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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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

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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

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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.

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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/

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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

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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

In the rush for instant marketing gratification, don’t trample the rules!

By Tim Hazlehurst
IAS b2b Marketing

Now that the B2B marketing chips are down, it is easy for marketers to be drawn into tempting but subjective routes that are offering sales salvation when the board is desperate for results.

A lot of people (Bob Lauterborn, Jack Trout and Michael Treacy etc.) spent a lot of time researching, identifying and highlighting certain fundamental rules. Rules about the marketing process. Rules that can be accelerated but not ignored! 

Technological and tactical advances can lead you astray

I’ve seen communication tactics evolve from the commercial traveller with the Bell and Howell presentation, through video and direct mail, to the wonders of the digital age. All of them have created tremendous opportunities and made our discipline more sophisticated and enjoyable.

But the rules of engagement are still the same!

So, when you are bombarded with better tactical solutions from providers (often with vested interest as it’s where they specialize), such as: 

• Demand generation
• Online rather than offline
• e-mail campaigns
• C R M solutions
• Lead Nurturing
• Data Management

… all promising the business uplift you crave, don’t forget the established, unchanging rules!

1. The Rule of Brand Strength

There is a direct correlation between your Brand Strength and your ability to attract and convert enquiries

It may be more efficient now but, through many years’ measurement and experimentation, we have proven irrefutably the correlation between attraction and conversion and your brand strength.

2. The Rule of Relevance

In the early 80s I wrote a paper called “The Face in the Crowd”. We had proved that segmented direct marketing produced 3x more response than non-segmented. Since then, every technological development has enhanced the opportunity/ability to enter into meaningful dialogue with your clients and prospects to enhance your brand strength.

And when you appreciate that “Your Brand is the Sum of your Contact” you understand why planning and integrating ALL your contact is crucial for maximising your relationship building.

3. The Rule of the Relationship Timeline

The lure of leads can drive logic out of the process. The process is to coax prospects along a relationship timeline which can be accelerated but not circumnavigated.

Of course the timeline operates differently for repetitive, comparatively low cost specifications and purchases, to infrequent capital purchases, but it operates nevertheless.

I always asked prospective clients’ Sales Directors how long their company’s timeline was and the average answer was 1-2 years… “So why do you send your sales people to call on a prospect whom you have never been in contact with before and why are you disappointed when they don’t sell!” would be my follow up remark – which won me begrudging respect more than it did friends!

4. The Rule of the Sales & Marketing Disconnect

It always exists. Sometimes to the complete detriment of the Relationship Timeline. Sometimes below the surface. But an Integrated Contact Strategy understood and enthused about by all the brand’s touchpoints is the solution to minimising this disconnect.

Make sure the CEO champions this.

5. The Rule of Process Efficiency

The secret of optimum lead conversion/market share gain/business growth (call it what you will) is about minimising the timeline. This is where picking the right tactical mixes to suit individual audiences (based on constant evaluation of individual’s contact preferences and dialogue mix historic performance) is crucial.

But beware going to a Bow and Arrow maker and asking them what weapons you should use for your next attack!

6. The Rule of Creativity

Nothing minimises the Timeline more than stunning, relevant and engaging creativity. Using Creativity reasoned out in accordance with these 6 rules of B2B Marketing delivers the maximum results.

And a thought on the current environment: it would be easy for the under-pressure Marketing Director to opt for lower-cost lead generation solutions but the sobering fact is that buyers and specifiers are craving more sincere, genuine relationships, in addition to lower cost and higher value.

Who can blame them? Their needs are as great as yours.

Stick to the rules to succeed (or survive). 80% won’t. But then, as a rule, only 20% truly succeed anytime.

Read the original article at B2B Marketing Magazine Online

More on B2B fundamentals:

The Man in the Chair – well worth watching on YouTube      Getting real in B2B – what do you represent?

The WOMsta Monsta – Social Media and B2B     

In B2B, outcomes are the differentiators - outcomes make the difference

Cultivate consistent customers, prevent price pressure - CCC & PPP: the two objectives of B2B marketing

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