Marketing Interactions

The Job of a Lead Nurturing Email

I was reviewing a few email messages I'd developed for a B2B lead nurturing program with a project team when they said the equivalent of - Gosh, these are short. We should include links to events, products, etc. We're missing a big opportunity to give our prospects more choices.

Then there was a pause and one of them asked, "What if they don't like the one link we're including?"

And there you have the ultimate email challenge - being perceived as relevant enough to get the level of attention that motivates action.

This said, inundating prospects with more links and choices rather than improving the personalization, value and contagiousness of your email message is not the right answer.

The purpose of a lead nurturing email is NOT to:

• Be everything to everyone.
• Get any old click.
• Ask for a lot of time.
• Make a sale.

At the rate inboxes fill, you've got to pass the Catch Factor test. This means your email - within seconds - must communicate:

• Urgency - Do I need to know this right now?
• Impact - Is this subject matter relevant to my priorities?
• Effort - How easy will it be to get the information?
• Reputation - What's my perception of the sender?
• Intent - What do I think they want from me?

Attention spans are fleeting. Your email needs to get attention, motivate the action and be done with those two things really fast. At the outside, within 10 seconds. Bury your hook, use dense text not written in a scannable format and you're probably out of the game.

The only job of your lead nurturing email is to get the prospect to take an action that shows you their interest in the subject matter of your content offer. There's just simply not time for much else.

Instead of worrying about adding offers, start focusing on how you can improve relevance and create higher connection rates.

One of the biggest issues for gaining attention is uniqueness. The ease of publishing content has saturated the Web with redundancy - at varying quality levels. As a marketer, how many articles have you seen on the value of lead nurturing, or the top ten ways to use content? Repetition is great for creating awareness and acceptance, but how many times do you see the same words before you start tuning them out as so much blah, blah, blah that you assume you've heard before?

The same is true for your prospects. The challenge is often to say what you need to differently than others with similar messages. It's hard because you're also used to seeing all the same words used within your market.

Additionally, short is good. You should be able to compose an active email that does it's job in less than 150 words. In fact, aim for 100. Break it up so that it's easy to scan. Think about what it might look like in a mobile device. I often send emails to my smartphone just to see what they look like, how easy they are to read.

Dump the HTML and use text. Seriously. I don't download graphics if I can help it. Do you? I don't have time. Most business people I speak with don't either. In fact, if all I see is the emptiness of graphic boxes waiting to be downloaded in a preview, I just delete. Who has the time?

You may be proud of those gorgeous graphics, but if they impede your message getting through, are they worth it? At least do some A/B testing of text vs. HTML to see which perform better. I'd save them for your landing pages. That's where you want prospects to spend their time, right?

Now we're back to the job of lead nurturing email. Getting prospects to take the action you request of them.

After all - the metrics you can measure from an email are limited to clicks, opens, and bounces. But, get them to a landing page and you've got much bigger possibilities. You can learn about interest levels, topical interest, time spent, where they go next, if they share it with someone else, and what stage of buying they're in. [Much of that depends on the quality of your content offer, but that's another blog post.]

And, when your email message is confined to one focus, you're challenged to make it even more meaningful and relevant than you'd be if you relied upon throwing in the kitchen sink to try and just get any old click.

When your lead nurturing email is focused on doing its job, you're focused on doing yours.

Oh - and the thing about choices: More choices equals less response. It's too hard to decide what to do. Keep it simple and direct. One step at a time. Each thing you ask them to do is an added burden. If yourlead nurturing emails look like too much effort, the prospect deletes them and moves on to something easier to deal with.

I've done tests with email to prove just this to clients who've wanted to keep multiple links in their emails. The educational and thought leadership links got the clicks. The others were basically ignored. And the emails with many different links received higher unsubscribe rates - likely due to the scattered focus the emails presented.

What are you doing to make your lead nurturing emails more actionable?

4 Areas of Challenge in B2B Marketing

Browsing my LinkedIn Groups today, I came across a discussion started by Holger Schulze on the B2B Technology Marketing Community that got me thinking. Holger asked:

Can you use ONE WORD to describe the biggest challenge facing B2B Marketing today?

Holger always asks these fantastic, insightful questions. At the time I checked, the question had received 85 one-word responses. Considering them in combination, I was intrigued so of course I entered them all into a spreadsheet and started doing a bit of armchair analysis. Here's what I came up with.

The responses (from my perspective) fall into four distinct areas of challenge for B2B marketers:

• Management
• Execution
• Mindset
• Market

Even more interesting, when counting up the number of responses after I'd divied them up, management, execution and mindset each received 22. Market received 15.

The distribution makes me wonder if marketers are still overly focused on internal stuff rather than markets? However you look at it, the answers point to some clear indications of a few things that need to be ironed out.

Here's my interpretation of each of the four areas of challenge:

[*Note some words submitted by more than one person.]

Management:

The overall standouts in what I've labeled management fall into several clusters:

• Accountability, Measurement, Revenue, Sales
• Budget, Profitability, Credit
• Goals, Effectiveness, Success
• Professionalism, People, Time, Collaboration
• Automation, Integration, Overcomplicated
• Branding, Communication

Proving ROI and the alignment of marketing spend with results have risen as imperatives for marketers and are obviously proving challenging. This can also be tied to technology challenges as well as the overall integration of marketing programs across the enterprise. Talent, time and teamwork are proving difficult to solve for marketing departments with limited resources and an ever-widening scope of responsibilities.

Execution:

The words attributed to execution are evidence of difficulty in matching marketing programs to the challenges of management as well as to market receptiveness.

• Attention, Awareness, Proposition, Relevance
• Engagement, Follow-up, Relationship
• Clarity, Consistency, Disconnect
• Leads, Target
• Content

Relevance received the highest number of responses across the board. That only one person responded with content suprised me a bit, although a number of these could be reflective of the quality of content that's being produced. Importantly, what becomes obvious is that all stages across the entirety of the funnel appear to be challenging—from beginning to end.

Mindset:

This area shows evidence that marketing is changing so quickly and comprehensively that we need to do some work to help marketers adapt in order to equip them to resolve the other areas of challenge.

• Competence, Confidence, Creativity, Focus, Flexibility
• Dullness, Differenetiation, Saturation
• Insightfulness, Listening, Ill-defined
• Fear, Obsolescence, Uncertainty

Marketers cannot be at their most effective when they lack confidence in what they are doing or realize that their skillsets don't prepare them to address today's markets. If you look at the third bullet, it's obvious that there's still work to be done to get to know our markets so damn well that the programs we create for them [not for us] will help us to overcome many of the challenges identified by Holger's question.

Market:

It's important to remember that these challenges were voiced by marketers and apply to their perceptions of what they think their target audiences think. Or even how they perceive the marketplace.

• Clutter, Hype, Noise
• Choices, Commoditization, Fragmentation
• Skepticism, Trust, Value, Loyalty

The ease of publishing has definitely made it a world of too much information. Audiences have changed and fragmented and the ability to gain more insight into vendors without ever speaking to them allows perceptions to form that may or may not be realistic. But, it's what it is and we've got to rise above it to do our jobs effectively and answer the challenges of the other three areas.

When you evaluate management, execution, mindset and marketing, you can see how one feeds into another. The best part of this analysis is that you can also start seeing paths to resolution.

The one-word challenges play off one another so that if you solve one cluster, it's highly likely that another will diminish. This said, I also find it interesting that personas or buyer knowledge didn't make the list. If that's resolved and applied, a lot of these words might vanish from the list.

It's also important to note that 4 marketers said their answer was a definitive NO. That there was not one word to define the biggest challenge to B2B marketing today. I agree with them.

What do you think?

Would you have arranged the one-word responses differently?

If I can add my own word (beyond NO) - I think it would be Interaction - but you probably could have guessed that!

Is Meaning Getting Lost in Your Content?

I was browsing the #contentmarketing stream on Twitter this afternoon and came across a Tweet by Marcus Schaller (@b2bforhumans) - love that Twitter handle, don't you?

Marcus Tweeted:

"Nobody is persuaded by data, they are persuaded by meaning. #b2b #contentmarketing"

There's a nugget of gold in that Tweet. So I decided to play out one version that occured to me.

How many times have you seen content that makes a statement like this:

Our solution will help your company increase productivity by 33%.

What does that mean? I don't have a clue, do you? First of all, what kind of productivity?

Our solution will help your company increase employee productivity by 33%.

Still not sure. In relation to what?

Unified communications and collaboration capabilities will help your company increase employee productivity by 33%.

Closer but not yet there. How?

Unified communications and collaboration capabilities will help you increase employee productivity by 33% by helping workers quickly find and connect with the people and information they need to do their jobs.

To make it meaningful, add interest and tighten up the focus:

Knowledge workers defy traditional automation but unified communications and collaboration tools can help them compress time to task completion by up to 33%.

Meaning is about sharing ideas your audience can relate to and work with, not vague statistics and solution statements. Give them something to visualize, chew on and share wtih others and persuasion will come easier.

*By the way, I made up that statistic for illustrative purposes - so don't go using it.

Asking Prospects to Pay

How valuable is your marketing content? Do you think your prospects would pay for a subscription to continuously receive your latest and greatest publishing efforts?

Well, that's precisely what we ask our prospects to do.

We ask them to pay by:

• Giving us their attention
• Taking us up on our calls to action
• Sharing our content with others
• Spending an hour in our webinars
• Following us on social media
• Participating in discussions
• Contributing to interactive, online dialogues
• Commenting on our blogs
• Filling out forms
• Downloading our white papers
• Watching our videos
• Listening to our podcasts
• Visiting with us at trade shows

We ask them to up the ante by:

• Talking to our sales reps
• Answering questions
• Attending demos and presentations

We ask them to go ALL-IN by:

• Buying - the ultimate subscription!

Each time we ask them to pay, we're asking for more. Are we living up to the value expectations that motivate our prospects to renew their subscriptions to our content repeatedly?

Go review your content offers and ask yourself what you can do to improve the odds that your prospects will keep on shelling out their attention, information and interactions to pay for your content.

One of the things marketers often forget is that the value exchange has to be as beneficial to our prospects as we expect it to be for our companies.

Is your marketing based on Win-Win?

One Content Asset Can't Do Everything

With all the focus on creating content for marketing programs, many marketers are still missing a critical point. Many still believe that one piece of content must do everything. Where did marketers get the idea that B2B marketing over a long-term buying process aimed at selling a complex product was a one-shot deal?

My guess is that these marketers are still so focused on creating sales opportunities in the near term that they're overlooking the necessity for evolving a relationship over time, aka nurturing.

One of the biggest wastes in B2B marketing is tossing leads not ready to buy into a black hole while pursuing only those who are deemed "sales ready." Sadly, many companies are mistaken about just what that term means.

A lot of marketers I speak with are certain they know exactly what their buyers want. But some of their reasoning has me questioning whether this is true. Or, perhaps they do know, but have unknowingly reverted to company focused communications. Habits are hard to break.

Take a look at these examples:

We've got to talk to them about pricing first. Otherwise they'll think they can't afford our solution and they won't engage.

• Does your prospect care about pricing if they don't even know that the product or solution is valuable to them based on their goals and objective?


• How will your buyer even evaluate the idea of budget or funding if they don't know much about the potential impact of what you're selling?


• Context > Understanding > Interest > Confidence > Engagement

The idea for that content asset is pretty good, but we need to add customer examples, product extensions, discount information, link to our next webinar, etc. in order for them to get the full picture.

• Attention spans are shrinking. Buyers want shorter-form content, but they still want it to contain valuable insights they find helpful.


• The "full picture" won't happen with one article (or even one white paper) for a complex solution. Think series instead. One brick at a time is how a house is built.


• Be careful your helpful information doesn't turn into a sales pitch. Because that's where your head is when you start gloming stuff onto a topic that can stand on its own - if you'd just let it.


• Try to cram too much information into short-form content and it loses value because you're now so high-level you've left no space to talk about what interests your buyer.


• 1 premise + a few supporting ideas > easy assimilation > better experience

I'm hearing more of this rush to make one content asset do a bigger job. But it's not going to sell your complex product any faster. In fact, it kind of wreaks of desperation and may send prospects right over to your competitors who let their expertise shine through without being pushy.

You want to create urgency on the buyer side, not display yours. Content will serve you best if you follow the KISS principle and keep it simple and focused on what the buyer needs to know given his/her stage in the purchasing process. One content asset will not win the sale.

This said, grouping a number of related content assets together to present a comprehensive resource area can work wonders. It allows prospects to pick and choose what's most relevant to them, not shove it all down their throats at once.

Scenarios Add Value to Marketing Content

Every B2B company has stories they can use in content marketing programs. The challenge is in how you frame them within your marketing content as helpful scenarios your prospects find relevant. 

Think about why you read a novel or go see a movie. You want to be transported somewhere else. This is called suspension of disbelief. If the novel or movie is done well, the story moves you to believe its veracity for the time you're involved.

With a novel, this means you can visualize the story in your head. Have you ever read a book and then gone to see the movie they made from it? If you did so in this order - book, then movie - it's likely that the actors playing the characters don't match the picture in your head. Why? Because you visualized them based on your world view.

With marketing content, this is one reason why knowing your audience is so important. In a perfect scenario, your content should intersect with their world view. Which, from a marketing perspective, are the problems, issues and challenges that your products and solutions address based on their roles, responsibilities and industry.

Marketing content is very evolved from a high-level perspective. We can list the litany of attributes that make our products worthwhile, discuss the features, use the phrases we think our prospects want to hear about increasing efficiency, productivity and revenues or decreasing costs, time and missed opportunities.

The reason scenarios are important is because they take our content from 30,000 feet to 3 feet. Scenarios don't just help our prospects understand the concepts, but relate to them by being able to visualize what they might mean in practice for them and their companies.

At the 3-foot view, our prospects can get their hands dirty. They can transition from theory to what that might look like in practice. Kind of like a "visual" try-it-on-for-size experiment.

A scenario used in B2B marketing can be defined as:

The depiction of an experience your prospects or customers might have that relates to the problem your offerings resolve. The scenario can be focused on a situation that exists either before or after the problem has been solved.

The easiest way to picture this is with customer success stories. They usually discuss the problem, highlight the company's expertise and products applied to solve it and then showcase results.

The reason they usually aren't great scenarios is because they're focused on the nuts and bolts and on making your company look good. Imagine the power if they were actually told in a way that allowed the prospect to visualize themselves going through the experience. There's also no reason your company can't look good in these - even better than you think - if you embraced the opportunity to create them this way.

The way to get to the scenario level is to dive deeper into the details. Do you know how your prospects experience the issue? By knowing just what their pain points are, you can create scenarios that address them directly.

Let's say that you think the problem is that they're hesitant because they think user adoption and training will be too difficult and disruptive. You can write a content piece that makes the point about why your solution and training process is easier and then insert a scenario that illustrates the point. Put a person like your prospect in the lead role, overcoming that obstacle. Give them an in-the-trenches example of how it can be done.

Scenarios don't need to be novels. They can be effectively illustrated in several paragraphs and included in articles, eBooks, customer success stories; or a minute or two in webinars, videos, and podcasts.

However, using scenarios is a bold move. It takes work and creativity firmly grounded in the reality of your prospects and customers. But using them can result in a steady increase to pipeline momentum. Once a scenario is embedded with a prospect, they'll picture that in relation to everything else they read or see about the subject.

Just like you want the novel and the movie to match, they'll want what they picture to be how their situation is handled. If you're the one who creates that vision, you'll be more likely to become the partner chosen to help them get there.

How are you incorporating scenarios into your marketing content?

 

Hello Mr. Customer; It's Me...Your Vendor

According to research by BtoB Magazine, 58% of B2B marketers say that marketing involvement never stops and must continue across the entire customer lifecycle. Be that as it may, marketers are focused on driving qualified leads as their most important mission.

So where does that leave customers?

Research from the CMO Council finds that companies lose 10% of their customers each year, on average. Would it shock you to learn that 68 percent of customer defections occur because customers perceive "an attitude of indifference?" (American Society for Quality)

Content marketing across the customer lifecycle can play an important role in reversing this perception of indifference. Considering that even a 5% reduction to churn can increase profitability by at least 25%, it’s definitely time for marketing to create a continuum for content marketing that reaches beyond the sale.

Thankfully, there may be a change brewing. I certainly hope so.

According to Google's 2011 B2B Marketing Outlook report:

87% of marketers invest in customer retention, and 2/3 say that this is where the majority of their marketing dollars will go in 2011.

To use content marketing for customers, marketers must consider the differences between content designed for prospects and content designed for customers.

This is easier when marketers realize that their marketing automation platform is not just for pre-sales use. By using the profiles and activity histories developed during the customer acquisition process, marketers have great visibility into the intelligence they need to continue to deliver relevant and valuable communications after the deal closes.

In fact, given the data marketers should have available, it should be even easier to develop relevant content for customers than it is to do so for prospects.

To construct a content marketing program for customers, do the following:

Reset Their Status Quo
Once a prospect becomes a customer, their status quo is different. They no longer have the problem they set out to solve as a prospect. Any marketing content developed must take into account the customer’s current situation as the foundation from which to address why more change and evolution is beneficial to their future success.  

Define New Needs and Priorities

• Given the customer’s current status quo with your solution in play, what new needs or priorities have been created now that the original problem was solved?


• What features might your customers not be using that can help them reap even more value than they required during the initial purchase?


• Are there industry trends that point to the need for customers to proactively take next steps that you can help them achieve?

Create content that showcases your company’s expertise in helping your customers meet their future business objectives. Use in-depth customer success stories that show just how you’ve expanded your role to create richer, enduring value for other customers like them.

You DO have a Relationship, Right?
Theoretically, your company already has an established relationship with your customers.

Unfortunately many companies act like they’ve never met their customers. This is evidenced by sending them information that’s no longer relevant to them after the purchase or pushing up-sell offers without foundation. Even worse, acting like you don’t know them diminishes your credibility as a partner and works to establish that perception of indifference that leads to defection.

Our customers are our greatest asset and the importance of continuous engagement across the entirety of the customer’s lifecycle cannot be overstated. Marketers need to focus on continuing to grow the relationship established during the pre-sale instead of starting over once the ink has dried.

Zap the Excuses Limiting Personalization
During pre-sale marketing, it’s a challenge to target and personalize our marketing content appropriately because we're often using a number of assumptions.

With customers, marketers have the data to do so. Or we should. If marketers are leveraging their marketing automation systems for customer communications, continuing to expand profiles, monitor interests and respond to online behavior is less complex.

Integration with CRM systems will help us work with account managers to increase visibility into how we can best provide continuous value to each customer. With the ability to use marketing automation technology to finely tune our customer segmentation, messaging can become highly relevant to each niche a company serves.

Leave No Customer Behind
Growing revenues is not just about net-new customers. It's about extending the lifecycle with those we have and increasing the value that we provide to them over time. Let's face it, a customer relationship is a terrible thing to waste. Especially when we've got the tools and the data to create content and conversations that increase loyalty and spend from those we've already sold.

Go Beyond the Marketing Motions

Many marketers work on one project at a time. They need to create an email marketing campaign or it's Tuesday and the blog post should go up. Or, the new white paper idea needs an outline or they need to help their executive build a slide deck for the next webinar, place a bylined article, etc.

There are standard execution tactics that go with each one. What's not so standard is stepping back from it all and asking how each and every thing you do can be combined or integrated into the whole to produce something new or different. If you actually connected your marketing projects and programs, what could be the result?

The reason this doesn't happen as a usual matter of course is often due to a lack of time, resources, skillsets and strategy. But, it's precisely these restraints that necessitate that we look at the big picture and how — by connecting the dots — we can amplify our audience.

I was listening to Keith Urban sing on the Country Music Awards on Sunday night and jotted down a couple of phrases from his song that spurred my thinking about this subject. [Yes, I know, I can find inspiration anywhere!]

"Just going through the motions? You'll never touch the sky!"

It occurred to me that many marketers (for reasons stated above) are lucky just to get through the motions to check things off their to-do lists. This approach is just so dang limiting.

Instead, start thinking about how what your're already doing can become bigger and better. With each new channel you embrace, your audience gets a little bit bigger. With each new way you create to use content, your audience has another opportunity to engage.

How can you amplify what you're doing right now if you consider:

• Opportunities to connect one-off content to other content assets.


• How you can group content of varying formats together to create a new experience, or several.


• Additional channels to use to promote your webinar.


• How you can reuse content from a nurturing program.


• New ways to invite people to participate in or share your ideas.


• Influencer audiences that you've overlooked in favor of focusing on only decision makers.


• Why some content gets much better response than others.


• How to bridge a theme across industries and personas.


• Why Facebook requires different content than Twitter.


• How you can actually entice more people in your company to write blog posts.


• Spinning ideas for how you can reuse those employees' blog posts in other content pieces.


• Creating unusual calls to action.


• Challenging yourself to try new formats for content - what have you never done?

Working with Marketing Content Writers

The two top challenges to B2B content marketers are producing engaging content and producing enough of it to fuel their marketing programs. This means, for many, that they'll need to hire freelance writers to develop at least some of the content they need.

I help many of my clients learn how to work with writers—as well as to hire the right ones whether freelance or in-house. It's tough. Much harder than it needs to be sometimes.

Once we create their content strategy and map out editorial calendars, I create a content assignment template for them to use when hiring a freelance content writer for a project.

A Content Assignment Template includes:

• Target market and how to refer to them within the content
• Format and length of content
• Style and tone
• Keywords and phrases to include
• Pain points, concerns and interests of the audience
• Premise for the content asset
• Key points the content should include
• Reference materials - links to sources or indication of attached documents
• Fixed fee price with number of revision turns
• Due dates for drafts and revisions
• Ownership rights and byline (or not) for the asset
• *If the company has a style guide, that's also included upon acceptance of the assignment.

If the writer has solid skills for structure and balance, decent researching capabilities and a dose of creativity—in addition to some background in the subject matter—they should be able to produce a good quality content asset.

However, it's surprising how often they don't.

A few things to watch for when working with a content writer:

• They don't follow the instructions in the assignment template.
• They use passive sentence structure.
• The tone doesn't flow consistently throughout the piece.
• They use your reference materials verbatim rather than as ideation fuel.
• They become defensive when you provide revision notes.
• They act like any criticism is of a "baby" they've got ownership of instead of a work product.
• They miss deadlines.
• They turn around the content too fast, indicating they haven't taken the time to let it sit and then gone back to revise with a fresh mindset. Editing takes time. A first draft is just that.

I'm a tough taskmaster - I admit that. I want the best content I can get for my clients. I've written a lot of content myself and run enough programs to know what I want to see.

But what's critical is to take the time to work with the content writer to determine if they're coachable and have the potential to become the resource you need. If they have the basic skills and a can-do attitude, then they're worth coaching in order to develop their potential. Just be sure to get agreement that they're willing to be coached.

If they think they know it all already, then let them go quickly and move on. I've been writing pretty much forever and still learn new things everyday.

Finding and/or developing great content writers is necessary. Many times we cannot create all the resources we need ourselves or with our in-house staff. Knowing you have a few solid writers you can count on will take a lot of the strain off fueling the content marketing programs your company needs to create competitive advantage.

Just remember to set writers up to win by making your expectations clear and doing the homework you need to do to create a viable content assignment. Often times it's not the writer who messes up, but the company providing the project.