Marketing Interactions

Why Opt Out is Not a B2B Marketing Strategy

There's a pretty interesting discussion going on over on HBR based on a post Ruth Stevens wrote about using opt out vs. opt in for B2B email marketing. As you can imagine, I'm not a fan. Strangely, the comments on the post are mixed.

Here are a few reasons I'm against it. Opt out is:

• Lazy.
• Presumptuous.
• Arrogant.
• Disrespectful of my time. 

Yes, making me go through an unsubscribe process because you chose to send me something I didn't request is using up my valuable time and not endearing you to me. Not one iota. And I'm not alone. Chris Brogan doesn't like it either. Neither does DJ Waldow at Blue Sky Factory.

For some reason, B2B companies think buying a list is the way to gain access to people who don't know you and haven't consented to hear from you. Like they'll all become instantly enamored when they do. Ahem.

When you decide you need more leads, you need to go earn them. Lead generation is not something you get to decide. Irritating people, training them to hit delete or designate your messaging as spam is not the right tack. Lead generation is extending an invitation to people to choose to interact with your company because you provide them with something valuable in exchange.

This is one reason why inbound marketing has so much potential as a lead generator. By spreading your content and ideas around freely, you can entice people to spend more time with your company and then make a conscious decision to offer up even bigger chunk of their attention by opting in for more. This is what I mean when I talk about contagious content in my book.

I read an article over on DemandGen Report, Even High Performing Marketers Struggle with Content, Alignment, that shared the results of a survey that found "less than one-quarter of BtoB marketers say they’re generating enough demand to satisfy their sales teams." This is not  a reason to use an opt out policy in a weak attempt to pump up demand by focusing on quantity over quality. Due to the reasons I stated above and, well, quite frankly because it will backfire.

This may be causing part of the problem. The survey also found that:

"Less than half (46%) have developed buyer personas to guide communications and sales readiness for their prospects."

If marketers don't know enough about their target markets to create content that interests and connects with them, buying lists and opting in people isn't going to work. Even if they do garner some initial attention, it won't amount to much because their communications efforts won't have the stamina to consistently captivate audience interest.

So, here's the thing. Cultivating leads takes time and effort. It takes generosity and caring and a mutual exchange of value. Only then can B2B marketers build relationships with leads that have a prayer in heck of becoming sales opportunities.

Help B2B Buyers Find Their Place in The Story

For years I've talked about writing content from the perspective of your buyers. I was reading an interview with David Willows over on Kathy Hansen's blog, A Storied Career, and came across an idea that can be very useful for helping B2B marketers think about why they need to develop marketing content for perspectives beyond just the decision maker's.

"...I often say that my role is all about ‘telling the story of my school and helping others find their place in that story.'" - David Willows

This statement illuminates the need to consider that each influencer, recommender and stakeholder holds a potentially different place in the story about how to solve the company's problem.

Assorted research finds:

• there are more people involved in the buying process
• they're spending more time in the consideration and research phases
• confusion results in no decision being made

So when you set out to develop content, consider which place each persona holds in the story. Yes, this likely means that you'll need to write different versions for each persona for the idea to be really effective.

Marketers need to understand why generic content won't help all of the people involved in the decision find their place in the story of how to get from problem to solution. WIIFM (What's in it for me?) is more personal than that.

Here are a few examples to consider:

• Would an end user care about return on investment ratios?
• Would an IT developer care that the marketing department will need less headcount once they have your system?
• Will the CFO care that the ease of use for end users will increase employee satisfaction and morale?

Likely, the answer to each of these is "not really."

Unfortunately, marketing content is often written to address a whole kitchen sink full of benefits that apply so widely that no one can find their place in the story. But, when content is narrowly focused to provide clarity for a specific persona, this changes. Once they can find their role in the story they can see your solution or product from a new angle. They can personally identify with the value that's just for them.

Why should you care? Because with this clarity they can then visualize how your solution can be helpful to them. When they decide it's worthwhile to pursue, they'll start helping others figure out their places in the story. That's what happens when your prospects can ingest your ideas and share them with others.

When your prospects find personalized value, pipeline momentum builds. Through them, your reach extends to others within the company that you haven't been able to engage on your own. They become more active in taking the next steps toward purchasing.

What are you doing to help your prospects find their place in your story?

Why a Blog Improves Social Media for B2B

I presented during a webinar earlier this week and was a bit taken aback at the response to a poll taken during the session. When asked what type of social media the attendees participated in, they responded:

• 54% - Social Networks (LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.)
• 21% - Microblogging (Twitter)
• 7% - Blogging
• 11% - Groups, Discussions, Q &A, Comments 

I'm happy to see that marketers are embracing interactive online experiences, but I have to say I was surprised that only 7% are blogging. This makes me wonder what kind of links and content they're sharing via Twitter and on their Facebook fan pages.

Most B2B marketers will tell you that they aren't sure about the impact of social media on their marketing programs or able to prove ROI. Could it be because they are participating in social media as a standalone effort?

What helps drive effectiveness with social media is to share access to content that pulls people back to your company - to divert that traffic to your playground for a bit. But that means you have to have relevant and fresh content to offer. Blogs can help with that.

For those of you not blogging, here are a baker's dozen of reasons why you should consider incorporating a blog into your marketing mix:

1. Blogging is more conversational in style and matches nicely with the need to create online dialogues.


2. Blogging doesn't require an epic effort. A few paragraphs that share an insight offer a perspective, provide how-to tips or debate the status quo can work nicely.


3. The Internet moves fast. Publishing a new article once a month on your website isn't enough to keep up a consistent dialogue.


4. On a blog, it's perfectly acceptable, even encouraged, to link to other bloggers and add your ideas to the ones they've shared. Can you say instant idea fodder?


5. Blogs allow comments longer than 140 characters.


6. Blogs enable you to take big, complex ideas and extract one point to simplify it.


7. Blogs can help you get a read on what your prospects care about by monitoring which posts (topics) they interact with the most.


8. Blogs let you share a variety of formats like embedding slide decks, podcasts, videos, graphics and charts, etc.


9. Blogs are a great way to promote your webinars and other events.


10. Blogs can offer a brief look at a topic with a link back to your website to other content that expands on that subject matter.


11. Blogs invite other people to pass along your content to their networks, helping to spread your ideas beyond the reach you have today.


12. Blogs can feed lead generation activities by offering opt-in opportunities for those who've come to value the ideas you share freely.


13. Blogs are a kind of "natural nurturing" - the more often you touch your prospects, the more your ideas are top of mind for them. (hence, your company)

A blog is a natural extension to other types of social media and can help you improve the effectiveness of your overall marketing programs (including SEO). The trick is to incorporate your blog as an integral part component of your overall marketing strategy. 

It Takes More than Traffic to Generate B2B Leads

I love inbound marketing. I really do. Heck, I practice it, promote it and preach about it. But not as a singular effort for lead generation. One of the things that inbound marketing does is grow traffic. In fact, Twitter is one of the top referral sources for this blog.

But just generating traffic does not make for leads. In a B2B complex sale what matters is what you do to gain the opportunity to grow the relationship with people after they arrive. At the point of entry, they are hopeful they made the right choice to click by receiving whatever was promised to them to motivate the visit.

Your content has less than 7 seconds to deliver on their expectations.

A few tips about content format to help catch initial attention include:

• Sub-titles that set the tone for longer articles.
• Written for them, not about you.
• Value proposition close to the top for orientation and assessment of relevance.
• Scan quality that enables the use of the scroll button to confirm initial impressions. This includes things like headers, bulleted lists, and white space.

Now, let's get back to the traffic jam.

I read somewhere (wish I could remember where??) that blogs were receiving more new traffic than returning traffic. The question raised was whether blogs were really all that engaging if people who'd been weren't coming back.

Here are 3 reasons why we may need to look beyond that statistic:

1. If someone subscribes to your blog's RSS feed and it pulls full posts into their reader or email, they could be highly engaged with whatever you're talking about and simply not have the time to always visit the blog looking for comments. There are many more spectators online than creators and contributors.


2. If your blog is syndicated, people may be reading your posts elsewhere - and commenting there as well. Are you tracking and responding to that activity?


3. If the blog post they read prompted them to go to your website to sign up for a content offer (newsletter, white paper download, etc.) you may be engaging them by different means. Do you monitor origination sources for opt ins?

These reasons aside, the main idea is to capitalize on traffic by creating reasons to stay upon arrival and reasons to continue to engage. It doesn't matter which means people choose to engage with you, only that they do. That's the job your content should be doing.

Increased traffic is great - whether to your blog or corporate website or even a specialized niche micro-site. What are you doing to make sure that your traffic isn't just a one-time drive by?

Update 3/23/2010: Hat tip to my wonderfully loyal reader, David Dodd - he's reminded me that Mark Schaefer is where I originally read the statistics I talk about above in this post. (I fixed it in his comment below as well.)

In addition, Jay Baer writes about the topic today in his post 5 Ways to Make Friends with Strangers on Your Blog.

Does Curated Content Drive Vendor Preference?

I've read quite a bit lately about the suggestion that marketers become content curators in lieu of developing content of their own. If you have a strategy for integrating this content with your storyline this can be effective. However, in my opinion, too much reliance on other people's content can diminish your prospects' preference for your company as a solution provider.

People go through a process when deciding whether or not to engage:

First, the content has to catch their attention.

Second, they need to be interested enough to digest the ideas.

Third, they need to be motivated to do something.

So, here's my quandary with Curated Content. If it's not yours, who will they be motivated to engage with? 

I'm not saying all 3rd party content won't work to advance your relationship with prospects and customers. In fact, there's a big difference between curated content and 3rd party content.

Curated content means gathering content on subject matter you think your audience will find interesting from around the web.

3rd party content can be content that helps to build your company's credibility because you play a part in its development. Your company also likely paid the expert (cash, exposure, etc.) to produce it and guided the topic to ensure it relates to and supports the story your company is sharing with your audience.

Curated content - even if on subjects your audience cares about - has no relation to your company. Actually, if someone else is actually telling your story as their own, then I'd suggest you've got a differentiation issue.

It's been proposed that curated content will allow you to publish content more frequently, thus drawing higher traffic levels to your website or community site. I agree with that.

But what's the reason the traffic flows to you?

Is it because they're looking for information and they just happen to like the stuff other people are writing that shows up in your feed?

Or is it because they're interested in learning more about your expertise and how you can help them solve a business problem?

I'm not saying you need to rule out using curated content. What I am saying is to make sure that the balance between curated content and your content is weighted heavily in your favor.

Using curated content occasionally to support your company's ideas can give them more validity when done strategically. Using curated content instead of producing your own can disappoint if you're counting on it to drive vendor preference.

On the bright side, those other content producers you're helping out will really appreciate your support.

Just something to think about. What do you think?

Updated 3/20/10: Since this topic is of high interest, there's another interesting discussion going on over at the Genius.com blog that you may be interested in about this subject - including a video clip of Steve Rosenbaum speaking at SXSW.

Social Relevance Plays a Role In Vendor Selection

There's quite a bit of talk by B2B businesses about the presumed lack of true prospects actively engaging in social media. But, even more of a detractor to marketers is how to prove the ROI of investments in social media. IDG Connect's brief, Social Media and the IT Investment Process – Linking to Relevant Content: May the Best Vendor Win, has some data that shows ROI directly correlates to the relevance of vendor posts in social media.

IDG asked IT buyers about their experiences with social relevance. Similar to a past report that learned buyers only find relevant content 42% of the time, this research found buyers saying they only find relevant links in social media posts 39% of the time.

I found this slip in perceived relevance disconcerting. But, it also points to how difficult it is for solution providers to make the shift into social where interactions count on personally produced, often off the cuff posts.

Here's a great reason why we need to improve our social relevance. 

"Over 40 percent of buying team members who use social media as part of the investment process state they pursue links they consider relevant over 40 percent of the time. If the offered content is found to be relevant increases the likelihood of a positive recommendation by over 30 percent."

As I'm writing this post, I'm listening to the 2nd webinar presented by Genius.com and DemandGen where they're sharing additional insights from the Transforming the B2B Buying Process study they recently conducted.

Here are a few more reasons why social media relevance carries significance for vendors:

• 48% of buyers surveyed said they followed industry conversations about topics of interest.
• More than 20% of these buyers said they connected with a vendor via social media.

All of the above present some pretty significant reasons why B2B marketers need to focus first on really understanding and getting to know their buyers and then apply those insights to how they participate in social media as well as how they create content.

Social media should be included as a core component of your content strategy. I don't know about you, but a 39% rate of relevance just isn't acceptable to me. Tangible ROI will remain elusive if we don't flip our focus to our buyers and keep that focus firmly in place.

The good news is that if we improve our relevance, we can generate results. For those of you who think buyers aren't using social media for business reasons—think again.

Marketing Content Must Reach Beyond Two-Way Dialogue

The prevalent consensus about the evolution of B2B marketing is that we need to motivate two-way interactions. But I say that's stopping short. If you're only focused on designing your marketing content to make an isolated connection with a specific persona, you're not stretching your content strategy far enough.

In a B2B complex sales process, buying committees involve a number of people. People your company may never meet. It's not enough to just focus on creating a two-way dialogue between a prospect and your company. You've got to get your ideas into the conversations that happen between the prospect and other stakeholders involved in the decision.

Marketing content needs to be designed to broaden your reach.

We see mounting evidence that shows buyers have taken control over the ways in which they buy. Salespeople are getting pushed much farther out in the buying process. Buyers are searching for and accessing a variety of content to help them learn why they should solve problems and just how to do so.

If you think that the buying committee is sitting in isolation, waiting to discuss all this until they invite your company into the conversation, you're kidding yourself. The biggest disconnect for many companies is that they don't think about what precedes their invitation to the party. All they focus on is getting prospects into a sales conversation.

Well, it's not enough. These companies are overlooking a critical opportunity to get "in the room" sooner.

Content design.

Let's take a look at a possible scenario:

David, a prospect, enters a search term into Google and finds an article your company wrote about why it's critical to solve a problem he's facing.

David clicks on the link and reads the article where he discovers the information he needs to persuade Joe in product development that he can actually get something he's been wanting for a long time, but didn't know could be solved as part of the deal.

David hunts Joe down, shares the insight and the article.

Joe calls Susie and discusses the implications with her. She's excited about the potential for process shift that would also play into her needs.

Susie goes out to your website and does a bit of research, finding another article you designed to answer the questions people like her (persona) have about impact to areas they're responsible for managing.

Susie gets David and Joe on a conference call, shares what she's learned and the three of them create a list of further questions they need to get answered.

Keith shows up to a project meeting with content from another vendor that answers some of the new questions. But David has done a bit more research on your solution and shows how your content helps to connect the dots putting your solution back in the preferred position.

And on they go. 

This scenario is being played out in many a complex purchasing process. All of the interactions happening are without a salesperson in the room. But, your ideas can be there. Your ideas and expertise can be shared by your prospects with their buying committees if your content is designed to inspire conversations.

Some tips for designing content that inspires conversations include:

• Develop content to match your buyers' perspective.
• Address obstacles they may face in relation to people - not just technology, integration, or features.
• Enable them to visualize how their situation will change if they solve the problem.
• Remove the risk of failure with customer success stories that go beyond the boring versions all about products. Think user adoption, process change and other things that can lead to failure even if your product works perfectly on its own. Those are the things that really scare people.
• Help them build a realistic business case with tangible evidence they can apply to their own situations. 

This is why doing the research and learning as much as you can about the people involved and the specific situations they're each facing is the key. The level of relevance prescribed to your content by your prospects will determine whether or not your ideas put your company "in the room" even before you ever speak with them personally.

Having your ideas represented during the pre-sales conversation stage can also be the key factor that determines your company's odds of ever getting that sales conversation most companies are devoted to securing.

Why Sales and Marketing Alignment is Like Golf

Last night my husband and I watched our DVR recording of The Haney Project's new season featuring Ray Romano. In this series Ray Romano is seeking the help of golf coach Hank Haney to break through his lowest score to date of 80.

I used to play a lot of golf. I was never great at it, but I love the game. While watching the antics of Ray as he tries to grasp Hank's tips and improve his swing - the commentary is hilarious, as you might expect - I started thinking about why golf is so challenging.

A few things on my list include:

• Too much to do at once - head down, don't dip your shoulder, bend your knees, stay in your swing plane, keep your club face in the right position...and about 90 other things critical to achieving perfection. But only if all done simultaneously.
• The wind can change everything. Even a skillfully hit shot can be taken down by a shift in wind currents. 
• Water is only friendly to ducks.
• The rough isn't friendly to anyone.
• Trees. Why?
• Bunkers - just in case you haven't had enough fun already...

Yes, there are a lot of obstacles in golf. Lot's of things that can stop you from getting the ball onto the green and into the cup.

Golf has a lot in common with the B2B marketing-to-sales process.

Marketing tees it up and takes a swing. The more they know about the course (buyer's) and the conditions surrounding it (buyer's needs), the more forward progress they can make. If they take a misstep and hit the ball out of bounds, they must return to take a drop and start again. When marketing gets the ball on/near the green, sales takes over to execute the short game with as few additional strokes (sales calls) as possible. 

The lower the handicap, the shorter the sales cycle.

Anyone who's spent much time watching Phil Mickelson over the years knows what happens when there are issues with hitting the long shots or in the short game. It's getting the two consistent that produces a champion—and that takes a lot of practice, coordination and highly-tuned skill. 

When marketing and sales are working both ends of the game without collaborating on what works, tuning the transitions and eliminating obstacles, their results will be much worse than Ray's best score.

What golfers learn about the course on the way to the green plays into their efforts to sink the putt. If they can read the course well, they need less shots to finish out the hole. It takes practice and the honing of skills needed for every shot of the game to improve your score.

What handicap would you give your marketing-to-sales alignment efforts?

The Many Jobs of Marketing Content

Marketing content is like an emissary for your company. In the digital world, companies rely on content to produce a variety of results. The best result is, of course, sales. However, that's only one job at the end of a long list of responsibilities. It's up to marketers to make sure the marketing content they produce is shouldering the load well.

Take a look at some of the expectations we heap upon our content and then assess your own to determine if you've prepared said content to deliver.

1. Attention - your content needs to get noticed - and not just by anyone - by the audience you've targeted. You did target your content to appeal to a specific niche or persona, right?


2. Awareness - once people have engaged with your content, they should have some thoughts about your company - preferably favorable ones worth remembering.


3. Mindshare - it's not good enough to just get attention, we need people to spend enough time with our content to actually "get" the ideas it's sharing.


4. Anchor - once people have ingested the ideas, your content needs to work to make sure that those ideas take precedence in forming how your audience thinks about the topic.


5. Action - your content is sent out on a mission to get people to DO something. Is it?


6. Conversation - beyond the action your content requests, it needs to ensure that the audience has a clear enough understanding that they can now talk with others and share your ideas with them in their own words. You know there's more than one person involved in the purchase to influence, don't you?


7. Confidence - the learning your content provides needs to help people feel certain that they know what they need to take the next step...and just what that might be.


8. Competence - your content must provide evidence that your company can actually do what it says it can.


9. Invitation - content must entice people to spend more time with your company - whether through opting in for a newsletter, attending a webinar, subscribing to an RSS feed, reading multiple articles or web pages and interacting with your sales people.


10. Authority - content must inspire reliance on your company for consistently valuable insights. In fact, they should be looking for them on a regular basis.

These are only a few of the expectations marketers have piled onto their content with more and more reliance on content marketing to fill their pipelines. The challenge now is make sure that your content is actually designed to multi-task across the many jobs piled on its plate.

What would you add?

If you had to give your content a job performance review, would it earn a promotion? 

Does Your Content Marketing Make You Different?

Being recognized as unique, different and desirable is what every company strives to achieve to stand out in their marketplace. Unfortunately, this appears to be easier said than done.

Take a look at these three tag lines:

Achieve Dramatic Cost Savings, Increase Operational Efficiency and Business Agility

Reduce Costs, Improve Service Delivery, Enable Business Innovation

Reduce IT Costs, Improve Performance, Do More with Less

Do you see anything unique that sets one apart from the others? If you had to choose a vendor based on this, which one would you choose? And yes, they each sell the same type of solution.

“Only 14% of the ‘unique benefits’ promoted by companies drive enough preference to have a commercial impact.” Corporate Executive Board

Every single one of us likely has a slew of competitors trying to sell a similar product or solution to the same markets. The problem is that what we think is important and “differentiating” about our products quite often misses the mark for what the prospect is trying to buy.

You’ve all heard the adage that you may think you’re selling a drill, but what the buyer wants is really a hole. We get so wrapped up in our products that we forget that we know too much. We all believe our products and solutions are the best possible choice for solving our prospect’s problems. We know the nitty-gritty details about just why that’s so.

What we forget is that customers don’t really care. They care about what they’re going to get, the difference it’s going to make for them and how certain they are that they’re really going to get what you promise.

Sadly, what we promise isn’t always what the prospect wants. Or we're up at the 30,000 foot view so our messaging doesn’t have any immediate impact that’s easy for the prospect to hone in on.

Which could be why research from IDG discovered that buyers say they only find relevant content 42% of the time. Yep - less than half the time. That should serve as a wake-up call.

[Unless of course you've convinced yourself that your content is well within that 42%. But I'd encourage you to take a look anyway.]

If our content is going to serve as a differentiator, we’ve got to think differently about how we seek to establish a dialogue with our prospects. We’ve got to flip our focus to what they’re buying instead of what we think we’re selling. It’s not about the solutions, products or services. It’s about what they enable your customers to achieve that they couldn’t do before. It’s about why that’s important to them.

In case you think it's not that big a deal, IDG also found that the lack of relevant content perceived by buyers is responsible for reducing the vendor's chance of closing the sale by 45%!

That’s a big deficit. And one we can't afford to allow to continue.