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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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

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

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

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

Avoid creating clutter

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

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

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

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

Use multiple channels

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

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

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

Be consistent

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

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

Apply judicious measurements

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

There are two categories of metrics:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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 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

These are the criteria that influence and motivate B2B buying decisions. This extract from an ealier post looks at analysing how products, services and processes create Value in relation to each of the Five Factors.

It is a simple approach, but it produces bottom line results: marketers can deliver fact-based messages that go to the heart of what B2B markets are really buying.

Analysing Value

Begin by choosing a product or service and the way in which it is supplied. Then start a review of your selection in relation to the definitions for each Value Factor – as listed a little way below.

This review should include a performance-ranking of 1 to 5, with 1 being ‘poor’ and 5 being ‘exceptional’. By exceptional, I mean being at least equal to your competitors or better than them.

Here’s an example for the first definition under ‘Response’: if you think you beat the competition in listening to how you affect customer’s success, then you score a 5.  But, you need to support your ranking with a credible statement as to why you should score a 5 – as to why you excel… 

To help get the process started, here’s the type of questions you should perhaps be asking in terms of ‘Response’: 

• How do you identify and then meet your customers’ needs?  
• Who manages your communications with customers and what are the results of this communication? 
• In terms of customer expectations, how do you rate yourselves at fixing problems and delivering the outcomes the customer wants? 
• How does your performance in these areas compare with your competition? 

The Five Factors of Value:

1.  Response

• Continual communication with customers: listen to how you affect their success
• Identify and meet changing customer needs
• Speed of problem solving and solution delivery 

2.  Service

• Accessibility: an open and reassuring organisation
• Clear product information and project status
• Pro-active and innovative 

3.  Time

• Competitive lead times
• Dependable
• Consistent delivery format 

4.  Quality

• Consistent products, services and processes
• Meets the brief or specifications: fit-for-purpose
• Achieves the customer’s operational goal 

5.  Price

• Competitive
• Rational
• Structured 

My suggestion is to begin by involving your sales team in the analysis. Then, once you have built a series of rankings and supporting statements, begin broadening the evaluation process to include opinions from other core functions such as finance, technical, production and distribution. 

It’s an enlightening process and is the first step on building an understanding of how to accurately address B2B’s five buying motivators.

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

• Cultivating consistent customers – CCC
• Preventing price pressure – PPP

CCC is about keeping your customers loyal and finding more like them: sales and volumes. PPP deals with building and maintaining margins: delivering the right Value to the right people. 

Are we asking the right questions?

Data, analytics and metrics are the components for assessing marketing performance. But, if you ask the wrong questions, then the answers don’t matter. If CCC & PPP really are the two objectives in B2B marketing, then performance isn’t something that can be determined internally:

The market rates your performance in terms of what it gives you – volumes, margins and loyalty.

And if you accept that, then perhaps marketers should be examining the answers to questions like these:

• Is the Value your company delivers clearly communicated to all elements of the market – is there a consistent reflection of the brand and what it represents? How do you know this?
• Does the entire market-facing team believe the brand messages and act accordingly?
• What are the sales objectives for both CCC and PPP? What info do you have about targets, timeframes and ambitions relating to each set of products and services. How do you know they are being met?
• For existing customers, how are you performing against forecast volumes and margins? How satisfied are customers with your company in terms of contributing to their continued success?
• What are the requirements for lead-generation in terms of volume and conversion? How are leads ranked and how do you measure their origins and the cost of attracting and converting them?
• From the point of first contact with a lead, how well is the ‘conversion chain’ working? Who monitors progress and performance in the chain?
• What’s the ROI from marketing? In some ways, this is the simplest question of them all. It’s the combined and measured impact that all of the above are having on CCC and PPP.  

Measure outcomes: don’t confuse activity with achievement

Producing and placing an ad is not an outcome. The response generated by that ad isn’t even an outcome. The impact that the response has on CCC & PPP is an outcome. So, measure that.

Developing a new product is not an outcome. Launching the product is not an outcome. The product’s impact on CCC & PPP is an outcome. So, measure that.

And so it goes on: the process of linking marketing activities to outcomes and then measuring. Because Outcomes are the Differentiators – how you contribute to customers’ success is what differentiates you in the market.

A gentle warning: be careful what you measure

Measuring performance in terms of CCC and PPP is perhaps not as straightforward as it looks: it’s easy enough to define what you need to measure but it can be hard to put the rulers in place. It can be even harder to keep them there.

What happens if the results from measuring B2B marketing-performance demonstrate shortcomings within a company? Who is responsible for change?

Measure with muscle

If you do measure, do it for a purpose. It’s important to understand how shortcomings will be addressed and then re-measured to assess the impact of improvements. This can be CEO territory in terms of motivating and monitoring the necessary changes.

Presenting marketing measurements can be a tricky task. Results can be skated over: ‘Product development a problem? Surely not?’ ‘TQM forever letting us down? Really?’

Top-level support to act upon the results of measurement is essential. If the commitment to act is not there, why bother?

Read more on measurement:

Leveraging B2B’s buying motivators - how to analyse the influence of ‘Value’

So what is Value? - the five buying motivators in B2B

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

All marketers understand the need for getting the right messages to the right people. What’s not so straightforward is defining the messages and who should be getting them.

Marketers need to be looking at what their market is buying, because B2B marketing is not about selling, it’s about buying.

An incisive approach to defining relevant and motivating messages is to identify how B2B products, services and processes contribute to customers’ success. As marketers wishing to understand buying motivators, we need to look at what is being bought, how it affects customers’ success, and who is buying it: the What-How-Who of Buying.  

What motivates buying in B2B? Fear?

A lot has been written about how fear is a key buying motivator in B2B – fear of not making the right choices and the subsequent consequences for those involved in the buying decision. The old adage that it’s safe to buy IBM is often trotted out to support the argument that, in B2B, fear is the key. And this is further supported by the idea that minimising fear by minimising risk is a key element in successful B2B marketing.

Surely, this can’t be true in the age of the information superhighway, where customers and user-groups are swapping experiences and opinions on the likes of LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter? Given all the information that is available about B2B companies and their products and services, I’d agree that confusion may be present in the buying process, but I’m finding it hard to accept that fear is still a factor.

No. Fear does not motivate B2B buying – Value does.

Communicating the Value produced by products, services and processes is a sure-fire way to differentiate a B2B company from its competitors. It’s also a guaranteed way to cut through confusion in a rational way that will motivate the market to listen and to buy. 

In B2B, Value comprises Five Factors: Response, Service, Time, Quality and Price. These are the criteria that influence and motivate B2B buying decisions. In order for marketers to address these criteria – to start ‘talking’ to the motivators – we need to analyse how products, services and processes deliver Value in relation to each of the Factors.

How to start analysing Value

Begin by choosing a product or service and the way in which it is supplied. Then start a review of your selection in terms of the definitions for each Value Factor, as listed a little way below.

This review should include a performance-ranking of 1 to 5, with 1 being ‘poor’ and 5 being ‘exceptional’. By exceptional, I mean being at least equal to your competitors or better than them. 

Here’s an example for ‘Response’: if you think you’re better than the competition in listening to how you affect customer’s success, then you score a 5. 

But: you need to support your ranking with an honest statement as to why you should score a 5… To help get the process started, here’s the type of questions you should perhaps be asking around ‘Response’:

• How do you identify and then meet your customers’ needs?
• Who manages your communications with customers and what are the results of this communication?
• In terms of customer expectations, how do you rate yourselves at fixing problems and delivering the outcomes the customer wants? 
• How does your performance in these areas compare with your competition?

The Five Factors of Value:

1.  Response

• Continual communication with customers: listen to how you affect their success
• Identify and meet changing customer needs
• Speed of problem solving and solution delivery

 2.  Service

• Accessibility: an open and reassuring organisation
• Clear product information and project status
• Pro-active and innovative

 3.  Time

• Competitive lead times
• Dependable
• Consistent delivery format

 4.  Quality

• Consistent products, services and processes
• Meets the brief or specifications: fit-for-purpose
• Achieves the customer’s operational goal

 5.  Price

• Competitive
• Rational
• Structured

My suggestion is to begin by involving senior sales people in the analysis. Then, once you have built a series of rankings and supporting statements, begin broadening the process by canvassing opinions from other core functions such as finance, technical, production and distribution. 

It is a simple approach, but it produces bottom line results: marketers can deliver fact-based messages that go to the heart of what B2B markets are really buying.

It’s also an enlightening process and is the first step on building an understanding of how to produce marketing messages that constantly address B2B’s five buying motivators.

The results will also start to generate guidelines as to the audiences that should be getting these messages.

Read more about Value in B2B marketing:

How Value protects margins      Marketing is not about selling, it’s about buying

Outcomes make the difference      The commercial power of brands in B2B

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

Deon Cilliers at SAP South Africa; Bruce Bond-Myatt at SAS Institute; Bridgette Ward at AdvanceNet; and Julian Diaz & Jon Jacobson at Global Vision.

Several years ago, a little piece I wrote about CRM was kindly posted on themarketingsite.com. At the time, CRM solutions were a seriously big buzz in SA. I seem to recall that the (slightly self-styled?) CRM gurus, Peppers & Rogers, visited the country to wave the technology’s flag. 

Loadsamoney certainly got spent and a little of it even came my way in the form of some consulting work with Siebel’s local sale team. That small project was about how companies can systematically develop an understanding of the Value they produce for their customers – and then go on to use CRM technology to increase the efficiencies and effectiveness of customer interactions. 

I think the project had some lasting benefit for those involved: a few years later, one of the team saw me again and re-introduced himself, favourably quoting ‘PQRS&T’ – the mantra of Value. 

Here’s some snippets from that old article: 

“We are all somebody’s customer. And from this standpoint, we know that Customers Represent Money – it comes out of your pocket and goes into theirs. And here’s the big failing of CRM in SA: it takes no account of what you value.”  

“As the customer, you decide what something is worth, and you decide how much of it you want to buy. You create the value. But the way many CRM-users talk, you’d think they created the value. It’s business as usual and Customers Rarely Matter. You’re there to be harvested and exploited in the most time-efficient and cost-effective manner.”

Customers Rarely Matter.

I’m afraid this still rings true. We still hear the same complaints about SA’s low levels of service. Chris Moerdyk wrote about these woes just a few weeks ago. But he also stressed the positive side: because we’re coming off such a low base, there is a great deal of commercial opportunity that’s longing to be addressed.

It’s certainly a truism that if you work at providing customers with what they value, then the profits will follow. And, in this respect, B2B is no different than B2C.

So what’s changed in CRM? 

I asked SAP, GlobalVision, AdvanceNet and SAS Institute for their views on CRM in 2009. In particular, I wanted to find out if CRM had migrated from a predominantly B2C focus and how it was being used within B2B marketing. 

Some common themes emerged from talking to these solution providers: 

• B2B certainly can benefit from CRM
• CRM is still used predominantly within B2C, primarily for Sales Force Automation (SFA)
• Even within B2C, there is a lack of integration between SFA and the marketing function 

Go for small wins. Take it step-by-step. 

Deon Cilliers, CRM Solution Manager at SAP South Africa thinks B2B companies should, “Target specific goals by looking at areas within their marketing where there are challenges and address these on a step-by-step basis. Go for small wins and build from there.” 

Even though he acknowledges that a strength of SAP CRM is the facility to integrate with, for example, ERP solutions, he cautions against: “Going straight for big solutions that require large-scale integration across multiple disciplines.” As examples of achieving small-wins, he cites: improving customer-data quality; scheduling and monitoring selected campaigns; and measuring the response to them. 

For me, this sounds like just the right approach: set some specific objectives and be clear about the outcomes that are required. For example, don’t attempt to improve all the data related to the market – select some specific components and begin with these.   

Analytical vs operational. 

For Bruce Bond-Myatt, Solutions Architect, SAS Institute, an analytical approach is key to migrating CRM into B2B: “Who you are communicating with and what you are saying to them would have to be the starting point.” 

Now this is music to my ears, and I’m sure Bruce would agree that ‘why’ you are saying it should get added to the list. 

Bruce says that for some time he has been thinking about the function of CRM within B2B and the need to develop: “An holistic approach to marketing in which CRM technology plays a ‘standardising’ role.” 

He sees real advantages in introducing processes into marketing communications that allow measurement and response in a controlled manner. “SAS technology already enables this within the B2C environment, albeit principally for the sales function. Perhaps what is needed is more encouragement about how these practices can be more aligned to meeting the needs of marketing.” 

Once again, my reaction to this is that he is right on the money. Given the fact that B2B marketing must respond to a diversity of market reflections, a systematic approach to managing communications makes real sense. 

B2B CRM? Doing it already… 

Bridgette Ward, Sales Manager at AdvanceNet says that they are predominantly focused on B2B – rather than B2C, and that their approach to CRM is different to that of other vendors: “We see our work in CRM as being more about business process management – as a strategic, competitive weapon as opposed to a tool. CRM is not software, it’s strategy.” 

I like it. Bridgette says that CRM is no longer a software solution but is much more concerned with competitor-strategy and communicating brand messages. “Internally, we use our solutions to the full, so we have several years’ first-hand experience in maximising its potential.” 

This certainly rings true. Last year, a colleague enthused about the way visiting customers are treated at AdvanceNet’s Jo’burg offices and rated it as the most personal and professional ‘reception’ he’s experienced. 

Bridgette says that, “B2B clients are applying the technology to influence their end-users and manage brand communications throughout the sales channel. The solution is also used to incentivise and motivate the channel in order to support and increase their own sales. These clients consider it important to assist their customers as much as they can with ‘centralised’, cohesive marketing.” 

Last. But certainly not least. 

We just kept missing one another: Jon Jacobson and Julian Diaz of Global Vision did their best to fit in with the questions I wanted quickly answered, and here is Jon’s e-mailed summary: 

“Based on the following CRM breakdown of the 3 main pillars from a technology perspective being: Sales Force Automation, Marketing Automation and Customer Service & Support – then the B2B aspects are typically delivered through the Sales Force Automation modules. 

This is how financial services companies manage their agent channel or how an FMCG business manages their distribution channel. 

Marketing automation normally manages the consumer related communication aspects and allows the business to build a consumer profile for ongoing marketing efforts which eventually is used to drive “Just-In-Time” marketing initiatives. 

Customer service and support is about managing: contact centre agents; help desk; support desks; and Case Management”.

Modern CRM. Come Read More…

This November’s issue of the UK’s ‘B2B Marketing’ magazine is due to feature an examination of where we’re at with CRM. Critical Reading Matter?  

Once again, my thanks to all of you who helped out on this blogpost.

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

1. What are customers buying?
2. How does buying contribute to their success?
3. Who is buying?

These are the must-knows that determine tactics in B2B marketing. Cultivating consistent customers and preventing price pressure – CCC & PPP - provide the strategic direction, but What-How-Who drives implementation.

1. WHAT are customers buying?

Customers are buying outcomes. They are buying outcomes that make a positive contribution to the continued success of their business.

All too often, the marketing focus gets shifted from buying to selling. ‘We sell every variety of nuts and bolts.’

Ok. So, presumably it works like this: There is one gigantic pile of all sorts of nuts, and another huge pile of different bolts. Customers come and get all the nuts they need and then find the matching bolts. Right?

Maybe not. 

In terms of customers ensuring a positive contribution to the continued success of their business, it’s fair to say they are also buying:

• Matched and packaged nuts and bolts
• Adequate stockholding
• Structured discounts
• Nationwide deliveries
• Technical advice and customer training
• Accounting services, credit facilities, stock monitoring
• Warranties

Already it’s clear that they’re buying a lot more than more than just nuts and bolts.

2. HOW does buying contribute to their success?

To answer this question, marketers need to know how their products and services are being used by customers:

‘If these bolts fail, the wings fall off…’ ‘If you don’t have any of these nuts and bolts, we can’t put the wings on. This means we can’t sell the planes…’

Pretty important bolts. Pretty important contribution, too, if they never break, are always in stock, if technicians are expertly trained how to fit and test them, if they are guaranteed to consistently conform to certain specifications, if you can supply them worldwide and track their usage and life-cycle.

Discovering how the contribution is made highlights the Value created within the customer’s business.

Listen up

Listening to customers is the fastest, simplest way to discover this. Meet them, ask them questions about how you are creating Value in their business. A sales team can provide a lot of insight here because they should understand each customer’s business. But marketing needs to develop its own perspective.

Marketing needs this perspective to see the customer in the context of the market.

3. WHO is buying?

The market can exert powerful influences on buying decisions. In B2B, although customers might be buying outcomes, market reflections have to be considered.

The market is not just made up of customers. It may include distributors, overall solution-providers, specialist consultants and support providers. In addition, there may be user-groups, analysts, the media, statutory regulators and industry associations.

Who is buying? The answers to this question are so important because they pinpoint the targets for marketing communications – they provide that all-important focus. Gotta be talking to the right people.

Bringing it all together

Understanding the ‘What’ and the ‘How’ provides crystal clear guidelines for the content and format of these communications.

‘Who’ ensures that marketing is addressing the right audiences within the customer and within the market.

And this means that marketing can maximise the impact of its communications in terms of its two objectives: cultivate consistent customers and prevent price pressure.

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