Content marketing is one of the most powerful tools for B2B marketers, most of whom likely have content development as a substantial part of their 2010 marketing plans.

But before you get started with developing more content marketing assets, take a step back to assess your efforts to date.

Below are six steps to help you do that. While the list is not exhaustive, my hope is that these steps will help you improve the performance of existing assets and develop strong future content marketing efforts. 

1. Map site content to the buying cycle

Some people segment the buying cycle into three or four stages. B2B Marketing Strategist Ardath Albee segments it into seven stages. However you choose to define it, analyze your buying cycle and make sure you have substantial, valuable content that speaks to each stage. Prospects have questions at each stage in the buying process. Each question represents an opportunity for content. Think about what should be free and what should be gated (Chris Koch and Michele Linn had good posts on this recently).

Also remember people have different learning styles, and consider having multiple media available for each style. Analyze the effectiveness of your existing content vis-à-vis your buying cycle, determine the gaps in your content marketing strategy, and develop a plan to round out your content.

2. Reduce friction on gated content

Review registration pages for items that reduce conversion rate. Yes, this includes how much information you’re asking for, but it also includes many other things.

Ask yourself, is the page design and intent clear, or do you have many other things potentially distracting visitors from taking the desired action or perhaps even obscuring the desired action? Have you reduced the anxiety of registering? Are the benefits of doing so clearly stated? Have you illustrated credibility, e.g., are there recognized third-party endorsements on the page? Have you told visitors what you’re going to do with their information?

Todd Miechiels had a great post on reducing site visitors’ anxiety last year, and Ben Hanna gave some strong, practical examples of ways to improve B2B conversion rates by reducing buyer risk.

3. Review your content analytics

Analytics can be great, but too often we fail to actually learn from them. Take a look at last year’s numbers for the content on your site. What was the most popular content? What were your most popular landing pages? What were the sources of the visitors? Did those sources change over time? What organic keywords drove traffic to that content? What did these visitors do? What were the conversion rates? Where did they go next? What made those pages successful? Equally important to analyze is the content you thought would do well, but didn’t.

Compare and contrast the successes and the failures, and you’ll likely find strong clues to help you develop a best practices model. But don’t just use this information for prospective content. You can likely redeem some of your previously less-than-successful content by making improvements or repurposing and relaunching that content.

4. Capture the value of content

If your content is a web page, it’s pretty easy to track the results. But what if your content is a PDF or some other digital asset? These assets can drive readers and viewers back into your website. However, unless you’ve coded the links appropriately, these visits will show up as direct visits instead of being attributed to your content marketing assets. Obviously, you should ensure future content marketing assets have such links, but there’s no reason you shouldn’t make these changes to existing content as well.

5. Include sharing options with your content

White papers, eBooks, case studies, best practice guides can be powerful lead generation and lead nurturing tools. At the same time, they’re expensive to create. They’re also hard to get into the hands of the right people. You may get one of these assets into the hands of one of your contacts, but there are many other people at the prospect’s company who will influence the purchase decision.

Embedding social sharing options is a great way to help push the reach of great content, and modifying existing content marketing assets to include social sharing options is fairly painless.

6. Optimized content for search

Finally, optimize your content for search. While social media can play a big role in the visibility of good content marketing assets, SEO will help ensure online visibility over the long term. Make sure your content marketing assets and their related landing pages are optimized and aligned with the keyword strategy for the piece. This includes optimizing copy as well as other on- and off-page factors. While it does take a bit more work, you can optimize PDFs for search as well. 

Related posts:

Is your B2B website building the bottom line? Part 1     

Is your B2B website building the bottom Line? Part 2

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Back to The Long Hello: making B2B marketing work for the bottom line

When it comes to generating a return on investment from direct marketing campaigns, half the challenge often is just being heard. But getting the attention of business decision-makers isn’t about shouting the loudest. It’s possible to improve results with an integrated approach that puts a limited number of coordinated messages into the market.

Jonathan Perloe, Senior VP-strategic Marketing: Wunderman New York shared some insights with the global network that include four strategies to integrate B2B direct response communications campaigns to achieve greater impact:

• Avoid creating clutter
• Use multiple channels
• Be consistent
• Apply judicious measurements

Avoid creating clutter

The first strategy is to avoid creating clutter, especially within a multiple business unit company where each has a portfolio of products, services and marketing communication needs. The clutter often happens when product managers independently create standalone, product-centric marketing campaigns. 

To prevent this, Wunderman suggests creating an annual campaign architecture for each key market segment; one that identifies the broad themes to be promoted and aligned with the value propositions of the company’s offerings. It’s important that the direct response demand-generation activities are supported by the brand-level messages that are also in market. 

This will help avoid once-off tactics and allow for a consistent set of messages that establishes and reinforces what the brand stands for and what drives revenue. 

Companies that are just starting out need to take a structured approach that documents the capabilities, functional benefits and higher-level business value of each product or service offering. Common business-level themes should be identified and used to build a limited set of benefit-oriented direct-marketing campaigns that address the targets’ needs. 

Use multiple channels

Once a well-defined campaign architecture is in place, the next step should be to identify effective ways to reach the audience. While budget and marketing objectives will dictate the reach and frequency of a campaign, Wunderman suggests using more than one channel. Placement in multiple direct-response channels creates the impression of having a greater presence. 

Don’t overlook the power of search and social marketing tactics. Informative, relevant content – such as a white paper, a best practices guide, a webcast demo or customer success stories – can be posted online and used to drive a response that will begin a conversation with prospects by getting them to register and provide contact information. The content can be seeded through search marketing and by joining conversations in relevant online forums. 

Utilise the different strengths of each channel to tell the brand story in different levels of detail, letting the messages build on each other. 

Be consistent

The third strategy is to ensure that all tactics carry a consistent set of messages delivered via a common visual idea. 

First express the brand story in a compelling manner; in a way that connects with the target audience. Then, ensure the key visual and headline(s) are carried consistently through all the tactics that comprise the campaign. Don’t shy away from repetition; it’s a key principle of advertising. Saying and showing the same message more than once is one way to break through the noise, especially if it’s expressed in a customer-centric, benefit-oriented way. 

Apply judicious measurements

The final strategy is effective measurement applied judiciously. This is especially true in direct marketing, where the link between marketing activities and results is easier to establish than with perception-changing communications. 

There are two categories of metrics:

• First are measures of overall campaign performance: account for and determine how much it costs to deliver qualified leads or sales. Using the potential value of a lead and sales conversion rates, question if the campaign delivered an acceptable return on investment. 
• If not, the second category of metrics can help explain why. These are diagnostic measurements such as response and click-through rates, registration rates and lead-conversion rates. They outline which tactics were most effective at engaging the audience.

Use these metrics to fine-tune elements of the campaign and optimise across direct-response channels. But use metrics wisely, because with integrated marketing, all communications work together to drive sales. This is true even though it may look like just one tactic drove the sale, such as a particular email blast or a banner ad.

Wunderman SA’s MD, Debi Loftie-Eaton guarantees that together, these four strategies will guide companies from strategic campaign planning through to post-execution measurement. 

She says, “When followed, this approach can lift a set of disconnected, competing, tactical communications into a focused, insightful story that drives sales more effectively while also building a brand.” 

Michelle Cavé, Group PR Director, Young & Rubicam Brands SA

Tel (+2711) 797 6318/00    Email michelle_cave@za.yr.com

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Back to The Long Hello: making B2B marketing work for the bottom line

Mapping audiences and their connectivity within a ‘sphere of influence’ is the first step in creating a marcoms strategy that gets the right messages to the right people 

Using the sphere to motivate buyers 

Marketers can use the sphere of influence to target the bullseye – the centre of the market that contains buying decision makers – BDMs. 

Our goal is to ensure that each audience has a positive influence on the centre, that their opinions will confirm the validity of our brand messages and motivate consistent buying decisions. 

It’s about driving accurate perceptions of the brand into the place they matter most: the world of BDMs. 

Populating the sphere 

The graphic highlights some of the audiences typically found in B2B markets. It could certainly contain others, such as wholesalers and agents; the general public; and special interest groups or lobbies. 

Any audience within the overall market that influences the centre – either directly or indirectly via another audience – should be included within your sphere. 

Having populated the sphere, it’s useful to look at how the audiences are connected and how they might influence one another. 

Assessing the significance of the influence 

To understand this, marketers need to be talking to the centre – the BDMs within the customer base. As mentioned in other posts on The Long Hello, marketers need to get out and about amongst these people and find out who is influencing their decisions and why this matters. 

This is important because customers are not identical – buying motivators will vary from one customer to the next. There will certainly be some generic, commercial influences in terms of the Five Factors of Value, but there will also be some (surprising) variations in the degrees of influence exerted by different audiences within the overall market. 

All of this information can be mapped-out on the sphere. You may find that individual customers warrant their own sphere – a dedicated map that details how buying decisions are influenced and made within that particular company. 

Who’s influencing the audiences? 

Just as marketers need to know who’s influencing BDMs, we also need to know how brand perceptions are being created within individual audiences. There’s more ‘fieldwork’ for marketers here in terms of meeting these people and building an ongoing understanding of how they relate to the brand. 

In particular, marketers need to be alert to any variance between brand perceptions and brand messages. If the two are not aligned, then you need to act in order to adjust this imbalance by using the appropriate tools in marketing’s portfolio. And these soundings and adjustments need to be taken on a continual basis in order to ensure that perceptions in the overall market are in line with the brand messages you are delivering.

Related posts:

Managing brand perceptions

Brands build business

Back to The Long Hello: making B2B marketing work for the bottom line

During the past 18 months or so, this demand has risen to painfully loud levels and has been accompanied by huge cuts in marketing-spend.

At a time when margins and market share need to be heavily protected – let alone increased – many organisations are actively reducing their ability to do so.

 Cutting marketing-spend now is like having your head removed because you want to lose weight…

Marketers need to end this absurdity by demonstrating that the B2B marketing function is a profit-generator, not a cost-centre. And they need to be wary of trying to squeeze more from less by using alternative channels for their marcoms – particularly in the ‘cheaper’ world of online. 

If it wasn’t working offline, why will it somehow work better online?

Because it’s cheaper. Ok. That will certainly produce results in terms of cutting costs, but will it get any other results? Will it serve B2B marketing’s two objectives: to cultivate consistent customers and prevent price pressure?

SEO, website optimisation, lead-generation, lead-nurturing and Social Media all received massively-heightened attention throughout 2009. They also received a lot more of the world’s marketing budget as ‘traditional’ comms media experienced big cut-backs:

 “Facebook, at 350 million users worldwide, is the premier (social media) destination for marketers in the US and many worldwide markets. It will surpass its former rival, MySpace, in ad revenues in 2010. In total, marketers will spend $2.2 billion to advertise on social networks worldwide in 2009, with $1.2 billion in spending in the US. In 2010, Facebook will account for nearly one-quarter of all social network ad spending worldwide, up from 20% in 2009.” 

That’s from e-Marketer and is endorsed by similar reports appearing across the marketing media: a mass-migration from offline to online that is being prompted by cuts in marketing budgets: 

In a recent NY Times article, TNS Media Intelligence, part of WPP, reckoned that US ad-spend fell 15.3 percent in the third quarter of 2009 compared with the same period a year ago, and for the first three quarters ad spending declined 14.7 percent compared with the same period in 2008.

Having closed it’s print version, SA’s Maverick magazine resurfaced online as The Daily Maverick and reported recently that 2009 was a truly dreadful year for US magazines:

“A total of 428 titles closed, and almost 60,000 less advertising pages were sold against 2008… advertising revenue for full-year 2009 closed at $19,450,949,762 — posting a 18.1% decline against the previous year…”

Locally, SA lost publications ranging from stalwarts like Computing, to ‘quality’ newcomers like The Weekender.

So, forget the ‘trad ad’ because online is obviously the way to go – it’s clearly a panacea for all marketing’s ills. I think not.

The pie has certainly got smaller. So, compete harder and smarter.

Marketers recognise the power of the web as a communications tool. But do we use it to encourage and maintain dialogue with the market? Of all the B2B websites that were out there in the middle of 2008, what percentage were, say, optimising the site for visitor feedback; tracking activity from page-to-page and monitoring keyword usage? Were the sites at all interactive, or had they just become dusty shop windows with so-called news pieces being at least a year old? And was anyone doing any research into what each of the audiences in the market thought of the site and how it helped them? 

Rather than rushing to embrace new ‘cure-all’ channels – Facebook and Twitter for example – shouldn’t we be making sure that we are leveraging the best possible results from the stuff that’s tried-and-tested?

Going live, five-by-five 

For example, live events like trade exhibitions, conferences, focus-days and roadshows are the surest way for everyone involved in customer management to connect personally with the full spectrum of an overall B2B market. They can be used to guarantee that your messages are being received five-by-five amongst distributors and wholesalers; solution-providers; specialist consultancies or professions; support and service providers; user-groups; financial analysts; industry associations; commentators in the media and the general public – as well as end-users. 

Sure, live events cost a lot more than tweeting – and require much greater effort in planning and successful execution – but they certainly do generate accurately-qualified leads and accelerate sales-cycles. And they do this particularly well if the competition isn’t doing these things because it’s too busy removing its own head… 

But, they do not work if they lack the innovation that’s essential to differentiate your brand and sustain that difference in the market’s eyes. 

I experienced a shocking example of this lack of differentiation at the biggest trade-show I visited last year. Combined with an almost universal disregard for how customers benefit from what they buy, it was essentially one enormous features-list, a sort of zombie version of the dull mediocrity that characterises so much B2B advertising: zero appeal to the market’s buying motivators. 

As the saying goes: keep on doing what you keep on doing and you’ll keep on getting what you keep on getting… 

Better-managed traditional media 

Marketers might also need to rejuvenate how they work with the media. Is the right message being delivered to the right people at the right time? Are we leveraging all the comms opportunities these suppliers offer – online and offline? Perhaps more importantly, are we looking to work in partnership with them – not merely as buyers – but as innovators looking to break some new ground together. 

It’s not always instinctive for media sales people to be motivated by how they can contribute to your continued success and they might need to be actively encouraged to do so. And the same goes for those people who determine and produce content: their objectives are not the same as yours. This means it’s important to find some common ground where both sets of objectives are being served. 

And the only way to do this is by talking to these people: take the initiative, start innovating, kick some ideas around, get the ball rolling in terms of building partnerships. 

The right stuff: getting back to basics 

Several posts on the Long Hello have looked at the fact that, in B2B marketing, fundamentals don’t change:

cultivate consistent customers and prevent price pressure by delivering the right message to the right people at the right time. 

So, junk the begging bowl and demonstrate to the market that, in comparison to the competition, your business is clearly more capable of making a positive contribution to customers’ success. 

And to do that, marketers need to harness all the support they can. What they don’t need is to have it removed – either by others within the business, or by diluting the impact of their messages in an attempt to cut the costs of delivering them. 

Related posts: 

Cultivate consistent customers, prevent price pressure - CCC & PPP: B2B’s two objectives 

Don’t trample the rules - the importance of fundamentals in B2B marketing

Relevance and accuracy - creating the right messages for the right people at the right time

Back to The Long Hello: making B2B marketing work for the bottom line

The bell-curve can also be used to develop synergy between marketing and sales, creating a united approach to customer-management – building sales, margins and loyalty

Where do I sign?

Although it’s concerned with the marketing of new technologies, the principles of the Adoption Lifecycle can be used by the marketing and sales functions to increase the relevance of their messages and position them more accurately. The goal is encourage customers – as quickly as possible – to ask that key question: where do I sign?

Building a sales platform by identifying and fulfilling demand: the right message to the right people

Just as customers can be categorised according to their position in the funnel, they can also be positioned within the adoption lifecycle according to their perceptions and usage of your products and services.

For example, Innovators do not make buying decisions based primarily on a product’s track record, case studies or WOM recommendations. Their ‘independent’ decisions will be influenced more by how a product can contribute to their continued success and how strongly they trust a supplier’s ability to deliver on their promises.

In contrast, the buying motivations of Early & Late Adopters are more likely to be influenced by examples of successful adoption – by others – combined with a supplier’s demonstrable ability to deliver proven results.

By analysing the customer-base in this way, marketers can provide solid support to sales by ensuring that each category of customer is being targeted with messages that are relevant to their position in the adoption lifecycle. 

Live the brand: moving from cliché to results

If marketing and sales synergy is about the two functions working in unity to achieve improved commercial results, then it’s important that there is no diversion between expectations and experience at the customer interface. If an element of marketing is to create customer-expectations, then the sales function has to deliver matching customer-experiences: you gotta walk the talk…

But you have to walk it on a tightrope because there are two challenges in walking the talk: over-promise and under-deliver; under-promise and over-deliver.

The consequences of over-promising are pretty easy to understand: loss of trust in the brand; damaging WOM; erosion of brand-loyalty; falling sales and lower margins.

But under-promising is equally dangerous – delivering more than you are being paid for is not a sound commercial model: margins are not optimised; and customer expectations and market perceptions are artificially lowered.

If the sales function can’t fulfil customer-expectations precisely – to build volumes, margins and loyalty –  marketers need to find out why. And the only way to do that is to talk to the sales people and their single, external audience: customers.

Marketers have to talk to the market. Writing in Marketing Magazine about the core skills of great marketers, Mark Ritson sees this as, “the fundamental starting point for any great marketer: get out of your office and spend time in the places and spaces where your consumers experience the product, no matter how senior or ‘important’ you consider yourself.”

Live the brand: move away from the cliché by monitoring and managing customer expectations

Customer expectations are tricky things to manage: people see things in different ways. Innovators and so-called Laggards have very different perceptions of a product’s potential to contribute to their success. If they are in your funnel or bell-curve the sales function has to manage interactions with them all. And so does the marketing function in terms of the relevance and positioning of its messages.

B2B marketers need to be certain that their messages are not only relevant but that they are also realistic – that sales can deliver on the expectations created by marketing. If marketers insist on delivering messages that make ludicrous claims – ‘With us, anything is possible’ – then it’s small wonder that sales can’t deliver a matching customer-experience.

Equally, the entire sales function – the management of customers – needs to be performing at a level where it is delivering on realistic expectations that marketing creates amongst customers. A set of compellingly credible messages can easily be diluted and devalued by unprofessional interactions with customers – whether it’s happening at reception, in accounting or in after-sales support.

Read more about:

Marketing united - integrating marketing with other core functions

Market reflections – managing brand perceptions

B2B marcoms - using funnels for relevant targeting

Back to The Long Hello: making B2B marketing work for the bottom line

The Ultimate Skid Steer Smackdown: a DM campaign for John Deere by GyroHSR

When John Deere wanted to move into a new category of earth-movers, GyroHSR conceived a campaign centred around head-to-head contests between JD and the competition. The following article looks at how the campaign evolved and the results it delivered.

Since its launch in April 2008, the John Deere ‘Smackdown’ microsite has had more than 150,000 visitors with 125,000 unique views and over 350,000 page views.  Smackdown videos have attracted 100,000+ views on YouTube.

By Christoph Becker, Chief Creative Officer, GyroHSR

Contrary to what some may think, direct marketing is not just a tactical tool, it is a strategic approach.

It can build brands and it can create an intimacy that no other approach can. Believe it, because if you don’t, you can’t sell it. And if you can’t sell it, you might be left to turn the lights out as everyone else embraces a new era somewhere in the future.

This is an approach we had to adopt when launching a US campaign for agricultural and construction equipment giants John Deere.

The challenge was clear: John Deere wanted to enter a new digger category

The audience was contractors, landscapers, farmers and dealers. So a simple offline DM piece, targeted and tracked, might have done the job.

It might have done. But then, it might have gone down as another classic example of the real potential of direct marketing going well and truly unexploited. Instead, we created a campaign that incorporated the stalwarts of direct marketing and used them to create something much, much bigger.

“Smackdown” involved staging a series of head-to-head battles featuring the top machines in a ‘robot wars’- style duel. The events – the hill climb, visibility test, power lift and serviceability – were based on real-world situations that drivers experience and were staged in front of a live audience.

Initially, the audience was engaged via offline mailers, but that was only the beginning. At the heart of the programme was the ‘SkidSteerSmackdown.com’ microsite, featuring videos of digger battles. The site was fully interactive, enabling visitors to engage in a number of ways. For example, fans could create e-postcards which could be customized and distributed to friends and co-workers. This simple tool converted dealers and operators into the campaign’s strongest advocates.

A series of eDMs were distributed to alert both dealer and prospects when new content was available on the site, and finally – traditional elements such as print ads were also incorporated.

And through this activity, John Deere gained a cult following

Since the site launch in April 2008, the microsite has had more than 150,000 visitors with 125,000 unique views and more than 350,000 page views.  Smackdown videos have garnered more than 100,000 views on YouTube.

Offline, the Smackdown-themed lead generators yielded a 4 percent response rate, outpacing many other similar mailers during the year. Drive-to-site banner advertising had click-through-rates of approximately 3 percent, and eBlasts promoting the site had response rates of more than 7 percent.

This was a campaign that had direct marketing at the heart – there was an identifiable audience, a clear proposition and a measurable response. But to encapsulate it in this way does no justice to the true reach of the activity. We could have sent out the mailers and waited to track the sales. But we didn’t. We took the brand to a new marketplace and created a following populated by genuine advocates. We drove awareness, created buzz and instigated WOM.

More on Social Media:

The WOMsta monsta -  a new dimension in Word-of-Mouth

PR & B2B. The perfect couple – the importance of PR in B2B

Back to The Long Hello: making B2B marketing work for the bottom line

Promoting the business, professional and technical magazines published by McGraw Hill, the message is as fresh and relevant today as it was fifty years ago: sales start before your salesman calls.

In July this year, the Business Marketing Association staged a ‘live’ version of the ad 

‘The Man In The Chair – Live’ is well worth watching because it tells it like it is: B2B customers and markets need to know about your company, what you are selling, how it will help them and why they should believe you. And all of that comes before even considering to buy from you. 

The graphic below is from a whitepaper by Tippit Inc and it illustrates the phased nature of the B2B buying process. It’s such an important graphic for marketers because it provides a roadmap for developing and positioning marcoms that are relevant for each phase in the buying process - ranging from initial awareness through to purchasing and beyond.

Working with funnels

The concept of marketing and sales funnels is not new: essentially they are a development of AIDA and the Hierarchy of Effects which categorise the buying phases as: Awareness, Interest, Evaluation, Desire/Conviction, Action/Purchase. Nowadays, its usual to add something like ‘Support’ and ‘Retention’ to account for maintaining loyalty in the post-purchase phase.

The shape of a funnel will vary according to two main factors: the amount of buyers in the market; and the timescale of the sales cycle. Markets with lots of buyers have funnels with wide openings or mouths – so that you can ‘pour-in’ lots of potential buyers:

 Time

From a marketing perspective, Tippit puts it like this:

The funnel is the most commonly used metaphor to describe B2B sales cycles. But funnels come in dif­ferent shapes and sizes depending on the nature of your target market. For example, the complexity of a purchasing decision guides the frequency and breadth of interactions between buyers and sellers. This, in turn, determines the shape of the funnel.

To be a successful marketer, it’s important to understand how certain variables shape the funnel, and what type of funnel governs your market. This understanding can help marketing professionals like you choose the most effective set of marketing tactics for your organization’s goals.

Using the funnel to segment marketing messages: the Perception Cycle

In the Tippit whitepaper, ‘buyer activity’ is categorised or segmented as follows: 

• Browsing
  information gathering as normal part of job
• Downloading
  business opportunity or challenge identified
• Project
  business case for the product or service established
• Shortlist
  qualified vendors selected
• Decision
  purchase is made

Marketers can use the categories to segment the type of messages that are most relevant in the perception cycle.

The perception cycle is the market’s process of acquiring information that builds associations and opinions about a brand and what it represents.  

First impressions

In the ‘awareness’ phase, buyers are gathering information that begins to build their knowledge about a subject and its related products and services.

They are starting with a blank canvas and are forming opinions and perceptions. This process of discovery is a critical point in the perception cycle because first impressions really do matter.

This is a major opportunity for marketers to influence first impressions or to shift initial perceptions that have not yet become entrenched. For example, someone searching the web is likely to fall into the ‘awareness’ category, as opposed to someone who goes straight to your site because they already know of you – perhaps from an ad they just saw. 

Will a Google search find you? And if it does, what will they find there? Will it be relevant and what further action will it motivate?

Most importantly, will it keep them in your funnel?

In the funnel: five-by-five

Wikipedia defines the term ‘five-by-five’ as: ‘a signal that has excellent strength and perfect clarity - the most understandable signal possible.’

As the funnel narrows – not everyone who is ‘aware’ converts to a buyer - the relevance of marcoms messages and the accuracy of their positioning need to be increased.  

Equally, as the funnel narrows, the influence of those still in the funnel increases: at some point, the influence will be sufficiently strong to sanction the purchase. Some people will only fully enter the funnel at an advanced stage of the sales cycle – perhaps towards the end of the Project and Shortlist phases once their colleagues have already completed the processes of Awareness and Consideration.  

Very often, these late-entrants hold the purchasing authority. They might be guided by the opinions of others, but they will still draw their own conclusions and make their own judgements – as decision-makers, that’s what they do.

At this point in the cycle, the relevance of your message is critical. Excellent strength, perfect clarity and the most understandable signal possible: concise and compelling.

Relevance and positioning: what are you saying in the funnel and how are you saying it?

Two earlier posts, Building brand relationships and B2B buying: What? How? Who?, focus on identifying audiences within B2B markets and how to create relevant messages for them.

Having established the various audiences in the funnel, it’s a relatively easy task to identify how to communicate with them across the marketing portfolio: in essence, a detailed knowledge of each audience within the overall market will provide guidelines for the most effective means to communicate with them.

It all comes back to relevance: relevant message, relevant medium – five-by-five.

Working your way through the marcoms funnel

By their nature, B2B funnels are much narrower than those in B2C. However, not all your products and services will necessarily fall into the same-shaped funnel. As a generalisation, B2B tunnels will become narrower as the complexity and cost of your products and services increases.

Here’s what Tippit has to say about managing communications in narrow funnels:

Target hard-to-reach buyers
Hone in on key buyers in decision committees by profiling the organization. This means get­ting resourceful and creative to uncover and connect with influencers who would benefit from your remarkable content and, ultimately, your offerings.

Create and distribute remarkable content
A library of marketing assets is critical for complex and expensive purchases with long sales cycles. Your content must educate and convince buyers that your solution is proven and makes sound business sense to them and others in the decision committee.

Execute a multi-channel pursuit
Engage buyers with a combination of communication techniques (online retargeting, email, and phone all work well). Use multiple touches to deliver to sales a verified list from within a hard-to-reach target.

Managing the ‘perception cycle’ for higher ROI

B2B marcoms are a cycle of interactions with your market that should be carefully balanced so that the right message is getting to the right people at the right time.

By thinking in terms of a funnel, marketers can raise ROI by increasing the relevance of their messages and targeting them more accurately. And this approach certainly brings structure to managing the five basic principles of creating and presenting marketing communications: what, who, how, when and where.

Click on the link below to download the whitepaper from Tippit Inc

What’s the Shape of Your Funnel? Why funnel shape means everything in B2B marketing

Read more on creating and positioning marcoms:

Market reflections: managing brand perceptions

Leveraging B2B’s buying motivators - results-driven marcoms     

Marcoms: Outcomes are the differentiators - how outcomes create ‘Value’

Preventing price pressure - the influence on ‘Value’ on B2B buying

Back to The Long Hello: making B2B marketing work for the bottom line

The leopard cannot change its spots

In other words, basic characteristics cannot be altered.

Oh, yes they can…

The spots on these ‘leopards’ were changed to fingerprints as part of brand re-positioning for clients demonstrating biometric-based access control solutions at Europe’s biggest corporate security show in 2006.

This was just part of a campaign to influence market perceptions of biometrics – to alter highly-sceptical attitudes by encouraging a conservative, risk-averse market to re-evaluate its opinions of this emerging technology. 

The Biometric Leopards: altering market-perceptions of fingerprint biometrics

Fingerprint biometrics are pretty hi-tech products. Three years ago, the buzz around biometrics was fully-focused on the technology and its futuristic, sci-fi aura. And all the world’s biometric brands positioned themselves in this way - happy to be associated with hi-tech images of eyes and fingertips embedded with electronic circuits and binary code.

No wonder people felt alienated and threatened by the technology…

The concept of the biometric leopards was generated by three objectives:

• move away from a high-technology focus and the market’s ‘me too’ clutter
• emphasise the human, non-threatening aspect of biometrics
• highlight the technology’s ease-of-use for widely-ranging applications 

As with any big promotional event, a fourth objective was to produce a ’show-stopper’ – something that would differentiate the clients from all other exhibitors and generate as much visitor-traffic as possible.

Why leopards? The clients were both South African companies looking to build European sales by leveraging their world-class experience with large-scale, corporate access control solutions in southern Africa.

Take the high-ground. And hold it

The biometric brand in question, Sagem, and their biggest distributor, Ideco, have continued to use biometric leopards and their variants at South African events since their 2006 debut, securing hi-visibility and exceptional visitor-numbers at trade shows like Electra Mining and Securex. They are also used as part of the ‘living’ brand at roadshows, product-launches and even presentations to analysts and investors. 

The fact that bright young women – with only minimal training – can demonstate the brand’s hardware and its associated software at such events has done a great deal to break-down perceptions of Sagem biometrics as a high-complexity technology that only exists in sci-fi movies.

Repositioning across all marcoms channels: building brand-cohesion

As mentioned earlier, the biometric leopards only form part of the overall strategic re-positioning. A great deal of work was also done on re-branding, and a couple of examples are highlighted a little later in this post.

In terms of re-positioning, it was important to build strong relationships with the media – in particular, relevant trade and market-related publications as well as the business press. A key objective here was to position the brand as a thought-leader and trusted ‘educator’ whilst reinforcing the ‘human’ image in preference to a pure technology focus.

Consequently, a range of media was encouraged to broadcast these messages editorially – from specialist security media through to those focused on key industry sectors within the market. Equally important was editorial coverage and support in publications targeting specific management functions within potential end-users: HR, finance, IT, SHEQ and facilities management. 

There was also communication and dialogue with all the other components that go to make up the overall B2B market – VARs, professional consultants, wholesalers, installers, market analysts and industry associations.

And then there was the competition: 

In terms of competitor-strategy, we ring-fenced the brand’s exclusive position as representing the technology’s ‘human’ appeal: accessible, non-threatening and, perhaps most importantly of all, appropriate right now.

Influencing market perceptions: reinforce the brand’s positioning at every opportunity 

To strenghten the on-going, ‘human’ positioning of fingerprint biometrics, images of hands are used as recurring themes in various print-formats – advertising, brochures, posters and banners:

Re-positioning the brand in the widest-posssible market 

Back in 2006, the access control market regarded biometrics as an exclusive technolgy that was limited to ultra-secure applications – associating it with the sort of security solutions that confront Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible or something featured in the latest Bond movie.

This perception was so strongly-entrenched that it created a major barrier to biometrics’ penetration of the access control market. Something had to be done to alter this perception – to highlight the fact that this brand of biometrics has ‘universal’ applications:

The concept of ‘universal’ applications for the brand is reinforced by the graphically-positive slogan: ‘Everyone, Everytime, Everywhere’. And it is used repeatedly as a core brand symbol across as wide a range of collateral and media as possible.

Positioning for bottom line results: brands do build business:

• 50,000+ Sagem fingerprint readers now deployed across southern Africa
• Controlling access for some two million people
• Huge diversity of applications – from nursery schools to gold mines
• Ideco is now the world’s largest distributor of Sagem fingerpint readers
• Market share for biometrics in southern Africa: 80%+

After all, the leopard can change its spots… 

More on B2B branding:

Brands are dead. Brands are now more important than ever      Brands build business

The Long Hello: building brand relationships

Back to The Long Hello: making B2B marketing work for the bottom line

Think of the brand as a reflection of your company in a mirror. You hold the brand up to this mirror and it reflects everything the company represents in the market. You don’t see the brand staring back at you, you see what the market sees.

When an end-user holds the brand up to this mirror, what do they see? Is the same image reflected back when VARs, consultants and the media look in the mirror?

Very often, there are as many different images in the mirror as there are people looking at it.

And this lack of brand-cohesion creates confusion and uncertainty in the market, weakening the brand by creating mis-perceptions of what it represents.

Building perceptions of success

One of the cornerstone posts on The Long Hello looks at how B2B brands should be making a major contribution to the bottom line by creating compelling associations in the market:

Brands can generate such strong associations of trust and fulfilled-expectations that customers simply won’t consider another supplier.

B2B branding is about saying: we own this product or service. It may also be about saying: we own its reliability, its short lead-times, and its quality. We also own its support, its maintenance and its future development. But most of all:

We own the positive contribution we make to customers’ continued success.

Are they looking at us? Identifying the market’s composition

B2B marketers understand that their market is like a jigsaw – many pieces go to make the whole.

Of course, this little jigsaw is far from complete. 

A typical B2B market may also include distributors and wholesalers; support and service providers; user-groups; financial analysts; standards boards and statutory regulators; industry associations and the general public.  And it will almost certainly include different ’stakeholders’ within each individual customer, such as finance, sales, production and distribution.

But it is a starting point for building an overall picture of the market.

Influencing market reflections: relevance, relevance, relevance

Having listed the reflections, marketers perhaps then need to ask some questions in the market:

• how does the brand reflect itself to each component of the market
• how relevant are your marcoms to these individual components
• what needs to change in order to achieve a consistent reflection of the brand

Relevance is crucial because it builds credibility and confidence. And relevance is all about outcomes - the outcomes that are produced for each component of the market: what does this brand do for me? 

You have to talk to the market

In order to identify what is relevant, you need to get out of the office and talk to the market. Writing in Marketing Magazine about the core skills of great marketers, Mark Ritson sees this as:

the fundamental starting point for any great marketer: get out of your office and spend time in the places and spaces where your consumers experience the product, no matter how senior or ‘important’ you consider yourself.

For a more detailed look at how to create relevant marcoms:

Marketing is not about selling. It’s about buying

Outcomes are the differentiators      The role of Value in B2B marketing      Getting real in B2B

Leveraging B2B’s buying motivators      Building brand relationships: The Long Hello

Back to The Long Hello: making B2B marketing work for the bottom line