Strategically mapping content to the Buyer’s Journey is important—and so are the basics that make content connect. I recently checked out a video where Joe Chernov, VP of Content Marketing at Eloqua, shares some content marketing tips that I thought I’d pass along. Joe offers a few good reminders to help ensure your content gets shared:
When making content choices, Joe favors the slideshare over the infographic and doesn’t think too highly of the whitepaper. He and I don’t entirely see eye-to-eye on this. I think there’s no silver bullet when it comes to content. Diversity is the spice of life, and our job as marketers is to offer diverse formats and experiences—because everyone consumes information in different ways.
What steps do you take to ensure your content connects to drive demand, and what has been most effective in meeting that goal?
I was checking out one of my favorite foodie blogs, Eater 38, when I came across the iQ by Intel series on Mobile Food. These videos investigate how popular food carts in New York and Portland are using technology to succeed. The first, “Starting the Food Cart,” shows mobile restaurant owners discussing how technology shapes the industry. Next, “Powering the Food Cart” looks at how these businesses use the latest payment technologies. And the third, “Promoting the Food Cart,” will show how they use social media to connect with customers. I think these are great examples of how smart content becomes discoverable—by revealing something people want to know and are excited to share.
A colleague of mine knows Bryan Rhoads, iQ Editor-in-Chief, and he gave her the inside scoop about this project. “iQ is designed to feed a content-hungry 24/7 cycle. It may sound cliché, but content is the currency of the modern web…and social shares are the transactions in this market place for eyeballs and exposure.”
How has iQ been effective in grabbing eyeballs? “As consumers of information, we still Google or search for information, but content discovery has changed. I’m much more likely to discover interesting items, news and product offerings in my social news feeds like Facebook, Twitter and Google+. An additional and very pleasant surprise for us is how often we’re seeing our content in news aggregation sites, magazines and apps like FlipBoard or Zite. That’s effective modern marketing. That’s how the game is now played: getting one’s content to appear organically in these new tools and apps. Seeing an iQ story, including the Foodcart series in FlipBoard and Zite, is what it’s all about.”
How can businesses increase exposure? “It’s a 24/7 on-demand market place. Brands need to think more like publishers, i.e. cater to what the audience needs, wants or wants to share. iQ’s content strategy is ‘demand-side’ economics, not the ‘supply-side’ where brands have traditionally focused. Brands historically want to supply content and messages that they want to push out. However, in this on-demand world, messages and content will fall helplessly flat if there is no demand.”
The Mobile Food series is a great reminder that we can increase awareness and credibility without being salesy. One of my social gurus, Carmen Hill, agrees that these guys have knocked it out of the park. “I love what Intel is doing with the iQ site. Bryan and his team have truly blazed a trail with their social and content marketing practice. It’s so easy to fall back on the bad habit of always talking about ourselves. What Intel is doing—and what we should all aspire to do—is to create content about things our audience cares about. Talking about our products is boring. Talking about how our products help get your lunch paid for and ready to eat faster is much more interesting.”
The takeaway? When B2B demand gen efforts are aligned just right with what’s hot, content can become not just relevant but magnetic.
How are you delivering the content your audiences are hungry for in ways that reveal your true value—and get you the eyeballs you want?
Today, social media is as important as email and whitepapers in driving demand generation success—and this is widely recognized by high-performing businesses. In fact, according to a recent study by the Aberdeen Group, 41% of best-in-class companies have integrated social media with their lead management and lead scoring efforts. And 33% of those companies have integrated social profile data into their customer or prospect records.
If you’re considering using social media to generate leads, you’ll find dozens of guides and thousands of blog posts on this topic. I think Eloqua’s The Grande Guide to Social Demand Generation delivers a succinct and useful introduction that will help you dip your B2B demand gen toes in the social waters. Below is my distillation of the guide’s greatest hits.
Blueprint for Your Integrated Contact Strategy
I’d suggest that companies getting started in the social sphere check out “10 Touch Points for a Socially Savvy Contact Strategy” by Carmen Hill, Social Media Strategist at Babcock & Jenkins, on page 8 of the Grande Guide. (Yes, I’m biased because we work together, but we work together because Carmen is awesome!) I’m going to share my three favorite tips from Carmen here:
1. Influence the influencers
Participate in influencer blogs and forums by providing relevant, data-rich content and commenting or responding when appropriate.
2. Be social
Interact with others on social networks by joining or starting relevant conversations, sharing content and providing your insights.
3. Nurture relationships
Stay in touch with responders via email and social channels until they indicate interest or intent to purchase.
I think Carmen offers a smart place to start, without biting off too much. I encourage you to read the rest of her tips about how to get your message in front of the right people at the right time.
Six Success Tips from Sage Software
Take a look at the case study “How Sage Went Social in Just One Year” on page 4 of the Grande Guide to learn how Sage Software established a social media presence for their human resources products that outpaced the competition in just one year by following these six steps:
1. Outline clear goals
Reached influencers by developing a content creation process that feeds social engagement and joining prospects’ and customers’ conversation.
2. Find the audience
Conducted a social media audit for their space, identifying the relevant posts, articles and targets to engage.
3. Pick the platforms
Focused on creating a branded presence on the four most relevant channels for HR conversations: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube.
4. Identify the influencers
Developed a methodology for identifying and reaching out to the key influencers in the HR social space leveraging tools like Klout.
5. Turn on the tools
Employed a socially savvy content management system and marketing automation platform.
6. Measure meaningfully
Through a custom dashboard, measured number of leads generated and cost per lead.
What I most appreciated about this case study is how it demonstrates that taking basic (and repeatable) steps can make a significant impact.
Account-based marketing has become a time tested and critical approach for B2B marketers wishing to start or accelerate a buying cycle with single target prospects or customers.
In late May, I moderated a panel at the 2012 International BMA Conference titled “Ignite the B2B Pipeline with Account-Based Marketing,” where we heard two very different success stories from Andrea Ogg, then Senior Marketing Manager – Integrated Marketing, CenturyLink Business (now Senior Manager of Marketing—Worldwide Service Provider Campaigns & Demand Generation at Juniper Networks) and George Stenitzer, Vice President of Corporate Marketing and Communications for Tellabs.
Our panel explored how these organizations are using account-based marketing (ABM) to break through to strategic prospect accounts, retain and grow customer relationships, penetrate other divisions of large customer organizations and nurture and accelerate the buying cycle with key prospects. I was intrigued by their stories—and felt there were great takeaways for us all to consider in our marketing. Following is a recap of the stories and results shared.
CenturyLink Targeted Accounts Program tripled, with 8:1 ROI
Andrea Ogg shared with us how CenturyLink Business strove to penetrate new enterprise accounts and promote a sales meeting to initiate the lengthy 12 to 15 month sales cycle by focusing on its key differentiator: the ability to customize a network solution.
To accomplish this, the company delivered a high-value, personalized experience to an executive-level audience, beginning with an architectural tube containing detailed network maps of the prospects’ networks (developed by CenturyLink Business sales engineers). A hand-written note on the map directed targets to a personalized microsite (via a PURL). Information about the transition program, personal recommendations and direct access to their Account Manager extended the personal experience.
The enthusiasm of a CenturyLink sales engineer who proclaimed, “This is the best marketing program I’ve seen in my 15 years in this business,” is backed up by the quantitative results. CenturyLink Business’ targeted accounts program earned 64% participation rate, 26% win rate, 8:1 ROI and tripled its program.
(Full disclosure: my firm was responsible for the creation and implementation of this program.)
Tellabs grew from $1M to $40M in two years by building awareness in Russia.
Tellabs produces equipment for telecom networks such as AT&T and Verizon in 90 countries around the world, with current expansion focused in Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. In this industry where the top 20 companies make ¾ of the capital expenditures, the sell cycle is 6 to 24 months. George Stenitzer shared how Tellabs overcomes these challenges as it breaks into new, international growth markets through a case study of the company’s success in Russia.
Russia is a huge territory. With an unknown brand, one salesperson and no strong local partners, Tellabs employed what they call “the Pufferfish strategy”. This approach involves pinpointing specific customers they want to do business with (in this case, the top three mobile businesses in Russia), getting very close to them and surrounding them with Tellabs’ message—so they look big while staffing up sales and service areas.
The company accomplished this marketing surround-sound by launching www.tellabs.com/ru customer and partner website, creating a customer magazine in Russian focused on customer concerns, running fresh banner and print ads to drive site traffic, generating key trade media coverage, building an email list of customers and partners, starting an e-newsletter and having a significant presence at the leading trade show.
Clearly, Tellabs hit their mark with the following results:
• Web visits grew from zero to 400 to >1,000 monthly
• Signed up new local partners
• Won business from two of the top three Russian mobile operators — MegaFon and MTS
• Tellabs increased revenue outside North America to half of overall revenue
The packed room and swarm of enthusiastic people who approached me afterwards to say how relevant this topic is to their business confirmed the importance of understanding and leveraging ABM in B2B marketing today.
Today, our best (highest quality and velocity) leads are coming from inbound marketing. In this post, you’ll learn about the business climate shaping this trend and important content creation insights that can maximize the value of your inbound marketing efforts.
1. Inbound marketing is the new frontier for lead generation.
Today, buyers control the journey toward a closed deal. According to SiriusDecisions, by 2015, more than 71% of an organization’s leads will come via inbound marketing. Yet, their recent research brief “Inbound Marketing: Findings From Our Survey” indicates that fewer than half of organizations today have defined an enterprise-wide inbound marketing strategy. This means that the playing field is wide open and you have an opportunity to become a B2B inbound marketing leader.
5 Components of Inbound Marketing, by Eric Wittlake
2. Be found through the recommendation of others and delight everyone that finds you.
I believe that this recommendation offered by my esteemed colleague and celebrated B2B blogger Eric Wittlake in his blog post “5 Key Elements of Modern Inbound Marketing” will give you the greatest return on your inbound marketing efforts.In this post, Eric sums up the opportunities of inbound marketing today as follows: Modern inbound marketing is built around the core of your content and the experience it is wrapped in. This content and experience is discovered through organic search, other people’s social media recommendations and earned coverage from media, analysts and other publishers. The rest of this post is focused on “delighting everyone that finds you” to ensure that you are found.
3. Deliver content that has meaning for your audience.
Content becomes discoverable when it is relevant. When you understand the buyer’s pain points and produce content designed specifically to meet those needs, you maximize the odds that your content will be read—and shared. In fact, I advised a prospect today with limited money, time and resources that they’d get the most return on their marketing investment by discovering what kind of content their audience wants and then dedicating their resources to creating that content and leading that conversation.
4. Stand in your buyer’s shoes.
Don’t forget that putting content at the heart of everything you do becomes powerful when you put the buyer at the heart of everything you say. Don’t stand in your own shoes and talk about your own agenda. Write content from a buyer-centric perspective—to help answer questions, solve problems and reveal opportunities for that buyer.
5. Increase your buyer-centric marketing intelligence.
In summary: When content is GREAT, it is inspired by what your prospect or customer cares about most. And they can’t wait to read it, apply its insights and then spread the word. This is the power source behind high-impact inbound marketing. Put this principle into play now and you’ll have a strategic advantage in satisfying buyers all the way to the purchase.
For B2B tech marketers, it’s critical to understand the CIO’s mindset, motivators and attitude toward marketing.
CIOs today play a vital role within their organizations as change agents—not just functional heads. They care about solutions that will help propel the business forward, and if you can connect with these decision makers, you have a truly valuable high-level ally.
But to engage buyers like the CIO and move them through the sales cycle, you need to stay focused on all the things that make them tick (and what things turn them off). That’s where building an in-depth CIO buyer profile, or persona, really pays off.
Revealing what matters most
Recently, my organization created research-based buyer profiles for the CIO and several other decision makers and influencers by:
Interviewing the audience (buyers and potential buyers)
Drawing on publicly available and paid research reports
Interviewing sales teams (who often have the closest ear to the buyer)
Applying plenty of quantitative and qualitative analysis
Employing social listening
The result is a concentrated view of the CIO that you can capture at a glance—a poster that acts as a reliable sense-check for every marketing initiative (snippets of this are featured in this post). It highlights how and why the CIO thinks and responds when approached by tech partners, as well as an intimate summary of the CIO’s general mindset (in the first-person):
“These are exciting times. There’s huge opportunity for me and my team, but also a fair amount of risk. Some days I’m drinking from the fire hose, trying to keep up with the challenges of my new role and the information needs of my company. Now I have a revenue number to hit and my responsibilities are global! But I love that I have greater visibility within the company and can make a greater contribution to helping our company win in the marketplace. I feel it is my responsibility to leverage our business needs into more transformational processes and innovation. I expect my technology partners to be reliable, accountable, innovative and to make my team look good.”
Just the facts, please
Important highlights of the CIO buyer profile include questions and issues CIOs keep in mind when considering tech solutions in their roles as business strategist, functional head, and transformational leader. Good insights, but what can you put into practice? Here’s a peek at one of the most useful do’s-and-don’ts lists in our CIO profile:
CIO Communication Preferences
Technical, data-driven facts
Credible blogs and news pertaining to partnerships, who’s investing, new trends and technologies
White papers that outline decision points and content that illustrates the implications of those decisions
Case studies that detail a complex issue and how it was solved
A way to measure the potential impact of the solution on my unique environment
“I ignore marketing language that makes promises but fails to quantify how or why. Don’t market down to me. I also ignore generic emails from people I don’t know and anything that isn’t factual or analytical in nature.”
Can’t do the deep dive? Two ways I can help.
1. Email me at laureng@bnj.com to request your own copy of the research-based CIO profile featured here.
There’s buzz in the air at this year’s Online Marketing Summit in San Diego (#oms12) and everyone is striving toward the same end game: Igniting their marketing!
The annual congregation of digital marketers in San Diego to evolve their practice shares the same casual, friendly community I’ve enjoyed in the past, but the event’s explosive growth from 500 attendees in 2010 to nearly 1500 this year represents an industry that is growing up fast. As a digital native focused on B2B demand creation, I am delighted that OMS attendees understand the value of leveraging buyer insights across channels to produce relevant, measurable experiences! As evident in keynote address and draw for my session “Ignite the Pipeline: Personalized, Integrated Communications Drives Revenue for Nuance Software” the thirst for advanced strategies that push the bounds of marketing technology to design multi-channel, measurable experiences is alive and well at OMS.
The wide array of conference tracks and sessions makes one thing clear: there’s no silver bullet. Search, social, conversion, content, email, A/B testing, and marketing automation are all important pieces of the mix. But to truly connect with prospects and customers and move them through the sales funnel you need insights and integration. PERIOD.
In my OMS presentation, I shared a truly integrated account-based marketing model that allowed Nuance Software to:
Engage 46% of their most important customers and prospects
Drive over $6M to their pipeline
Deliver a 19-to-1 ROI on their marketing investment
Enable sales with personalized tools to support prospects and customers engagement
Please check out the attached slideshare presentation.
The humble but truly effective growth principle we tend to overlook—and 4 ways to make it work for you.
Many of the technology organizations I consult with have one primary marketing priority: GET NEW LOGOS!
It happens at my organization too—everyone gets excited when we secure a major new customer. We open champagne, toast the great accomplishment and sing the praises of the key contributors who led to the win.
But what happens when, say, your largest customer renews for an additional 2-year commitment (without requiring procurement, RFPs and competitive bids)? These retention wins may represent a larger opportunity and/or higher margins, but do we invest our marketing dollars as heavily toward these wins?
I think intuitively we know that customer retention and growth contribute more profitably to the bottom line than acquiring a new customer. But if we need more nudging, here’s a powerful reminder from Sean Geehan, author, speaker and leading expert in B2B executive strategies.
The Business Case for a Retention Focus
I had the pleasure of hearing from Geehan at ITSMA 2011, where he reminded us of the Marketing 101 principle: It costs 3-5 times more to acquire a new account than it does to retain an existing customer.
His useful chart, shared below, clearly demonstrates a best practice model for ensuring the greatest ROI from marketing spend AND has been the baseline model for helping many organizations catapult growth.
Geehan also shared an eye-opening business case from his client, HCL Technologies, a multi-billion dollar global IT Services firm that has grown by more than 20% annually for the last 5 years.
When HCL realized that 70% of their revenue came from just 70 customers, they formed a Customer Advisory Council (CAC) as the centerpiece of their highly focused marketing efforts. Essentially, C-level executive and thought leaders from 80 HCL customer companies met regularly to exchange ideas, experiences and best practices.
In the process, the CAC shared the honest requirements of their businesses with HCL, and ultimately steered a lot of product direction. Meanwhile, HCL helped customers address more of their problems, nurturing trust and senior relationships.
As a result, Geehan notes in his B2B Executive Playbook, establishing a Customer Advisory Council can:
Improve strategic relationships with key decision makers
Enhance companies’ ability to sustain, cross-sell and grow large strategic accounts
Validate that the company was launching the right solutions at the right time
Create a customer reference program
Elevate the company’s positioning in the customer’s mind: true partner vs. vendor
4 Ways You Can Drive Retention Efforts Worth Celebrating.
Showcase your expertise via thought-leadership content! Being a thought leader is AS important with customers as it is with prospects. Customers are looking for partners to support growth and innovation, so keep them informed and in tune with your organization’s best practices. You never know when they’ll have a need for them.
Consider whether a Customer Advisory Board makes sense for your business. Geehan shares some very compelling evidence for the importance of this function within large tech organizations. Regardless of how you execute, access to customer insights, challenges and opportunities is essential.
Remember the math: It’s far more profitable to retain/grow customers than acquire new ones. Treat your customers as your organization’s #1 asset. Customer appreciation efforts go a long way!
Score! How and why to gamify your B2B demand generation strategy (it’s not just because everybody’s doing it).
As a B2B marketer, you’ve likely heard the term “gamification” more than once in the past several months.
Or, if you attended SXSW in March 2011, you probably heard it 5,000 times. And gamification is making the big-business news, too: Recently, on the Forbes AdVoice blog, Tim Clark@SAP mused, “It was Ben Franklin who once said ‘in the world nothing can be said to be certain except death and taxes.’ If Ben were alive today, I wonder if he’d modify his now-legendary quote to include gamification.”
So what is gamification, and how does it apply to B2B marketing?
Gamification Defined:
Forrester’s defines gamification as: The insertion of game dynamics and mechanics into non-game activities to drive a desired behavior.
Now, how does it relate to our B2B world?
“Gamification describes the broad trend of employing game mechanics to non-game environments such as innovation, marketing, training, employee performance, health and social change,” said Brian Burke, an analyst at Gartner. “Enterprise architects, CIOs and IT planners must be aware of, and lead, the business trend of gamification, educate their business counterparts and collaborate in the evaluation of opportunities within the organization.”
Does Gamification Make Sense for B2B Marketers?
Absolutely! Interactive and B2B marketers can use game mechanics to motivate action and drive engagement with prospects, customers, channel partners, sales… just about any audience, really. The key to making it more than just a fun attention-getter is, as always, to clarify the actions and metrics you expect to result from gameplay.
The essential game dynamic works like this:
It begins with motivation—the incentives that will trigger people’s interest in playing the game.
The motivations drive actions that are fulfilled by rewards.
The rewards give players a sense of achievement that reinforce the initial motivations.
Repeat!
If at this point you’re thinking, “B2B marketers have been integrating gamification into marketing programs for years,” I agree—this is not our first rodeo! The best developer contests and games put on by companies like IBM, Oracle, Intel and Cisco feature all of the most powerful game mechanics like challenge, peer recognition, social status, reward and community.
However, there’s been some new smart thinking (and plenty of buzz) about how to best apply game theory to marketing. One of the most cogent gamification analyses comes from Seth Priebatsch, a thought-leader and Chief Ninja at gaming platform start-up SCVNGR. His SxSW 2011 keynote on how “the game layer” is building influence (and driving action) among audiences is worth your time to watch:
How Do I Start Thinking About Gamification for B2B Marketing?
As with any B2B marketing activity, you need to put the buyer and their business needs at the forefront of your mind. R “Ray” Wang, Principal Analyst and CEO of Constellation Research, offers plenty of useful perspective and direction in “Trends: 5 Engagement Factors For Gamification And The Enterprise.” Start with his simple tips on how businesses can apply game mechanics and dynamics to improve engagement and participation:
Intrigue. Content and story line often represent the consumer tech side. The enterprise needs to develop relevant content to keep users engage. Content could include help topics, related information, user generated comments, etc.
Reward. Both non-monetary and monetary incentives can be deployed. Rewards should match level of difficulty so users gain a sense of accomplishment. Non-monetary rewards could include exclusive information, access, or recognition.
Status. Leaderboards codify status in gamification. Leader boards reward status and provide a recognition mechanism as well as a way to tier users. A robust analytics platform must align with the objectives of gamification and support reward systems.
Community. Social is a key part of gamification. Users want to connect, share, and reach out to other “players”. Expect integration back to mobile and social platforms.
Challenge. Users must earn a sense of accomplishment to remain engaged. Gamification in the enterprise should tie back to the achievement of levels with increasing difficulty. Challenges will tie back to reward and intrigue over time.
Take these four (often overlooked) steps to attract savvy B2B buyers and increase pipeline efficiency.
Moving toward a buyer-centric marketing model is an essential strategic requirement in B2B marketing today.
As marketers, we have a tendency to indulge in marketing strategies that focus on OUR priorities, our key messages and our current content assets first. A buyer-centric model naturally prioritizes the buyer’s business challenges and the questions they need answered to make a purchase.
And there’s good evidence that the buyer-centric model is working. At the 2011 SiriusDecisions Summit, Athena Varmazis—American Express Director of Corporate Payment Solutions—provided a great case study that proved the success of adopting a buyer-centric marketing approach and technology solutions to support nurturing communications.
Before adopting this approach:
Precious resources were being utilized to call on cold leads and provided limited visibility into lead quality
Marketing qualified leads were converting to sales at a rate well below average
After adopting the buyer-centric approach:
They increased the quality of leads
They closed a significantly higher percentage of leads
So instead of kicking off strategic marketing discussions with defining messages, tactics, marketing channels and assets you want to promote, take four steps back and start with the buyer!
Step 1: Identify and segment the audience: Who are the buyers (and influencers) of your solution?
If you’re connecting with your customer base—or trying to convert a known prospect base—you likely have the critical information in your marketing database (e.g., the decision-making and/or job roles). Plus you can always consult your sales team for information that can be analyzed to determine “who” this audience really is.
In B2B tech marketing, it’s typically important to consider variances in your business-oriented buyer vs. the IT buyer. It’s also important to identify any key influencer types, or researchers.
If you’re just getting started with segmentation, consider limiting yourself to 2-3 key target segments for a particular initiative. You can always expand once you’ve mastered these!
Beyond identifying your core audiences, sub-segmentation within these audiences will enable you to target your content and messaging to be as relevant as possible.
Sub-segmentation will vary greatly depending on your top-level of segmentation, but may include variables like vertical, organization size or geography.
Step 2: Develop personas
Now that you’ve identified your key audiences, you need to find out what they care about and how to speak with them for best results.
Ideally, we’d always have the time and budget to commission formal persona research, complete with focus groups and well-targeted online surveys. But you can also collect information to inform personas by:
Reading the blogs and other media your audience reads
Joining the LinkedIn groups they are active in
Talking to your salespeople (they are the closest point of contact with your audience, after all)
Step 3: Define the buyer’s journey
The key purpose of the buyer’s journey is to reveal the questions that the buyer (or influencer, or researcher) needs answered in order to make or influence a buying decision. Typically the buyer’s journey can be broken into four quadrants, and should address the key questions your buyer will have.
Discover: ”What issues am I dealing with?”
Consider: ”What options do I have to solve this (these) problem(s)?”
Evaluate: ”Which of these solutions is best? What are the core benefits and disadvantages of each?”
Advocate: ”What will my TCO or ROI look like? What are the best practices for this type of solution?”
Step 4: Map content to the buyer’s journey
Almost there! Next you need to do a thorough review of all content assets to determine which quadrant (discover, consider, evaluate or advocate) they best serve.
Although this can seem daunting at first, you’ll find it’s much easier to “know” what kind content will be relevant to your audience after completing persona development and defining the buyer’s journey.
Additionally, it will become clearer which specific content assets will match each of the personas within the audiences you’re targeting.
Note: Following the content mapping process, you’ll often see glaring “gaps”: quadrants without relevant content. Consider these gaps your roadmap for new content development.
Now, go full steam ahead with your campaign work—and you’ll find you’re already a GIANT STEP ahead!
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Eric Wittlake
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