mean that no effort is spent on social media marketing.  Dani Lee, Director of Marketing at Copanion says, “(This) is partly due to the fact that our B2B SMB target audience has low adoption of social networking. However, from a time perspective, we definitely spend more time on social networking this year compared to almost no time last year. We drive content to our social networking sites with the goal of creating more engagement with our audience over various channels.”  Another contributor doesn’t see that social media makes sense in highly complex solution sales.

The big question is, what does social media marketing do for B2B?  Or, is there also a factor that social media marketing as it is defined today does not represent B2B marketing perspectives for marketing overall.

Where social media marketing and advertising is focused on the consumer, the engagement is much more relaxed and, well, social.  In B2B, there is a lot of vested interest on both sides of the deal. Sending tweets to customers may not be the answer to relationship building.  There also may not be an audience to connect to through social networks and communities.  B2B is going to have to figure out what the conversation looks like from their perspective and map to social media outlets.  It all boils down to conversational preference.

You can watch the Q&A session on LinkedIn by going to http://www.linkedin.com/answers/marketing-sales/advertising-promotion/internet-marketing/MAR_ADP_INM/443710-575533?searchIdx=0&sik=1237987444226&goback=%2Easr_1_1237987444226

Also, if you would like to participate in a survey on budget and resource allocation, you can go to http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=9ccwmeJJoa_2f_2fcSl_2bwgr_2fDA_3d_3d

Part 2

Related Articles:

You Don’t Have to Get Social Media, You’re Doing It

Conversational Preference in B2B Social Media

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Filed under: b2b, customer relationship, marketing technology, networking, sales 2.0, social media, , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

March 24, 2009 • 12:30 am 0

Step Back and Take A Look Around

Dave Winer said:

Ask a mammal to describe air or ask someone who is living through a transformation of journalism to explain, they can’t. This is no one’s fault, it’s just human nature. The closer you are to something, the harder it is to see.

via The reboot of journalism (Scripting News).

In our passion, we tend to get as close as we can to our interest and focus.  We zoom in on the niche finding out every hidden detail.

What would happen if we stepped back?  Would we get a different view?

I get ultra focused.  I’m deeply passionate about marketing strategy and intelligence.  I’ll pour over what industry leaders and gurus are doing.  I analyze the business to pick the best plan of attack.  Yet, about every two to three years I just let go and see what happens.

Letting go has lead me from market research, to database administration, to management consulting, to product management, to marketing strategy, to data management, to business intelligence.  One the surface you would think I am all over the place.  But, my passion is in every aspect of these career moves – strategy with insight.  Business success through intelligence.

If I didn’t make these shifts I couldn’t grow my experience and knowledge.  I like to step back.  I like to take a seemingly illogical step.  The journey is so much better when you step back and take a look around.

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March 23, 2009 • 9:31 pm 1

Starting Your Business: Data From the Ground Up

data managementIt is easy when starting up a business to think about selling first, marketing and database management later.  Afterall, revenue is the most important thing to focus on.  Though, once you get over the hump and begin to groove, you realize that data is important.  Now you have to sort through it and it feels worse than diving into list of 300 emails in your daily inbox.  Well, if you have a method to deal with your email inbox, create one for managing customer and contact data.

Here are some simple things you can do up front to stay organized and be better prepared when you are ready to look at and manage your customers and the business in depth.

  • Be consistent about how you collect customer data – There are usually several layers to the importance of customer information elements depending on your relationship.  What you want to do is determine the information that is most critical and collect this consistently across all methods.  Keep in mind that what is mandatory to transaction may be different from what you need to follow-up with customers after a purchase.  So, make sure that you take this into account at the point in time you collect the information.  It is harder and more costly to collect after the fact.
  • Save data elements into dedicated fields - The biggest issue I find with new businesses and small businesses when they need to convert to more robust systems is that data elements are merged together into a single Excel cell.  When collecting contact names, break apart the first and last name into separate fields.   Do the same for addresses having fields for street address, city, state, country, and postal code.
  • Determine what platform has the Master data - The second biggest issue when migrating customers to a robust system is the inability to determine which record is the most valid of duplicate entries.  If you are saving contact and company information between your mobile phone, laptop, website, and company server, which will you consider the single source of record?  Once you determine this, make sure you sync your lists to that source.  I recommend you do this weekly at the least and use your primary server.  Then, include the database in a weekly back-up process.
  • Save, Save, Save - You may have caught this recommendation in the previous bullet.  Backing up is critical.  It is mandatory.  I’ve watch small businesses loose business critical information because they didn’t back up or back up often enough.  There are easy services today that make backing up our information simple.  At the very least, invest in a USB storage device and plug into daily when you sit down and get to work.  Before you do anything, back up.  Make it a habit.

Managing your customer and company information does not have to be difficult or cumbersome.  With a little forethought, when you business gets off the ground and you are ready to invest in better platforms and reporting, you will have a great foundation to do so.

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Filed under: business intelligence, crm, data quality, , , , , , , , , ,

March 20, 2009 • 11:32 pm 0

Translating Awareness to Consideration Set in B2B

Want to improve lead quality?  Focus on knowing when a customer includes you in their consideration set.marketing timing

It is one thing to get someone to notice you, it is quite another to get them to think of you when getting ready to make a purchase.  B2B marketing works to tie these aspects of a customer purchase cycle together through a strong call to action.  In the end, the holy grail when targeting the campaign is reaching the customers that are truly at the beginning of the purchase cycle.  The relevancy of a campaign isn’t just that you provide valuable content to someone that is the subject matter expert (SME) in their company, it is that it is relevant when the SME is ready to become engaged.

Right message, right person, RIGHT TIME.  Timing is everything.

Judging when a customer is ready to engage is not as allusive as you might think.  The key is to recognize behavioral aspects within you customer and contact base.  Opportunity segmentation has typically focused on financial transactions due to its availability and consistency.  It is effective when determining customer value and staying on top of purchase cycles.  Although, this fails to account for the “who” that acts with in high opportunity customers as key influencers and decision makers.  In addition, it fails to account for prospects you’ve brought in and engaged.

The other piece of opportunity identification through behavior analysis is recognizing how contacts are interacting with content on your website, responding to campaigns, support inquiries, and, if available, social media venues.  There are a several ways to leverage this type of information from the simple to more sophisticated predictive analysis.  It will depend on your level of ability to identify behavioral aspects of contacts and linking behavior information across various marketing venues.

  1. RFE Analysis (Recency, Frequency, Engagement) – A modified version of RFM (recency, frequency, monetary) which focused orders, replace M with E (Engagement), you can begin to identify behavioral aspects for simple segment selection.  E is the point when sales recognizes the opportunity and includes in a pipeline and confirmation that the customer includes you in the consideration set.  E can also be another type of event that the outcome is a face-to-face meeting, for example trade show attendence or in-person seminar.
  2. Reference/Word-of-Mouth – There are two aspects of this.  The first is that the contact will be a reference or unrequested acts on your behalf to influence others.  However, the other side is that they are actively seeking out other customer perspectives by reading other’s opinions and asking for opions.  Tying together campaign interactions with a transition to reference/word-of-mouth activity can provide insight that they are ready to engage.
  3. Predictive Analysis – The previous two approaches can be easily done through simple segmentation techniques.  Taking them a step further, you can apply predictive analytics to solidify benchmarks and KPIs.  Indexing of contacts’ behavior and mapping that to scorecards identifies pre-engagement contacts and customers.  The values can be dynamically set so that as contacts and customer reach thresholds they move into campaigns that are targeted to move them into sales engagements and support the sales engagement.

Are you tracking the transition from awareness to consideration?  What do you look at?

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March 19, 2009 • 1:57 pm 1

You Don’t Have to Get Social Media, You’re Doing It

My 9 year old daughter watches as I write blogs, check my stats, and ponder what others are saying and doing.  While writing this morning, she is peaking over my shoulder and says, “I really don’t get social media.”  I had to laugh because she is immersed in social media.

B2B social mediaShe doesn’t think about what she is doing as new, different, or leading.  She blogs to tell friends and family what she is up to.  She is obsessed with Webkinz and all the things she can do in Webkinz World (I recently found out she has a boyfriend there, YIKES!).  She is plugged in to her Ninetendo DS and sits with friends connecting through a game.  Her goal is to get a cell phone when she turns 10 so that she can text with friends – we’ll see.  She doesn’t have to get it.  She just does it.

You may think that as B2B marketers and salespeople you are lagging behind your B2C brethren. I think that is wrong.  The foundations of social networking and communities already exist within your websites, trade associations, and professional associations.  You have a captive media audience with your analysts.  You also have existing media assets that you determined work. And, believe it of not, you are already doing it.

Here’s an example of social media in action during 2001.  I worked for a computer software company that had it’s own solutions as well as a large partner network.  The dot com bubble burst and our event budget was significantly scaled back.  However, we still wanted to have interaction with customers as well as fulfill our partnership obligations through joint marketing and sales efforts. Our solution was to combine webinar, conferencing, and forum capabilities to create a virtual conference.  The virtual conference mimicked live conferences with tracks, product showcasing, break-out sessions, as well as pre-scheduled customer meetings for demos and solution discussions.  We promoted it the way we would our other conferences, but there was no charge for the event. The event was highly successful both in attendance, interaction, and initiating or closing business even as the technology platforms were in an early stages of capabilities and usage.

A hidden benefit to the virtual conference was we now had an extensive asset library.  Webinars, flash demos, white papers, and forums that could be converted to FAQs as well as kept open for further community building and interaction.  It also pushed us to test new technologies and work out some of the kinks before applying them within our overal website.

If you think about it, social media is really just a virtualized society.  It makes it faster, easier, and at times cheaper to connect with others that have simliar interests or commonalities.  The tools today, as opposed to 2001, are more intuitive and flexible making it faster and easier to get started.  So, the real effort is taking what you have in your assets, look at how you interact both online and offline, and recreate that in social media.

Additionally, you will need to evaluate how the conversation is different in a face to face setting vs. the content push that primarily happens today with direct marketing efforts.  What works with events and meetings is dialogue exchange.  Our websites and marketing as a whole have become more of a linear mechanism to bring people into the lead management process.  The social setting is about exchange.  I heard one person say that social media is really a vortex – kenetic, circling, accelerating to a mutual objective.

Don’t believe that you are behind in your ability to implement an effective social media strategy.  It doesn’t matter if you “don’t get it”.  In many ways, you are already doing it.  Now there is a lexicon for it.

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Filed under: b2b, marketing technology, networking, sales 2.0, social media, , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

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