B2B Marketing is NOT a Speed Sport

Since it's Friday, I figure I'm entitled to a bit of a rant.
I keep reading things like:

Achieve marketing success in 20 minutes a week.

Manage all your marketing in an hour a month.

Stupid stuff like that.

Are you buying it?
Don't.

Instead of looking at ways to minimize the time you spend, why not look at what makes your marketing successful and figure out how to do more of that. Anyone who thinks marketing in this day and age will be successful with a "set it and forget it" strategy is in for a big surprise. Not the good kind.

I'm a huge proponent of marketing automation systems. I firmly believe that marketers will never be able to share highly relevant communications that engage the right buyers across lengthening sales cycles and get them to the sales team at just the right time without technology.

This said, what you put into your marketing automation systems is pretty much responsible for what you'll get out of it. The technology is a great enabler. It allows marketers to learn all kinds of things they never had solid access to before and look at that intelligence they gather in new ways. The systems enable refined distribution models that marketers probably couldn't create on their own. Scoring helps them to gauge when to pass leads to sales in a more effective way and it helps to reduce the wasting of leads by allowing sales to return the ones who need to mature back to you.

Great marketing takes time, thoughtful consideration and, well...strategy. And that's before you get to the execution requirements.

I'm not trying to make this harder than it needs to be, but 20 minutes a week or an hour a month is ridiculous. I'm a prolific writer and it takes me longer than 20 minutes to write a solid, valuable and relevant marketing article for a client. Often it takes hours to get it polished and tuned to give it the best chance at producing the highest levels of engagement.

Go ahead, try to write a white paper in an hour. I double dare you.

Try to analyze your lead scoring reports and determine exactly what's working and what's not in 20 minutes.

Does it take you more than 20 minutes to post a new content article to your website, write a blog post that links to it and then Tweet about it and share it with your LinkedIn groups? If you spend time thinking about how to make it relevant for each place you post it instead of posting the exact same thing everywhere, I'm guessing yes.

In an age where buyers are clamoring for relevant content (finding it less than 42% of the time), talking to others about your company and pushing sales interactions to the end of the buying process, it's just going to take longer than that to do marketing right.

Sorry. I'm just not buying the premise. What do you think?

Comments

[Jill Konrath]

Amen! You and I are singing from the same hymnal. In the sales field, sellers are always looking for the killer value proposition, or the magic dust to get people to buy.

It doesn't exist. It takes analysis, thoughtful consideration, experimentation and even customization.

Keep up the rant!

[Lori]

I concur. Automation is needed for streamlining not replacing creative human elements.

[patweber]

This is spot on! In marketing and sales there is no one ANYTHING. The ultimate decision - to read or not to read; to buy or not to buy - is dependent on the buyer readiness and degree of pain. That means the marketing and selling might have several venues and ways to get to the goal.

I am curious: you state - In an age where buyers are clamoring for relevant content (finding it less than 42% of the time)... that's an incredible statistic. Can you talk more about it?

Thanks.

Patricia Weber

[Ardath Albee]

Thanks to Jill, Lori and Patricia for your comments!

Patricia - in answer to your question about the statistic, I wrote about it in this post in reference to an IDC Survey on Dec 29th:

http://marketinginteractions.typepad.com/marketing_interactions/2008/12/you-could-be-losing-50-of-your-potential-sales.html

Thanks,
Ardath