Marketing Interactions

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?

5 Points from the 2012 Buyersphere Report

John Bottom from Base One was thoughtful enough to send me the latest Buyersphere Report - hot off the presses. You can read his initial thoughts and download your copy here. Below is my first take upon reading the report that asked EMEA buyers involved in a purchase during the last 12 months about their buying experience.

Type of Purchase Directs Informational Needs

In the report, one third of respondents said that their purchase was something brand new to their organization in comparison to 50% who said that the purchase was something the same or similar to something they already have.

Has your content strategy considered the difference in the type and amount of content needed for a brand new buyer vs. a replacement buyer who is already familiar with the basics? Both types require content, but the emphasis will be different. A new buyer needs to be convinced the product is going to pay off and a replacement buyer must be convinced that they'll get more value than they have today and that the risk of changing is manageable.

Channel Consideration is Key

Who your targeted buyers are will determine which channels will be most useful to you--and to them. The survey found that social media use overall was in play with 21% of respondents. But, when considered by role, 41% of IT Managers used it, while only 12% of senior directors (business buyers) did so. But it's interesting that when considering the type of purchase (new or replacement), 30% of those buying new used social media to source information.

Usefulness of Channels

Word of mouth still edges out web searches for most useful channel. This should be a big wakeup call to B2B marketers that they're either not producing content that provides hard hitting information that buyers consider to be unbiased and truthful - or that it's languishing away on their websites unfound by their target audiences. What's interesting to note is that usefulness is also determined by the buyer's interactiveness with the channel. For example, in this study, buyers who engaged in conversational exchanges on LinkedIn found it to be more useful than those who only browsed.

Career Length May Influence Type of Content Used

One thing I found intriguing was the discovery that those younger in their careers (other than IT managers) were more likely to download white papers than those with a longer career track. This may be due to having more to learn and less confidence that they're making the right decisions to grow their careers, as well as meet company objectives. Also in this areas is more validation that buyers purchasing something new to them also used much more content than those buying a replacement and were familiar with similar solutions.

The Influence Value of Supplier Websites

Supplier websites and emails were both considered highly influential, followed by web searches. What I wished the survey has asked was whether or not the influence was negative or positive. Either way, buyers are attributing more influence to corporate websites than they did last year - 73% rate them influential this year, up 5% from last year. This corresponds to research I've seen that shows marketers rate website optimization at the top of their budget lists. And it's about time.

I'll leave the rest of the report for you to sort through, but what I want to point out is that each of these nuggets should be factored into your content strategies - expecially as they apply to personas representative of your buyers.

What other points will you take away from this report?

3 Critical Tips for B2B Buyer Personas

As many of you know, I spend a lot of time working on buyer personas in my client projects. I thought I'd share a few things that should be obvious, but apparently are not.

• Objectivity is critical. One of the benefits of an outside perspective when creating buyer personas is no baggage. When I come into a project, I don't have any pre-existing beliefs, company Kool-Aid, or political pressure to see them in a certain way. I'm always open to input and feedback from the client. They know their markets better than I do, but when they start rewriting the personas to match their own beliefs, we have a problem.
  
  Before you say that I'm protecting my work, let me explain. If you conduct interviews with salespeople and customers and the feedback differs from everything you heard, then the reality is off. The reason i push back is to make sure that the client has an objective tool that works, not something that they like that represents their opinion.
  
  
• Personas aren't interchangeable. If your personas are developed around problem-to-solution scenarios your prospects pursue in relation to what a specific solution helps them achieve, you cannot use the VP of Infrastructure or Director of Online Marketing personas you create for one solution in application for another.
  
  Here's why: If your Director of Online Marketing persona is created in relation to influencing the purchase of a marketing automation system and you also want to market a PPC optimization tool to them where they're the decision maker, the persona for one won't address the needs of the other. Those are totally different dialogues. If the objective of the dialogue changes, so does the persona. You may be able to reuse certain parts - such as orientation and obstacles, but the objectives and the questions the persona will need to have answered across their buying process are different.
  
  
• The person who makes the final decision may not be a persona candidate. If the purpose of creating a persona is to create a tool that informs content strategy and prospect engagement then each persona you create should be an avid content user. They should be the ones who will research to build the business case, spend time evaluating options and be charged with solving the problem your solution solves. If they are only holding the purse strings, then you may be wasting your time.
  
  The CIO persona is often representative of a misstep in persona selection. Most companies want to target them because they hold budget and have the final say. But if you dig deeper and look at the folks who are actively involved in the buying process, I bet you'll find them a couple of layers down. Who you target with personas is a critical decision. After all, you're investing a lot in content marketing. If it's not engaging anyone, it's not doing it's job and you're wasting that money. This being said, there are a few strategic pieces of content that will serve the CIO extremely well. But make sure that they're truly involved in the buying process in a way that involves sourcing content, knowledge and information, before you invest in an entire strategy to market to them.
  
  One example would be utilities tools for managing infrastructure. The CIO will want to know about them, see the business case for making the selection and have that meeting with the team to make the final decision. But they will not be out searching online for automation tools unless they're running a very small IT department.

These are 3 important things to consider when you set out on your buyer persona journey. What else would you add?