Marketing Interactions

5 Things to Consider BEFORE Using Social Media

Many companies I work with today are enthusiastic about diving into social media. It's shiny object syndrome at its finest. The problem I find most prevalent is that companies have no realistic idea about what it takes to launch and support a social media program.

It takes a lot more than creating an account and setting up a profile with the best of intentions to participate.

Here are 5 things to consider before you choose to add social media to your marketing mix:

1. Prospect Preferences. Do you know where your prospects hang out online? Do they engage in social media? If so, is their involvement based on personal or professional reasons. (e.g. many people use Facebook for family and friends, keeping it separate from business) 


2. Content. How much of it do you have? Do you have plans to continuously develop a flow of content with the variety of contexts you need to meet expectations in different social media venues? Is your company stance to gate content or make it freely available? Is all this content focused on your prospects' perspectives? Is it helpful? Do your prospects engage well with the content you already share with them? In other words, will they be receptive to more of it? If not, fix that first.


3. Resources. How many people do you have that can spend time working on social media efforts? What? Just you? How much free time do you have in your current schedule? Social media is not free. Take a look at #2 above and then consider how much time it actually takes to keep up with conversational threads, developing and sharing your content—-as well as that of others—contributing to conversations, answering questions, etc.
   
   Are you a writer? If not, make sure you line up writing resources to contribute content you can use. If you think you can force people (engineers, product managers, customer service agents, executives, etc. to write blog posts, think again. It's harder to get busy people to make time to write than you'd ever imagine.) Solely interacting in social media by curating other people's content (not your own) may make you a relied-upon resource, but it won't make you a thought leader that people seek out for ideas.


4. Long-term Commitment. Social media is not something you start and expect to see amazing results with in 3 months or less. It's definitely the turtle that beats the hare in this race. It can take 6 months to a year to develop the following, engagement and participation that leads to directly attributed sales gains.
   
   And, if you start, what impression will you make if you stop and your accounts become inactive? Social media requires commitment. You must be prepared to measure short-term wins and long-term goals accordingly. And those goals must be reasonable and achievable or you'll be setting yourself up for failure. Getting pushy and trying to make it happen faster can (will) backfire.


5. Connection Points. How can you integrate your social media efforts with your existing marketing programs? Set up a plan to develop cross-over and help your prospects find the content they're searching for regardless of where they look. Make sure you've got calls to action designed to help them migrate from one platform to another to follow your ideas and engage with your content—and your company.
   
   How will you share what's going on in social media internally across your company so that when the subject comes up, your customer service agents, salespeople, installers, etc. know how to respond? For B2B companies, social media is not a singular effort but a plural one. If people are out of the loop and get blindsided, it can be problematic—both for your company's reputation and your own dealings with other departments within the company.

Social media can be a boon for marketers and companies. But it does require planning and commitment that's often out of reach for many marketing departments already spread thin.

The best advice I can share is to do your research and stockpile some content (or create an editorial calendar) before you begin. Incorporate it with your existing marketing programs from the start to give it legs. Choose one tool that matches your prospects' preferences and apply yourself to becoming the best at it. Measure as you go. Then add more platforms/tools as you and plan to be prepared before continuing to expand your efforts. 

Consider starting with a blog. A blog is the surest way to generate the content you need to fuel sharing on other social media platforms. Plus, with the proper planning, you can incorporate blog posts into newsletters and nurturing sends right away. This said, go back and really take a hard look at the list above before you commit.

Give Marketing Content a Job Description

Content and more content. You can read tons of blog posts, analyst recommendations, industry articles and more, all pointing out the need for content. Today's marketing is fueled by massive amounts of content - whether online or off. But, without a plan your content will likely suck wind.

Content has a job to do. This means it needs a job description.

Imagine hiring a new employee, showing them to their desk and saying "have at it." How successful do you think that employee will be without a clear understanding of roles and responsiblities required to achieve the goals you've set for them?

If I had to develop a job description for marketing content, it might look something like this.

Position: Marketing Content

Role: To consistently engage targeted prospects during each stage of their buying process.

Responsibilities: To create pipeline progression by encouraging prospects to take next steps toward purchase, build credibility and inspire trust in the company's expertise.

Required Skill Set: Marketing Content must have the ability to...

• Adjust to meet the relevance requirements of the prospect.
• Address a facet of a problem the prospect is trying to solve.
• Answer a question the prospect is asking.
• Hook the reader in less than 7 seconds.
• Be scannable as well as easily read and understood.
• Deliver useful information the prospect values.
• Be the rockstar during nurturing programs.
• Compel prospects to do what you ask of them.
• Hold attention for the duration of the read.
• Provide visual ideas that help prospects share them with others on the buying committee.
• Morph into the appropriate format for the communication.
• Be findable whenever prospects search for you.
• Invite website visitors inside the front door.
• Gain attention in crowded social settings.
• Refer prospects to your "marketing content" colleagues.
• Show prospects how we deliver more than the other guys. (adapted from Larry's suggestion below)

How much of your content is living up to its job description?

What would you add?

Just a little something to think about as you go off to "Labor" this weekend.

Are B2B Marketers Missing the Point?

Marketing Sherpa released this chart today about the processes B2B marketers are using to manage prospects across their buying cycles. What concerns me is the percentage of marketers who've labeled these processes as non-priority items and assigned them to purgatory.

In my opinion, these marketers may well be the next to experience purgatory.

Let's take a look at why a few priorities need to shift:

• Collaborate with Sales to define sales-ready leads.
  This one always leaves me a bit perplexed. In essence, one of marketing's most important jobs is to generate and qualify leads worthy of sales pursuit. Yet they don't seem to care what sales people consider to be a qualified lead. Thankfully, 20% are planning to change this but 35% don't seem to think it matters enough to make it a priority. I'm sorry, I just don't get it.


• Measure lead generation contribution to revenue.
  In the age of increased demand for marketing accountability, it makes zero sense not to be able to account for marketing program contribution to revenues. Nada, zilch. For all the marketers out there whining about your budgets, start measuring this metric. If marketing is wants to be considered a contributor to driving the strategic direction of the company, they need to start learning how to prove their impact to business objectives.


• Have system for rating "qualified" and "warm" leads.
  If you want to keep that divide between marketing and sales nice and healthy then keep tossing contacts over the wall to sales. As it is now, salespeople spend more time on administrative tasks and research than they do on selling. This is not the best use of their time. And yes, marketers, this one's on you. Salespeople need help prioritizing leads so that their selling time can be maximized for best results. Spinning their wheels trying to talk to prospects not ready to talk with them isn't productive and it just irritates your prospects.


• Have a process for nurturing leads not sales ready.
  Considering that only about 20% of leads generated are ready for a sales conversation—if you're lucky—this means that 38% of marketers are fine with wasting 80% of their lead generation budgets. That just does not make good business sense. With buyers in control of their buying process, the growth in self-education opportunities and the increasing complexity of the problems they're charged with solving, the need for nurturing has never been higher. But, never fear, if you don't do it, your competitors will be glad to take those future buyers off your hands.


• Closed-loop tracking from source to conclusion.
  This one goes back to measuring lead generation contribution to revenues. But, beyond that, it also means discovering which sources provide the highest quality leads and which you should eliminate due to poor quality leads that don't convert. Given that 43% of marketers say this is not a priority added to the 31% that said they don't track lead gen to revenues, 74% of marketers don't think that monitoring what happens over the entire course of the buying process is important. Considering how much farther across the buying process marketers must now reach to get sales people in the game, this could be one of the biggest mistakes being made today.


• Have a process for handing leads back to marketing.
  The fact that 53% of marketers think that once they toss leads to sales they have been absolved of any further responsibility in the buying process is just frightening. If you tie this result with the 38% of marketers who don't have a nurturing process for leads not sales ready, it gets to be a really scary statistic of 91% of marketers who are not engaged in facilitating the entirety of the buying process.

Is it just me, or does anyone else see a disconnect here between what should be priorities given today's business environment and what marketers think is not important?

Tech Buyers Find Salespeople Lacking

There's a growing divide between buyer expectations and sales conversations. This reality is evidenced by findings in Forrester Research's Technology Buyer Insight Study: Are Salespeople Prepared for Executive Conversations?

Here are a couple of eye-opening responses from buyers:

"Only 15% of executives believe that their meetings with salespeople are valuable and live up to their expectations. Not surprisingly, with such low marks on the value of that first meeting, the probability of a given salesperson securing another appointment is extremely low, as only 7% of executives say they usually accept a follow-on meeting." [emphasis mine]

The research points to some key factors that contribute to this result.

• Training salespeople on how to have conversations with a "generic executive" doesn't translate into meaningful dialogue about specific business issues, roles and responsibilities. In fact, "...no such role as a C-level executive exists." 


• Onboarding programs are often designed to get reps up to speed quickly on the company's product vision—not on understanding the roles and responsibilities of the prospects they're going to be selling to.


• Vendor use of jargon and their lack of simplifying issue complexity often keep business-oriented buyers from grasping the nuances of how technology can help to solve their problem. When it's too difficult, the executive will choose to switch priorities something easier to understand and take next steps toward solving.


• Customer examples and stories used don't match the buyer's reality, making it hard for them to validate the need to take next steps because the salesperson isn't proving that they understand their business situation.

In fact, if your salesperson is in a meeting and the buyer's admin interrupts with a call that the buyer agrees to take, it's likely that your sales rep has just been shut down. "...one CIO of a pharmaceutical company reflected that he will choose to take the call over 50% of the time."

So, what can marketing do to help enable the sales team?

• Develop and share highly targeted personas. Even better, work with sales on the development and refinement of those personas.


• Design highly segmented content marketing programs to address the buyer's perspective at each stage of the buying process, based on those personas. Make them easy to access for salespeople.


• Create content based on addressing specific roles and responsibilities of prospective buyers and package it up for sales to access and use easily.


• Eliminate the jargon and complexity by creating content designed to answer specific questions buyers have at each stage of the buying process. Create a conversational brief for sales that indicates which resources should be used when for specific buyer segments.


• Create a variety of customer examples based on situations, industries, company size and problem resolution—not on the list of products you sold them. Make sure the customer stories include quantifiable results your salespeople can reference during conversations as they explain how your customer was able to overcome the obstacles they were facing.

If marketing is tackling the buyer-focused content marketing challenge, they've got the resources that sales needs to have conversations that meet buyers' expectations. Instead of looking at this as a sales problem, companies need to look at it as a buying problem and address it fluidly from one end of the process to the other. By combining resources, sales enablement can become a core component of the marketing-to-sales process, not a standalone monkey on your sales team's back.

Juan Eloqua's Grande Guide to Lead Scoring

Eloqua has released the first in a series of B2B marketing guides labeled the Grande Guides. This first one is on Lead Scoring. To have a bit of fun, they've also created Juan Eloqua - who's quite a Bold and Smoky guy whose specialty is growing fine coffee and, of course, revenues. If you haven't met Juan, you should.

The Grande Guide to Lead Scoring is a nice educational piece. There's plenty of explanation about what it is, why you need it and tips for creating a lead scoring model of your own.

So I won't cover it here - go get your own copy.

What I want to discuss in this post is one of the predictions Eloqua makes at the end about the future of Lead Scoring. The second item on the list is content scoring:

"Content-based scoring. Companies that regularly refine their scoring models begin to notice patterns in lead quality that can be directly tied to the content that is accessed during the buying process. Advanced organizations are experimenting with scoring models based on content type – like whitepapers, product information and customer testimonials – instead of the download activity itself."

I'd like to add a few ideas to their definition of content scoring. Learning more about content type is great. It can guide you to the types of content you produce, but that's not nearly enough to help your content impact the buying process overall.

I suggest that we start looking at content groups or tracks - whatever you'd like to call them.

There are a couple of ways to think about content groups:

• The content you use across the duration of a nurturing program. If your content is designed to answer prospects' questions at each stage of the buying process, which content assets are getting the most attention? Take a look at what the content addresses. Find out from sales if this is a sticking point, slowing momentum. Perhaps you'll need to create more of it. Also look at which content is getting the least attention. Is it in the wrong place in the track? Or is it answering a question your prospects don't have?


• All the content you have that addresses one problem-to-solution scenario, whether in your nurturing track or on your website, blog, etc. Are prospects seeking out related content in other locations? There should be a way to tag content so that marketers can say - show me the response to all the content that covers problem X. We should also be able to determine individual interest levels based on topic, not just types of content read.

Knowing that a prospect downloaded 5 white papers and 3 customer stories and 2 data sheets is one thing. Knowing that all of those resources are related to solving problem X can impact when you reach out as well as the quality of the conversations you'll be able to have with the prospect.

With buyers expectations growing much faster than our abilities to engage them with added value, we need insights that help us to have better conversations, build our credibility and convince them that our company is the best choice to help them solve their problems.

The interest part of lead scoring needs to be based on a solid content strategy.