Tag Archives: #LinkedIn

June 19, 2015 · 2:00 pm

Making the Short List: Get into the B2B Game or Go Home

Struggling to make ends meet as a young teacher, I pursued a part-time job as a waiter at a popular local restaurant, where I was told there were no positions available. I completed an employment application…just in case…and handed it to the restaurant manager, who thanked me, and placed my application on top of a very tall stack of papers on his desk.

As I left his office, I asked the manager about my chances of getting a waiter’s job there. “You see this big pile of applications?” he chuckled.

Not satisfied with his answer, I asked, “When a waiter position becomes available, how will you select which candidates to interview?”

The manager replied, “That’s easy. I just pick 3 applications from the top of my pile.”

So I made him an offer. “I really need this job. I’ll come back here every few days to complete a new application, so that mine stays at the top of your pile. Or you can hire me as a busboy right now, and I’ll clear tables and wash dishes for as long as it’s necessary, if you promise to give me the first waiter position that becomes available.”

I served as a busboy for two months before I earned a job as a waiter, which helped to pay my bills. More importantly, the experience provided some valuable insights about “making the short list” that continue to have direct application to our B2B marketing business.

“Making the short list” in B2B marketing means that your firm has been chosen by a prospective client as a candidate for an assignment. At least 3 candidates, and as many as 5 or 6, are typically included on a potential client’s short list.

For a B2B firm, making the short list is always a priority, and here’s what my restaurant experience taught me on the subject:

Provide Good Reasons to be on the Short List

The restaurant manager had a few good reasons to put me on his short list. He knew I was motivated, and different from those applicants who were willing to participate in his selection process.  More importantly, I positioned myself as a safe choice by giving him an opportunity to evaluate my potential as a waiter, based on my actual performance as a busboy.

Your B2B firm must find meaningful ways to differentiate itself and showcase tangible assets. Claiming your firm “has 80 years of combined professional experience,” for example, is not a strong value proposition. Having a blue chip client explain, in a short video, her selection criteria and experience with your firm, is far more likely to earn you a spot on a prospect’s short list. Third-party validation also addresses career risk: the prospect’s fear that hiring the wrong outside resource will affect their own reputation, bonus or employment status.

There are many ways to differentiate yourself in a competitive marketplace, but most often they require some original thought, clever packaging and elbow grease.

Put Your Firm into a Position to Make the Short List

Unlike my tenure as a busboy, you won’t be able to demonstrate value directly to a potential client in advance of an actual engagement. But for starters, your B2B firm must maintain a consistent presence on all the radar screens that your prospects monitor. “Fist-call capability” is how well your firm puts itself in a position to be noticed by target audiences, and it’s the key factor affecting your chances of making the short list.

What’s surprising in our current B2B world – where at least 70% of the short list selection process in made online, in advance of any direct contact – is that so many B2B firms have ineffective or outdated websites; provide no catalysts to drive traffic to their website; generate no content to validate their intellectual capital; and fail to properly leverage social media tools, such as LinkedIn, that prospective clients use to discover candidates for their short list.

Many B2B firms believe that simply doing great work for existing clients will drive all the referrals and word-of-mouth recommendations necessary to put them on short lists, or allow them to avoid having to compete at all.  Their lunch is often eaten by competitors who not only do great work for clients, but also don’t rely on others to put them on the short list.

Increase Your Odds of Making the Short List over the Long Haul

The most difficult aspect of marketing for B2B firms involves transparency: never knowing when your prospects are ready to buy. I was prepared to re-apply for the restaurant’s waiter position every week if necessary; but that level of persistence is more likely to eliminate a B2B firm from short list consideration. A more sophisticated, strategic, nuanced approach is required.

To drive consistent top-of-mind awareness with target audiences, you’ll need to do far more than simply show up all the right radar screens. Over the long haul, your B2B firm must communicate directly, consistently and effectively with its clients, prospects, referral sources and employees.  This is an easy concept to understand, but it’s the exception rather than the rule in B2B marketing. We are more likely to see B2B firms with great thought leadership that’s not appreciated by their target audiences, for lack of an effective CRM system; B2B firms that religiously push out canned newsletters and curated content that diminishes their brand stature; and B2B firms that fail to appreciate how their employees can serve as either brand ambassadors or terrorists.

There’s a profoundly simple, Yogi Berra-esque message here: you first need to get into the game, if you’re hoping to win it. In a business world increasingly driven by RFPs and RFIs, and where gaining and maintaining visibility with decision-makers is essential, B2B firms need to add “Short List Participation Rate” as a key performance indicator for their marketing investment.

Leave a comment

Filed under B2B Marketing, Marketing Strategy

Tagged as , , , , ,

June 11, 2015 · 5:01 pm

Checklist Marketing: Too Many Shoes in Your Suitcase?

Many companies view marketing simply as a checklist of items they believe to be essential: Website…check. White Paper…check. LinkedIn and Twitter Accounts…check / check. Client Newsletter…check. Trade Show…check. Blog…check. Publicity…check.

But marketing strategy is not akin to packing for a trip. “Shoes” may be on your checklist of items to put into your suitcase, but depending on your destination and itinerary, you may need dress oxfords, high heels, running shoes, slippers, golf shoes, sandals or hiking boots. Or perhaps you only need the shoes on your feet.

Marketers often throw far too many shoes into their suitcase, either because they see competitors wearing them, or they wish to avoid explaining why their company lacks the trendiest footwear.

Unfortunately, it’s this collection of shoes with no real reason to be in the company’s suitcase that causes the greatest problem for the marketing function, in terms of justification of related costs and contribution to enterprise goals.

To wean our B2B clients off their shoe fetish, we apply a “Marketing Diagnostic” planning tool, consisting of 10 simple questions. Here are the first two questions it asks:

1. Does your firm have a written marketing plan?

Although it’s the most essential marketing task, most firms do not have a written plan. A marketing plan need not be lengthy, take months to prepare, or require the services of McKinsey & Co. Effective plans can be developed in a few whiteboard sessions, and be contained in a 2 – 3 page document that address these key questions:

  • What is our value proposition and competitive advantage?
  • What is our target market and who are the decision-makers?
  • What specific business goals / benchmarks are we seeking to accomplish?
  • What tactics will we use to engage with and nurture our target audience(s)?
  • What budgets, timeframes and responsibilities will we assign to those tactics?
  • How and how often will we measure results and make course corrections?

The two most important aspects of a marketing plan are, first, that it ensures organizational consensus regarding the firm’s strategic purpose, where it wants to go, and how it intends to get there.  Secondly, it provides accountability for results. In many cases, it’s that fear of accountability that discourages firms from creating a marketing plan.

2. Do all of your marketing tactics have measurable goals linked to business outcomes?

This diagnostic question involves the most difficult aspect of marketing: demonstrating tangible outcomes that justify the time and expense invested in marketing tactics. The classic complaints against marketing sound like this: “We’ve attended the XYZ conference for 3 years, and it hasn’t generated any new clients.” Or “We were mentioned in the Wall Street Journal and Forbes, and no one has contacted us based on that exposure.”

However, when you examine those marketing results-related complaints more closely, you’re likely to discover that (in the case of conferences) the firm failed to build an integrated strategy to communicate properly both in advance of and following the event, and did not leverage the conference-related content to reach a broader audience. And in the case of publicity, the firm likely generated the wrong type of media exposure (regardless of where it appeared), or simply hung the coverage on their website like a hunting trophy, instead of using it proactively to engage with their target audiences.

This second diagnostic question, regarding the practical benefit of marketing activity, is actually an integral part of the marketing plan development process. Every tactic that’s included in your marketing plan requires its own response to “How will we measure results?” Some tactics can be measured in terms of direct business outcomes, such as lead generation. But tactics that are unlikely to generate direct results, such as media exposure, will require a plan that combines related tactics. For example, to benefit from your published bylined article in a trade publication, your strategy might include sending a reprint of that piece (along with a non self-serving cover note) to targeted audiences, as a means to generate the awareness and conversations that precede transactions.

Both Do-It-Yourself marketers and professional marketers alike rationalize their activity on a tactical basis (number of white paper downloads, website traffic, “Likes” and “Re-Tweets,” etc.), and fail to either design or connect the marketing dots in a manner that’s likely to drive meaningful business results. This disconnect is the #1 reason why marketing is held in such low regard, compared with other professional disciplines.

If you’d like a complete copy of our 10 question “Marketing Diagnostic” planning tool for B2B firms, just shoot me an email through LinkedIn, or to gordon at andrewselikoff dot com. It includes a self-scoring system, allowing you to know exactly how you stack up, marketing-wise.

1 Comment

Filed under Marketing Strategy

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

May 7, 2015 · 12:36 pm

Investment-Related Publicity: How Clueless is Your Fund?

According to BNY Mellon’s most recent survey of Investor Relations (IR) practices worldwide, fewer than half of the nearly 700 respondents are using media relations to support their IR goals. More significantly, only 6% of that group included media exposure as a top IR goal.

Whether its reluctance to proactively pursue publicity (also called “earned media”) is based on cost, control, or misunderstanding of the function, the investment industry is failing to take advantage of one of the most powerful means to build investor awareness, third-party endorsement, and assets under management.

Here are some thoughts on how your fund can effectively leverage publicity:

More Publicity is Not Better: The term “media mentions” is broadly used by the investment industry to describe publicity, which implies that the sheer volume of exposure is beneficial. Even if your fund generates piles of press clippings, however, there are too many distractions within print, broadcast, and digital media channels to ensure that target audiences will ever notice, or be influenced by, any of those mentions. A media relations strategy driven by volume rather than substance is an expensive, zero-sum game.

Not All Publicity is Created Equal:  High-value media exposure puts an exclusive spotlight on your fund’s intellectual capital, underlying values or narrative, and typically allows you to control all or most of the content. On that basis, specific types of publicity — such as a firm profile written by a “friendly” journalist, or a one-on-one interview on relevant topics — are far more valuable than simply being mentioned or quoted (often with a competitor or two) in a news story, or providing a sound bite for CNBC.

Create Credibility Tools: The underlying value of media exposure lies in the inherent third-party endorsement that’s provided by a respected, objective media source. (This is why a Wall Street Journal article is more valuable than paid Wall Street Transcript coverage.)  Your goal is to generate media exposure that serves as ad hoc “credibility tools” for your firm, which can be used in your IR program to assure current investors, prospects and referral sources that you are a safe choice. If your publicity doesn’t make your fund’s marketing materials more believable, then the tactic will never have a connection to asset growth.

Plan Media Solicitations Last: Most media exposure is pursued in a haphazard, opportunistic manner. But to generate publicity that has inherent business value, you need to work backwards: first define what specific behavior or opinion you’re attempting to influence, and then determine what type(s) of media exposure will accomplish your goal. Only at that point are you prepared to solicit specific media opportunities that have the potential to drive measurable business outcomes.

Put Your Media Exposure to Work: Too often, media placements are passively hung on a website or a LinkedIn profile like a hunting trophy. But media exposure itself is never the goal; it’s only a means to an end, and must be put to work. Current and prospective investors, referral sources and other key audiences should be consistently reminded – through your positive media exposure – of who you are, what makes you different, and why they should invest with you. This is the tedious but critical step that most firms skip: maintaining a database of important contacts, and nurturing those relationships with those individuals by leveraging their media exposure to drive awareness and engagement.

Slice & Dice for Incremental ROI: In our digital age, there are online opportunities to gain additional mileage from the publicity you generate. For example, if you’ve scored a bylined article in a respected publication, initiate a discussion on the article’s topic within appropriate LinkedIn user groups, and attach a link to the published piece. Or use Twitter to promote your article’s link, by Tweeting (more than once) a provocative observation or quote from the piece to generate interest.

Funds that use media exposure effectively also understand the greatest limitation of the tactic: that no amount of publicity can compensate for an enterprise that lacks a strong value proposition, a clear sense of purpose, and underlying integrity. Without those cornerstones of brand reputation, publicity’s potential to expose a fund’s shortcomings will always represent a liability.

Leave a comment

Filed under Uncategorized

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

February 13, 2015 · 10:15 am

The Road to Hedge Fund Transparency: Marketing Essentials and Potential Pitfalls

To survive and prosper in a marketplace where transparency and trust are now valued by investors and promoted by regulators, hedge funds will be increasingly required to build a rational and risk-averse approach to external communication. Ideally, those plans will also avoid many of the non-productive tactics that marketers are known to promote.

Here’s a marketing roadmap designed to achieve that objective:

Build your brand strategy first. This internal discipline yields a unified view and clear expression of what your firm seeks to achieve for investors, how it addresses that goal, what makes it uniquely qualified for consideration, and why investors should select and trust your firm. An upfront articulation of the firm’s value proposition serves as the cornerstone of a written marketing plan that should include: tangible business goals, appropriate marketing strategies and tactics, calendarized activity, budgets and accountabilities. Any firm that operates without a formal plan (which should be simple, and not take months to create), eventually becomes a victim of “trust me it’s working” marketing. No plan = lots of wheel-spinning + no tangible business outcomes.

Create a bona fide website, not a proxy. In an online world, websites are the mother ship of market transparency. If a hedge fund is unwilling to provide on its website essential information related to its capabilities and credibility, then the firm is not really serious about market communication. Ideally, your website should express institutional values, explain investment processes, showcase human capital, provide examples of thought leadership and include inherent 3rd party endorsements. It’s not a sales pitch or report card. Your website will generate investor interest by allowing visitors to draw their own conclusions about the firm and its potential to help them achieve their goals.

Leverage your firm’s intellectual capital. Thought leadership – which is overused marketing jargon – is a strategy that leverages knowledge and ideas to engage target audiences. Effective thought leadership can involve a broad range of marketing tactics, but should always be designed to achieve measurable goals; not to simply have people think you’re smart. A hedge fund’s intellectual capital represents its most powerful market differentiator, and can be showcased without giving away any proprietary information or methodologies.

Harness the market reach of LinkedIn. LinkedIn has become an important due diligence tool for investors, intermediaries and the financial press. Most hedge funds understand this, and either provide a very basic firm profile, and / or allow its employees to post their personal profiles on LinkedIn. But to harness LinkedIn’s enormous market reach and professional clientele, hedge funds must establish a buttoned-up institutional persona that’s consistent with the firm’s (bona fide) website; ensure that its employees’ profiles enhance the firm’s brand positioning; and take full advantage of appropriate user groups on LinkedIn to raise brand visibility and display its thought leadership. 

Hold off on Twitter and other social media sites. Twitter can be a great information source, and most hedge funds should use it exclusively for that purpose: to listen rather than to speak. Few hedge funds have the time or social media sophistication to engage safely and consistently on Twitter, and the compliance risks are significant. Facebook is simply not an appropriate channel for hedge funds, and posting comments on independent blogs or online publications will not yield meaningful results.

Manage press exposure selectively. Beneficial media exposure can provide valuable brand credibility. But this is a high-risk tactic because reporters have agendas, can make mistakes, and are not in business to make your firm look good. However, hedge funds should proactively seek media exposure through participation in targeted editorial opportunities – such as bylined articles, OpEd pieces and certain types of feature articles – if they provide total or nearly complete control over what’s published. Although guest spots on financial news channels such as CNBC can fuel the ego, these are high-risk opportunities that most hedge funds should avoid.

Unfortunately, most media coverage yields no marketing value, because it’s simply hung like a hunting trophy on a firm’s website. To benefit from the implied 3rd party endorsement, beneficial coverage must be properly integrated into the firm’s direct communication strategy with clients, prospects and referral sources.

Merchandise conference participation. Investor conferences are high-cost tactics that can be effective for hedge funds. But these events also yield low results because firms fail to properly re-purpose the related thought leadership they’ve produced; which can serve as raw material to influence target audiences that are much larger, and sometimes of higher value, than those in attendance at the conference. Doing all the heavy lifting (in terms of content preparation, travel, time away from office and home), but failing to benefit from that investment – both before or after the event itself – represents a tangible opportunity loss.

Forget advertising for now, and perhaps forever. Regulators have not made it easy for hedge funds to understand the rules of the new advertising game, so the industry is better off encouraging the very large players – with deep compliance muscle – to be the first ones on the field. But there are more significant reasons why most hedge funds should never include advertising in their marketing plans. Notably, institutional advertising is expensive, requires a long-term commitment to be effective, and is very difficult to measure or generate a market response. More importantly, at most hedge funds there is an extensive list of marketing strategies and tactics (for example, building an effective website) that should be addressed first, and that will provide a more meaningful return than advertising.

As market dynamics of the investment world drag hedge funds, however reluctantly, into the new era of transparency, there is some good news for those firms. Hedge funds have long demonstrated their ability to sustain a successful business enterprise without traditional marketing tactics. So any benefits that effective market communication might provide for them are very likely to result in incremental asset growth.

Additionally, because hedge funds do not currently depend on marketing for survival, they can act in a deliberate, strategic manner. Hedge funds have the luxury of being able to design and implement their marketing programs incrementally, and to focus on doing a limited number of things very well.

In that regard, other vertical industries may eventually point to hedge funds as examples of best practices in branding and marketing. But at the current rate of change, that’s unlikely to occur in our lifetimes.

 

Leave a comment

Filed under Uncategorized

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

September 2, 2014 · 1:08 pm

How WebMD Has Changed B2B Marketing Forever

webmd2Many B2B companies, and professional services firms in particular, do not succeed at marketing for two major reasons:

  • Failure to understand that the vendor selection process has fundamentally changed.

Prospective customers now turn to their personal networks and publicly available information — via digital and social media channels—to self-diagnose their problems and to self-prescribe their own solutions. In this new WebMD World of B2B Marketing, making the short list of potential vendors relies heavily on being visible and appearing smart in appropriate online channels on a consistent basis.

To appreciate the magnitude of this shift in how customers select outside resources, consider 2012 market research conducted by the Corporate Executive Board’s Marketing Leadership Council, which surveyed more than 1,500 customer contacts (decision makers and influencers in a recent major business purchase) for 22 large B2B organizations spanning all major NAICS categories and 10 industries. As depicted below, the survey revealed that the average customer had completed nearly 60% of the purchase decision-making process prior to engaging a supplier sales rep directly.  At the upper limit, the responses ran as high as 70%.

57

The implications of this research are clear: B2B companies that fail to “show up strong” in the online world are missing engagement opportunities with potential as well as existing clients.

  • Failure to respond properly to the new vendor selection process.

Unfortunately, many B2B companies that understand the new dynamics of vendor selection have responded in knee-jerk fashion, by saturating every possible online / digital channel and social media platform with content that neither reaches nor resonates with decision makers in their target audiences. Although buyer selection habits have changed, when it comes to brand awareness and positioning of a company’s value proposition, less is still more. And this chart explains why:

Attention Web

The online world makes it easy to obtain information, but extremely difficult to gain attention over all the noise. Increasingly, B2B firms are learning that simply having all the online visibility tools – company blog, Twitter account, Facebook page, LinkedIn profile, etc. – does not guarantee marketplace attention. They’re also learning that tactics designed to feed those online beasts – most often “currated content” from 3rd parties – can be akin to the “throw some shit on the wall and hope something sticks” marketing approach.

The firms benefitting most from the new WebMD World of B2B Marketing apply traditional marketing disciplines: they stake out intellectual territory that supports their brand with insights that are relevant and interesting to clients, prospects and referrals sources; they drive top-of-mind awareness (and new business inquiries) by ensuring that those target audiences receive their insights on a consistent basis; they create opportunities to engage, rather than talk at, decision makers; and they use online tools to enhance, rather than replace, direct communication with existing and prospective customers.

 

1 Comment

Filed under Uncategorized

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

July 1, 2014 · 3:48 pm

The Attention Web: What B2B Marketers Need to Know

For B2B marketers who are too busy to keep up-to-date on every marketing trend and buzzword, here are a few thoughts on all the current noise about the Attention Web:

  • Attention as a marketing asset is not a new concept: Top-of-mind awareness has always served as a cornerstone of effective B2B marketing.  In their 2001 book, The Attention Economy, social scholars Thomas Davenport and John Beck proposed that in today’s information-flooded world, the most scarce resource does not involve ideas, money or talent. They argued that unless companies learn to effectively capture, manage and maintain attention – both internally and in the marketplace – they will fail. Here’s one way to understand what’s happening:

Attention Web

  • Pageviews, Likes, Clicks, Shares and Downloads do not measure engagement: Now that the advertising industry is using actual data to evaluate online behavior, smart B2B marketers can validate what they’ve always suspected about the metrics that are used to measure the effectiveness of the content they produce. There is now hard evidence that shows the number of clicks, comments, and shares are not indicative of how much time people spend engaged with the actual content. One recent study, reflected below – produced by Chartbeat and based on a boatload of data – demonstrates that there is no relationship between how often a piece of content is shared and the amount of attention the average reader will give that content. The good news for B2B marketers is that there are now editorial analytic tools that can provide attention and engagement metrics and insights.

article sharing

  • Attention, engagement and business relationships are driven by quality content: Beyond whatever products or services they sell, all B2B companies must establish credibility and trust with clients, prospects and referral sources. Initial inquiries and longstanding relationships are not nurtured by bombarding target audiences with aggregated content from 3rd parties. The most successful B2B firms only associate their brand with highly relevant content, most often home-grown, that supports their value proposition, stakes out intellectual territory, avoids self-serving claims and truly differentiates their company from competitors. Less can be more, when it comes to B2B content.

 

  • Don’t rely on the internet exclusively to generate market attention. For B2B firms, direct communication (email, snail mail, face-to-face, etc.) with target audiences remains the most effective means of gaining and maintaining engagement. If you’ve created high quality content, ensure that it earns an adequate marketing ROI by consistently putting it in front of the right people; don’t expect them to find your content by themselves on your company website or blog, on LinkedIn or through Twitter. Those online channels should be considered a secondary, rather than the primary means, of generating attention and engagement through content.

Leave a comment

Filed under Uncategorized

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

July 1, 2013 · 12:58 pm

Thought Leadership Merchandising: Rising Above the Noise

kjhkjhk

Thought Leadership Programs Must be Accountable for Business Outcomes

Thought Leadership is one of the most widely used terms in B2B marketing.  But there’s a range of opinion regarding what Thought Leadership is, and fuzzy expectations with respect to its tangible benefits.

Researching the term “Thought Leadership” yields everything from a sterile Wikipedia definition, to blog posts featuring marketing insights similar to this online gem:

“It doesn’t matter if you’re an entrepreneur, an employee, or a student – your ability to become a thought leader will catapult your success.  A great way to accomplish this, is on LinkedIn.” And we wonder why the marketing discipline is held in such low regard.

Broadly, if Thought Leadership is a marketing strategy that leverages intellectual capital to engage target audiences, then there are two critical components and issues:

  1. Content — What qualifies as legitimate and effective Thought Leadership?
  2. Application — How should the content be applied to drive tangible business outcomes?

A coherent and concise description of bona fide Thought Leadership content is contained within a checklist (shown below) developed by Jeff Ernst, VP of Marketing at Forrester Research, who broadly describes the strategy as “expressing a viewpoint that influences others…” as a means to “generate conversations that build trusting relationships over time.”

It’s important to note that Thought Leadership should not be limited to pushing one’s own viewpoint. True Thought Leaders are those individuals or organizations that define what topics or issues are important, and also provide opinions on those topics (other than their own) that are worth listening to. Thought Leaders seek to manage, rather than control, the conversation.

For example, rather than featuring a message from your CEO in each issue of the company’s quarterly newsletter, consider publishing guest commentaries (not promotional messages) from clients, prospects, referral sources and recognized opinion leaders in your discipline. In return, you’ll gain higher readership levels, greater credibility and top-of-mind awareness, and the likelihood that the client / prospect will distinguish your brand from competitors.

Merchandising Strategy Precedes Content Development

To the consternation of CXOs, some marketers employ Thought Leadership as though it embodied some mystical higher purpose; as a tactic that’s not held accountable for increasing leads, clients or revenue. Apparently through marketing osmosis, a brilliant OpEd piece in the Wall Street Journal or a rousing keynote presentation at an industry conference will somehow bolster a company’s balance sheet. All too often, Thought Leadership’s only benefit involves corporate egos.

Proper application of Thought Leadership-based content begins with development of a content merchandising strategy, involving two basic questions:

  • What measurable outcomes do we want our Thought Leadership to achieve (other than having people think we’re smart)?
  • How will we apply our Thought Leadership content (other than dropping it on our website) to achieve those measurable outcomes?

Creating any Thought Leadership content before fully addressing these two questions is akin to building a large sailboat in your basement. It may be a beautiful work of art, but you will never sail it around the lake.

Ultimately, the most effective merchandising of B2B Thought Leadership content yields credibility tools that:

–        support your company’s value proposition,

–        deliver an inherent 3rd party endorsement,

–        can be presented in a non-self-serving manner,

–        contain content that has a very long shelf life,

–        integrate seamlessly into your firm’s sales process,

–        engage target audiences in conversations that build relationships, and

–        drive tangible business results.

In fact, the acid test of effective Thought Leadership should not be based on your CEO’s level of satisfaction in seeing her byline in print. Instead, you’ll know that your Thought Leadership is effective when the head of sales or new business development is nipping at your heels regarding the campaign’s progress.

2 Comments

Filed under Uncategorized

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

March 16, 2013 · 6:00 pm

An End to B2B Social Media Madness

20070805-humanLemmings

Rapid, lemming-like adoption of social media tools by small and medium-sized B2B firms – fueled by an army of self-proclaimed social media experts – has resulted in wasted dollars, missed opportunities and heightened distrust of the marketing function in the C-suite. As if CMOs needed another cause for termination.

The past decade’s social media debacle is akin to introduction of desktop publishing in the early 1980s, when personal computers arrived in the business world. New software programs enabled companies, for the first time, to design and produce their own graphic materials in-house. Every company needed desktop publishing; corporate bean counters promoted the cost savings; anyone who learned how to use the software claimed to be a graphic designer, and the trend resulted in the most unprofessional and ineffective marketing & sales collateral every produced. Over time, even the bean counters came to understand that misapplied technology can be very costly.

The impact and potential of social media is far more significant than desktop publishing, but this also means that its range of casualties and cost of misapplication are exponentially greater. Simply, there are far too many B2B companies that are either:

–  using inappropriate social media tools,

–  not using appropriate social media tools correctly, or

–  missing opportunities to use appropriate social media tools.

At the risk of generating a firestorm of debate from social marketing gurus armed with clicks, likes, re-tweets and other forms of meaningless ROI validation, and based on the social media casualties we’ve seen or treated first-hand, the following guidelines are suggested for small and medium-sized B2B firms:

  • Focus on Your Website. This is the online mother ship of your brand. Don’t bother with social media tactics unless this tool is all that it can be. If your website has not been refreshed and updated in the last 3 years (which means more than simply sticking press releases in the “News” section), then your company is due for an overhaul.
  • Blog Correctly, or Don’t Have One. A company blog is the most effective way to leverage social media. But if you are unable or unwilling to generate meaningful content on a consistent basis (at least twice a month), or to merchandise your blog content properly (which means taking specific steps to promote the content with target audiences), then do not start a blog. If you already have a blog and you’re not meeting those goals, then shut the blog down. It’s a brand liability.
  • Forget Facebook, Twitter and Google+. These are primarily personal and B2C social media platforms, and there are few good reasons why most B2B firms should be investing any time or resources there. In terms of demographics, it’s telling that Twitter’s top 3 profiles belong to Justin Bieber, Lady GaGa and Katy Perry, but if your B2B firm needs quantitative evidence to support dropping these social media platforms, here is some recent research from Pew Research Center:

PRN_landscape_social_media_users

  • Use YouTube Selectively. YouTube can be a very effective social media channel for B2B firms. But your video products must be sophisticated, professionally produced, and no longer than 3 minutes. Resist the temptation to include sloppy, home-made productions, or hour-long webinar presentations. They reflect poorly on your brand, and few people will watch them. Ensure that you develop ways to drive consistent traffic to your YouTube channel.
  • Build Your LinkedIn Presence. LinkedIn is 3x more effective for demand generation than either Facebook or Twitter. LinkedIn has become an essential part of the business world’s due diligence process, and your company is conspicuous by its absence. Unfortunately, few companies take full advantage of LinkedIn’s social media potential. Their corporate profiles often do not contain adequate information, they do not merchandise blog-related and other relevant content, fail to connect through industry user groups, and their employees’ profiles are inconsistent and sometimes unprofessional. Most B2B companies would be well served to invest 100% of their social marketing effort through LinkedIn.

Very often, the root cause of dysfunction and disappointment related to the application of social media tools by B2B firms has less to do with the shortcomings of the various platforms, and more to do with the lack of a coherent and articulated marketing strategy. Chances are, if a B2B firm is spinning its wheels in the morass of social media, they’re having similar challenges with traditional marketing communication channels as well.

1 Comment

Filed under Uncategorized

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

January 16, 2013 · 11:32 am

Is Your B2B Firm REALLY Marketing…Or Simply Making Tactical Soup?

Is Your B2B Marketing a Tactical Hodge Podge?

Is Your B2B Marketing a Tactical Hodge Podge?

B2B firms invest significant dollars and hours maintaining a broad range of marketing tactics that may or may not demonstrate economic value. Often, the value of marketing activity gets measured in tactical terms—such as volume of media exposure, website traffic, webinar attendance, email click-through rates, awards for civic participation and social media “Likes” and “Followers,” rather than by tangible business outcomes such as lead generation, conversion rates, acceptance of new service offerings among existing clients, or revenue per associate.

When this situation exists, a B2B firm is not marketing; it’s simply making Tactical Soup.

Here are 3 steps to get out of the soup kitchen, or to avoid it altogether:

1. Put every marketing tactic under the microscope. If there’s no tangible connection between a current marketing tactic and bona fide business results, throw it out. Be ruthless in your tactical assessment and focus on marketing initiatives that demonstrate a direct correlation between activity and a measurable business outcomes.

2. Calculate the value received from the marketing activity. Press releases and related media exposure is a good example of marketing activity that is often overrated in terms of effort vs. tangible outcome. Unless your firm has accomplished something truly noteworthy—like discovering your profession’s equivalent of cold fusion—then the likelihood of your clients, prospects and referral sources actually noticing the media exposure and doing something about it, such as visiting your firm’s website or requesting an introductory meeting, is probably low. Exposure that’s largely based on a firm’s achievements delivers little practical benefit to existing clients and may leave them wondering if such self-promotion will result in higher client rates and fees.

3. Schedule ongoing maintenance of the activity. Unfortunately, many B2B marketing tactics are often one-off or plug-and-play solutions. Blogs and newsletters demand original, timely content; not canned information. White papers and case studies become quickly outdated. Website effectiveness requires ongoing attention to visitor traffic analytics and search engine optimization. Webinars and public forums entail lead qualification and follow-up with prospects. Email and direct mail campaign accuracy depends on a reliable and accessible database. LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook must be updated regularly to stay relevant. Before embarking on these activities, make sure you have the time and resources to dedicate to their maintenance.

THE PAYOFF

B2B firms can avoid the pitfalls of tactical soup by being selective in the type and volume of marketing tactics they apply. Most importantly, they must identify a specific and measurable strategic outcome in advance of any tactic’s design or application. For example, a 25-person CPA firm with an emerging practice among medium-size, privately held businesses sought to add a pharmaceutical company to its client list. Leveraging the life science industry background of one of its senior partners, the firm proposed and published a bylined article on Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) revenue-recognition compliance—a supply chain issue of great interest and value to pharmaceutical industry executives—in a leading life science publication with more than 35,000 print subscribers and an even greater number of online readers.

Instead of simply posting the bylined article on its website and adding article reprints to its marketing kit, this firm understood three important considerations regarding the real value of media placement as a marketing tactic:

  • The article’s content was not as valuable as the firm’s indirect affiliation with a respected pharmaceutical industry publication.
  • On its own, publication of the article was unlikely to generate any viable, near-term new business prospects.
  • For the firm to benefit from the credibility associated with publication of its partner’s life sciences expertise, it would need to proactively merchandise this inherent 3rd party endorsement.

Now that its marketing toolbox contained validation of the senior partner’s intellectual capital in a leading vertical trade magazine, the firm leveraged the value of that exposure. It used the article reprint as the cornerstone of a direct mail campaign designed to raise awareness of the firm and to initiate substantive conversations with CFOs at pharmaceutical firms matching the criteria of prospective clients it had targeted—in terms of geography, ownership, revenue growth, number of employees and apparent levels of sophistication.

The firm’s mailing included a hard copy, personalized cover letter to those targets, offering to provide a pro bono analysis of the prospect’s SOX exposure, which was followed by a courtesy phone call designed to measure levels of interest and to schedule an introductory meeting. Over the course of this six-month campaign, which effectively combined two marketing tactics—media exposure and direct mail—this accounting firm netted two new pharmaceutical industry clients.

Instead of generating marketing activity for its own sake, this B2B firm effectively applied specific marketing tactics to yield a predetermined business outcome.

Tactical Soup was not on this B2B firm’s marketing menu, and it has no rightful place on yours.

Leave a comment

Filed under Uncategorized

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

July 12, 2012 · 1:20 pm

Do Most CEOs Lack Social Skills?

Do CEOs need charm school, rather than business school?

According to a new study sponsored by Domo and CEO.com, CEOs at Fortune 500 companies are participating in social media channels significantly less than the general public. The study claims that 70% of them have absolutely no presence on social media.

On the major social networks, including Facebook, Twitter and Google+, the participation of Fortune 500 CEOs was minimal, with only 7.6% on Facebook, 4% on Twitter, and less than 1% on Google+. In comparison, more than 50% of the U.S. population uses Facebook and 34% uses Twitter.   No Fortune 500 CEOs are on Pinterest.

LinkedIn is the most popular social media site among Fortune 500 CEOs, with 26% on the network, compared to just 20.15% of the U.S. general public. Of that group, ten Fortune 500 CEOs have more than 500 LinkedIn connections, while 36 CEOs have 1 LinkedIn connection or none.

Six Fortune 500 CEOs (or more likely, their PR departments) contribute to blogs, and only one of the six CEOs, John Mackey of Whole Foods, maintains his own blog.

Given the demographics of Fortune 500 CEOs, none of this news is jaw-dropping. Older, well-established corporate guys (and gals) in the business world’s stratosphere are not wired for social media.

But here are some potential take-aways from the research:

  • The propensity of C-level executives at companies of all sizes – well below the Fortune 1000 level – to invest time on social media outlets is extremely low. Top decision-makers spend most of their day dealing directly with people within their own sphere of influence. And most C-level execs still are not convinced that social media is anything more than a technology hula-hoop that will eventually run out of steam.
  • Marketers attempting to reach and influence C-level decision-makers are still best-served by leveraging the channels that are used and respected by that target audience…including traditional business media sources and professional forums; and by seeking to influence the 2nd and 3rd tier corporate executives who provide insight and guidance for  C-level decision-makers…which may involve selective use of social media tools.
  • Aspiring CEOs may still be more likely to reach the top of the corporate ladder by joining the right country club, rather than by having 500 connections on LinkedIn.

Leave a comment

Filed under Uncategorized

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,