Marketing Interactions

A Few Thoughts on B2B Marketing Buzzword: Relationship

I've been a bit of a journey to explore B2B marketing buzzwords. Today's focus - at the suggestion of Eric Wittlake — is the buzzword: Relationship.

Relationship is formally defined as a connection between people — emotional or otherwise. A relationship can be thought of as a dependence, affinity, or kinship.

What I find the most interesting in relation to marketing is the word "connection." This seems to be the missing link for many marketers whether they're referring to potential or existing customers.

Let's first take a look at what does not equate to a relationship:

• One white paper download. From experience, I know that I won't remember the company or the paper when they call me to schedule a demo because I had a brief encounter with their website form.


• Showing up when it's time to renew the contract. This is a case of what have you done for me lately? A relationship must have a personal or human component. It cannot be solely reliant upon my experience with the product, alone. A relationship must have some kind of human value exchange.


• A ReTweet, follow, like, or invitation to connect on a social network. I have a lot of followers. I follow a lot of people because I'm interested in what they're talking about or a cause they're passionate about. This does not mean I "know" them or that they know me.

In fact, if we go back to the work "connection," it must encompass some kind of "knowing" or recognition. This generally means there needs to be an exchange or even a longer term engagement, as I discussed in my blog post on that term.

The problem in marketing is that we seem to paint the word "relationship" with a one-size-fits-all brush. We talk about customer relationship management as if we actually spend time with all of our customers equally. We seem to think that transitory experiences with prospects mean more to them than they would in any other context if we thought about it rationally.

For example, when you think about your personal relationships, you have levels of them, right? Your hierarchy could look something like:

• acquantance - someone you've met a couple of times
• colleague - someone you've worked with and perhaps respect
• professional - someone who delivers a service (dentist, doctor, accountant)
• mentor - someone you learn from
• friend - someone you like and rely upon
• spouse - someone you know intimately, love and rely upon for the long term
• family - people you love unconditionally (if all is right in the world)

I'm not going to argue semantics on this one - you get the point. There's an evolution based on how well you know them and what role they fulfill in your life.

From a marketing perspective, establishing relationships with prospects must also be thought of in some kind of hierarchical fashion. This may run in parallel with buying stages and the level of engagement that can be established and earned along the way.

If you flip what I said above about personal relationships to a B2B prospect's perspective then the relationship you have with them will be determined by how well they know you and what role you may have earned the right to fulfill in relation to their needs and priorities.

Their hierarchy with respect to your company could look something like this to your prospects:

• nobody - I may have heard of your company, but I have no opinion or affinity.


• acquainted - I may have had exposure to your content or brand in some way.


• familiar - I know who you are, but I'm not yet sure you're relevant to my needs.


• known - I've discovered you may have insights I find valuable so I'm paying more attention


• respected - I'm following your blog or have subscribed to your newsletter because I see consistently valuable ideas.


• mentor - I'm now on the lookout for your content and have shared your stuff with my network.


• expert - I'm in conversations with your salespeople to see if you can really help me.


• customer - I've decided you bring enough value to the table that I'll invest in having you help me solve my problems. I think I can rely upon you.


• advocate - You've proved your value and I'm so enthusiastic, I think others should have you help them — and I'm proactively sharing my praise.

Do you notice the additional steps and time it takes for a worthwhile relationship to form for both of you? Yet the standard today is that we treat people who consider us "nobody" or maybe "acquainted" as if they're bonified prospects. This stems from our determination that anyone who could become our customer is viable whether they want to be or not. If you look like a "duck," by gosh we're going to make you one!

Relationships are not something to be taken lightly. They take a lot of work and a lot of consistent value delivery. This is why the way you go to market is so important. Think of the hierarchy as a ladder. If you slip up, you slide down a rung or two, maybe more. Then you have to rebuild.

The level of relationship marketers can build will pretty much dictate what they can accomplish with their marketing initiatives. Relationships are about credibility and trust, as much as value and relevance. This being said, prospects don't just build relationships with one part of your organization. Marketing can only take them so far. What happens when salespeople get involved better be a seamless extension and the same when it comes to implementation teams and customer service.

The challenge is in how to establish lifecycle relationships, not just an experience in a pocket of time.

So be a bit careful the next time you start to throw around the word relationship. It means quite a bit more than we often give it credit for. Especially with our growing reliance on digital marketing that tends to remove the human part in many ways.

Debunking B2B Marketing Buzzword: Engagement

I'm tired of seeing so many concepts that should be being used to evolve content marketing applied to vague notions or traditional practices that just serve to confuse marketers and cause a lot of semantic arguments across the space.

I'll be writing a few posts about buzzwords that are making me a bit nuts. Feel free to jump in with your thoughts. I think it would be great if we can bring some clarity and new thinking.

Let's start with the term ENGAGEMENT.

What does engagement mean? I hear it being used in reference to clicks, email opens, page views, time spent on page, new followers, ReTweets and a variety of other point-in-time activities.

I'd like to suggest that engagement is not about point in time. It's about longevity and sustained attention. If it isn't then lead nurturing wouldn't work. And it does. If engagement was about point in time then one touch should get someone to talk to sales, right?

As an aside - judging by the number of calls I receive from salespeople who just know I'm ready to buy from them since I downloaded their white paper - obviously that belief is alive and well.

But it makes no sense. Marketers that I work with have sales cycles that are long (9 - 12 months or more) and growing longer. Salespeople say that they're not getting into conversations until much later in the B2B buying process. So engagement must mean more than point in time.

The ability to measure engagement is (IMO) what lead scoring was meant to do once you get past the demographic scoring. But then we must take into account if all activity is contributing to engagement in the same way or if specific activity should mean more than other activities.

For example: If a prospect visits your website and bounces around, viewing 5 unrelated pages, is he as engaged as a prospect who arrives, clicks on a topical content asset and then follows the path you created with a string of relevant and related content that delivers a storyline about how to solve a business problem that may be a priority for him? There is a huge difference in those two scenarios.

What marketers need to do is to get better about how they design scoring frameworks. In those two scenarios, only one of those people warrant further attention from inside sales to validate their interest level. And I'd even suggest that their activity should trigger a follow-up with another related content offer that also provides contact info they can use, unless the prospect specifically requests contact.

And offer up some compelling reason for them to interact with you personally.

So think about how you're using the term "engagement" and whether or not the definition you're using is adding value to how you achieve your marketing objectives.

Engagement is about what comes next. Are they interested enough to click, read, and respond when you send the next email or publish your next blog post?

As marketers, we measure opens and clicks and as long as the numbers look good and continue to grow, we're satisfied that we're doing our jobs. But who is responding? Is it the same people? Or is it a whole new group of folks whose interest you caught?

I'd be curious about levels of engagement that we're creating. For example, go look at your lead nurturing program. Take the last 5 sends and look at the prospects who clicked on your links. Across the series of 5 touchpoints, how many times did each lead respond?

How many 5:5 results do you have?

There's research that shows a minimum of 5 touches are needed before a prospect will engage with a company on a personal basis. Are you sustaining that many? In which channels?

If you look beyond that, how many "see also" clicks did they pursue from the content assets you linked to in your emails? (Perhaps some to blog posts, an on-demand webinar, a slide share, etc.)

If you looked farther, are they on Twitter? If so, are they following you/your company? Better yet, do you follow them?

Are they following your company on LinkedIn? Did they join the group you sponsor? Do they post anything? If so, have you responded to them?

To stretch engagement a bit farther, it's a two-way street. You/your company needs to express as much engagement in them as they express in you. (More and you may look like a stalker), but think about it. Why should they be the only ones putting it out there? Could you shorten sales cycles if you become more responsive?

Yep. You absolutely could. What would that take?

If you had to create an engagement scorecard what would you put on it?

Content Curation Sneaks Up on Marketers

I've read a lot of articles and blog posts about content curation. I have to say that I've been outspoken about not being a fan. Mostly, my reaction is related to the ridiculous notion that a company can become a thought leader through curation alone. Eric Wittlake wrote recently about that with his post, Three Reasons Content Curation is Overated, so I'll let you read his views. I tend to agree with him.

This being said, I started thinking about curation and I realized that for how outspoken I am, I'm a huge curator. Yep, it's true. Nearly every time I Tweet, I'm doing so to share someone else's content. Twitter is the content curation machine of this century. And we're all doing it.

But let's not mistake this activity for thought leadership. Curation is sharing. Curation is your personal or brand's recommendation for the source and content of others. Sharing is good. And I'll concede that I choose to follow others not only for their original content but for the content they share.

Sometimes my head spins when I publish a post to my blog and there are ReTweets before I can even flip from my editing screen to my blog to make sure it published properly. I wonder that those people are so willing to trust that I'm not going to publish something they might be afraid would embarrass them for recommending it. :) Who knows? The pressure could get to me and I could flip out. It has been known to happen to others who appear far more grounded than I am.

But I digress. I appreciate all who share my content, but I think I'd rather have them read and engage with it than just Tweet from a feed. Sometimes my Twitter stream is dry. This is because I'm too busy to go read other people's posts. I never Tweet unless I've read a post and think it would be valuable to my audience. I'm sure some people find that actually reading stuff and being present when Tweeting is a drawback because they have automated Tweets to cover every time period of every day so their visibility stays high. I think that's gaming the system and missing the point.

I believe you need to be present when you participate in social media. Sorry, but I do. That's where the "social" part comes in.

Now let's move back to some of my other thoughts about curation.

Curation can be integrated sharing. For example, when I quote statistics or opinions from analyst reports in a blog post, I'm curating that information. But I'm wrapping it with my own thoughts and ideas to perhaps apply a different take or perspective. I'm adding something I hope is valuable to the original source information.

I'd like to think of that as Inspired Curation.

Curation can also be hyperlinks embedded in a blog post. I'm inviting people to check out something related to what I'm talking about - as I did with the link to Eric's post above.

I call that Directed Curation.

What I don't think adds a whole lot to the act of curation is just repeating what's there with no added commentary. For example; just tweeting the title and link of something without any added phrase that helps me understand why you chose to share a link to a blog post, video, article, etc.

For example: 10 Ways to Improve Your Blog [link] by @joeblow

Compared to: 10 Ways to Improve Your Blog [link] by @joeblow - #3 is a Must Do!

In the first version, I could be interested, but will think nothing more about you. With the second, the recommendation by you to look at #3 tells me something about you. Makes you more interesting, as well as motivates me to go look because I'm now thinking that this list has something I may not have seen before in all the other gazillion list posts about improving my blog.

Curation with commentary changes the game a bit. It provdies more value to both the curator and the audience.

I still think curation has its limitations. But since we're all doing it, perhaps we should give a bit more thought about the value of our curation. What kind of curation are you doing?

Format is Not a B2B Persona Question

I am often asked which content formats to use in which stages of the buying process. B2B marketers often arrive at this question during the creation of buyer personas and content flows. In a perfect world, there would be some magic formula for content format based on this work. However, I advise marketers to consider that content format is not a buyer persona question, it's a circumstance question.

Now, arguably, certain content works better in certain formats. Longer form content is more suited to a white paper, eBook, or Webinar format. Shorter content to a blog post, Facebook post or, obviously, a Tweet.

But that skews the question. That's not a function of persona, but of the content itself.

From a persona perspective, let's say I'm representative of a target segment. Well, I happen to love videos, but I'm time constrained. Therefore, I'm more likely to go for text-based content because I can scan, get what I need, and move on. Am I now a different persona because I downloaded the whitepaper rather than watched the video?

No, I'm not. I'm still the same person operating in response to my circumstances.

Circumstances are often the cause of content format preferences. For example:

• Driving a long commute? Listen to a podcast.
• Eating lunch at your desk and curious about what's new with X? View a webinar.
• Need to really understand the latest research on a subject? Download a white paper.
• Want a quick "how-to" lesson? Watch a video.
• Only have an hour to catch up on what's new today? Scan blog posts from your feed.

I can think of a ton of variations. But none of them make me a different persona. Remember that a persona is representative of a target segment of your market with similar characteristics that is trying to solve a problem that your product or solution addresses.

Buying stages offer another angle on format, but it's a bit more fuzzy. It often depends on the question or query that brings the persona to search for content.

• Is the question easier to answer? Shorter content.
• Is the question more complex? Longer content, or a series approach.
• Is the question a late-stage validation question? Bring on the customer stories.

Perhaps you noticed that in this instance the format is in regards to length and type, not really format as marketers traditionally mean it. There are still many ways to determine which format you'll use. For example, one way is which channel you'll use to distribute the content.

Considering buying stages will also play into how well your personas know your company and how credible they think your content is. The better they know you and the higher esteem they equate to your content, the longer you'll be able to hold their attention. And attention is currency these days.

But perceptions vary. Someone who is early stage but has a referral to your content from a trusted colleague, for example, may be willing to give you the benefit of the doubt and dive into a white paper. Others who have no reason to believe your content will really be helpful will remain skeptical and may only choose a blog post to give you the opportunity to earn their attention.

I think B2B marketers often work from a deficit because we've been slower to lose the product and company focus in favor of the buyer's perspective. We have to prove our content is better and more valuable from the word "Go."

This being said, in my opinion, all of these circumstances indicate that companies need to enable prospects to choose the format they prefer, regardless of the topic they're interested in pursuing.

Format should obviously match the channel. But the formats you choose should also be evidenced in response to all the topics/questions your personas would be interested in learning more about and answering across their buying process.

If your persona is interested in Topic A — then create a variety of formats for Topic A. You can have a white paper, a blog post series, a few videos, etc., all about topic A. Then, regarless of their circumstances, your personas will have access to the format that meets their needs in regards to obtaining that information.

I also acknowledge that creating a quantity of quality content is many marketers #1 challenge. I'd suggest you make your best guess and monitor response and engagement. If a topic shows a lot of interest, try creating more content about it in different formats and see if you can gain more attention from a wider variety of prospects.

All personas are not created equally. And content format is not one-size-fits-all-personas—no matter how much we'd all like it to be.

Yesterday, Joe Pulizzi wrote a blog post, "Finding Your Content Marketing Hedgehog," that discusses how to blend content, format, and expertise for best results. It's great food for thought if you're pondering how format fits in with your content marketing strategy.

Robotic Email Campaigns Miss the Point

In addition to learning that lead generation is the top marketing priority for tech marketers, IDC's 2012 Tech Marketing Barometer Study asked them about their perceived effectiveness at lead nurturing. In reponse to the 22% who said they use regular nurturing touches geared to buying stages that include more than email and web-based multi-step campaigns, Kathleen Schaub, VP-research, CMO Advisory Service at IDC, said:

“I don't believe this, or people don't understand what nurturing means,” Schaub said. “I talk to a lot of our clients and people in the industry, and I know for sure that people are not nurturing well.”

Based on what I've seen, I agree with her. Kathleen also made the comment,

“A lot of people look at nurturing as, "Now we can program our campaign system to deliver six emails in a row.'"

Hence the need for this post. Yet again.

Lead nurturing is not about sending out emails on a regular schedule just because you can. Or just because you think that constant communication (regardless of relevance) will help you sell something. It won't.

And it's evidence that marketers have missed the point.

Lead nurturing is about providing education, expertise, and evidence that help prospects learn what they know during each stage of the process and build the confidence to make a buying decision in your favor — or to gain the consensus from those involved in the decision to get the deal done. It's about positioning your company as an expert that can bring more value to the project than the product would alone.

Let's face it, perceived value, expertise and credibility are the true differentiators in today's marketplace. Otherwise it would just be a price war.

Stringing together 6 emails as a set-it-and-forget-it program won't do this. Don't misunderstand. It's not about the number 6, but the laziness behind the robotic campaign that sets my teeth on edge. Based on the length of the buy cycle, 6 touches may do the trick — if they're relevant and build the right story.

The problem with robotic email campaigns is that they:

• Lack the consistent provision of relevance and value
• Irritate your prospects (based on the above)
• Don't build your credibility
• Are likely focused on feeds, speeds and products
• Don't take into account buyer behavior during the campaign
• Are a campaign, not a strategy
• Have no progression of story that builds momentum
• Have no cohesive story
• Do not differentiate your company
• Are more about timing than context
• Do nothing to stimulate dialogue
• Create another marketing silo
• Don't integrate with programs in other channels
• Probably push the sale for lack of anything better to do
• Are instantly forgettable
• Train your prospects to achieve speed records in clicking delete
• Are about you, not them
• Let you check the box without achieving objectives
• Put you squarely in the marketing fluff camp
• Usually aren't tied to revenue
• Make your company irrelevant
• Don't provide ideas worth sharing (or even pondering)
• Lack the ability to stimulate curiosity
• Repel engagement

I can probably think of more, but you should get gist.

Please understand that this has nothing to do with marketing automation. I think every marketer should have it. It's what you do with it that counts.

Lead nurturing is a process. It's the unfolding of a story that helps the buyer understand why they need to solve a problem, options for solving it, why they should change and why they should choose you to do so. It's never about buying a product. At least not overtly.

This takes thought, planning and the establishment of a lead management process that's managed to goals and objectives.

And it takes the chops to develop outstanding content designed for buyers.

It also means that you need to think outside the Inbox. Lead nurturing happens with every asset your prospects come in contact with in whatever channel they're using. Whether they see a Tweet and click to read a blog post or receive an email with a link to an article or white paper, or find your infographic using search, the result should be the perception of value and time well spent.

So before you go hook up 6 emails in a row to send out on a schedule, take some time to think about the experience you're creating for your buyers. If you need more motivation, review the list above highlighting the consequences of using robotic emails.

Picture courtesy of Robot Pictures

Can B2B Marketers Become Content Whisperers?

One of the mandates bandied about lately is that B2B marketers need to become listeners. They should set up listening posts and they must listen first, before launching marketing programs. You're told listening is a requisite for establishing 2-way dialogue and sustaining relationships across the buying process. If you've "listened" to all of this, then you know that listening informs (or should) how marketers respond to prospects' online behavior.

Anyone who's married or in a relationship can relate to "listening." Trust me, I've been married to a wonderful Italian man for 16 years and it's not so much what's being said, but what it means, that counts.

This is great and dandy for one-to-one relationships or even amongst small groups of people, family and friends, but what happens when you're a B2B marketer with thousands of contacts in your database? How the heck do you manage listening to that level of volume? In other words, the input of a few will not necessarily correlate to the wishes or intentions of the many.

Telling marketers they need to listen is one thing. Helping them figure out how to do so in a way that produces an effective input to inform marketing programs is entirely another.

A Few Ways Listening Goes Wrong

Listening is defined as making an effort to hear something. Hearing can be defined as paying attention to gain knowledge or insight.

Unfortunately, many people treat listening as the stimulus for their response, rather than an act of learning to inform their response. I call that selfish listening. Much marketing is done in relation to selfish listening. This is when you see the "me, me, and more about me" marketing content based on products and company grandeur rather than what prospects are interested in.

The other thing that can have listening lead your marketing astray is when you allow individuals—rather than the collective that relates to your personas—to influence how you market to a segment of a target market. You see examples of this related to the squeaky-wheel-that-gets-the-grease syndrome.

If one person says so, is it true? How about 10? Or 100?

The Role of Personas in Listening

When trying to determine if what you're hearing from prospects should inform your content marketing strategy, the first thing you need to do is ground the feedback. Is the person (or people) you're listening to representative of the persona the marketing program is designed to engage?

Marketers must make sure that feedback and dialogue is considered in the appropriate context before acting upon it.

Is the input common? How can you be sure?

Assuming you have a content strategy that was used to develop content related to answering your persona's questions, concerns, and informational needs related to solving a specific problem your product addresses, what inputs can be used for "listening?"

For example:

• The average time spent reading the content is 25 seconds when it takes an average person over 2 minutes to read the piece is an indication that the content isn't a relevant part of the persona dialogue.


• A lack of click through—whether from social media or email—indicates that your message isn't resonating with your audience.


• A discussion you start on a LinkedIn group or industry forum where you know your persona hangs out that points to a blog post to back up your premise gets no clicks or comments.


• A blog post written for Persona A gets shared by dozens, receives numerous comments and garners a nice volume of clicks to a landing page you linked to offering a white paper on a related subject.


• An article in your lead nurturing program for Persona B that also offers links to related content is shared by a number of prospects with colleagues they work with at the company.


• A Twitter thread using your hashtag becomes active with numerous people offering comments and perspective.

The list above includes both good and not so good responses to your content marketing efforts. If you're listening in relation to personas, you can likely find some things to improve and determine which may not be relevant based on who is reacting to what content.

The one thing marketers often forget is that just because we design content for one persona, doesn't mean it won't find exposure with others. In other words, all feedback should not be weighted equally.

You will never make everyone happy, so you must choose how and when to allow listening to shift your strategies and your response.

From Listener to Content Whisperer

The trick to listening is to equate what you're "hearing" to creating higher engagement, interest, and momentum with your personas.

Don't get me wrong. If an individual reacts to your content by leaving a comment or saying something on social media or replying to an email, a relevant response is warranted. But that doesn't necessarily mean changing your strategy.

In B2B marketing, often the response is passive viewing. At least during quite a bit of the self-education phase that seems to be growing longer as more and more content fills up what used to be empty space. But marketers cannot sit by passively if we want to achieve their goals. That's a luxury reserved for your prospects.

This is when becoming a content whisperer comes into play.

Nicoholas Evans wrote The Horse Whisperer, inspired by Dan "Buck" Brannaman who is known for the philosophy of natural horsemanship, based on the idea of "...using an understanding of how horses think and communicate to train the horse to accept humans and work confidently and responsively with them. One of Brannaman's stated goals is to make the animal feel safe and secure around humans so that the horse and rider can achieve a true union."

To become a content whisperer, marketers must focus on listening to propect behaviors to help them become credible (safe) resources that buyers trust (secure) and want to do business with (union). (Okay - maybe stretching it, but bear with me)

When prospects are passively engaging, marketers must "listen" to that engagement based on the information prospects are willing to spend time with. If they respond with content related to those topics, then they are helping to create a two-way dialogue that is the goal of listening.

• Prospect expresses interest
• Marketer provides more related content
• Prospect engages again
• And so it goes

If marketers have designed content to answer specific questions that a persona will have to get answered during their buying process to move to next steps, then based on the content they engage with, a marketer should be able to anticipate what might also be of interest. This is the art and science of B2B storytelling at its finest.

It's important to note that content whispering is not only related to your content, but to content produced by others that may get the reaction or dialogue you're looking to establish. Marketers need to consider not just what prospects say, but what they do.

What can you learn from "listening" to the content that engages people represented by your personas?

Perhaps becoming a Content Whisperer is a skill worth developing...if you want to create a 2-way dialogue that builds momentum toward buying.

What do you think?

B2B Content Strategy Should Never Be a Wallflower

A B2B content marketing strategy should never be contained in a silo. First of all, to be literal, a silo is a dugout, cave or shelter for grain. Secondly, it denotes walls and barriers that keep its contents apart from everything else. A B2B content marketing strategy must lead somewhere. It should be based on a continuum that matches the needs of prospects and customers wherever they may be in the experience at any time.

The issue I see often, is that content marketing is an add-on to everything else that marketers have on their plates. It's viewed as a campaign, a project or a standalone initiaitve. A silo. This is in part related to the way marketers are wired. In the traditional sense, most of what marketers do has start and end dates and each effort is graded on its own merit (I'm using the word "merit" loosely).

How's our SEO strategy doing?

How many "leads" did that last campaign produce?

Did our webinar attendees increase for this topic?

How many followers did our Twitter account attract last month?

Is our web traffic growing?

Don't get me wrong, we need to measure and evaluate, but we need to quit using our metrics as boundaries that separate one initiative from another. To do this, we need to look at transitions and experiences across buying and the customer lifecycle.

An experience is a set of dynamic transitions that flow together. Until you step out of it or it ends.

When marketers focus on campaigns, they are instituting a construct that boxes in and ends the experience. Three email touches and a sales call, move on. This construct is for us, not related to anything our prospects or customers need, want or value. It was created so that we could manage and measure our efforts based on some ridiculous notion that a short-term campaign can definitively drive sales for a long-term buying process.

But I digress. The point I want to make is about the need to integrate transitions.

Channels are proliferating and marketers need to pay attention to the transitions between them. If your social media team isn't cognizant of your nurturing program, for example, how fluid will the experience be for a prospect or customer taking part in both?

If a buyer watches a video on your YouTube! channel and finds it fun and informative, then visits your website only to see a bunch of dry, product-focused content they find neither fun, nor informative, how will you overcome that disconnect? Or can you?

Often overlooked is the critical transition from marketing to sales. Marketers often plan their content strategy without ever sharing it with sales or - highly recommended - involving sales in its development. If the entire be all and end all of marketing is to help produce and grow customers, why the heck is this transition so overlooked?

It's time for marketing to stop producing more wallflowers and start creating the Belles of the Ball! You may laugh but the Belles of the Ball are sought out, followed and considered highly engaging. This will never happen if we don't integrate all of our marketing initiatives into our strategy and consider how to gain the benefits of dynamic experiences based on transitions.

I know this is difficult. If it was easy it wouldn't be near as much fun!

Take the first step by evaluating everything you're doing and discovering how to create better transitions that tell a story your audience finds engaging. Start connecting the dots. Just don't leave your content strategy sitting on the sidelines as just another project.

 

What Purpose Do Your Buyer Personas Serve?

In every project I work on, some version of buyer personas are involved. Sometimes I'm given personas (usually "profiles") to work with and sometimes developing them is the first step in the project. Let me tell you that I've seen a lot of personas - or what passes for them.

What I have noticed is that there seems to be two types of personas: those suited for marketing and those better suited for salespeople.

For example, I recently saw a collection of personas that were labled with titles such as The Forward-Leaning Buyer, The Risk-Averse Buyer, and The Jock Buyer (yes, I'm making these up for demonstration). The kicker is that each of these personas could be representative of the same title, roles, and responsibilitites as the others.

These personas went on to detail the personal lives and attributes of the personas including marital status, number of kids and even the breed of the family dog. And let's not overlook sports and entertainment preferences. (Yes, I'm still talking about B2B personas)

There were some useful details for marketers, but my first thought is how the heck would marketers begin to figure out which one of these personas were representative of their prospects in order to segment their databases appropriately?

Perhaps these personas are indicative of the need to develop content about how to train your Australian Shepherd to play frisbee or how to improve the efficiency of shuttling your kids to after-school activities. Then we could postulate that anyone responding to the content is related to the corresponding persona.

Okay - all joking aside - Buyer personas must serve the purpose they are designed to address.

From a B2B marketing perspective, this means that a buyer persona should:

• Serve as a tool that can be referenced easily to help guide the development of relevant marketing programs for the market segment represented by that persona.


• Point to specific topics of content as related to priorities defined as important to the persona.


• Reveal the circumstances of what could derail the deal (or the championing of the deal)


• Be unique from all other personas to indicate a truly definable market segment.

The purpose for a B2B marketing persona is to have a tool that defines and guides the marketing programs developed to engage a specific market segment. Never forget that a persona is similar to a composite sketch. It must help you to get close enough to the business interests of the actual humans involved in the process to create the opportunity for marketing programs to reach the goals set for them.

Personas that are based on personality traits or personal situations will not help as there are just too many variables to address to roll them up into a useful set of guidelines that have any traction with a market segment. This being said, these personality-driven profiles may be useful conversational tools for sales reps who are in conversations with a Director of Customer Service who they learn has an Aussie who won't return the frisbee.

Do you see the difference?

BTW - the picture is my girl, Bella, who absolutely LOVES to play frisbee.

 

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?