I talked to her in March about her approach to B2B marketing and how she has delivered some of SA’s most innovative and arresting B2B marcoms, positioning her company as a real thought leader in its field and generating unprecedented positive response from her market.

B2B’s double hard-sell: internal, external

Most B2B marketers have to wear two sales hats: one for their colleagues and one for the market.  With only a few exceptions, I’ve had to sell the marketing function to every senior exec I’ve worked alongside, whether they’re a consulting client, a fellow employee or working for an external vendor or partner. 

I’m not talking about selling them new ideas for a particular marketing activity, I mean selling them the entire concept of B2B marketing: what it achieves for the bottom line and how it does that. If you take them through a formal presentation of the function and its objectives, they’re usually happy to acknowledge that getting the right caps for a golf day and arranging the Christmas party ain’t top of your list. 

Everyone’s a marketer…

When it comes to marketing, it seems everyone’s got an opinion that they’re keen to share – even those who’ve never even met a customer, let alone dealt with a buying decision maker. This is because some of our outputs are such a visible representation of the people we work with and the ‘commentators’ are motivated by a desire to see the organisation thrive. Surely, that’s it? 

But sometimes it’s a matter of letting the baker do what the baker does best and marketers often need to be very firm on this. I wouldn’t dream of questioning someone’s choice of accounting software or suggesting that we shouldn’t use that type of robot welder. Why? Not my field of expertise and I know zip about it. Now, what was it you wanted to tell me? 

Selling to the C-Suite: know your competition

Stubbs’ target market is relatively small and commercially sophisticated. Within current and prospective end-users of outsourced supply chain management, it’s a typical C-suite audience and their attention is in demand from direct competitors plus a whole host of unrelated vendors selling everything from ICT solutions to environmental consulting. 

The audience’s attention is being fought for by so many vendors simply because big buying decisions lie in their hands.

B2B marketers really do need to be aware of this and to recognise that what we are really competing for is the C-suite’s time and their focus.

The big question then becomes: how do we get that time and focus? 

Know what you’re selling

Kate says that Barloworld Logistics are selling the application of original thinking based on a sound understanding of supply chain management: “We sell our thinking, particularly in terms of problem-solving within our field of expertise. We consider ourselves to be real thought leaders and innovators. It’s what defines our whole approach to managing your supply chain. As a marketer, it’s my job to engage buying decision makers on that basis.” 

I was so impressed by how Stubb’s does this that I featured an example on The Long Hello last year. The ‘Puzzles’ campaign with direct marketing agency, Wunderman, struck me as being really arresting, innovative and motivating. 

What really impressed me was that a B2B company had taken such a radically different approach to positioning their brand. I thought at the time that I would’ve loved to be a fly-on-the-wall when the concept was presented internally. Hold on to yer hats, boys! 

Stubbs says, “It certainly raised some eyebrows.” I bet it did …

Relevance and creativity

Anyone who reads the specialist trade and business press is aware of just how dull a lot of its B2B advertising can be. And yet these advertisers are all competing for the same thing: the time and focus of the C-suite in other businesses. 

It’s not that this audience doesn’t have time to focus on things that will contribute to the continued success of their organisation – that’s the very essence of their jobs. 

What they don’t have time for is stuff that they perceive as having no relevance to aiding that success. Big difference. And one which is overlooked by many B2B marketers: why should I take time to focus on you? 

Stubbs is not one of those marketers: “The whole puzzles campaign was driven by the imperative of making you stop, think and respond. As problem-solving innovators, we need to get decision makers focused on our thinking and encourage contact.” 

Campaign results have been outstanding, motivating high levels of direct, executive response. Stubbs says, “It initiated C-Suite contact on two levels. Many executives and their colleagues, friends and families were so intrigued that they wanted the puzzles’ answers or to know they’d got them right. Professionally, it opened doors for our experts to interact with executives who had a highly positive perception of the brand.” 

Building brand relationships

Long sales cycles are commonplace in B2B and Stubbs says that her company typically works with cycles of 18 months. “For our market, managing the supply chain is a critical component of their business. Making changes to existing processes or switching supplier are high-impact decisions which require careful planning and consideration. This takes time.” 

One way that Barloworld Logistics encourages long-term interaction with the brand is through an annual survey that examines industry trends, challenges and influences. Conducted by Frost & Sullivan, this year’s supplychainforesight focuses on ‘Growth in Adversity’ and addresses the role of supply chain strategy in enabling recovery from recession. 

Almost half of the nearly 400 respondents were CEO’s or senior execs and 23% of the companies surveyed were multinationals with revenues of over R5 billion. It’s real C-suite stuff and is treated accordingly by both respondents and readers. Stubbs sees it as, “An integral part of the brand that positions us as an authority in the minds of senior executives within our market.” 

Brand relationships are a living thing

Stubbs releases the survey with a media briefing just prior to its national launch. “We then host breakfasts in Durban, Cape Town and JHB on three consecutive days. Respondents and the market in general are invited and we arrange for industry leaders to give us their view on supply chains in SA as well as their interpretation of the results.” 

“We support this with reports on our site plus a dedicated site at www.supplychainforesight.com” 

Once the main launch is complete, Stubbs runs industry-specific launches. “This year we had an FMCG & Retail breakfast and an Automotive evening session. These are more focused interactions and typically result in good engagement and discussion. Once again, we invite industry leaders to voice their opinion on the survey results and to give us their view on what is happening in supply chains in SA.” 

Positive response to the brand

Barloworld Logistics received a special merit award at the Logistics Achiever Awards for the survey’s contribution to the industry. Stubbs says, “Even competitors quote the survey and it is frequently used internationally to benchmark the industry. We receive emails and calls thanking us and requests to focus on specific topics in the next survey. We encourage this type of response so that we can include common focus areas in the next survey.” 

Reinforce your relevance

The company hosts breakfast meetings with execs from the same discipline – HR, Finance, Operations – as well as after-hours sessions to introduce new service offerings or ideas for very targeted audiences. Stubbs’ goal here is to strengthen industry networks and brand relationships by facilitating knowledge sharing and engagement on topical issues.

The road ahead?

Stubbs sees it like this: “Continually finding new and relevant ways to engage our audiences. We must understand clients’ needs thoroughly in order to create relevant, interesting messages that break through the clutter. Messages also need to be simple and clear. Find creative ways to facilitate engagement and relationship building that is commercially beneficial for both parties. Focus and relevance is key. And make sure it’s enjoyable for everyone involved.” 

Way to go, Kate.

Wunderman, Johannesburg:
Debi Loftie-Eaton, Managing Director. debi_loftie_eaton@za.wunderman.com

Straight to your inbox?
Get them when I post them. Subscribe to the free RSS feed – on the top right of this page. Simple.

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

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

Straight to your inbox?
Get them when I post them. Subscribe to the free RSS feed – on the top right of this page. Simple.

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

Breathe life into your site. B2B marketers have no excuse for failing to deliver a compelling customer experience online.

Alex Blyth presents six golden rules for improving and maintaining your website. There can be few B2B marketers who remain unconvinced of the importance of the online channel.

As Catherine Lawford, MD of customer experience consultancy Seren, puts it, “Online is more than important. It is becoming – and will continue to be – the single most important tool in a marketer’s armoury. Bearing in mind that the vast majority of customers will decide whether to engage with a company by first looking at its Internet site, creating a poor online experience makes no business sense.” 

Yet, despite this – and despite the fact that most B2B marketers know exactly how much this matters – the B2B world is lagging some way behind its B2C counterparts in terms of online customer experience. 

Martina Schell, head of user engagement at marketing agency Archibald Ingall Stretton, says, “While B2B online experience has developed very little since the early buzz in the 1990s, consumer-facing online experiences have developed around user needs and technology.” 

She continues, “This has steeply raised expectations of business websites. Remember that all business customers are also consumers. Today the majority of B2B customer experiences seem clunky, poorly thought out and ill-matched to the complex demands of business customers. This is a great opportunity to lead in your category.” 

Part of the problem is that while much has been said and written about how companies should talk to their customers on the phone and how they should engage with them face-to-face, there are few hard and fast rules about what constitutes best practice online. 

By following these six rules most B2B marketers should be able to dramatically improve the online customer experience they offer, and so gain significant competitive advantage. 

1. Make your site easy to navigate 

“Still too many online experiences are damaged by the fundamentals not being in place,” says Darrel Worthington, director of information architecture at digital consultancy, Rufus Leonard. “Poor product and service categorisation, insufficient product detail and no online product support to fill the gaps. Poor search facilities and torturous navigation. This all leads to confusion, increased calls to the customer help desk, loss of sales and ultimately brand damage.” 

Simon Boydell, marketing manager for Retail Eyes, a provider of customer experience improvement programmes to sites such as O2 and William Hill, offers this advice on how to get it right, “Keep content succinct and to the point and use standard fonts; the best are Arial and Verdana as they are easier to read. And ensure your text has room to breathe, is well spaced and not squashed together. Don’t be tempted to try and cram too much information on one page as this will only turn off a visitor.” 

He adds, “Balance your text with images and good visuals to grab attention. Customers only read 25 per cent of the content on a page, so making your site visually appealing will help ensure customers stay longer. But make sure they are good quality images, reflecting the standard of your product or service, and don’t be tempted to use too many flashing images – two per page is the maximum.” 

Robert Barnes, operations director at web design agency Design UK, reports that law firm Berwin Leighton Paisner recently launched a redeveloped site with improved navigation and more interesting presentation. The outcome was was higher traffic numbers with the average visitor staying on the site approximately 50 per cent longer. One-page visits are down by a third, he says. 

2. Make information easy to find  

“Customers don’t have time to trawl through websites,” advises Tom Pelly, senior consultant at customer service software provider Transversal. “They want quick, comprehensive answers to their questions. 

Replace keyword search with natural language search that understands questions asked in plain English and provides the right information, quickly and in a format that meets B2B customer needs.” 

3. Ensure your site is fast and responsive  

“Avoiding slow levels of service online must be a top priority,” argues Graham Moore, e-retail specialist at infrastructure provider Zeus Technology. “Marketers must work with IT to ensure sites can cope with peaks in traffic. This is especially important when launching promotions online – as there’s nothing more frustrating than launching a campaign only to find that the website crashes.” 

This is also an important issue if you use a large amount of rich media. Neil Barton, director at web hosting company Hostway, says, “While multimedia content can be visually impressive it can also have a detrimental effect on website performance if not managed correctly. Traffic management solutions are now becoming so intelligent that businesses can start prioritising e-commerce traffic over visitors who are simply browsing, which again can help optimise the online experience.” 

4. Integrate with other channels 

Do not fall into the trap of seeing your website as an isolated channel. Your customers are not interested in the channel they use to contact you; they only care that you respond in a timely and effective way to their enquiries. 

So ensure you put in place all the resources and processes necessary to cope with online enquiries. Be clear on your site about response times and then ensure you deliver on that promise. 

In the same way, you should aim for a unified platform that gives you a single view of customers and prospects across all channels. 

Frank Lord, VP EMEA at e-commerce software provider ATG, explains why, “A unified platform is key to delivering a good online experience. B&Q has increased business-to-business sales using a single e-commerce platform. The platform runs across its website, more than 330 stores, transactional catalogues in showrooms and three call centres to provide cross-channel integration and a single customer view. A single unified platform enables B&Q to better understand customer behaviour and anticipate their needs. As a result, B&Q has increased online conversion rates by 40 per cent.” 

He continues, “AT&T has also used e-commerce to gain market share with its B2B customer base. It has rolled out more than 50,000 unique sites for its business customers, managed centrally from one ATG platform. Each site is tailored to a particular customer segment – offering B2B customers a personalised online experience, increased satisfaction and new customer acquisition rates. In fact, AT&T achieved a dramatic increase of nearly 100 per cent year-over-year in new customer additions, and it significantly reduced customer churn.” 

5. Provide genuinely useful information

More and more B2B marketers are using content marketing as a way of capturing prospect data, engaging potential customers and so generating leads. However, if you intend to request information from visitors to your site you must ensure that you give them something genuinely valuable in return. 

You may be surprised to discover what interests your visitors. In its recent ‘Turning the Corner’ campaign, Barclays Corporate set up a site to support its series of regional events and business clinics.

Kathryn Taylor, Barclays Corporate’s head of marketing, says, “We filled that site with a wealth of information on every aspect of leading a business out of recession. However, we found that visitors were much more interested in the information on finance than anything else. Looking back, that makes sense – as a bank we’re most credible on that topic. So, we refined our content strategy to provide more articles on financial matters. The site attracted 74,000 visitors with 51 per cent returning at least once.” 

6. Test continually

“Conversion rates on websites are very often five per cent,” says Andy Budd, MD at user experience company Clearleft. “By testing not just for the usability of a site but also its desirability we are frequently able to improve that by 100 per cent or even 200 per cent. The simplest way of doing this is to watch people using it. This will show you where they tend to struggle. Very often they won’t complain – they won’t even realise something hasn’t been as good as it could be. Typically we’ll find 20 to 30 problems by doing just this type of testing. It’s the low hanging fruit that a company can solve very rapidly and produce an immediate uplift in conversion.” 

Boydell at consumer experience experts Retail Eyes concludes with this advice, “Once your site is up, don’t abandon it. Ensure your website is maintained and updated consistently, in-line with or even before the rest of your business to ensure it always reflects your brand and changing customer needs. Continuous investment in your website is one of the best investments you could make. Neglect it and it could be one of the most costly mistakes you make.” 

Related post: Is your B2B website building the bottom line? Part 1

Straight to your inbox?
Get them when I post them. Subscribe to the free RSS feed – on the top right of this page. Simple.

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

As many websites have been around a while, they may not reflect your marketing initiatives and business strategies for this year. We offer the following suggestions to help guide your review of your site. Some of these may be small fixes to your site that can be easily accomplished. Others, however, may require you to shift your priorities and make a site redesign part of this year’s tasks.

 1. Home Page: clarity and functionality

When prospects arrive at your home page, is it clear what products or services your company offers? 

Objectively review your home page and view it as a first time visitor, whether your primary offerings have changed or not this year. You may have optimized your search results to drive great traffic, but if people can’t tell what you do at a glance, they are not sticking around. 

And by the way, if you have an animated flash landing-page or autoplaying music or video, remove it today. These outdated and slow-loading bits of media only slow down your site and make it more likely that visitors will leave without taking action. 

Check your analytics to see what sites people came from or what keywords they searched to understand who stays on your site and who leaves. 

2. Clear path to information

Prospects and customers arrive at your home page and they know they are in the right place, but can they find what they are looking for? As web sites have gotten fancier and technology more advanced, gadgets, widgets and sliding navigation have made it harder to find what your site visitors are looking for. 

Make sure your site has a clear path to get people to the information they need, whether it is product specs, customer service or finding a distributor. Again, your analytics tell you what pages people go to after your home page.

3. Call to action

Is your site generating leads for your sales force? Are you trying to get new subscribers to content via RSS or to an email newsletter? Are you selling products directly from the web or passing all these prospects to a distributor? 

Whatever your call to action on your site is, make sure it is on every relevant page and customers and prospects know what to do. And make sure this is all trackable so you can match this up to your objectives. 

Review these numbers on a regular basis so you are not surprised by either success or failure. Your website is a living entity that should be easy to change to make it more effective. 

If you are constantly fighting with your IT department or a web vendor to make changes, you need to re-evaluate that relationship.

Your company’s success cannot be held back by technical limitations or the whims of your internal or external partners. 

4. Social Media profiles

Last year you started a blog, joined Twitter and created a Facebook fan page. Now is the time to get those social presences to the home page of your site. You want to grow these social communities and burying their existence on your ‘about page’, ‘contact page’ or some random page that no one can find is not the way to do it.

Realted post: Is your B2B website building the bottom Line? Part 2

 Straight to your inbox?
Get them when I post them. Subscribe to the free RSS feed – on the top right of this page. Simple.

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

Brands mean ownership

We can all recall an ad that lost its link with the brand: “Great! Clever, sharp, funny, hard-hitting. What company was it?” Or, even worse, ‘What was the product?’ No brand: no ownership.

In B2B marketing, branding is about saying: we own this product or service and, most of all, we own the positive contribution it makes to our customers’ success.

It may also be about saying: we own the outcomes produced by its reliability, its short lead-times, its quality, its support, its maintenance and its future development. All of these things are ours: this is what we represent.

B2B branding is the work of building associations between a company’s ownership of the brand and their ownership of what the brand represents. These associations are not created by logos or slogans. They are solely about the associations created in the market around ownership: who owns what and what it is they own.

Strong brands build business

Marketers understand that brands are symbols, something which represents something else. Brands can evoke powerful associations and allegiances. In their most potent forms, we may love them or loathe them - think of national flags and sporting emblems.

Weak brands – those with little or no meaning - are particularly common in B2B as opposed to B2C marketing. When it comes to cans of baked beans, there’s one brand for me. I’ll go beanless rather than break that allegiance. But is the same true for a company buying a baked bean canning-plant?

The answer is yes: a B2B brand can generate such far-reaching, consistent associations of trust, fulfilled-expectations and satisfaction that customers simply won’t look anywhere else – won’t even consider another canning-plant supplier.

Trust, satisfaction and fulfilled-expectations. These are imperatives in your market’s relationship with your brand: that your products will match past experiences or proposed deliverables.

What is your brand?

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

When the CEO holds the brand up to this mirror, what do they see? Is the same image reflected when production, finance, sales, distribution and marketing look in the mirror? Rarely. In fact, very rarely.

There are probably as many different reflections in this mirror as there are people looking at it. The brand becomes such a confusion of images that it’s meaningless. No matter what the company is selling, the brand may as well be symbolised by a blue potato eating a camel. 

Market reflections: how B2B brands are created

In B2B, the overall market may include distributors and wholesalers; solution-providers; specialist consultancies; and support and service providers - as well as end-users. In addition, there may be financial analysts; commentators in the media; regulators; industry associations and user-groups.

Each of these represents a ‘market reflection’ – the way the brand is seen by individual audiences in the market. And it is these reflections that give a brand its identity. Unlike B2C, in B2B, a brand’s identity is created entirely by the market. Not by comms agencies or graphic designers, but by something much more in tune with commercial reality and its latest trends: the market. What it sees is all that matters. In B2B, the market gives you your brand.

B2B markets become confused and uncertain if the reflections are unclear and inconsistent. So people draw their own conclusions. They create their own associations, set their own expectations and decide for themselves how much they trust the brand and what it represents.

Consequence? Ownership of the brand is lost and your credibility is cut to shreds. Sales fall, margins get squeezed and market share shrinks. Bad. Very bad.

Weak brands build business barriers

This loss of brand-ownership and market-credibility is a formidable, ongoing obstacle to building sales, margins and loyalty. It consistently generates perceptions in the market that have no relation to what your company actually represents: ‘Oh? I never knew it could do that.’ ‘I didn’t realise you guys knew anything about this.’ ‘What? You mean you can handle this too? ‘Oh yes, I know XYZ Inc. They sell those potatoes that eat blue camels. Er, don’t they?’

Are they talking about us?

More than ever, market reflections - that diversity of associations made by the market with the brand – are what influences a company’s ability to increase sales, retain customers and protect margins. And this influence is increasing as more lanes keep getting added to the ‘information superhighway’.

For example, there is rapidly-growing interest in social media as a way for people to share their experiences about B2B suppliers and products. And this goes both ways, companies are joining the discussion on the likes of LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube in order to present their brand-messages and interact more directly with their markets.

So, it’s now more important then ever for B2B companies to ensure delivery of a credible, relevant and compelling reflection of the brand to each audience in their market. As B2B companies become more and more visible to their markets, it has to be true that the brand is your real business.

Be the brand. No, it’s not a cliché. It’s seriass: be the brand

Brand management is not the business of designers and communications agencies. Yup, you heard that one right. It’s not that designers and agencies produce poor or inappropriate work. Quite the reverse. It’s just that they have no influence over how clients build and maintain trust and satisfaction, or how they fulfil customers’ expectations. That’s not their job. As a B2B marketer, it’s yours.

In his book Ackoff’s Fables, the eminent management consultant, Russell Ackoff, describes a problem-solving process he calls ‘idealized redesign’. Although not specifically related to branding, the process is certainly relevant for a company that wants to ‘Be the Brand’:

“Assume that the entity (ie the brand) that has the problem was destroyed last night, but everything else remains the same. Redesign that entity so as to eliminate the problem that faces it. The redesign is subject to only two constraints: first it must be technologically feasible, and second, it must obey the same externally imposed constraints (eg the laws of the land) to which the current system is subject.”

“In addition, it should be designed so that it can 1. improve itself by learning from its own experience, 2. adapt to a changing environment, and 3. be improved by being redesigned again in the future.”

B2B marketers can use ‘idealized redesign’ to define how their brand should be reflected in the market. They can start the process by asking the (rather long) question: what market reflections will attract and retain customers and maintain margins?

The answers will provide a stimulating roadmap for your company’s development as we move deeper into 2010 and a period of slow, cautious growth in B2B markets. The economy may be improving but negative memories of recession will definitely remain and strongly influence B2B buying-decisions.

For marketers, this means it’s essential to generate brand reflections that are not only credible, relevant and compelling but also highly reassuring to each audience in their overall market.

Visit Marketing Mix – South Africa’s magazine for intelligent marketers.

More on brands and branding:

Brands build business      Outcomes make the difference      The Long Hello: building brand-relationships

Straight to your inbox?
Get them when I post them. Subscribe to the free RSS feed – on the top right of this page. Simple.

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

Sonia Simone of  Remarkable Communication recently posted this list on her blog. Thanks to B2B Social Media for highlighting it. 

Sadly, the concept of customer focus or of being customer-centric has become badly tarnished.

A lot of the blame for this lies with marketers and comms agencies who produce ludicrous slogans that claim devotion to customer’s interests: just think about all the syrupy guff that comes out of the financial services sector.

For companies who want to cultivate customers – rather than harvest them – an understanding of what they want will always boost the bottom line.

Using Sonia’s list, I reckon there’s a really useful exercise here for anyone involved with customers:

• divide the list into five sets of ten
• rank each set of ten in their order of importance
• act accordingly…

Fifty things customers wish you knew. From Sonia Simone of  Remarkable Communication

1. I don’t need you to be perfect, but I do need to know I can rely on you.
2. Telling me what you don’t know makes me trust you.
3. It means a lot when you take the time to thank me for my business or a referral.
4. You don’t need to do all that much to be a superhero. Just do exactly what you say you will do.
5. A friendly voice on the other side of the phone means more than you can imagine.
6. Your employees treat me about as well as you treat them.
7. I don’t mind spending the money, as long as I feel I’m getting real value.
8. My life is really stressful. If you can reduce that stress, you become immensely valuable to me.
9. I want to tell you what would make this relationship better for me. Why don’t you ever ask me?
10. I don’t understand a lot of the messages you send me. Can you make them clearer?
11. My life is very complicated. If you make it easy for me to just buy a simple all-in-one package that I can use without learning anything, I’ll take it and be grateful. (I’ll even pay a premium for it.)
12. I want to trust you, but it’s hard for me to trust anyone.
13. Once you’ve won my trust and loyalty, the truth is you can screw up once in awhile and I will forgive you. If I don’t think you’re taking me for granted, that is.
14.  When I refer my friends and you give them exceptional service, that makes me look and feel smart. I love that.
15.  I spend an awful lot of time being scared to death.
16.  The wealthier I get, the more I like free stuff.
17.  A lot of the time, I secretly feel like a lost little kid. I don’t admit it, but I want to be taken care of.
18.  I’m lousy at admitting I was wrong, but I respect you when you do it.
19.  I like to get little goodies no one else is getting.
20.  I don’t understand how to use your Web site, but I can’t admit that because it would make me feel dumb.
21.  There’s no worse feeling than feeling like I was suckered into trusting you. If I’m screaming at you or one of your employees, that feeling is probably behind it somewhere.
22.  Our relationship isn’t equal and it never will be.
23. I get crazy jealous if I think you love another customer more than you love me.
24.  I don’t have any interest in your excuses. In fact, I usually don’t notice them at all, and if I do, they annoy me.
25.  I find myself endlessly fascinating.
26.  I hate salespeople, but I really like to buy things.
27.  I only like to communicate over the phone/Web/mail and I hate when you try to make me communicate with you over the mail/phone/Web.
28.  I want to buy your product, but I need you to help me justify it to myself.
29.  There’s something in my life I’m afraid of losing. If you can make me feel like you’ve protected it for me, my gratitude will be intense and eternal.
30.  I’ll give you anything you ask if you can help me not feel silly.
31. I want you to do the hard work for me. Even better if I can get all the credit.
32. I’d rather do it the convoluted hard way than learn something new.
33. I’d love to know something about your product that I could use to brag at a dinner party.
34. I have the attention span of a goldfish. Go too long without contacting me and I’ll simply forget you exist.
35. Money is no object when it comes to my obsessions.
36. What you think you’re good at is not what you’re good at. Ask me, and I’ll tell you what you do better than anyone else.
37. I like it when I feel like you’re talking just to me.
38. It infuriates me when you answer the phone while I’m talking with you face-to-face.
39. Embarrassment scares me more than death.
40. I’m lazier than I would ever admit.
41. I’m more selfish than I would ever admit.
42. I’m more vain than I would ever admit.
43. I’m more insecure than I would ever admit.
44. Despite all that, I secretly think I’m a better person than most people. Help me believe that and we’ll be fast friends.
45. I believe I deserve much more than I’m getting.
46. I want to tell you everything you need to know in order to sell to me, but I’m lazy. Make it easy enough and I will. (Especially if you flatter me a little.)
47. I don’t know what I want most of the time. You need to figure it out for me.
48. I mostly daydream about making life better for myself, but I’ll take action to keep from losing what’s mine.
49. I believe that most of what’s wrong in my life is someone else’s fault. Let me keep that cozy illusion and I’ll believe anything you say.
50. It really is all about me.

Straight to your inbox?
Get them when I post them. Subscribe to the free RSS feed – on the top right of this page. Simple.

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

The minibook addresses key issues that anyone working in marketing may face with B2B brands. It’s easy to understand and uses clear examples of the challenges and solutions in a logical order. 

B2B Marketing for Dummies ends with Ten Top Tips for success in B2B marketing:

Be patient. Remember that people in business don’t buy on impulse – they carefully consider purchases and consult multiple stakeholders. 

Consider your Web of Influence. Always create a map of your market to help you make the best B2B marketing decisions. 

Be thoroughly strategic. Establish how your brand distinguishes itself from the rest of the pack with a brand planning process that leaves no question unanswered. 

Be focused. Create a strategic proposition that makes your brand irresistible over the competition. 

Prioritise your market. Use the Web of Influence to pinpoint the decision makers who’ll give you the best return for your marketing investment. 

Be choosy. Don’t waste time and money on marketing placed in the wrong channels. 

Be positively different. Show people their working world in a way they’ve never seen, and they’ll want to know more. 

Have multi-dimensional ideas. Remember that you need to satisfy many different stakeholders, so you need creative ideas that are flexible. 

Make the most of your website. Ensure that your site caters for all of your customers and tracks their activity so you can use that information for constant improvement. 

Tap into social media. Don’t get left behind – use social media networks to influence your markets! 

B2B Marketing for Dummies was produced by IAS b2b Marketing and John Wiley & Sons, publishers of the ‘For Dummies’ guides. Download a copy at http://www.b2bfordummies.com/

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

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.