Marketing Interactions

B2B Marketing Zone Launches

Tony Karrer (Browse My Stuff) and Tom Pick (WebMarketCentral) have created and launched the B2B Marketing Zone as a filter to aggregate content for us in one spot. Similar to the idea of The Customer Collective for sales and marketing professionals and My Venture Pad aimed at SMBs and Junta42 for content marketing, this site focuses on a niche.

I'm excited to be one of their launch bloggers along with the terrific expertise provided by Brian Carroll, Paul Dunay, Newt Barrett and Jon Miller. I love that it also includes some new perspectives such as Cece Salmon Miller (PR Meets Marketing), Jay Lipe (Smart Marketing).

There are a couple of unique features of the B2B Marketing Zone that I think you'll find useful.

Navigation: On the left you see navigation around Concepts, Tools, Types and Companies such as Forrester. This makes using the site much easier than only having a list of bloggers or a blank search field. They've recognized that it's not about us (the bloggers) as it is about getting you the information you want, faster.

Participation: Rather than being a site that only focuses on well-known bloggers, the B2B Marketing Zone is asking for input, content suggestions and blog recommendations for inclusion on the site. See this post to learn more and find out how you can join in.

Subscribe Options: Instead of just one full feed to the site, the B2B Marketing Zone offers you the option of subscribing to a "Best of" feed that "will consist of posts that are limited in number and point to the content that is the best stuff based on social signals." I like this added filter and am looking forward to seeing how it works out.

Widgets. Located at the bottom of the pages are options for widgets you can add to your own blog. There's one that enables keyword filtered content display and one for search. And, you can even specify which featured blogs you'd like to include or choose all of them.

Go take a look at the B2B Marketing Zone for yourself. I'm looking forward to seeing how the community evolves over time.

Plan B2B Content for the Takeaway

There's an evolving list of all the things you need to consider when developing B2B marketing content. One of the components often discussed is the call to action. And, yes, you still have to do that. What's important to understand is that the call to action is not the takeaway.

A call to action is what you want your prospects and customers to do next.

A takeaway is the specific impression or memory the audience walks away with after reading your content.

A good takeaway is:

• Conceptual - produces an idea your content helped generate.
• Conversational - inspires sharing of that idea in the their own words
• Recommendable - promotes people to pass the content along to others
• Transferable - applicable to their own specific situations
• Visual - something they can "see" happening—not pie-in-the-sky thinking

Quite often I read content that's technically correct. It may even offer some valid insights. But, yet it doesn't inspire me to think of anything on my own. In B2B, that's often because the content is written without consideration for the prospect's perspective.

Content like that usually spends more time telling me what I'm supposed to think than providing ideas that help me think.

The easiest way to grasp the difference is to remember what happened when your parents told you that you had to do something. How many of you did the opposite, just, well, because?

Your prospects and customers want to be in control of their buying process. They want takeaways they can ingest that build their knowledge, increase their confidence and help them make the best decisions. In order to take action, they need to take ownership of the choice.

And that's often due to their ability to lower or eliminate their concept of the level of risk related to the choice. You can tell them all you want that your company is an expert. You can tell them not to worry because you're the best. You can tell them that research shows X, so they should do Y, but unless the content presents that finding as a takeaway, it's only just a statement.

I see articles and research reports all the time that display statistics like, "96% of an average organization’s Marketing Qualified Leads fail to make it closure."

My takeaways could be:

• We're much better. Only 75% of our MQLs are lost. (proof we're better than average)
• Sales isn't doing their job. (pass the buck - not my problem)
• Marketing needs a better definition of an MQL. (What should I do?)

B2B marketers need to plan for the takeaway. In the article used above, their takeaway is a big one. The idea that companies need marketing automation. (I agree, btw) But, there are also a number of smaller ones such as sales needs to participate in nurturing programs and applying resources across the entire opportunity lifecycle.

[This article could actually provide fodder for 3 or 4 nurturing articles with planned takeaways that build the case for marketing automation in step with prospects' thought processes.]

This is a good, informative article, and I love Sirius Decisions research. My point is that for prospect nurturing content, you will do better if you focus on emphasizing one takeaway. Seed one idea that the prospect can build on.

Then present the next nurturing takeaway to build from that foundation. This doesn't mean you can't mention anything else, but it does help you to develop content with a specific intent. By helping your prospects and customers create ideas they can make their own, they'll return to your content to help grow their ideas into business cases.

The beauty of the takeaway approach is that as you enable the prospect to build these ideas they relate their confidence and knowledge to your company. It becomes a natural conclusion for them to consider your company credible, trustworthy and a great choice as a partner to help them when the time comes to buy.

Kitchen-Sink Content is a Recipe for Failure

We’re all on the receiving end of email marketing messages. The problem is that most of them appear to try and do too much. It often feels like marketers have a list of all the stuff their solutions do and they want to cram it all into one message to make sure they say something that interests you.

That kind of content makes my head hurt. It’s confusing. It takes too much effort and I can’t be bothered to listen to someone who’s so unsure what to say to me.

Talk about impersonal. That’s about as general as you can get. At a time when buyers can filter the content they choose to read, you can’t afford to use kitchen-sink content.

Besides that, it’s lazy. And one of the most obvious traits of kitchen-sink content is that the message becomes so convoluted that it doesn’t make sense.

Here’s an example of a marketing email I received from a PR firm the other day:

I hope you don’t mind the follow-up. [Company’s] platform offers a unique Website Reengagement tool (different from shopping cart abandonment) that lets companies track and recognize customers who visit their website. With [Product], companies can tailor an email to abandon customers based on the web page visited to reengage them. They also offer a social networking tool which lets companies enable their subscribers to create their own social networks where all centered on the company's branded community center. This is only a few of the many unique services they offer their clients. [Company] has a long extensive list of happy clients that have seen tremendous ROI and invaluable results.

Yes. It was all in this one paragraph.

What really irritated me was that the PR firm probably charged this company for creating this drivel. Not only is the grammar awful, but the intention is muddy. I still really don’t have a clear idea of what this company does or why I should care. Unless, of course, I want to “tailor an email to abandon customers.”

The elements of kitchen-sink marketing are:

• Trying to say too much without understanding what it is you want to convey.


• Tossing in terms because you think they’ll catch attention – not because they make your message better or more easily understood.


• Displaying a self-oriented focus that doesn’t serve anyone well.

The effects of kitchen-sink marketing on your audience include:

• Instant delete or abandonment


• Negative credibility for your company

Obviously, this kind of content doesn’t create engagement. Nor does it enable marketers to sustain interest across a complex buying process. Suffice it to say that this is a surefire way to lose people, immediately, who could become qualified leads over time.

Socialize B2B Customer Advocacy

I received a request to publicize a webinar this week from a company I'd not heard of before.  Their name is Zuberance. The email content interested me, so I went to check them out. Zuberance is in the business of helping companies mobilize customer advocacy programs.

That interested me. It sounded, at first, like something that was more suited to B2C, but the ideas started spinning. So I attended the webinar to find out more, and now I'm full of ideas about how B2B marketers can expand their reach through more effective engagement programs that inspire customers to include your company in their conversations.

But, before we get to that, here's a few things that might surprise you:

• 84% of buyers are influenced by word of mouth [WOM] - Forrester Research
  
• A study by Keller Fay found that executives have 118 WOM conversations a week [EVERY WEEK]
• That same study learned executives mention brands in conversation 102X per week.
• It's estimated that 40% of your customers are advocates - Zuberance research with B2B & B2C companies
  

So what's an advocate?

An advocate is a customer who goes out of their way to recommend your company's offerings.

The interesting thing to note is that advocates may not be your biggest spenders.

Another thing to note is that 1 in 5 of your customers are detractors. Even though they're still your customers. Seems like that's something companies should work on fixing, but that's another post.

How do you know who your advocates are?

According to Zuberance, you ask them this one question:
How likely are you to recommend us to a friend or colleague?

Those who score 9 - 10 are potential advocates.

You may be sitting there saying, yeah, well, we only have 100 customers, so how much can this be worth? Well, it's not the number of companies you have, it's the number of people within the companies. This can mean buyers, influencers, end users and other employees who's jobs have been positively impacted by your products or solutions.

You can see the multiplier implications on advocacy, right? And, out of that group, Zuberance says 25% of these advocates will become active. That means they'll recommend you to their network.

The trick is that once you identify your advocates, you need to mobilize them. That's what the Zuberance hosted platform enables. Plus, they track all the activity so you have visibility to the results of their influence. [think lead generation]

The platform enables advocates to post their content/recommendations to social networks and via direct emails and I'm sure lots of places they didn't cover in the webinar. Which is where the socialize part comes in. Think about the exposure and reach you'll gain within every active advocate's network.

Here's an example of a company's experience using Zuberance.

• They identified and activated 5,600 advocates.
• 59% of those advocates created content (recommendations).
• 48% sent offers (think "see this exclusive content" or "you should attend this webinar" type referrals for B2B)

And the results?

• 2,250 new leads generated
• 112 deals won
• $5.6M in additional revenue

Anyone not need that?

As a disclaimer, I have no further experience with this company, but I do have to say that this is compelling enough to start thinking about. Oh, and for those of you who say the B2B buyers aren't out socializing - consider that Forrester Research found 91% of tech buyers they interviewed were Spectators and 58% were Critics.

What's your take on this concept?

E-Book: It's Not About You Anymore

Given what buyers can learn about your company and products without ever speaking directly to you, B2B positioning is more important than ever. The problem is that many companies look around them at their competition and model themselves after the company they want to emulate. But that's "me too" stuff that doesn't differentiate your company.

Rebel Brown [my great friend and colleague] has written a terrific E-Book about positioning that will help you begin to spin your own story in ways that are uniquely yours. She says,

"Anyone who says there's a one-size-fits-all approach to strategy and positioning simply doesn't get it. Great positioning is as unique as each situation. Strategic positioning is as much an art as it is a science. And each and every situation offers a blank canvas."

In It's Not About You Anymore Rebel shares her positioning matrix to be used as a foundation. She discusses how you can evaluate your market, company and solutions in order to create a clear, relevant message for each one. And then she shows you how they can all work together to differentiate your company from any other.

When Rebel and I work together, her ability to create a compelling positioning platform sets me up perfectly to develop e-marketing strategies and nurturing programs that do what they're supposed to — generate demand and sales-ready buyers.

Why? Because everything works together in a consistent way based on the insights and nuances she's helped the company uncover and then woven into their go-to-market approach. She also ensures that the positioning platform is an organic foundation with plenty of room for flexibility as your markets evolve in real time.

Go download the E-Book and see for yourselves. Your company may look very different to you after you read it.