A Few Gold Nuggets from BtoB's NetMarketing Breakfast(5/14) – Interactive Marketing

How do you get busy marketers in a room for 2 hours to discuss some of their interactive marketing practices? One way is to offer them breakfast, exposure to several leading marketing organizations and industry experts, and introduction to a couple of digital marketing vendors. BtoB did just that this morning in Waltham, MA. Panelists included John Smits, Global Dir. Dbse. Mktg. and Segmentation, EMC; Leigh Day, Sr. Dir. Corp. Comm, Red Hat; and Paul Gillin of Paul Gillin Communications. Vendors included Brightcove and ZoomInfo.

Here are a couple of key takeaways from the meeting:

How do you avoid "campaign collisions" [EMC insight]

• Problem: multiple BUs and regions were sending communications to the same individuals (e.g., CIOs) about different EMC events on the same day
• Solution: "Deliver the most appropriate information, to the most relevant audience via the user's medium of choice" [sounds easy, no?]
  - "Centralized Demand Center" created a couple of years ago --> a single global database
  - Segmentation strategy used to profile individuals and their needs, leveraging intrinsic and extrinsic information from disparate sources to best understand who should be targeted for which go-to-market(GTM) activities
  - "Plan, calendar and govern". . . only give folks access to prospects/customers that meet specific criteria, thereby improving the quality of interaction of EMC with specific individuals as part of GTM activities
• Results: For a specific launch activity (email) for one of their platforms, they achieved a >20% open rate and <0.05%>
• Ongoing challenges. . ."How do you "control" prospect interactions across all BUs and regions?": Less about control, more about leveraging common interests; Involve users in decision-marketing processes; Offer value for use of corporate database (e.g., access to valuable infrastructure, higher quality contact information) [leverage Mktg. Shared Services as another part of this execution strategy]

Some key success factors for your digital marketing strategy

• Red Hat
  - news blog with an RSS feed, headlines on Twitter
  - offer high quality content and value for customers: Red Hat KnowledgeBase to provide relevant and valuable info. to customers; "Carve Out Costs with Red Hat" campaign- an online resource site to help customers deal with the downturn
  - Leverage multiple types of technology to reach different audiences (e.g., video, podcast, whitepapers); yet content must be written differently for each medium ("don't just webify a white paper") [earlier Blog on video]
• Paul Gillen
  - "must lead with your business objective, not the latest social media tool"
  - To optimize participation in a community you need to identify and leverage peoples' interests and passion for participation and collaboration
  - The real action now is branded and special interest communities. For example, "Opinion Panelists" by Hilton (private panel): direct feedback from their best (~300) customers. . . virtually replaced focus groups for Hilton. . .save $, immediate feedback, etc. . . get loyalty points for participation
• EMC: Leverage social media to broaden the impact and value of other marketing activities: EMC World. . "we've started marketing this in-person event months before its start date– e.g., getting people online to engage and discuss key topics and then gather these folks together when in-person at the event

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Measurement Maketh Marketing?

A number of recent conversations with advertising people have featured their defending of campaigns designed to "raise awareness" of a product/service. Of course, with the exception of the impulse purchase, it is probably important that a potential customer has some awareness of your offering, but I've always been concerned that awareness carries no inherent implication of action.

If your marketing solely raises awareness of your existence, it's more than likely raising an equal awareness of your category and will result in a general sales spike for you and your competitors. Unless your marketing prompts awareness coupled with genuine interest and, I would argue, a degree of real desire to purchase, then there is no guarantee that your sales spike will be better than your competitors.

In an age of metrics, building awareness has the advantage of being a goal that is reasonably convincingly measurable in terms of unprompted customer recall (though prompted recall still seems totally disingenuous to me). But to do so is to elevate measurement above effectiveness as your marketing goal. It's the difference between being Miss/Mr Congeniality and the one that everyone wants to date.

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The 4 C's Of Social Objects.

What the world definitively does not need now is yet another blogpost about social objects. I just want to remind you that regardless of what social media agencies might say, the social does not have to be about socialising in the sense of directly interacting or indulging in the dreaded conversation.

Consider that most quoted of social objects the iPod. It fulfils 4 C's of social media, but conversation is the last of them because it's specifically designed to isolate you from conversations. Remember that when you think of social objects in respect of your own marketing efforts.


Copying

Talking is just one way that we communicate. As Mark continues to tell us, ideas spread predominantly via copying. We see something that we like and we adopt it ourselves. We don't have to discuss it with the previous user. The "conversation" has happened anyway.

Confirmation

Confirmation follows from copying. Seeing the social uptake of something we've bought serves to confirm to us that we made a good choice. Nobody needs to tell us that, but every time we see it, we feel better about our decision and the product/service. A lot of marketing (think car advertising) works on that post-purchase reinforcement.

Communality

We see fellow users and delight in the realisation that not only did we make the right choice, but that the act of doing so ordained us with membership of a community of like-minded, savvy people. Our people, but not necessarily people with whom we have to have a conversation. Kathy Sierra summed it up perfectly when she wrote of the nod.

Conversation

And finally there is conversation. But it's not conversation about the product/service. Most of the time (as I wrote before) we don't want that. However, we enjoy conversations that spring from the preceding C's. Those are the conversations you want to inspire or simply faciliate amongst your users and prospects.

Interruptive conversations are much more interruptive than they are conversational and are the result of imposing an old communication model or a new communciation world. Avoid them and your product's social life will be a much richer and happier one.

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Leveraging Video for B2B Digital Marketing

B2B marketers have not been well known for their advertising creativity and innovation in the past 10-15 years. Yes, there are a few great examples; especially from the multi-billion dollar companies that have large advertising budgets and can afford those large agencies. However, this is certainly one area that we lag behind our consumer marketing counterparts. After all, we're marketing to engineers, software developers, CIOs, CTOs and other "left brain" people. Think "logical", "sequential", "rational" and "analytical". They won't be fooled by our flashy marketing tactics and colorful images. Right?

Well, maybe this is another area that we need to rethink as we shift into the age of digital marketing. What are some key drivers of this shift?

• The cost to create video and more advanced graphics has dropped considerably.
• We've learned that video and other graphical communication methods can be powerful in communicating complex products and solutions as well as their application to our customers' business needs. (sounds like a B2B tech environment to me)
• New technologies enable us to increase the interactivity of video, such as allowing video to respond to users' specific needs.
• In some cases use of a less professional look is actually deemed more valuable since it simplifies the messaging, increases your credibility and differentiates you from other companies.
• We can better measure the performance of digital marketing, thereby enabling us to improve our activities and assets "on the fly" as well as tracking ROI.

In fact anything that involves picture/video/animations vs. an avalanche of text is usually more valued as it’s easier to communicate. We can provide more bite-sized information enabling our cusotmers to absorb information “on the go”, it simplifies the message and it improves communication and comprehension. (e.g., doesn’t depend on pure text which quite often results in use of unfamiliar acronyms) But, don't forget all that you've learned in business school and in your years of marketing; and just as important, ensure that your digital marketing experts are privy to these learnings. (e.g., identify and understand your target segments, provide relevant and valuable content, identify key success factors, metrics and targets, etc.)

Here are a few examples that you may find of interest.

• Eloqua's interactive video: Some quick stats: “Starters”(those who answer the first question) spend an average of 3 min. 45 seconds interacting with the conversation; those who become leads reach up to 6 min.; 23% of “starters” reach the longest path. (Produced by Jellyvision)
• American Airlines: Capture the FlagshipSM Experience. Yes, it's more of a B-to-C example, but a great example of leveraging graphics to communicate an experience. Check out the First Class section.
• Google Docs in Plain English: A simple presentation of how to use Google Docs to create and share online documents, spreadsheets and presentations. Over 1.6 million views on YouTube.
• CRM Online Workbook created by IDC's Go-to-Market Services team for SAP: Designed to help companies evaluate and improve effectiveness of customer life cycle processes across sales, marketing and services (demand generation) Use of independent parties, such as industry analysts and end user interviews helped build credibility.

Have you seen some examples either by your company or others? Feel free to provide links in the comments area below.

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A Nonsense Of Customer Service Urgency.

We confirm receipt of your letter addressed to the Managing Director who has referred the matter for our urgent attention.

A member of our customer service team will get back to you within ten working days.

Can you spot the dissonance between the words and the promised action? It's not what you say that counts, it's what you do.

The speed of resolution isn't really that important either. After all, some problems are more complex than others. Thoroughness is good, but applying an arbitrary ten day response is not only daft, it's impersonal.

Will I be happy in ten days time. Who knows? Am I happy that it will take ten days before I get a clue of what they're thinking of doing? What do you think? The speed that matters is the speed with which you inform the customer what you're doing and not merely that you're doing something.

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Your Prospect Is Always Right.

Good marketing is about helping the customer, informing the customer and crucially about not frustrating the customer.

My friend Mark McGuinness has a new angle on this. We're used to companies buying up multiple versions of url in order to capture any browser search, but I've not seen it done on Twitter. Mark realises that people like me might mis-spell his name so he's anticipated that and ensured that when I made that mistake, I was still just one click away from where I wanted to be.

He could have opted for an easily spelled pseudonym, but this is better. Not only does he "own" his name (which in itself makes it easier for users to find him), he shows that he's thinking about what they want before they even get to him. Attention to detail costs very little and returns a lot.

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Escape From Cubicle Nation.

Pam Slim and I met in a non-descript corridor in the Austin Convention Center about six weeks ago. We'd known each other for some years. She was an early commenter on this blog and we'd spoken via phone and email on a frequent basis, but we'd never met. The fact that we immediately started chatting as if we'd seen each other yesterday speaks volumes to me and made me think.

Because if marketing is all about making people like your product/service so much that they want to hang out with it, wouldn't it be useful to ask oneself the question "What makes me like somebody?". Not with the aim of anthropomorphising your offering along the lines of the ghastly Microsoft Clippy, but to identify the traits that appeal on a human level.

For me, some that spring to mind are common sense, energy, intelligence, communication, transparency, realism, passion and fun. Pam has all these in abundance which is why I like her and which is why I think you'll like her book that came out yesterday. When the time comes that you choose or are forced to go it alone, you should have it (and her) by your side.

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