Marketing Interactions

Designing Calls to Action for B2B Marketing Content

During my keynote at the B2B Content 2 Conversion conference on Tuesday, one of the questions the audience asked was about a slide I used when discussing how to create a content flow. To sum it up, I suggested that each "touch" should be based on three components:

• The question your content will answer for a persona.
• The answer to the question that becomes the content asset.
• A call to action (CTA)

I was asked to elaborate on what I meant by a call to action.

The normal response to the "call to action" mandate is inserting a "have a sales rep call me" or some other version of pushing the sales conversation. But, this is not helpful during much of the marketing process.

Marketers need to reframe the way they think about the CTA, flipping it from what they ultimately want (qualified leads that will buy from their sales team) to what will be helpful to their prospective buyers. But what's even more concerning is that much of the content used by marketing doesn't even nod in the direction of a CTA - demonstrated nicely by a post written by Eric Wittlake — New Research: B2B Content is a Dead End — which he telepathically knew to publish today so I could link to it!

Calls to action should be used to build the best and most engaging buying experience imaginable. They can take many forms and accomplish the momentum needed to turn cursory attention into intentional attention directed toward embracing change to solve a specific problem.

Some of the benefits available from putting thought into designing calls to action:

• Extend engagement by providing additional information about a topic the prospect showed interest in.


• Showcase your company's expertise in solving the problem.


• Expose the prospect to content that they may have overlooked by linking to the previous touch in your nurturing program.


• Differentiate your company's expertise from the competition.


• Build credibility for your company as a valuable resource.


• Cement your ideas with prospects so they get used in conversations when your company is not "in the room."

I'd say those are some pretty good reasons to give CTAs some serious thought.

An additional consideration is to make sure that you vary the types of content you're linking together to create that interesting experience for your buyers. For example, all calls to action don't have to be links to other resources. A call to action can also be an embedded resource within a content asset, such as embedding a video or slideshare into a blog post or article. If the prospect reads the post/article and views the embedded content then you've achieved that extension on attention.

One note of caution: Just because you can add CTAs doesn't mean you should saturate every content asset with links, embeds and "see also" extensions. This is why designing CTAs takes thought.

What's the one thing you'd like for your prospect to learn next?

Give them that with each content asset. If you do this, you'll create connected pathways that thoughtfully engage prospects by offering them additional ideas that make sense given what they've just engaged with. Don't overwhelm them with choices or it will backfire on you by increasing the effort to choose.

Calls to Action enable marketers to serve as the guide to the buyer experience. Go out and build a great one!

Below is my presentation from the B2B Content 2 Conversion conference. Slide 19 is the one I mention at the beginning of this post:

10 Steps to Launch a Content Marketing Strategy from Scratch

View more PowerPoint from Ardath Albee

Marketing Beyond the Chit Chat in Social Media

I was just reading a post written by Margie Clayman, Myth: Marketing consists of just talking to people (or what is social media marketing?). Margie asked her community the question What is marketing? to begin to get at the premise for social media marketing beyond those vague terms of "engagement" and questioning how just "talking to people" (if that's the definition of social media marketing) can actually impact the outcome of selling stuff. This is a great topic! Of course, Margie always comes up with great topics for discussion.

Margie's post had me flashing back to the reactions of many people to social media when it first hit the web waves. I remember people saying that they didn't care if someone just ate a PB&J or that they didn't want to hear what their favorite jeans (brand) thought on a regular basis.

That stuff is still out there but I see a lot of evolution in the way people "talk" to people on social media. Then again, I see a lot of people talking for the sake of talking - mostly to themselves, so who knows?

I think that in order to answer the question, What is social media marketing?, we have to back up a bit to why people go online in the first place. Since I focus on B2B marketing, I'm going to limit my perspective to people interacting online for business reasons.

The Quest for Information

Research shows that pretty much all business people start online with search when they are looking for information. If we start there, then we realize that the next step is a query.

A query is based on a question the person want's answered. How they arrive at the answer depends on what phrases or keywords they type into the search field. But it's also critical to understand that "search" has changed with the availability of social platforms. For example, those of us on Twitter often search by hashtags, such as #contentmarketing or #B2B.

On LinkedIn or Focus.com we may ask questions of a community of people interested in the topic on our minds. That's also become a form of search enabled by social platforms.

Social Media Marketing Benefits from Q&A

As human beings, we learn through asking and answering questions. As business people, we have priorities to address and problems to solve to meet objectives. When faced with a problem, the first thing most of us do is ask, How do I fix that? What are my options? Or even, Why should I fix it? Do I really need to?

Robert Rose wrote a fabulous post on How Asking "Why" Can Get You To The Larger Story over on the CMI blog. I also talk about the role and value of questions in my post on content marketing where I wrote about theory vs. practice. Note that questions are way too valuable to only be applied to one facet of marketing. In my opinion, you can use them for just about anything related to marketing and sales.

Applying human nature to social media marketing, B2B marketers will accomplish their goals if they match up their use social media to answering the questions the people who could buy from them are asking.

This takes social media marketing beyond just "talking to people" to actually providing useful information that helps them solve problems by learning what they need to know to do so successfully.

It's the quality and helpfulness of the "talking" that makes the difference, as well as the intention behind it. Although the end goal of marketing must be to sell stuff, the execution must be about providing value your prospects recognize in order to achieve it — whether that's in social media or takes other forms.

Of course, this is only my perspective. What's yours? What does Social Media Marketing mean to you?

Does Your B2B Marketing Content Address Cause?

How deep does your marketing content dive into the problems and priorities your B2B prospects are facing? In B2B marketing, we talk a lot about addressing problems, but quite often we don't talk about what that really means or how to truly help our prospects solve the systemic issues that cause the problems in the first place.

This post is inspired by the following point in a list of reasons about why managers struggle on Leadership Now blog. This is reason #9:

They Fix Problems, Not Causes. Unless the manager fixes the cause of the problems they encounter, valuable time will be spent fixing the same problem over and over again.

How often do you think about why a problem exists for your prospects? As marketers we need to look beyond the obvious and get to the root of the issue to elevate the value our content provides. That's when we start to become interesting to our prospects — when we invite them to think.

I love blog posts about people who are representative of my client's prospects. Posts about managers and leadership are really good sources of information to help you help them by gaining a bit of insight to things they may be struggling with or how they view opportunities.

This particular insight can help us begin to consider the potential causes behind the problems that prospects say they want to fix.

Here's an example:

If your prospect says he wants to improve team productivity and collaboration, why might that be an issue? Some possible causes may include:

• Did the company grow too fast without the infrastructure in place to support it?
• Did the company expand via mergers or acquisitions and is trying to mesh cultures?
• Is the company's culture old school but the manager is trying to force the adoption of new trends?
• Was there insufficient onboarding to drive adoption of the last solution he tried?
• Is IT not responsive to resolving issues with the system reported by users?

Given whatever you determine might be the cause of the issue your prospect is trying to resolve, can you see opportunities to create content that helps them get to the root cause rather than just buying another bandaid?

I can see you reading this and thinking "Hey, how would I know which cause to focus on because I don't market to one prospect at a time!"

The trick to this is to figure out which are the most likely scenarios and create content that addresses those. Theoretically, in the scenario above, each of those causes may exist for some percentage of your prospects. Think about it this way, if you can validate that customers have addressed specific root causes and salespeople tell you similar stories, you know that content designed around the cause will be on target for some prospects.

Monitor who spends time with which "cause" content and continue nurturing them appropriately with extension pieces. There's always more than one angle to any story. Use as many as you think are relevant. It also makes sense to have salespeople ask what's behind the issue in their follow-up and share those insights with marketing as part of the validation process.

When marketers consider how they set up the problem-to-solution stories they share to build a buyer experience, they must also consider the longevity of customer lifecycles. After all, if the cause of the issue is addressed during the implementation of your solution, it's less likely to happen again. And that means higher customer satisfaction and adds to the value derived from each customer for your company.

Are you thinking beyond the surface of the problem when you design your content marketing programs?

Why Marketing Content Needs a Point of View

B2B marketing content is most useful when it serves as proof that you understand your target markets and actually know how to do what your company promises via it's products and services. Essentially, marketing content — and the experiences it creates — serves as a test drive of what it could be like to be your customer.

Point of view is the perspective through which readers will experience your content (or story). For B2B content, the best way to explain this is that if your content is company focused, the perspective they experience will be you talking about yourself. And that's boring.

If your content is focused on their roles and the issues they deal with, they'll experience it much more personally. But they'll also experience your brand's orientation in regards to the issue the content addresses.

Marketers must always consider how the content they publish reflects upon the brand. Great marketing content will consistently provide a perspective prospects want to spend their attention on and be truly representative of the brand behind it.

The following checklist can help marketers determine whether or not the point of view of their content is hitting the mark every time.

Is your content generous?

Evaluate your content and identify what takeaway(s) it's giving to the reader. Giving should be more heavily weighted than getting.

Is your content helpful?

Is the content providing clarity about something that will be useful to your reader in how they address the issue they're dealing with?

Is your expertise showing?

Do you share information that's representative of the knowledge, methodologies and experience your company has in dealing with the issue? You need to do this. And, no, it will not keep people from buying your services. If it did, I'd be on the corner with a cup and a sign.

Does your content demonstrate flexibility?

There's one thing to be said about sharing expertise. It's another thing if your content comes off as so authoritative that there's no room for compromise. Every customer is different — or likes to think they are. You can be firm, but not dictatorial. It is never your way or the highway. Face it — business evolves too fast to take a hard and fast position you may have to swallow later.

Does your content provide attention to detail?

Make sure your content delivers on its promise. There's nothing worse than seeing a title and first few sentences that focus on just what you want to know only to read it and wonder why you bothered because there was no substance. If you read content that has no follow-through in the delivery, how confident will you bet that the vendor will treat you any better as a customer?

Is your content responsive?

Based on what is being said on the web (social media, forums, industry portals), is your content in tune? Or is it based on some internal agenda that has no evident and timely resonance with your target markets? This is why you always want to leave room for shifts in topics during the rollout of your content strategy. Interests can shift quickly. Priorities can change in response to regulations or in response to quarterly results, for example.

Is your content definitive?

Contagious marketing content defines its topic in context with prospect needs. It's never wishy washy or repetitive of what other content says. It showcases your brand's unique perspective as aligned with your audience. If this is true, your content will never reflect anyone else's content — unless, of course, they used yours as a template.

Does your content minimize effort?

There's a tendency to want demonstrative payback for sharing content, most often represented by putting it behind a form. But, in addition to thinking hard about how much effort you want to require from prospects for access to your content, think about how hard it will be for them to ingest and understand. Simplicity trumps convoluted complexity every time. Getting your content found by your prospects is only the first step. Getting them to stay and engage with it can be much more difficult.

If you evaluate your marketing content for point of view in relation to these points, you'll find that response to it will begin to increase and engagement will become more consistent resulting in an increase in momentum toward purchase.

Finally, remember that everything included in your content should have a purpose. This point gains importance when you consider the limited attention spans of today's buyer. Get rid of the fluff. Get rid of the jargon and buzzwords. Eliminate the extraneous stuff that serves as filler. Do not pussyfoot around in getting to the point.

Choosing the right point of view for your content can transform the results gained from content marketing programs. The reason is that it helps prospects feel like they "know" you well enough to want to get to know you better — which means they'll take the next step to engage in conversation.

What techniques are you using to develop the point of view for your marketing content?

Why B2B Marketers Must Address Status Quo

When I do stategic planning workshops with my clients, we get into a lot of discussions about buying stages. Anyone who's followed me for a while or read my book knows that I always start very early in the process with the stage of Status Quo.

My definition of status quo is the buyer's current situation. We get to that by answering questions such as:

• How are they doing what your product enables today?
• What workarounds may be in place that could be escalating pain?
• Why should they care about what you're talking about?
• What would get their attention?
• What would they need to learn to become motivated to change?

In a recent conversation, a client voiced concern that we were starting too early in the process. Comments such as "this is a mature market, they know they need to change" came up as I probed deeper.

My response was, "If that's true, then why aren't they actively pursuing change?"

There's a big difference in knowing change is available and actually agreeing that change is needed and taking steps to do something about it.

Regardless of what you think your prospects and customers already know, they still have a status quo. If you can't motivate them to move from that position, you can't sell them anything. Period. End of discussion.

Heck, I "know" a lot of stuff, but I don't necessarily act on it. Even if I "know" it will be good for me.

But addressing status quo goes much deeper than determining their current position. It means you have to figure out why they aren't changing and what might make them reconsider their stance that status quo is good enough.

When looking for an approache to dislodge status quo, try applying some of these questions:

• What trigger event would cause them to pursue change?


• Is the way they've been offered the idea of change not aligned with their perspective?


• What business objective might they miss achieving if they don't change?


• What future opportunity might they miss if they don't start changing now?


• Is there a cultural "elephant in the room?"


• What move by a competitor might get them out of the gate?


• Is an industry development moving their market right while they're still going left?


• Is a regulatory or compliance change coming that they will need help addressing?


• Are they losing market share even while growing revenues?


• Are they meeting their KPIs, but still leaving revenue on the table they don't see?


• Will a looming merger threaten their market position?


• Is there a new market opportunity that they're missing due to their status quo?


• Who is an obstacle? (In B2B, there's nearly always a consensus that must be reached)


• What is an obstacle blocking change (process, legacy equipment, TCO, etc.)

Those are just a few ways to look at how you might position marketing content to catch your buyers' attention and arouse their curiosity about the costs of status quo. Just make sure you're creating a business-relevant dialogue, not a treatise about why your product is the best choice.

The goal in this stage is not to get them to choose a product, it's to get them to choose to pursue change. Big difference.

In today's market environment, good enough isn't a strategic growth plan, it's a recipe for obsolescence.

What will it take for you to reach buyers and make them reconsider their adherrence to status quo?

What other questions would you add to the list?

Are Shorter Sales Cycles a Wake-up Call for Marketers?

Marketing Sherpa's chart of the week shows the answer to this question.

Q. Please select the time period closest to the length of your organization's entire sales cycle, from first lead inquiry to purchase.

In the commentary, Jen Doyle states that these results showing shorter sales cycles correlate to the lower deal prices Marketing Sherpa's annual benchmark survey also discovered.

But I think there's more at stake here than lower prices. Everyone has been talking about how much time buyers spend self-educating and researching prior to identifying themselves to vendors. Buyers have even said that they may not request contact with a vendor until they have selected their short lists. Some estimates gauge the time buyers spend outside of vendor-defined sales cycles to include up to or beyond half of the buying process for a B2B complex purchase.

So, could this chart actually be reflecting that the period of time that buyers spend with a vendor is shorter, but not truly reflect the length of the actual buy cycle? I think it's very possible.

And, if so, then it validates the imperative for marketers to get their content found by the right audience, rather than waiting for them to enter their databases so they can nurture them formally. If your company's ideas and expertise aren't helping them decide how to solve the problem, then why would you think your company would make their short list when the time comes?

What do you think?

6 Tips for B2B Vendors Becoming Publishers

Judging by the amount of online noise being generated, the idea of publishing content is no longer considered to be an "edgy" proposition for many vendors. But noise isn't going to help you meet your goals.

The thing about noise is that we've all become adept at tuning it out. There's just so much of it that we've had to develop the survival skill of discernment. We've become very swift judges of what's useful and what's wasting our time. Time we have precious little of with all the social media interaction, email, meetings and job responsibilities. Our lists are long and our patience is waning.

To break through the noise and gain the attention of B2B prospects, our content must be better than good. It needs to be exceptional. And that's hard to do when you need so much of it to maintain a dialogue with your prospects until they're ready to talk to your salespeople.

Due to this shift in buying, vendors have had to become publishers or risk obscurity.

Consider how the following tips can help your company adapt more easily to publishing content that becomes sought out and a preference for your prospects.

Tip 1: Dump the Damn Style Guides!
Or at least slim them down to make them more appropriate for today's audience. Examples include:

• Spelling out the word "percent" when the "%" symbol is easier to pick out during a quick scan for relevance just makes more sense.


• Stop using trademarks, service marks and registered marks every time you mention your product, brand and services. Is it really necessary to put your company name before your product name throughout an entire article? In fact, if you have so many mentions of your product in an article that they stick out, your focus needs to shift.


• If your brand is only allowed to capitalize the first word in a headline, rethink that practice. You've got 3 seconds to get attention. Sometimes emphasizing a word or phrase can help with that.


• Use contractions. They won't bite, and reading becomes so much easier. Less effort is a good thing when trying to build engagement.

Tip 2: Quit Talking About Yourself!

• Nobody cares. Seriously, they don't. They care about themselves, not you.


• If you're sending an email with your company in the sig line, publishing a blog post or an article on your website - your company is already obvious. There's no need to mention it repeatedly like we can't see the branding it's wrapped in.


• If you think of putting "the leading provider of..." in anything, step away from the keyboard. No one believes that, yet it's surprising how many companies still think if they say it, it will matter. Well, it doesn't. It's what others say about you that matters.


• Try putting out a press release that focuses first on how your customers will benefit rather than talking about your company and products and see what happens. 

Tip 3: Sharing Valuable Expertise Will Actually Make You Money

• Some companies think that sharing expertise will cost them in services. The exact opposite is true. Prospects now require proof that you bring value they don't have or they won't escalate you to their short lists.


• Exposing expertise actually shows people how difficult it can be to do what you do, encouraging them to hire you and get that task off their list. Not to mention getting the job done right the first time.


• Helping them understand the expertise it takes to do what you do allows them to understand the value they're paying for and diminishes the "haggling over price" issue.


• If your content is valuable, more people will be drawn to it, link to it and share it, thereby increasing your reach, market awareness and credibility. Sharing useless, surface stuff without any meat won't do that.

Tip 4: Become a Resource by Sharing the Spotlight

• Showcasing others who have great content reflects back on you. Plus, you don't have all the answers. Help people connect the dots.


• Your ability to look beyond yourself and recognize greatness in others draws your audience in and may just generate conversations you wouldn't otherwise have.


• Those you promote will promote you in return. Choose wisely and build a network of experts with complimentary expertise and business will follow in the form of referrals, which are truly one of the best ways into new customer relationships. Don't forget to return the favor.

Tip 5: Get Your Staff the Appropriate Tools & Tech

• The day of putting content in a queue and waiting for IT to publish it are over.


• From blogs to websites to video and just about anything else now has easy-to-use software that business people can learn to use. Today's world moves fast. Get the tools to keep up.


• Publishing must deliver business value, so make sure you also have the tools to measure what it's doing for you. From web analytics to social monitoring to SEO, marketers need to be accountable for the outcomes of what they publish. Just putting content out there doesn't cut it.

Tip 6: Only Copycat if You Can Improve Upon The Concept

• Infographics are a great example of this tip. When they first came out, they were fascinating. Then everyone jumped on the bandwagon and started producing them because they were "cool." Many I see today don't have any story to tell.


• If you see a great concept executed, use it as inspiration, not a cookie cutter. Find some unique way of showcasing your material that has you stand out, not just show up as more of the same.


• Are you a leader or a follower?

These are only a few tips, but should get you thinking about how to adapt the old world of orchestrated corporate content to the new world of authentic expression. Posturing is out, expertise is in. You've got it, so you may as well flaunt it. Just remember that it's not about your products.

What Happens When Inbound Marketing Works?

The term "inbound marketing" is getting a lot of play these days as B2B marketers grapple with labels and learning more about how marketing practices are evolving — including the dynamics of content marketing. I'm not getting into what all that means now, but invite you to be part of The Great Marketing Conversation, on January 24th, if you'd like to delve into the nuances. With Robert Rose, Mike Volpe, and Marcus Sheridan, we're bound to stir up quite a discussion.

What I do want to talk about in this post is what happens when your inbound content marketing works. Have you thought about it beyond the idea of getting prospects to come to you? Do you have a response plan? Is your sales team on board?

The whole point of inbound marketing is getting prospects to find and interact with your company. But it's what you do once you make that happen that can determine the success or failure of your contribution to revenues.

Here's the thing:

Generating inbound prospects who are more highly qualified and sales ready is the goal. But when you change the buying experience, you need to consider how the underlying processes on your side must change as well. Not just for marketing, but for sales.

What companies haven't yet quite grasped is that by changing the buying experience, they've also changed their buyers' expectations. And you can't stop those changes at the handoff and hope to be successful if your salespeople try to continue on in the way they've always done. It just doesn't work that way. This is where sales enablement needs to be orchestrated to keep the brakes off momentum.

Consider this scenario:

• You've worked really hard to understand your buyers and develop content focused on their needs, problems, goals and aspirations. (not your products)


• A prospect is following you on Twitter, visiting your blog and following the links you share socially.


• One day he goes online to search for specific information and comes across a search result for an eBook you published six months ago that they weren't aware of. So he visits your site and fills out the form to download it. He doesn't hesitate because his experience with your company has been great thus far.


• An inside sales rep sees the activity and calls the prospect to follow-up. Unfortunately, she starts off the conversation with a monologue about your company and products and tries to push the prospect into a demo.


• Your prospect extricates himself from the call and goes dormant.

Yes, this still happens. Happened to me just the other day from a company I thought knew better. And the account exec couldn't even tell me what I'd downloaded, just that they knew I'd downloaded something.

The problem is that all the work marketers do on the front end will be wasted if they don't create a response plan and enable sales (both inside and direct) to continue the dialogue without disappointing  prospects.

Follow-up by inside sales is fine. But remember that they need to be able to have a business-relevant conversation with the prospect. Following up on a content download isn't a sales call, but a relationship building experience. The sales rep should be able to discuss the topic the prospect expressed interest in and offer additional content the person may find relevant. Along the way, the rep can subtly learn more about the buying stage the prospect is in.

Inside sales follow-up should be treated as a form of progressive profiling, unless there are buying indications that indicate it's time for escalation.

This means that marketers need to think beyond their lead generation strategy to create a response plan that coordinates with nurturing and how they'll enable sales to meet those expectations your brilliant content is setting. If you can't keep prospects engaged once they come to you, what's the point?

Things to think about include:

• The process in response to specific content downloads and lead gen offers
• What additional content offers relate to a download?
• What conversational prompts will be helpful to ensure relevant follow-up conversations?
• What questions need to be asked/answered to help you be more relevant as the relationship continues? Focus on need first, not budget.
• Should the reponse to a download be a call? Or should that download activity serve to trigger an auto reponse email to be sent with a related content offer?Or, perhaps it's indicative of which lead nurturing track the prospect will find most valuable.

The concept of inbound marketing is great. But the strategy must be planned beyond the "getting found" part to what comes next.

B2B Content Marketing as Trojan Horse

I sat in on the Content Marketing for Real Marketers webinar, with Joe Chernov and Rebecca Lieb, hosted by #CMI and Joe Pulizzi.

Of course there were many great points made, but two of them stood out and prompted this blog post:

• Content draws 10X more media attention than product launches.
• Diminishing the brand representation in favor of the story enables it to spread.

If you look at the first point, it offers proof that no one cares about products, but rather what they enable — which is what great content marketing is all about.

The second points out that it's not about your company, but about the story you're sharing.

I get asked a lot how to increase engagement with content. In fact, I know many marketers pining for the ability to get their content to go viral. In my experience you can't "make" something go viral. But you can certainly up the odds with the way your content is designed. (As an aside, viral means nothing in B2B if it isn't caused by the market you're trying to engage.)

The issues I run into when it comes time to actually execute a program by publishing content include (but are not limited to):

• Corporate editors bound and determined to get every trademark, service mark, product name and company name mentioned as often as possible when just talking about the product by an agnostic or industry label makes it easier for people to engage with the material.


• Corporate editors who insist that the grammar be perfect, thereby making the content a chore to read by removing contractions, inserting "that" everywhere possible and inserting jargon because it's part of the brand style guide. (e.g. use vs. leverage)


• Companies that insist their logo, tagline and template are prominently displayed on every content asset - even though the corporate brand mafia have already done all of the above.


• Companies that insist that the calls to action must be oriented around selling something.


• The inability to respond quickly because EVERYTHING must be approved before it's published.

The title of this post was also mentioned during the webinar and I love it. The concept is a perfect representation of content marketing done to best effect.

It's really that simple. If your content provides ideas that inspire people to visualize themselves solving their problems or the path to a better tomorrow, then you're on the right track. What you really want is for them to become so engaged that they take your ideas into conversations within their companies.

Such a simple concept, but one often overlooked because of the intense focus to insert the salesperson into the dialogue. Yes, of course that must happen in a B2B sale, but consider this:

If your content is designed to help people think about, visualize and discuss the ideas you share in relation to the problems your company solves, it serves as a Trojan Horse, getting salespeople invited into conversations faster than marketers can accomplish by trying to force the issue.

During the webinar, Joe mentioned that Eloqua's logo is getting smaller by design on the content they share. Do you actually think that no one recognizes that Eloqua is providing the content? By making themselves the secondary focus, Eloqua is actually helping their brand gain prominence, as counterintuitive as that may seem. Because they are not screaming "LOOK AT ME", the company is perceived as being more helpful by placing the emphasis on the content, not its brand representation.

Think about how you read content. Do you look for something interesting before you commit to spending time with it? I bet you do. Then, after you get that light bulb moment, you want to know who provided it. How much better of an impression has been made? How much more likely are you to remember the brand favorably?

It's about using the story as stealth marketing, not clubbing people over the head with your product. Once the story is "in," your company is "in" by association.

Great webinar! If you get a chance to listen to the archive, I suggest you do. There were many other great ideas shared during the session.

Is Gaming Your Customers Okay?

I've had a number of conversations lately with B2B marketers who are becoming concerned with, hmm, let's call it the overzealousness of some B2B marketing practices that are emerging. In the quest to gain what should be earned referrals and testimonials, some companies appear to be pushing the boundaries of ethics and standards by paying for them.

A bit of a disclaimer before I begin. I don't claim to have the answers, but I do think this is a conversation we need to have as an industry. I hope you'll chime in and contribute to the conversation. I'm all ears!

Also, I'm purposely refraining from naming or linking to any examples because my intention is not to reprimand vendors, but to honestly explore the ramifications possible to the industry from a practice that I see gaining traction that may become damaging to brand reputations.

For a bit of background, let's start with the FTC guidelines for endorsements in advertising [PDF]. *Statements below pulled verbatim from the guide linked to above.

• Endorsements must reflect the honest opinions, findings, beliefs, or experience of the endorser. Furthermore, an endorsement may not convey any express or implied representation that would be deceptive if made directly by the advertiser.


• Advertisers are subject to liability for false or unsubstantiated statements made through endorsements, or for failing to disclose material connections between themselves and their endorsers.


• A young man signs up to be part of a “street team” program in which points are awarded each time a team member talks to his or her friends about a particular advertiser’s products. Team members can then exchange their points for prizes, such as concert tickets or electronics. These incentives would materially affect the weight or credibility of the team member’s endorsements. They should be clearly and conspicuously disclosed, and the advertiser should take steps to ensure that these disclosures are being provided.

A situation that has surfaced recently with several vendors is the offering of prizes for the submission of use-case stories to the vendor or testimonials posted on social media in regards to a product or service provided by the vendor. The third bullet above is the closest I can find in the FTC guidelines, but it is essentially the same situation.

My question is, if the testimonials or stories do not disclose the enticement of prizes, is the information reliable, transparent and an honest representation of the experience had with that product or service?

Some vendors have stated that they have a clearly posted disclosure notice and that the people participating in the program or contest should know to follow it. But they don't. After all, 140 characters on Twitter doesn't leave a lot of room for disclosures. But does the posting of the notice absolve the vendor of responsibility? Not according to the FTC.

What if the collection of stories predicated on the opportunity to win a prize is done outside of public view? When the stories are used, if disclosure isn't made the vendor may be at fault, but who will know?

If you were submitting a story and wanted to win the prize (many of them are pricey and very nice), would you submit a critical story or a story about a bad experience?

How much differently would the story or testimonial be told if the person submitted it purely driven by self-motivation, rather than potential prizes or recognition?

Could it be that the desire for recognition from or "kinship" with a vendor or brand motivates people to post things they ordinarily wouldn't without prompting?

Is the offering of prizes actually gaming our customers? I believe can be.

Are vendors under the assumption that this is a form of earned media? In my opinion, that's not true. I see it as more of a form of paid advertising.

Some may argue that the people who participate don't know whether or not they'll win the prize, but this goes back to motivation to participate in the first place. Would they have done so without the incentive of a the possibility to win a desirable prize?

The FTC is very clear that if a product is provided along with a request for a review, that the blogger must disclose the relationship. This also holds true for endorsements.

The Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA) is also very clear on this subject as you can see in Standard 2 of their code of ethics:

"Disclosure of consideration or compensation received:  A WOMMA member shall require their representatives to disclose meaningfully and prominently all forms of consideration or compensation they received from the member, marketer or sponsor of the product or service.  In other words, WOMMA members shall not engage in marketing practices where the marketer/sponsor or its representative provides goods, services, or compensation to the consumer (or communicator) as consideration for recommendations, reviews, or endorsements, unless full, meaningful, and prominent disclosure is provided."

Are companies so zealous about online engagement that they're willing to pay for it, rather than earn it and mislead their prospects and customers along the way?

Another point to be considered is purpose or use. If companies want to reward customers to participate in  "social" focus groups within a community where opinions are shared and solicited for internal use and product/service improvement - and everyone knows the rules/conditions - that's one thing. It's when the information is used for marketing or advertising purposes or to sway brand opinion without disclosure that the problems arise.

What do you think? Overblown nonsense or a real issue that should be addressed?