Marketing Interactions

Is Your Marketing Content Ready for Step Backs?

As B2B marketers of complex sales gain traction in developing content across buying stages, they've got to remember that answering objections and correcting reversals is not just a sales activity. With sales conversations pushed farther back in the buying process, you can lose prospects before they ever speak with your sales reps if you don't remove any doubts that arise for them along the way.

Step Backs cause stalls to pipeline momentum. They tend to happen when your prospects have determined your company has a viable solution to their problem, but something pops up that causes hesitation. This can be a competitor's claim, a new ripple effect your prospect has uncovered that the solution will impact or something they've heard from a colleague or peer. There are a ton of things that can happen to cause hesitation.

Obviously, you can only address Step Backs if you learn what causes them to happen.

Some ways to do this include:

• win/loss reviews with your sales force
• customer interviews
• past customer surveys
• listening to and monitoring social networks

I've seen a number of questions asked on social networks lately about solutions. Someone posts a question asking for recommendations for a type of solution or what they should know about a specific solution before they choose to buy it or even why one solution might be better than another.

The amount of information being shared is extensive—some factual, but much that's based on opinion more than fact. Nevertheless, what's being said about your solutions on social networks needs to be listened to and, sometimes, responded to.

What marketers may struggle with is even admitting there are concerns about buying a type of product. They seem to have trouble talking about anything that's not evangelizing their products. Even though we all know that complex purchases are evaluated based on risk assessment as well as benefits. That's a part of the process. So, meet it head-on and be authentic while you're doing it.

I'm not talking about writing a piece about why buyers have chosen not to buy your solution. I'm talking about addressing concerns directly. For example; if your sales reps are reporting that you're losing deals because a certain type of influencer isn't buying in, find out why and develop content to address that concern to help eliminate that obstacle.

One of the best ways to identify Step Backs is with marketing automation. Here's one scenario made possible by the technology:

A prospect has been engaged by all your nurturing touches for the past five months and suddenly ceases to click through. Take a look at the prospect's individual profile and see if they've returned to some previously viewed content. If so, perhaps something in that content hasn't fully answered their needs and they've gone back to look for reassurance that their assumptions are correct. This is the perfect time to reach out to them personally and ask if they're looking for specific information you can provide. 

Most marketing automation solutions have a rules or work flow process that allows you to automatically send a message if your prospects do or don't do something. If you uncover certain patterns of behavior, you can develop content and distribution processes to address Step Backs as they occur, keeping prospects moving forward.

Or it could be that their priorities changed. You won't know until you ask. There's never a cut-and-dried rule for prospect behavior, but there are ways to try to address it helpfully.

Addressing Step Backs with content is a proactive way to show the depth of your understanding about your buyers' needs. By engaging with them about concerns that cause hesitation, you gain the ability to get them moving forward again, rather than losing them to a competitor or even to a decision to do nothing.

Marketing Content for Next Steps

In response to the blog post I wrote about the Return on YES, I was asked on Twitter to give some examples of what I mean by "show your prospects the next steps."

Think for a moment about the user experience at your website. You plan for how you'll get your website visitors to click on something to learn more after they arrive - to dive deeper into your content.

You construct navigational paths designed to lead them to the information they need (at least I hope you do). This means that once they click on something and move to that web page, you provide what you promised and then offer other related choices. And on, and on.

If all you ever wanted was for them to visit your homepage, none of this would be necessary. All of us would have single-page websites that read like executive summaries. Boring, right? Helpful, not so much.

Think about your content from this perspective.

Do you only want your prospects to read that one piece of marketing content?

Of course not. In a complex sale, that won't get you very far.

Each content resource is designed to do one thing. Some examples may include:

• Educate prospects about an issue that could be an obstacle to achieving an objective.
• Offer evidence that solving the problem delivers tangible outcomes.
• Provide thought leadership about an industry trend.

The examples can go on for miles, but you get the idea. So let's take the first one and dive in.

Once your prospect has read an educational piece to learn about why they might not be achieving an objective they want, is that the end?

Nope. You've left them hanging.

If you were them, what would you want to know next?

• What are others doing about this?
• If I solve it, what will happen?
• How hard is it going to be to solve?
• What if I do nothing?
• Prove that you can fix it.
• What will I have to risk to do so?

There are a multitude of thoughts and questions that occur to people after they've learned something relevant to them. To show your prospects the next step means to answer the questions that the content they've just read may have provoked.

This is why I continuously talk about content strategy, editorial calendars, storylines, buyer personas and problem-to-solution scenarios.

Showing your prospects the next steps doesn't just happen by accident. It takes planning.

It was pointed out to me the other day that no matter how I think a prospect will work through answering all their questions, they'll do it however it works for them. This is a valid point - the way people think is not as predictable as we'd like.

The crux is that if you don't plan for and develop content to show next steps, you won't have it available for whenever the time comes to provide an answer they're seeking.

The other factor is that if you develop your content to continuously evolve the concepts and ideas you're sharing in a progressive manner, you have a better shot at keeping your prospects engaged with your story. And that level of engagement is what will eventually cause them to raise their hands and reach out to get more answers - the ones they need right now that they expect you to have.

And that's exactly what you want them to do.

The Return on YES in Lead Nurturing

Lead nurturing has been proven to be instrumental in producing qualified sales opportunities for B2B organizations—when done well. The goal, of course, is for your content strategy to produce momentum during the buying process that consistently produces that outcome.

But I'd like to challenge you to go farther.

You've got to harness the returns on YES to help your prospects take each and every consecutive step with your company.

Every time a prospect responds to you is not a YES.

Here's what I mean. If YES is defined as not only getting your prospect to open the email, click through to the content and then click to read the next related piece of content in your storyline, they have to do all three to give you a YES.

If they only make it as far as open, that's a "maybe."

If they make it past open and follow the link to your content, that's an "okay."

But, until they click on that next link, you don't have YES.

You see, the email send is only an initial invitation. In a considered sale, your prospect has so much to learn that if he's only reading that one piece of content you send out attached to your nurturing email each month—well, it will take forever to get to YES.

Eventually, as you help your buyer traverse the steps of learning all they need to know to be willing to engage in a sales conversation, the definition of YES will become that sales conversation.

YES is progressive. YES is based on credibility and value perception by your prospects.

YES takes patience, consistency and relevance.

YES requires that you show your prospects the next steps.

YES means you're continually assessing your prospects' online behavior and increasing your personalized responsiveness. (think tighter segmentation based on behavior)

Without a continuous string of YES in response to your nurturing programs, how far do you think you'll get?

That's why you need a content strategy. It's not just about "what do we send next?" Nurturing is about knowing and planning for how we respond when we get a YES. Interactive marketing means your nurturing program is a two-way street.

If your response doesn't acknowledge their YES, you're not likely to keep getting that level of engagement.

How are you incorporating YES into your nurturing programs? Better yet, how are you leveraging the return when you get YES? Something to think about.

AllBusiness.com Podcast on Handicapping Target Markets

I was recently interviewed by AllBusiness.com about the idea of Handicapping Target Markets. Handicapping in this sense is about how to use personas to increase the relevance of your nurturing campaigns to cull more ideal customers from your pipeline—as well as shorten sales cycles.

In the podcast I talk about:

• How a handicapping approach works -
• • Circumstances - the trigger events that create need for what you sell
  • Characteristics - the traits like roles, responsibilities and influencers that dictate your buyers' behavior and what they need to build a business case to buy.
• Handicapping as a group process involving salespeople and customers.
• Defining personas
• What kinds of questions you need to answer from the buyers' perspective to create content with higher relevance.
• Examples of persona-driven outcomes
• And more...

I also delve into this subject extensively in my new book, eMarketing Strategies for the Complex Sale. I present the idea of extending the persona into the creation of buyer synopses, which is essentially the combination of personas with a targeted problem-to-solution scenario. The outcome of this work is producing the insights that help marketers develop highly relevant content for progressive nurturing programs.

You can also download two chapters of the book here.

Content Marketing for Product Customization

I was reading the AMA's Journal of Marketing and came across an article, Testing the Value of Customization [Sep '09]. Several insights presented through the research had me thinking about how marketing custom and unique solutions plays out in the B2B marketplace.

Although the research was based on two consumer studies, several insights can help B2B marketers improve the way customization is marketed:

• "...the magnitude of [customization] benefits increases in line with the person's insight into his or her own preferences and ability to express them."


• "...product involvement affects the benefits obtained from customization..."


• "...true customer preferences may differ from expressed preferences..."


• "...preferences are often constructed on the basis of how the options are framed when the consumer needs to make a decision."

With the high level of commoditization across B2B products and solutions, often what differentiates a company is how they help their customers use them to gain the best business outcomes. In other words, B2B marketers of a considered purchase nearly all offer a flavor of customization based on their company's methodologies and expertise.

What marketers and companies fail to realize is that buyers—who are solving a specific problem for the first time—may not actually know their preferences. But even if they do, they often won't understand the ramifications of those preferences once they're put into action.

Marketers tend to focus on engaging decision makers, but this research may be a true indication that end users and influencers should become more of a focus for content marketing efforts. It's also another reason that marketers and salespeople need to create the ability for prospects to have internal conversations about preferences in order to make the best decisions.

From thought leadership content about the pros and cons of preferences to customer stories that expose the reality of those preferences in action, content can help frame and initiate the conversations among stakeholders to help buyers make better decisions. By striving to provide clarity around underlying issues that create confusion, content can be designed to add more value to the decision process.

Let's take a look at how each of the insights above can be addressed by content marketing.

Insight into preferences: Although personal preferences will also sway decisions, assess what you know about how your customer's organizational culture influences the decisions they make. Are they innovative or conservative? Fast movers or slow and steady? Growing or contracting? Global or regional? If your content doesn't take these factors into account, your content may not be resonating as it should.

Ability to express preferences: When presented with information about something new, we can often visualize the meaning, but have difficulty verbalizing our thoughts and reactions. The increasing use of audio, video (even webinars) can help prospects learn to articulate and discuss preferences with more confidence. 

Product involvement as benefit driver: This is one of the insights that indicates inclusion of end users has value. People who have used similar systems in the past or will see their work styles affected by a new solution will have definite ideas about what they prefer and what will have limited benefit. Showcasing the changes and outcomes can provide a foundation for preferences that's helpful to removing obstacles to the sale.

True vs. expressed preferences: In a B2B sale, the buying committee has a number of members that must come to consensus before a purchase decision is made. When stakeholders are unsure of the importance of certain preferences, they tend to move toward uniformity with the majority.

Often all companies care about is getting that consensus to go their way. However, customer loyalty and retention is a key value. Therefore we'd be better served to help our prospects dig deeper to reveal their true preferences. Depending on the gap between what's true vs. expressed, your customer's willingness to switch to get to "true" can be costly.

Framing preferences: Essentially, all marketing content and sales collateral is a frame for creating preferences. The company who does this the best from the prospects' perspective is likely the one they'll buy from.

When the difference between a decision in your company's favor or losing the deal swings in the balance, your content marketing and sales enablement strategies can provide the competitive differentiation that sets your company above all other choices.

How you market customization is worth considering, don't you think?

Lead Nurturing is NOT About Campaigns

Content marketing is being used in all types of formats. There's the big bang eBook launch, the white paper promotion, the 3 touch plus sales offer approach, the quarterly webinar and other "standalone" configurations based on a short-term time frame. Unfortunately, none of these is actually lead nurturing for a complex sale. These are campaigns.

A campaign is generally a short term focus with a defined goal like - Generate 100 new leads or add $X to the pipeline forecast. Your buyers could care less because the very structure of a campaign is all about what your company wants to achieve, not what your buyers need.

A solid lead nurturing program extends at a minimum across your average buying cycle and even beyond. Lead nurturing is about providing useful content your buyers find valuable because it helps them think about, evaluate and solve their problems to create desirable business outcomes.

I know what you're thinking. "Heck, I'll just stream all my campaigns together and it'll be a lead nurturing program."

Nope. That's not it.

Why?

Because it's highly unlikely that you'll end up with a consistent and useful storyline that builds engagement with your buyers. This is because campaigns tend to hop around. Campaigns are the equivalent of ADD for marketing. They lack commitment so it's easy to flip your focus to some other trendy topic and head off down another path with each new campaign you create.

What's the result for your buyers?

• Disappointment that content they were interested in has reached a conclusion without providing them all the insight they needed to make an informed decision.
• Confusion about the actual value your company provides.
• Diminishing relevance that results in their attention moving elsewhere to get what they need.

Put yourself in your buyers' shoes and imagine you're trying to solve a specific problem.

• You find an article that speaks to that problem and follow the link to the website.
• You register for and download a related white paper while you're there.
• Over the course of several months you receive related information that helps you learn more about what you need to know - but you still have questions and have to convince the other members of the buying committee that this company can help.
• Next month you get an email promoting the value of a different product.

Yep. One campaign ended and another one began.

From the buyers' perspective, how interested are you now?

If your sales cycle is averaging 9 months, how effective is a strategy that dictates the launch of a new campaign focus every quarter? (Product A in Q1, Product B in Q2, Product C in Q3, etc.)

Instead, consider creating a nurturing program that educates your buyers step-by-step across the entirety of their buying cycle.

To do this you must know your buyers very well. You need to think in terms of problem-to-solution scenarios, not product lines when you create your content strategy and editorial calendar. Roll that eBook, white paper and video into your nurturing storyline. When you have an editorial calendar that extends across the buying process you can weave in your various content formats to both generate new leads and increase the engagement you're building with your leads over time.

The gist is that short-term campaigns are created for your benefit and nurturing programs are created to benefit buyers.

Which is going to get you farther in the long run?

23 Reasons Why Content Marketing Fails

I've seen some strange things happen to content. In an effort to help you get the most out of your B2B content marketing efforts, I thought I'd shed some light on the kind of stuff that can derail your attempts to gain the attention of your prospects.

In no particular order of importance, here's the top 23 that come to mind: (plus additions submitted by others)

1. Hiring an expert to develop content and then revising it to insert all those "me, me, me" terms and phrases that are noticeably absent.
2. Only use a content resource once and then archive it somewhere offline.
3. Sending out whatever content is at hand to your entire list every month.
4. Not creating a content strategy BEFORE you develop content.
5. Following up a great early-stage content offer with a pushy sales offer.
6. Creating great content but lousy email messaging that fails to get prospects to click.
7. Sending a great email message linked to lousy content.
8. Deluging your database with too many emails, too often.
9. Not measuring response beyond opens and clicks so you have no clue which content is working, or why.
10. When your website content is NOT in alignment with your nurturing content - hence confusing your prospects when they do click through.
11. Landing pages that bear no resemblance to the message in your email.
12. Promising a deep topic dive and delivering a surface skim.
13. Customer success stories that are all about your company, not your customers.
14. Changing focus with every nurturing touch so your prospects are totally confused about what's in it for them.
15. Covering too much because you aren't sure what's relevant to your audience and want to make sure something sticks.
16. Stopping prospects who want your content with lengthy forms that keep them from getting it - do you really need to know all that stuff right now?
17. Launching a blog to talk about your products.
18. Tweeting only about your content and company.
19. Using pre-sales marketing content for your customer base.
20. Giving salespeople early-stage content for use with sales-ready leads - even worse when it's stuff the leads have seen during nurturing.
21. Sending the same email with alarming frequency and repetition to train your prospects to ignore you because you obviously have nothing new to add to the conversation.
22. Disappointing your prospects with a great white paper offer because it's outdated. Just because it was good 3 years ago doesn't mean it shouldn't be updated before it's reused.
23. Only using 3rd party content so your prospects have no clue whether or not YOU know what you're talking about.
    
    Updates and additions to the list:
24. Burying your content in a complex web navigation scheme where visitors have to WORK to find it. (via Jonathan Kranz)
25. Favoring impressive-sounding, abstract jargon over precise, detail-rich stories. (via Jonathan Kranz)
26. Taking a "goody two-shoes" Pollyanna approach that never acknowledges the problems/challenges customers/prospects really face. (via Jonathan Kranz)
27. Failing to provide an easy way for readers to share your online content. (via Caroline)
28. Forgoing new media content--video, podcasts, webinars, etc. (via Caroline)
29. Thinking compelling content must be long and complex and forgetting that simple, interactive content can provide high value when executed well. (via Susan Fantle)
30. Only publishing content in one format. (via Sarah Mitchell)
31. Employing great content without well-planned follow-up. (via Sima Dahl)
32. Lack of unique content written with a conversational tone. (via Dennis)
33. Assuming you know what buyers want to know better than they do (via Melissa)
34. Following great content with company focused pablum (via Melissa)
35. Calling even when I've checked the box that said, just curious (via Melissa)
36. Thinking your content job is done with 4 or 5 pieces! (via Melissa)
    

Thanks to Jonathan, Caroline and Susan, Sarah, Sima, Dennis and Melissa for your contributions! Love it!

The list is growing...come on, what else?

What have I forgotten? Leave a comment and I'll add yours to the list.

Marketing Content Needs a Business Reason

Marketers who embrace demand generation and lead nurturing programs must generate a lot of content to keep those programs running. Just any old content won't get the job done. Regardless of the role (audience / segment) your content is designed to engage, it must lead with a business reason that resonates with your prospects and customers in order to get their attention.

This has been said again and again. It's something we all know, but it's sometimes not easy to define when developing marketing content. 

The business reason should be up front and obvious. Without one, people won't engage with you over the cycle of a complex sale, nor will they buy from you.

To be clear, a business reason should:

• have movement - increase, decrease, accelerate, grow
• add value - improve, simplify, drive, eliminate, connect
• integrate - merge, pull, push, combine
• align with objectives - match, parallel, cooperate

A business reason is not:

• a sales offer
• discounted pricing
• a free iPod, tshirt or Starbucks gift card
• your product or solution
• based on a request for information

Every complex purchase decision today must be supported by a business case. This means our content, communications and conversations must revolve around the desirable outcomes, obstacles to goal achievement, and the attainment of strategic objectives.

You may get a lot of response from that iPod offer, but how many of those leads actually turn into sales opportunities with a high propensity to buy?

We've got to change our mindset from hitting the numbers to attracting the quality with our demand generation programs. Otherwise we're just feeding our funnels full of activity that fills our already maxed-out days instead of interactions that drive revenues and value for our companies.

The next time you want to tell everyone about the great new feature your product development folks just rolled out, STOP.

Ask yourself what impact that feature delivers to your customers.

Find out how it delivered that impact.

Collect the evidence available to support your claims.

Got the deets?

Great! Now, write your marketing content based on the business reason.

How do your prospects know?

I've been in a number of client calls with sales teams to work on aligning marketing and sales goals. Listening to salespeople talk about prospects and the types of questions they want answers to in order to qualify leads as sales opportunities can yield a ton of insights for marketing and content strategy development.

One of the things that keeps popping up in these conversations is that salespeople across the board are saying their prospects already know about the types of solutions they sell.

This is followed by the disclosure that salespeople spend a lot of time educating these already informed prospects about how to apply the solutions to their business objectives. If they can get their foot in the door.

What I keep mulling over is this:

How do their prospects KNOW?

Who is it that's educating them?

And, if it's not your company, why not?

You see, whoever your prospects are choosing to learn from swiftly becomes the anchor for how they think about solving the problem. That company's content and communications are defining the context for the conversation and influencing beliefs about why the prospect needs the solution in the first place.

I wrote a blog post about why buyers need educational content recently. The commitment to educate your prospects and play a consistent role in delivering valuable insights during their early-stage process is critical to setting your company up for inclusion in the buying conversation when the time comes.

If you do this well, when your salespeople call, they'll get responses like:

• Hey, I really appreciated that article about X.
• I've been hearing a lot about your company, lately.
• Tell me more about...

If you don't, the responses could be more like:

• Where did you say you're calling from?
• We're already talking to someone else.

Educational marketing content serves the purposes of building awareness, setting context for your buyers, increasing your company's credibility and pulling prospects to the next stage of their buying process—with YOU.

Oh, and done well, it also clarifies issues, simplifies complexity and increases knowledge that builds the buyer's confidence that they're on the right track.

So, go ask yourself...How do your prospects know? And then make sure the answer is related to their engagement with—and the takeaways from—your b2b marketing initiatives.

Ambiguous B2B Content Won't Cut It

You hear it from all over, including from me. It's not cool to talk only about your products because your buyers don't care about them, they care about achieving their business objectives.The platform for accomplishing the objectives is secondary to the value add from the company providing them.

So you go out with the best of intentions and try to write about problem-to-solution scenarios and educate your prospects about outcomes they can get should they choose to buy from your company.

And this is often the result:

    "[generic term for solution] will help you increase efficiency, streamline cumbersome processes and boost your employee productivity so you can achieve shorter time to market."

Huh? Yep - that's your prospect shaking his or her head and thinking, "yeah, that's what they all say. Means nothing to me." Delete. Move on.

What's happened is that in trying to sound more impressive than our competitors, we've stacked vague phrase upon vague buzzwords and achieved mediocrity. Um, maybe worse. In trying to steer away from what we know best - our products - we've landed in this nowhere zone of ambiguous statements.

Let's just say that your prospect reads that statement above and tries to have a conversation with a stakeholder involved in a project where your solution could be a perfect fit.

Prospect: "Hey, did you know we can increase efficiency by implementing this kind of solution?

Stakeholder: What exactly becomes more efficient?

Prospect: "Um, I don't know, but whatever it is, it also boosts our employee productivity, so it must be good, right?"

Stakeholder: "How does it do that? In comparison to what?"

At your prospects shrug, the stakeholder eyes him with concern about mental instability and disappears down the hall muttering under his breath.

Okay - perhaps a bit dramatic, but go grab a piece of your marketing content and scour it for vague terms and see how many you find.

The reason for all this vagueness in content is because we forget about context that matches our prospect's worldview. We've forgotten how to tell a story of interest to our prospects, that engages them based on interest and needs, not product features.

Efficiency is fine and dandy. It means to get things done faster and with less effort.

Context might look like this: When you use this type of solution you can increase production on the line by up to 5X what you're achieving today.

A statement like that is not only easily understood, but it generates ideas for the prospect based on their unique situation. They may grab onto that 5X improvement and apply it to the possibility that they can eliminate the need for that costly expansion project to add another line to the plant. Is that appealing? Yep.

The point is that the more real you can make the value your solutions deliver, the easier it is for prospects to insert themselves into the story you're telling and relate that idea to a goal they need to achieve.

And here's the kicker - unless you can afford to create 1-to-1 content based on research into each prospect's reality, it's highly unlikely that your content could actually address that exact justification and remain relevant to everyone in that market segment.

For someone else, the 5X increase might mean they don't need to staff up to meet increasing demand, saving them additional overhead when compared to the solution's total cost of ownership.

Replacing vague terms with contextual examples gives your prospects:

• a way to equate value against their specific situation
• credible talking points to influence stakeholder conversations
• increased interest in learning more to validate their idea

And those points all help build higher levels of engagement that move prospects toward becoming qualified sales opportunities.

So where do you find the fodder for context?

You find it in the ways your customers use your products and in the business results they achieve. You can use customer insights in content articles without the need to identify the customer. In fact, by leaving the customer out of it, you give the prospect more freedom to imagine the possibilities than if you named the customer.

For example, if I'm working for a midsize IT company, I may perceive that an outcome achieved by IBM isn't possible for my situation. They have more resources and a heck of a lot more money to throw at the problem. But without that preconception in the way, I very well may see how to apply that context to my own situation.

So, remember that context is great, but also be aware of how perception can be affected based on the layers of context you choose to use. Make those decisions based on the market segment your content is designed to engage.

Applying context in place of vague terms and buzzwords can transform the results your marketing content generates.