Marketing Interactions

Curiosity and Context: Keys to Engagement for B2B Buyers

Many B2B marketers have jumped on the bandwagon about answering their buyers and customers' questions. There's a bit more strategy involved to do so in a way that drives momentum, but what I'm not seeing is marketers attempting to promote the curiosity that motivates their buyers to ask the questions they haven't thought of yet.

Campaigns are dead. Even Forrester says so.

Curiosity and Context are the fuel for engagement. And in B2B, you're going for the long-term - not the one-off. Consistency and longevity critical. The story must build across stages, pulling buyers forward by building anticipation for what's next - for them to understand how they get the outcome they want with your help.

So what drives engagement?

Curiosity. A desire to know more. Ideas that reshape the way people think about a concept, inviting them to ask new questions in exploration.

Context that uses stories based on how problems and priorities might be playing out for prospects and customers.

Perception of low effort that makes it stupid simple and appealing to create a dialogue with you.

A sense of empowerment that comes when buyers feel they are driving the conversation, not your agenda.

Anticipation to get what's next because your story (content) has motivated them to "turn the page."

Simply making a list of questions and answering them is not the solution to creating lasting engagement that drives revenues for complex sales. Why not? Because there are hidden questions, subconscious needs that buyers don't think to ask until their curiosity is aroused.

Reasons why content doesn't create curiosity:

There's no Open End.

Much of this has to do with corporations thinking that they need to be the definitive answer to prove their expertise. There's no room left for discussion without the risk of the buyer looking stupid or presenting an outright challenge. Let's just admit that we don't know everything - never will - and get it over with already.

It's not Novel.

A lot of content is a restatement of stuff other people have said so many times that there's nothing new. If this is a constant, these are the responses you can expect. People will either scan and see they've read the same stuff before and leave. Or they'll finally reach their breaking point and either mark your brand off their resources list or post a comment expressing their irritation. Either way, your value to them has diminished.

It's trying to talk to Too Many People at once.

When you don't know your audience well enough or you have limited resources, you try to do too much with one content asset. This usually means that it's so high level that it doesn't speak with meaning to anyone.

The Context is Skewed.

You are still using gut instinct to tell you what your audience cares about. But you've missed the points that matter to them. Perhaps you nailed the topic, but the angle you've taken tells them you really don't understand their situation or what they care about. In this scenario, there's just no motivation to engage because the buyer knows you don't "get" them.

It sounds Too Good To Be True.

You know your Whizz Bang solution is the next best thing to sliced bread. But you've emphasized so many upsides without the details, struggles or whatever else it takes to get them that the outcomes sound too good to be true. This immediately arouses disbelief about all the stuff that's been omitted or the veracity of what you're saying and results in diminished credibility - even if what you say is true!

I could go on, but I think I've made the point. What it comes down to is being human and highly relevant. But it's also a sense of mirroring - or being seen as a peer. No one likes to be lectured to by someone who thinks they're the smartest person in the room. If you want to create engagement with an upside, you have to be curious, too.

Buyers are looking for expertise, certainly. But they're also sure that their situation is unique - which it is. And they want to know that you're flexible and agile enough to adjust to it while still delivering what you promise.

B2B marketers need to tread the line between using their expertise to mentor buyers and curiosity that shows you're interested in them and what they need and want. Sometimes this means showing them that you didn't have all the answers when you started helping a customer, but that you helped them figure it out and overcome the unforseen challenges encountered along the way. In other words, revealing your humanity.

B2B complex sales have inherent risk - both for the company and the buyer. In many of the interviews I do for persona projects, what I hear repeatedly is that buyers want to work with people/companies who they feel care the most about them. I've heard many customers say the equivalent of "They just seemed to "get" us."

When I probe deeper it comes back to an alignment with context and the quality of interactions that the buying team had with the vendor they chose to solve their problem.

What are you doing to show your buyers that you "GET" them?

 

Cut Through the Red Tape of Consensus for B2B Buying Decisions

This headline caught my eye - 53 Percent of B2B Fortune 500 Companies Use Marketing Automation - so I clicked through to read it. Mathew Sweezey wrote the post based on his research into the State of Demand Generation. Mathew presents three reasons for why this increase in the use of marketing automation foretells good things for the industry and his first one got me thinking.

Reason #1: Lots of Red Tape

Mathew makes the point that these enterprise companies are not light in the wallet, but that the process of getting through all of the red tape to get a deal done is exhausting. The fact that this obstacle is being removed bodes well for giving marketing automation the visibility it needs to gain more market share.

I agree. Even though I find it curious that only 53% are using it so far.

But what it made me think about is how many companies I work with where the sales team is convinced that losing deals is about price. We've all heard this argument, but we've also heard the repetitive push back that value overrules price considerations. Both marketing and sales are told to go prove the value.

And I agree with value playing an important role in the decision - perhaps a critical role.

But what if we haven't looked far enough?

When I think of red tape, what I think about immediately for a B2B complex sale - and marketing automation is definitely complex - I think about consensus.

Consensus is hard to get. With the growing number of people (43% increase in stakeholders per IDC) involved in a B2B buying decision, 34% say it's so, getting all of them to buy-in to a decision is requiring more effort.

But are B2B marketers tackling this? Or are they leaving it up to sales? It appears that neither are doing a stellar job as Sales Benchmark Index finds that 58% of typical pipelines are stalled or end up as no decision.

Here are a few reasons marketing needs to get the jump on this:

• 58% of buyers say they spend more time researching
• 53% rely more on peer recommendations
• 34% say purchases were initially unbudgeted
• 65% said the winning vendor's content had a significant impact
• Non-executives view more content than executives

B2B marketers are very concerned about reaching decision makers. This is primarily because this is who salespeople want to speak with. But we need to start thinking about consensus. For without it, we have no deal.

If your marketing content is focused on engaging the decision maker and/or economic buyer, what about the other 3 - 7 (or more) people who can argue against the decision and stop it cold?

What are we doing to convince them that making the decision is the best answer to their problem, issue or achieving their objective?

Context and Conversations

One-size-fits-all content won't get this done. The context, care abouts and decision criteria are different for every influencer involved. In order to promote consensus, marketers need to figure out what the "overlay" conversations are amongst the stakeholders and provide ideas and insights that can be used to aid in their discussions about solving the problem. The key here is that you want them to use your ideas.

By addressing the context of each of them, we can help them to understand the opportunity that exists for them, specifically, as well as how these all culminate to be the best way to solve the problem for the company as a whole.

Establishing value is of course important, but relevance will determine its impact and this means it needs to be "personalized" and based on context.

The shift required here is for marketers to think beyond trying to getting their salespeople into the conversation. By working to facilitate conversations among the stakeholders based on our ideas, we'll find that getting invited into these conversations follows more easily.

What are you doing to ensure your content and nurturing programs are stimulating conversations among stakeholders that build consensus?

Shameless Plug - Mathew and I will be co-presenting a charged-up session on Advanced Nurturing at Content Marketing World in September. I hope we'll see you there.

Why B2B Marketers Need a Ping-Pong Plan

Let's say that the above is representative of a B2B buying process. Yep, it gets a little messy. All the people involved, the back and forth. The side discussions that you're not part of as you're returning a lob from a different contact. The bystanders who are observing your every smash and volley.

I've been working on scenario planning in my projects with clients. It's amazing how many variables there are today than just a few months ago. There will be more tomorrow.

But here's the thing: Most marketers don't think about the interplay or ping-ponginess (yes, this is a new word) of the B2B buying process. We still have campaign mentalities. We still care mostly about what we want buyers to do - whether we're accommodating what they want, or not.

We still sit down to plan a campaign and focus on the deliverables. "Okay - let's publish a couple of blog posts to drive registrations for a webinar, then we'll follow that with a white paper and a sales pitch. How many leads do you think we can generate for sales if we execute this program in Q2?"

Why don't we ever think about it like Ping-Pong®? There's a rhythm to Ping Pong (which I know is table tennis, but it doesn't have the same ring and you know what I mean), a back and forth.

Playing Ping Pong is like having a conversation.

And this is what your content should be designed to do. It doesn't mean that the program above won't work if rethought, but the problem is that it stops dead in its tracks when planned this way. It's a snippet of the conversation that will need to be held over a complex B2B buying process. As it stands, there's no connection to anything that comes before or after.

It's like having a great conversation and suddenly, in mid-sentence, the other person gets a text, glances at his smartphone and steps away to deal with it, never returning and leaving you to wonder if you're really that boring...

That's exactly how a campaign treats our prospective buyers.

Think about it:

Buyer: I wonder what my peers are doing to address X?

Marketer: This blog post talks about 6 different ways people are dealing with X.

Buyer: That was great information. Oh, look, they're having a webinar with more examples. Think I'll sign up.

Marketer: Thanks for attending our webinar. Here's a link to the replay.

Buyer: I was there. I don't need to see it again. What else have you got?

Marketer:

Buyer: Hmm. Those examples got me thinking, butI wonder if there are any industry best practices emerging about X?

Marketer:

Buyer: Where'd they go?

Salesperson: Since you attended our webinar, Marketer thought you might want a demo of our solution. Got 30 minutes?

Buyer: What? I'm not even sure this will work for our situation. I need to talk to Kathy and David and Harvey and Sam...

Salesperson: I just sent you an email about a demo, thought I'd leave you a voicemail, too. Want a demo?

Buyer: I wonder who the experts are who can help me learn more about dealing with X? Maybe I'll try a #hashtag search on Twitter for X...

Marketer:

If you think I'm exagerrating, I'm not. You may be shaking your head, but this is what so many B2B marketing campaigns look like that it makes my head spin. As someone who does a lot of research to learn about industries and solutions to work on client projects, I get subjected to them every day.

The problem with a "campaign mindset" is that you're missing the Ping to go with your Pong. And your buyers are very aware of the lapse.

But, not to worry. They won't be waiting on you to fix that issue. They've already moved on to someone else who is more helpful and concerned about what they want and need over the longer term. Someone who's dedicated to playing the game all the way through.

It's one thing to map content to the buying process. It's quite another to plan for the Ping-Pong scenarios that will keep the ball in the air.

What new considerations are you adding to your content strategy to account for the back and forth of extended conversation that won't abruptly leave your buyers hanging?

 

Why "Who" Sends B2B Nurturing Emails Matters

A lot of marketing emails used in B2B nurturing programs don't have a live person tied to them. Signature lines that reference Your [Company] Team, or no signature at all are the norm. This bothers me. Not only is it impersonal from companies that are trying to prove to you that they're putting your needs first, but it represents a hands-off attitude that is a bit offputting for your buyers. Not to mention it screams "I'm a marketing email."

Even worse is the dreaded "Do Not Reply" email moniker. I cannot believe that marketers think this is effective. You want to talk to me, but you don't want me to talk back? Nice.

Then there are the companies who use what looks like an executive's email and signature. Nice try, but I'm not buying for one minute that the Executive VP from a global company is using his or her personal email to do nurturing sends to thousands of contacts. Do you really think your prospects are buying it? If it's true, good for you, but I wonder what that exec's inbox looks like...

There's a big opportunity with sig lines. Some of the benefits include:

• Building a personal relationship
• Improving your responsiveness
• Inviting replies
• Showing you care
• Giving buyers an alternative to the anonymous contact form that goes who knows where?
• It's really easy to hit "reply"

In fact, I was on the phone with a client the other day and he was sharing some of the latest reactions the inside sales team has had from replies to nurturing emails. Yes, each rep has their signature on the emails sent to leads they'll be speaking to when the time comes. This company has their inside sales team set up as concierges who are helpful, coordinate the introductions and hand offs to the sales team and act as the connective tissue as much as needed during the entire buying process.

Here are a few of the responses they've received via replies to nurturing emails:

From a customer in a nurture stream:

The contact replied to a nurture email informing her rep that she's been promoted to a different area of the company, but she's been sending the emails on to four other colleagues who have asked to be added to the list. She providing all their contact information and faciliatated their request to personally receive content from the client because they find it that valuable.

When's the last time that happened to you?

From a targeted prospect company:

The executive who'd been receiving nurturing emails forwarded one on to a staff member and requested that he set up conversations to discuss their upcoming project. With the contact information on the email, the process was super simple and he also acted as if a relationship was already established because of the way his boss forwarded the email and request.

From an active prospect:

This contact sends his rep suggestions for what he'd like to see in the content we're sending to him. This helps to evolve their content process and editorial calendar. Mostly, what she wants is for the client to connect more of the story so she can keep following the thread. How's that for engagement?

Responsiveness is Critical

It's bad enough that many companies never respond when a contact form is submitted from their websites. But when marketers are actively trying to engage prospects and retain customers, responsiveness isn't a maybe, it's a must do!

Why in the world would you want to make it difficult for prospects and customers to start up a dialogue with your inside sales team?

Oh, I've heard the excuses - bunch of wimpy stuff in my opinion that includes stuff like:

• We don't know which rep they'll speak to
• We have a lot of attrition - why set up a relationship with someone who might not be here when they call?
• Field sales doesn't want inside sales building relationships with their leads

Change your processes. Hire better people, train them better and keep them up to speed about the content your prospects are engaging with. I don't know one inside sales rep who wouldn't be ecstatic to have an interested prospect reach out to them!

And if field sales has a problem, put their signatures on the nurture emails.

Just get out of your own way and set the stage. Let the dialogues happen as they will. Otherwise, what's the point in creating great content that promotes the urge for prospects to continue the dialogue in the first place?

Is Your B2B Content Stuck in Purgatory?

One of the challenges I've had a number of conversations about recently has been the ability of B2B content to attract the right audience. Much of the content created by B2B companies gets a limited amount of pageviews, social shares or direct passalong.

There can be many reasons for this, but for the purpose of this post, we'll assume that your content meets the standards for "amazing." We're going to talk about distribution.

One of the things I've often ranted about is the lack of content strategy. An important part of content strategy is distribution. So hopefully, this post will help start a trend for more B2B marketers to turn to strategy before they publish.

While B2B marketers have begun to embrace different content formats and modes of publishing, including articles, blog posts, SlideShare, videos, and more, their publishing practices are often focused on getting it live on the website, blog or wherever the launch point is for the asset.

While they may post a few times on social media, linking back to the content, usually this involves the title and a link. Maybe they send out an email blast to their database. After a few days they move on to the next publishing project.

This lackluster attention to distribution results in a lack of discovery and attention. Sometimes it almost feels as if marketers are checking the box off the list and just moving on to the next item.

What I'm sensing is a lack of enthusiasm.

As everything else related to content marketing requires, distribution takes a concerted effort. It takes creativity and thought and it takes a clear understanding of the audience you're trying to engage, where they hang out, how they prefer to access content and what formats are more engaging to them in which circumstances.

Without this kind of attention, your content will sit in purgatory. It will remain in limbo - neither loved nor hated. Just so-so content doomed to be unappreciated. And that's a shame.

A few things to think about:

• Content marketing is never once and done. Especially in a fast-paced environment, such as Twitter, where the life of a Tweet is said to be something like 20 minutes. Do you think your entire audience is watching the stream at the time you post? Not likely.
• Title and Link are okay once, but self-serving laziness after that. What are the key points the content makes? Use those. Is there a catchy phrase or a proof point that's compelling? Use them. If your title isn't drawing attention, can you change it to something that will?
• When you post on Facebook are you taking the lazy way out and letting the link pull the blurb and picture without adding any commentary? Is what gets pulled compelling?
• Have you thought about what people on different platforms may be looking for and adjusted the way you post to meet those expectations? All social platforms do not deserve the same treatment.
• Have you reviewed your other content to find relevant opportunities to link to this new content? Creating additional pathways is always a good idea as long as they're relevant and make sense.
• So you emailed it once. Why not take a new approach in the subject line and copy and send another email in a week to everyone who didn't respond to the first send?
• Can you submit the content to related industry sites or portals or blogs that cover the subject matter?
• In what other formats could you present the content in addition to it's original form? Does this give you new opportunities for distribution?
• Is there a discussion on LinkedIn where the content is relevant? Can you add to the conversation and then share the link?
• Can you start a conversation in a group on LinkedIn that will engage with the topic? I don't mean clicking on "start a new discussion" and just posting a link to the content. Set up the discussion with a premise and ask a pointed question or make a statement that will encourage people to get in the conversation. It's not as much about views as it is about initiating dialogue.

These ideas can help, but what you really want to base a distribution plan on are the goals for this content. You do have goals, right?

• Do you want to engage new audiences?
• Do you want people to engage with that content and then demonstrate their level of interest by clicking on a "see also" link to a related piece? Or something else.
• Brand awareness? Although this is often a pretty wimpy catch-all on its own.
• Lead generation?
• Customer engagement and retention?

There are many options. Just make sure the goals aren't conflicting. One content asset cannot do everything. If it's trying to, it will fail.

Which persona is the content designed to engage? Where do those people hand out? Have you factored that into your distribution planning?

This post only scratches the surface. However, by determining the goals for your content, you will be able to design a distribution plan that goes much farther than initial publishing. Doing this well takes work. If you want content marketing to work, you need to make sure that your content is given the best chance for being discovered by the people it was designed to engage.

Distribution counters the irrational idea that "if you build it they will come." It takes more than that to get your content out of purgatory.

The Power of Positioning in B2B Content Strategy

Brand positioning is becoming critical as more B2B marketers turn to content marketing across a range of channels to cultivate standoffish, self-service buyers. Your corporate positioning should be used as the backbone for your content strategy. This is what will hold it all together to ensure consistency and keep your storylines on track—no matter the channel in use.

The problem is that corporate positioning has traditionally been seen as a way to differentiate a company from its competition. In today's market environment it should be designed around the intersection of your company's strengths in relation to your customers' needs. Quite a different proposition, but one that can truly serve to help prospects become predisposed in your favor.

Every company has a distinct value they provide that their customers need and want. If not, they wouldn't be in business. Unfortunately, most companies mimick the leaders in their space, thinking that will help them "measure up" in their prospect's eyes. But, instead it makes the companies that do so appear less than unique.

This becomes obvious when you look at the "about" statements for companies in a specific niche and each of them leads off with "the leading provider of.." type of posturing. I've said this so many times it makes my head spin, but how many "leaders" can there actually be? Wouldn't you rather use those words to set your company apart? Seriously, you're starting a key piece of positioning messaging with the equivalent of "blah, blah, blah."

If you go look at your About paragraph, how many words are self-serving, self-focused blather that make you feel good about working there but don't do a thing to make you memorable to potential customers? Which words/phrases are not used by your competitors? How many words are you now left with? Probably not many.

But back to the topic at hand.

Positioning:

The art of sharing your company's unique value in ways that resonate with your buyers, compelling them to engage, trust, and—ultimately—buy from you.

Let's say that your company's unique value is to:

Simplify project planning and portfolio management with process automation designed to create the highest ROI from human resources and equipment assets.

[Yes, you should be able to sum up the overall value your company provides in one sentence. Get above the feeds and speeds minutia. If you do this well, all the other stuff will roll up to this statement.]

In this example, you're ideal prospects are:

Helen in Human Resources who's objective is to maximize the productivity of a 500 person staff of varying skill levels across a 3-shift schedule for an auto manufacturing plant.

Larry in Logistics who's objective is to ensure the specialized equipment is operated by the people most skilled in using it to reduce the risk of bottlenecks that slow or disrupt the line.

If you message to Helen, she may be most interested in content about how your solution will help her to streamline the effort it takes her to create a resilient workforce that's less susceptible to fatigue.

Larry won't care as much about that as he will about how your solution can match the best-suited workers to each machine for each shift, removing hours of effort from his planning process.

Even though these two content assets will have completely different orientations, by using the "unique value" as an underlay in their development, they will both align nicely with your positioning backbone and solidify your brand.

Multi-channel Advantages with Positioning

Obviously, as more channels entice new voices in your company to share about the work they do, the need to help them stay on track in aligning it to the value your company provides to customers is paramount. Providing them with a positioning story and guideline can be an invaluable resource for helping them to amplify the story.

Different channels require different modes of communication. With value kept front and center, your company's messaging can be consistent across any channel as long as the backbone - the unique value - is represented.

Think about Joe in your development bullpen who really wants to blog about the new features he's creating for customers. What about Frank, in sales, who wants to get prospects into conversation faster and is participating in groups on LinkedIn? How about your VP of Business Development who's giving a keynote speech at an industry conference?

Give people the freedom to share their expertise in the context of the company's brand without stiffling their participation. Diversity in presentation can be a good thing. Just as long as the underlying thread is always focused on the position you've established (are establishing) in the market place. After all, different prospects relate to different perspectives and styles. And it serves to showcase your company's expertise with richness and depth.

If it's not obvious by now, communicating with prospects is no longer just the realm of marketing. But, as marketers, we need to facilitate how the brand is represented and positioned in the marketplace. It's not about products, it's about the unique value they provide to your customers that they couldn't get from the vendor down the street.

We need to make sure that everyone in the company can articluate the value in relation to customer needs and wants. How many folks at your company can do so today?

When your story is based on relevant value and consistently shared across all the channels where your prospects will find it, you're creating a definite competitive advantage.You know why? Because you've focused your positioning on your customers, not your competitors.

Big difference!

Why Marketers Must Care After the Handoff

I'm still speaking with a lot of B2B marketers who draw a hard line in the sand at the sales handoff. Each time I hear the disinterest and see them disengage, I cringe a bit. Well, a lot. Comments vary, but often include flavors of:

• It's not my job.
• Our sales team is dysfunctional.
• They can write their own emails.
• We're sending over quality leads, what more do they want?
• They don't want us touching their leads after they accept them, so why should we care what they do next?
• What they do on their side has nothing to do with what we do on ours.

Seriously? And we wonder why alignment between the two disciplines is still on the table year after year? Not to put all the blame on marketers, but I'd like to point out that this stance is doing you more harm than good. Perhaps even career-damaging harm.

Think about it. I've seen companies survive without marketing, but I've never seen one survive without sales.

If a marketing department has the attitude expressed by the bullets above, I'd pretty much bet you that the company position about the two departments is a version of:

Sales produces revenues. Marketing spends it.

Marketers who are not helping their roles/departments to be seen as a valuable contributor to the revenue cycle are not thinking very clearly about their futures.

A number of ripple effects take place when B2B marketers insert the hard stop at the sales handoff:

• Insight to leads is lost
• Impact of marketing efforts is not fully known or validated
• Marketing gets no/less credit for won deals
• Sales messaging is probably telling a different story
• Brand confusion is imminent
• Salespeople are creating their own content
• Salespeople are likely restarting leads rather than stepping into the dialogue that's already in action.

When marketers remove themselves from the sales process, they're maintaining a self-focused perspective that narrows the big picture, leaving gaps that can undo the relationships with buyers that they've worked hard to build.

With buyers self-educating and admittedly holding sales at arm's length during a longer period of their buying process, the transition to person-to-person conversation is even more important than it's ever been. It needs to be seamless, stay relevant and continue forward progress. If sales is stopping that momentum to get up to speed, buyers will quickly lose patience and move on.

However, if marketing works collaboratively with sales to design content that keeps the story unfolding after sales steps in, then chances of success increase. Meeting expectations when your buyers know more about your company than, well, maybe your salespeople do, means the orchestration of the handoff becomes a critical component.

What companies fail to recognize is that it's not about about marketing vs. sales. It's about your buyer's choice to continue with your company or cut you from their short list. Why would you want to give them any reason to do the latter?

An even better question marketers should figure out how to answer is what you'll do if contribution to revenues begins to figure into your compensation plan. That's a trend gaining steam...

Taking on B2B Marketing Buzzword: Conversation

Everywhere I look, I see B2B marketing that spouts "join the conversation," "get in the conversation," and other references to the word that skew it's meaning into the equivalent of "talk to the hand."

In my last post, I wrote about debunking the B2B buzzword, engagement. In the same vein, I'm wondering what the heck happened to the art of conversation? Have we become so numb by the ability to publish whatever we want that we've forgotten how to be human?

The words dialogue and conversation are also interchanged without thought but, in online marketing, they have different criterion:

Conversation: an interchange of thought, information actively shared between/among people. (Requires 2 or more people)

Dialogue: an exchange of information (Only requires one person)

The difference here is that a conversation is an active exchange of information between people where a dialogue (as an exchange of information) could be between a person and a website, blog, video, etc. without the need for two active (human) participants.

I think this is an important distinction. I do not think the two are interchangeable.

Let's look at some examples of what a conversation is NOT:

• A push email - even if the recipient clicks
• A Tweet with no commentary (title and link and handle)
• A blog post with comments from readers, but no response from the author (This does, however, change if readers are commenting in response to each other.)
• A white paper download
• Viewing a video

Examples of what transforms dialogue into conversation is response.

• I receive an email, click the link, and forward the email on to a colleague who responds back to me with comment about the content I shared. We may exchange several more emails in discussion about the content.
• I receive a comment on my blog, respond back and ask a follow-on question and the person comes back to answer the question. Or another reader jumps in and answers the question I asked and I respond to them.
• Someone posts a question to a LinkedIn group and provides a link to a blog post or article on the topic. Group members respond by leaving comments and referencing perspectives of others - discussion ensues.

If I had just clicked the link and read the information in the first example, there is no conversation. It's the act of involving others and adding my commentary that turns the dialogue into a conversation. There must be back and forth between people for a conversation to form.

The evolution is that we don't need oral communication to have a conversation. As long as two people are involved, a conversation can be facilitated by a variety of technology platforms, from email to communities to social media and beyond.

But, it's only dialogue if technology is carrying on half of the conversation.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge proponent of marketing automation. Use your technology to establish a dialogue that engages people through contextual information they want and need, GO YOU! But it's not a conversation until another person gets involved. This is because the "dialogue" is dependent on the behavior of the single participant, not both.

[If I visit this webpage, the system sends me a link to content A. If I visit a landing page and download a white paper, the system sends me content B. Etc. In a dialoge scenario, there's not a possiblity that it could veer off to content X.]

This is even more important when you consider social media. I see so many exchanges where someone is looking for help, only to be told to call an 800 number. Really? That's the best you can do? Although that fits the criterion for a conversation (2 or more people), there's also a difference between a valuable conversation and a crappy excuse for one.

So, when you think about "conversation" in marketing terms - what are you doing to make it more human?

And for those of you thinking "Wait. I get thousands of responses to my nurturing program! I can't possibly deal with this..." I would point you to buying stages and personas and battening down your lead scoring schema to get to intelligence that's useful. It's all in your approach to prioritization.

Don't let conversation become a meaningless buzzword. With a little art and science we can make marketing human, approachable, and definitely more social.

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?

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.