Marketing Interactions

Nurturing Programs for Webinars

Nurturing programs have many more applications than drip marketing campaigns to your house lead list and eNewsletters sent to your customers.

Many of the marketing campaigns you likely execute can be improved with a nurturing mindset. For example, let's consider a webinar.

A webinar requires a number of steps from pre-promotion to post-event follow-up. But, when's the last time you actually thought about them as a nurturing program?

Let's outline the steps:

1. The audience has to be aware you're having a webinar.


2. They have to decide that it's worth their time to register to attend.


3. They have to actually be motivated to take the effort to register.


4. Then your attendees need to remember & make an effort to show up.


5. Once there, you want them to stay through the entire event.


6. Then you want to follow-up with them to continue the dialogue.

Each one of these steps has a variety of sub-steps and considerations similar to those you'd go through in constructing a lead nurturing program for a buying process.

Even if the audience is aware of your event, it may take several tries to get them to decide it's worth their time. You may need to create differently worded invitations and landing pages for the different personalities of your anticipated audience.

Instead of sending the same invitation repeatedly, consider approaching each invitation you send from a different angle. Surely your webinar has more than one set of takeaways. Or perhaps test the wording of the bulleted points in several different versions to see which work best for motivating registrations.

Think of a webinar invitation series as an example of the versatility and depth your expertise will provide during the presentation. Make it worthwhile for them to attend.

Increase curiosity about the subject matter you'll share. Focus on what's in it for them. Can you make the event more exclusive? Are you unveiling new research? Showcasing a customer story that speaks directly to their situation?

Once people register, consider ways you can create advanced participation. Can you survey your attendees to find out how you can really add value that is specific to this set of people? Yes, this probably means you need to be versatile in presenting, but if you involve them, think of the rewards...

When people participate in creating the event they'll attend, they have a stake in the ground to actually show up. Of course you'll also send reminder emails, and you'll provide way to add it to their calendar. 

Refresh their memory about why they want to attend. Relate the reminder to your invitation, but add something else. Maybe it's a white paper or eBook download special offer at the end of the event. Think of something that could be viewed as a value add.

Many companies put this on the original invitation. But why not roll out the "goodies" during the nurturing campaign to either drive registration or ensure they remember to attend?

If you think about a webinar as a nurturing program, it changes this need to dump it all in one shot and then just repeat that send over and over and over.

Now the big day arrives and you're ready to start the webinar.

Start with these 3 things:

1. Make the first slide deliver value for them. This means no company blather up front. You need to create immediate engagement to lock in their commitment to stay.


2. Tell them what they'll get and why it's important to them. Use the words your audience would use and frame the ideas from their perspective.


3. Acknowledge the advanced participation and talk about how it's being used. This creates anticipation on two levels. First from the people who participated. Second for the attendees to learn what their peers think.

Afterward, you need to interact with the attendees and attempt extend the dialogue. Do you have a follow-up informational offering that will help them extend the ideas you shared in the webinar? Unless they've asked you to, this is not the time to switch to sales mode.

Perhaps you've created an content series they can subscribe to, giving you permission to dole out that information in bite-sized chunks that move them into a nurturing program that extends from their current position in the buying process.

Webinars are one of the top 3 informational vehicles specified by B2B buyers as providing high value. If you're going to go to all the trouble to create them, it stands to reason that you should maximize the return on attention - for them, and for your company.

It's also worth noting that the better you get at short-term nurturing programs for webinars, the more you'll learn about your target markets that can be applied to your longer-term nurturing programs with other leads.

Linear vs. Holistic B2B Marketing Stories

Most of us have been brought up thinking about stories as structured with a beginning, middle and end. Most of them tend to unfold chronologically. If you miss the beginning, you have to work pretty hard to catch up with the middle.

The Internet has changed this experience. Information comes at your prospects from a variety of angles, viewpoints and places within the traditional linear structure. No longer must they start at the beginning.

Consider that the beginning a prospect starts with may not be yours. Does that mean you're not prepared to help them step into your story from the point at which they leaped away from your competitor's story?

The point I'm making here is that the availability of information online coupled with the rise in social media participation has altered the way stories get heard.

Another factor that influences the way stories get heard is the speed of change in business priorities. Due to shifts, a prospect may have to leap from initial research to constructing a short list faster than they thought, or they may have to abandon your story altogether, for now, to focus on some other priority that's gained prominence.

Do you make these shifts easy for them? Can your prospects effortlessly step back into your story when the time comes to resume consideration?

Have you left flexibility in your story lines to incorporate new information that comes along as business evolves? Or have you painted yourself into a corner without room for expansion that demonstrates your company's ability to adapt?

I've talked about mapping content to buying stages based on business scenarios your prospects are facing. Although you may originally construct these in a linear format, breaking down the steps into relevant and valuable, related stories provides flexibility for your prospects to choose what they need at the time they need that information.

When you enable that, you also add the ability to discover where prospects are in their buying process.

But here's the really cool thing. You've got openings to evolve your stories without interrupting the flow. When new things happen that affect your market, you can insert new content right into your story, honoring the theme, but updating the dialogue to stay relevant. Engagement levels will grow in response.

You may need to tweak a bit of the surrounding content to accommodate the additional story elements, but, if your story line started out oriented to your prospect's perspective, that shouldn't be hard to do.

As marketers telling our company's story, we have to become adept at weaving together the influence of newly available information and perspectives regarding their needs and problems.

The combination of blogs, Twitter, LinkedIn, industry portals, analyst forecasts and reports, customer reviews, user groups and any number of other media sources are continuously updating the stories your prospects are telling themselves—and each other. If you're not keeping up, incorporating these changes of viewpoints into your stories, you're likely losing engagement to someone who is.

This doesn't mean you have to go nuts with every nuance you see under discussion. What it does mean is that you need to be out there listening. When you see something taking hold, consider whether it makes sense to incorporate that idea into your story line.

Even better, listen for ideas you can claim first and expand them to address your audience in a compelling, thought-leading way. Become their anchor of preference that everyone else must surpass to regain their attention.

What are you doing to keep your marketing stories holistic?

Hat tip to Kathy Hansen's blog post Are We Now in the New Storytelling Economy? for planting the seed for this post. It's a good one, go read it.

Promote Nurturing with Signature Lines

I have this theory that any email communication can be used to nourish your prospects and customers. Everyone at your company uses a signature line when emailing, right?

They probably include a link to your website, maybe your company blog.

What if they included a compelling question or controversial statement and linked to the answer/explanation content that addresses it?

So instead of a sig line that goes this way:

John Smith
Manager of All
XYZ Company
666-223-6677
www.xyzcompany.com

You could have one for prospects:

John Smith
Manager of All
XYZ Company
666-223-6677

Wasted time searching for info may be costing your company $1.5M every year. Find out why...http://xyzcompany.com/wasted_time

And you could have one for customers:

John Smith
Manager of All
XYZ Company
666-223-6677

Did you know the new BLOOP feature can shorten time to revenue? Tips to start using it today...http://xyzcompany.com/bloop

You may need to provide a list of provocative statements and links to your staff each week, but if you're continuously creating content this shouldn't be a big deal. The fact is, you probably have a lot of content you can put to good use right now.

You may not be able to segment as tightly as you'd like, but you can increase the satisfaction, interactions and engagement of those your company communicates with outside the realm of marketing.

Experiment with using these above and below the actual signature information.

For example:

Thanks,
John

***
Did you know the new BLOOP feature can shorten time to revenue? Tips to start using it today...http://xyzcompany.com/bloop
***
John Smith
Manager of All
XYZ Company
666-223-6677

Monitor traffic to these content offerings to gauge interest levels. You may even discover a shifting priority or problem-to-solution scenario that applies to a prospect or customer segment you hadn't considered.

Don't make it a sales pitch. Make it helpful.

Have your staff create two email signatures - one for non-customers and one for customers. Or assign the link of the week for the most common type of correspondence specific groups of employees engage in. Each week all they'll need to do is update their signature files with the new info. It's a copy and paste, not rocket science.

This doesn't have to be a time consuming ordeal. But, it can reap some great results and be instrumental in generating dialogue between your company and your prospects and customers.

Start with salespeople's sig lines. Add customer service and support. Test. Expand...etc.

In this challenging economic time, providing helpful insights in addition to whatever the email addresses could turn all your employees into nurturers.

Does your marketing content promote unsupervised thinking?

I was reading this post about landing page optimization on the Marketing Experiments blog today and came across the term "unsupervised thinking."

I started thinking about marketing content on B2B websites and nurturing content for complex sales used over a longer-term cycle. With that in mind, here are some characteristics I see that promote unsupervised thinking:

• One-off, monologue content that's presented in a stand-alone fashion. 


• Content presented with randomly without an obvious storyline to extend engagement.


• Content focused on the company and their products and solutions that provides no "thinking" for the prospect.


• Open-ended content without an obvious conclusion or call to action perceived as beneficial by the reader.


• Web pages with too many choices not framed for the user perspective.


• Siloed website structure where "like" content is displayed together without context - like here's all our case studies or click here for all our product data sheets.

When prospects act upon an interest, they're telling you what attracted them to your company. Marketing content needs to honor that expressed interest, put it in context and guide the prospect's thinking to enable further exploration and engagement with the topic.

This is why developing a content strategy is essential to building higher levels of engagement. We all know that time is scarce. By incorporating a contextual path for prospects the opportunity exists to pull them farther into your world. [In lieu of them clicking over to a competitor's site in search of relevance.]

A few tips for creating guided thinking with marketing content:

• Create a contextual experience on your website.
  For example, if your article discusses the benefits of solving X problem, display sidebar content to a related white paper download, a webinar registration, a related customer success story, other related articles, etc.
  
  Include hyperlinks that use wording to indicate where your readers may find more information of interest to them. If there are several different next steps, use all three in your hyperlinks to learn how that prospect's orientation to the issue. Same for differing roles.


• Answer What, How and Why.
  What is the problem.
  How is the solution.
  Why is what happens if they do, or they don't solve it.
  
  If you develop this information to flow, you can guide your prospect's thinking by showing them you understand their pain, you have expertise in solving it and educate them on the reasons why they should do so, or what it will cost them if they don't. Make it about them, not your products. Use customer examples to help them relate and visualize themselves solving the problem.


• Unfold a Story over time.
  Map your content to buying stages and deliver a piece at a time. With a content strategy, you've scripted the buyer scenario and designed your content to answer questions, reduce risky assumptions and continue to engage over time. A complex sale isn't made with 3 emails with links to articles.
  
  The more trusted your company becomes as a source of information, the more credibility and trust you build. Make sure you refer to the last piece to generate familiarity and hint about the next to create a "serial" type of involvement and anticipation for what's next.


• Use segmentation techniques.
  Using the same marketing content for everyone is not effective. If it's for everyone it's too general to be useful and leads to unsupervised thinking. Instead develop content on the same topic oriented for each segment you sell to.
  
  Segmentation doesn't have to be overly difficult. It can be done by roles, industry or personas. The point is that it's difficult to guide their thinking if you're treating everyone as if they're the same. Different perspectives process and assign importance to ideas, well, differently. You're a specialist at what you do for each market you serve, right? Present your content with that orientation.


• Highlight next steps.
  Make what they should do next obvious. No, this doesn't mean buy now. This means, now that you've explored X, see how this customer dealt with it - or whatever makes reasonable sense for the prospect to want to know after reading what they read. Make it obvious. Make it helpful. Make it human. Don't make them work for it...because they won't. They don't have time. They're expecting you to be the expert.

Those are just a few thoughts about how to use marketing content to guide the thinking of your prospects over the longer term of a complex sale. I'm sure you can come up with others...

Podcasts for Sales Enablement

Over on the Sirius Decisions blog is this post: Social Media and Pipeline Acceleration

The point of the post is that marketing can provide value in helping move stalled leads through the pipeline. I agree. But, what really caught my eye is this:

"The use of podcasting as an internal training and communications tool continues to grow and is a proactive way in helping arm reps with the talk tracks and selling points to help accelerate prospects, particularly if they include the experiences of reps that have success accelerating their deals."

Think about sales-focused podcasts for a minute. They're portable. Your reps can download them onto their iPods and mp3 players and listen to them in the field.

What if:

• Marketing creates a series based on a persona and includes brief customer-like-them examples by problem-to-solution scenario or industry.


• A podcast for a specific situation includes conversational prompts and questions designed to help get the information sales reps need to move the buyer forward.


• You record a podcast with your customer speaking that answers an objection or concern a prospect has and the rep plays it for them. Or emails them a link to download it—that you track, of course.


• Marketing records a track that tells the nurturing storyline presented to a segment of leads. If you're providing reps with the nurturing content but it's too time intensive for them to dig through it, how about if they can listen to the 5 minute story. Then give them a few ideas about how to extend that story in their conversations.


• You create a weekly podcast series that highlights recent triggering events. One for each industry you sell to? By role? Or whatever focus is the most relevant for them.

These are only a few ideas off the top, but I'm sure you can think of more...can't you?

What a great idea. Keeping your reps in the field selling is imperative. Enabling them to listen to short, informational podcasts while they're out there can enable them to get in more engaging conversations that provide value for their prospects. And accelerate the sale.

What do you think?

Has your prospect's worldview changed?

Given the challenging times we're living in, it's likely that the worldview your prospects hold today is not the same one they held a year, or even several months, ago.

Changing world views also shift perspectives.

Have your marketing content and sales conversations shifted along with that of your prospects?

I know. I can hear you groan - "But we just updated that content six months ago."

Not good enough. Chances are that it's no longer relevant enough to strike the chord it did last year.

Give yourself a content audit—just to be on the safe side. It may only take a few tweaks to update the relevance of some content. Other pieces may need to be re-told in a different way that addresses today's concerns.

Check Your Payoff:

• Is your content all about increasing revenues? Right now, cutting costs may be of more importance to your prospects.
• Are your testimonials doing the same thing?
• How about your customer success stories?

Measure the Tone:

• Carrot? Hope is persuasive and engaging.
• Stick? Negative gets old, depressing and ignored.

Assess the Scenarios:

• Are you addressing today's problem-to-solution scenarios, or have those shifted, too?
• Has the makeup of the buying committee shifted? 
• What new factors are requiring more attention?

Rate Your Unfettered Helpfulness:

• Is everything you offer attached to your prospects giving you something in return?
• Consider just being graciously helpful with useful tips and techniques they can use today. They'll remember.

Enhance Dialogue Components:

• Is there an easy way for people to tell others how helpful you're being?
• Are you inviting interactions that feel more casual and less of a push into the sales process?
• What are you doing that entices your prospects to proactively engage with you?
• Review your calls to action.

And how the heck do you figure all this out?

Talk to your customers and salespeople. While you're at it, turn them in to featured heroes and write new customer stories about how they're riding out (or taking advantage) of today's challenging economy—with your help, of course.

Open your ears on social listening posts and find out what people are talking about in relation to your keywords. Tweet Grid is helpful for following keyword use on Twitter. Industry blog comments and topics can also provide timely insights.

The point is, this is no time to sit still. Content and the stories it tells must be on track with your prospect's mindset if you want to continue to build engagement with them.

What are you doing to make sure you're in touch with your prospect's worldview?

How human is your b2b company online?

I was reading a post over on David Meerman Scott's blog, People want to do business with people, and I started thinking about B2B websites vs. micro-sites.

David writes:

"People want to do business with people. We're human, and we crave interaction with people who know us."

"When online content seems created by some nameless, faceless corporate entity, it doesn’t entice us. And we're just not interested in doing business with that company."

Corporate B2B websites are usually boring, disjointed, politically correct, conservative and product-oriented. It's a bit difficult to make them otherwise due to all the different stakeholders involved in guarding their turf, or perhaps it's because the company doesn't have an integrated story to connect the dots for their prospects.

Smaller companies can often do better because their passion hasn't been stifled by bureaucracy—yet—or they only sell one thing or solve one problem. Although, that said, there are plenty of robotized small biz websites, too.

But what got me thinking about micro-sites was this:

"When you build content especially for your buyer personas, you build a relationship with people before you’ve even met them."

What if you took all the personas related to the buying committee for a problem-to-solution scenario and created a micro-site just for them? What kind of impression would that make? [WOW! comes to mind]

What if you filled it with content designed for each stage of the buying process, for each of them?

What if you delivered a complete storyline for your micro-site visitors that provided so much value in helping them understand, think about and explore solving their problem that you eliminated any need for them to talk to a competitor?

What if that micro-site was so human it actually caused your prospects to reach out to you, instead of you chasing after them?

Intrigued? I thought you might be.

Here are a few things to think about when you develop a micro-site:

• Create a storyboard for what the scenario may look like for each of the people on your buying committee. [each persona involved]


• Develop an overarching storyline from status quo through purchase decision. And make sure it's focused on the buyer's perspective. What questions are they asking. If they learn one thing, what will they ask next? Work you way through. Involve salespeople, customers and support staff if you need help.


• Slice your storyline into content topics for each stage.


• Consider the different viewpoints you need to address to create dialogue between you and them, as well as among them without you.


• Now develop an editorial calendar so you can research, plan for and develop content to answer their needs. Make sure it all flows with the storyline. Make sure you vary the format [podcasts, articles, white papers, customer success stories, webinars, video, etc.] You don't have to use all of them, but you get my point.


• Consider if there are other experts out there writing about your topic and either link to their posts/articles or invite/engage them to write an article for your micro-site.


• Create a distribution plan to attract prospects to engage with your micro-site. This could include email to opt-in people, blog posts, Twitter, SEO, StumbleUpon, Digg, Delicious, Squidoo page, Asking questions on LinkedIn with a link to related content, etc.

If it's great content sharing a good story people will be drawn to it. If it's all about your products, probably not so much.

Launch your microsite with all the content needed to sway people from status quo and then build it out over time. A complex sale takes multiple, consistent touches (at least 7 according to some recent research I just read) so you want to entice them to return for each new "chapter" of the story. Continuously adding content helps keep the site fresh and interesting.

Using a micro-site to put the human touch behind a story designed for a specific segment of the people you want to engage as potential customers can deliver compelling results for your company. There's technology out there right now that makes it possible to become your own publisher without needing an Act of Congress to involve your IT department.

And finally, don't forget to consider interactive elements. The goal should be to create dialogue, learn about interests and build trust. As David says, "people want to buy from people."

It takes more than a white paper...

A lot of b2b companies are focused on white papers. Lately I've been talking to companies who've discovered the importance of online content and the need to generate permission-based lists. But, when we talk, I find that many of them have only thought as far as the white paper series.

They've got the idea to produce a number of white papers over this year and researched options for syndicating them online where their prospects hang out. A good start for the demand generation goal, but then...nothing definitive.

When we discuss topics, they're not sure. Mostly this is due to angst about making a choice between target markets. Many times white papers are too broad in topic because the company wants to get the most use out of them. That generally results in a white paper too superficial to be of truly compelling value to anyone.

So, first choose the target market the white paper is intended to engage.

Then, before you do anything else, think about what happens after the white paper.

Let's go back to the strategy of creating a series of white papers for demand generation. Every time you release one, you're going to generate opt ins from people interested in that type of information, right? So, what happens to those people once you get them?

My suggestion is to create your white paper in concert with a slate of content to expand that storyline. In other words, when you brainstorm your white paper topic, make a list of the things people interested in that subject will want to know next. Or perhaps expansion topics are deeper dives into some aspect you discuss in the paper but aren't the main subject.

By planning your content development in this way you get all your research done at one time. You've got a plan to develop and distribute ongoing content focused on a topic people have expressed interest in. [They opted in, right?] With an ongoing content plan your leads won't be languishing in your database or receiving unrelated content that diminishes their original interest. Instead, they'll be coming to rely on your company for valuable insights they need.

Think about demand generation and nurturing as an integrated process. One is an extension of the other.

Conversion Metrics Aren't the Whole Meal

[And, rounding out my food motif for this week...I promise I'll get back to normal next week...well, maybe.]

With all this talk about quantifying marketing value many companies are like lasers focused on conversions to sales as the be all, end all metric. But, unless you apply plenty of thought into all the other metrics and steps that influence conversions you might be missing out on optimizing how many you can actually generate—even during an economic downturn.

Here's why.

A complex sale requires many steps before the buyer arrives at a purchase decision. If your company is only focused on the conversion metric, how will you improve it? Would you even know what can trigger a change?

Consider all the stages of the buying process and measure incremental progress through the pipeline. Are prospects stalling along the way? If you can pinpoint hesitations and develop provoking content that helps to move them over the hump, you'll increase conversion.

Consider which sources attract the most prospects to engage with you. Are there new audiences expressing interest that will move faster if you tailor content just for them? And, are you providing a continuous supply of content to the best origination sources or treating all of them as equal opportunities? When's the last time you looked?

How many days does the average prospect spend with marketing? How many with sales? Are you seeing a decrease in these numbers over time? An increase?

Same with contacts or touch points. Is it taking more content and communications to get progression? Consider the content you're using and audit it for value and relevance. If you're not creating your content for specific audiences start with one segment and measure the changes. Then branch out to other segments once you've got the hang of it.

How are you measuring progress? Do you do tele-prospecting to add a personal touch and inquire? Have you mapped content to buying stages and tuned the process to closely match how your prospects move forward at each step? Are you asking incremental questions for high-value content downloads or webinar registrations?

Is sales seeing less effort to connect with the qualified prospects marketing is giving them? If not, is the messaging they're using consistent with the marketing story those prospects have been told thus far?

The point is that conversion doesn't happen on it's own without other influences. You have to work on all the factors that play into producing that desired result. When you do, you'll find you can lift that conversion number skyward.

The Chicken or Egg of Marketing

I seem to be on a food theme this week...

Seth Godin wrote a post today, Which comes first, the product or the marketing? He says, "...just about every successful product or service is the result of smart marketing thinking first, followed by a great product that makes the marketing story come true."

This is great for marketers who are helping create and launch new products, but what about those of us who work for companies who already have products? I'd bet that's most of us.

I'd also bet that most marketers are being challenged to innovate how they're marketing those existing products. To do this, marketers need to put their customers and target markets first.

So, I wager that it's not the product or the marketing but the CUSTOMERS who come first. Then the marketing thinking and finally, the product.

For marketers with an existing product, adopt a "reverse engineering" approach for your marketing thinking:

• Talk to your customers and find out why they love the outcomes they get by using your products.


• Find out why life/business is easier than it was before.


• Learn who gets the biggest bang - In some cases it may be peripheral users not originally considered before implementation.


• Think about longevity. What can you do to extend the value they receive today.


• Look for the storyline and base your thinking on evolving that story.

I'd stipulate that customers are the best place to start for new innovations as well. Then the marketing thinking and then the product development.

Which of these elements are you putting first?