High-Tech Communicator

A Grand Experiment in Marketing

During the Mad Men era, advertising was much more of an art than a science. When Don Draper tried to sell his clients on a new campaign, more often than not, he relied on his good looks and gift for storytelling to beguile clients. Sure Sterling Cooper occasionally threw in a few focus groups to test out concepts, but the dozen people they polled were hardly a representative sample.

In short, it was never truly possible to measure the impact of a campaign.

Today, art remains a critical component of marketing. But it’s married to hard science. Because much marketing is now online and online marketing is imminently trackable, marketers can easily measure results. In addition, analytics tools make it possible to look for deeper meanings and uncover hidden trends. 

The Advent of Agile Marketing

Marketers are using this ability to obtain accurate feedback on their campaigns to take a page from the software developer’s handbook. Software developers are increasingly using agile development techniques originally popularized for use in mobile app development. With agile development, programmers quickly create an app with a limited number of key features, deploy it to customers, solicit feedback, incorporate suggested changes, and then repeat the process—all in a short period of time.

Developers deploy applications much more quickly than with traditional “big bang” deployments that deliver hundreds of features at once. And, because developers revise their apps continually based on feedback from end users, the applications are much more likely to offer what customers are looking for.    

Similarly, marketers are increasingly using an agile marketing approach. They now try things, see what happens and change their marketing on the fly. For example, Maia Tihista, Vice President, Global Marketing for Flexera Software noted, “We try different tactics for our email campaigns to see if open rates improve. When we run nurturing campaigns, we use marketing analytics tools to see what’s generating pipeline and bookings and make adjustments accordingly. For example, we might find that one solution has a long buying process and buyers want to consume technical content. We can easily determine what papers work better for them.”

Course Corrections

Constant monitoring allows marketers to pinpoint necessary course corrections quickly. For example, Sowmya Murthy, Head of Marketing, Technology Product Group for Unisys is constantly testing whether her messaging hits the mark and makes changes as needed. “We monitor ferociously as we roll out campaigns. We talk to customers to determine whether a particular problem area cited in campaigns exists or matter as much as we think it does. If an issue turns out not to matter so much, we scrap that piece of the campaign and focus on areas where we’re hearing about problems. This allows us to course correct on a regular basis.”

In one example Murthy said, “One of our messages that we used in an email campaign wasn’t nuanced enough. Open rates improved dramatically when we made our messages sharper.”

Murthy rolled out the improved messaging not only within the original email but to other downstream elements of the campaign such telemarketing scripts. “We use our findings to influence not just one area of a campaign, we apply them where applicable along every point in the road to the sale.”

Mixing Art and Science

Of course, it can be easy to go too far and base campaigns on data alone. But the best campaigns retrain their spark of inspiration, using analytics to measure whether that spark translates into sales.  For example, Andrew Spoeth, Head of Social Media Marketing for CA, noted, “As a social marketer, it’s an exciting time because you can be creative and analytical at the same time.”

 

 

Print: Down, But Not Out

Pity the poor print publication. The popularity of print of all types appears to be in freefall. 

Only 11 percent of marketers expect to increase their print ad budget over the next 12 months, while 32 percent expect to cut print ad budgets, according to the Association of Business Information & Media Companies. Many companies that once put out print publications for thought leadership and customer retention have moved to digital only versions. For example, CA cancelled the print version of its externally facing Smart Enterprise publication and has moved to a strictly online publication in partnership with Wired Magazine.

The reasons for this move are clear. Physically publishing a print magazine and sending it out using the postal service is far more expensive than digital distribution. It’s also harder to determine ROI. While you may be able to track circulation figures and response to individual ads —tracking print results will never be as sophisticated as the simplest online tracking capabilities that instantly show you how many people read an article, liked it, and passed it on.

Nonetheless, print publications are not without their advocates. The Association of Business Information & Media Company’s Research found that 96 percent of readers peruse both print magazines and websites. And while readers turn to online publications more frequently—73 percent use websites at least weekly and 67 percent read e-newsletters at least weekly—print publications still made it into the top three channels. Indeed, 45 percent of respondents report that they consult magazines at least once a week.

The savviest marketers then are not abandoning print. Rather, they’re using it strategically. As Michael DiLeva, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Bentley Systems noted, “Print is still important. The key is knowing your audience. We’re seeing mass customization. Different people consume content in different ways. We produce engineering software. Engineers may look at video, but they also want written long-form content that’s more outcome oriented.”

When companies publish their own print publications, they reap numerous qualitative benefits that nonetheless directly support sales.

Providing an Entrée to Decision Makers

Articles, particularly those in a company’s print publication can serve as a way to get sales reps in front of high-level executives. Loni Frazita, a marketing manager based in Long Island, New York, found hat, when working with a previous client, the company’s sales force would have a relationship at a manager and director level, but might have trouble getting in to see the VP or CIO level of decision maker. Sending a reporter to interview that high- level decision maker for a trend article could open doors.

 “Once the article came out, we had a relationship with them,” said Frazita, “The article acted as an icebreaker and allowed us to start a conversation. The sales rep could call and ask if they could drop off the magazine. By then, the customer was often more willing to listen.”

Lining Up Customer References

Most companies find that customer success stories are among the most valuable pieces of content they can produce. But it’s not uncommon for the sales reps handling the accounts to fiercely guard access to their customers. Reps typically fear that asking the customer to participate in a success story will compromise their ability to renew the customer’s contract or upsell them on additional products or services.   

Esri, the geomapping company, has used print publications to help line up elusive customer success stories. 

“There can be trepidation,” said Jesse Theodore, Communications Manager at Esri. “One of the greatest ways I can get buy in from the sales team to allow us to approach contacts for customer success stories is to show them an example in a print publication. I can then say, this is what we want to do for your customers. The printed stories are very compelling. The light goes on in their eyes. It does a lot to build bridges and assuage concerns. This happens much more with a print article than a PDF. People just get it.”

Building Strong Relationships with Prospects and Customers

Esri still publishes several publications that have both print and online versions. One magazine, Arcnews, reaches more than 750,000 people and talks about the what and why of geomapping. Another publication, ArcUser, maintains a circulation of 500,000 people and talks about the company’s products and how to get the most out of them. They also publish 8-12 page newsletters for various industries.

The company is convinced that the print publications provide that special something that helps cement relationships  with customers and prospects.  Said Theodore, “Our marketing and sales people love print publication leave-behinds. There’s something visceral about seeing a story in print versus seeing it in digital.”

While the response may not be as measurable as the clicks and likes in the online world, Theodore says, “Anecdotally, we get a lot of positive response. Our editors get emails. People come up to me all the time on the road.”

 “We promote digital but we’re not excluding print,” said Theodore, “People want their print pieces. There’ll always be a place for print.”

 

 

Brands Search for Meaning

Consider these scenarios:

1. Your company has binged on acquisitions. While each was tasty in its own right, scarfing them all down at once has left you fumbling for the Pepto-Bismol—and customers seeing a disjointed jumble. You want to help your customers understand what your company stands for.
2. You’re facing a classic catch-22. You have a spanking new product. While you have a beta test program, none of your customers are far enough along to show results. You’ll have to wait years for them to report on their outcomes. In the meantime, how do you sign up new customers without case studies of existing customers?
3. You have a product that’s so innovative and revolutionary that your customers are having trouble wrapping their brains around the concept. You want them to help them understand you better.

 How do you solve these marketing challenges?

Marketers are invoking brand storytelling as their savior to imbue their solutions with meaning for their customers.

Knitting Together Disparate Product Lines

After a string of acquisitions, if you’d stopped your average tech-savvy person on the street two years ago and asked, “What is does XYZ Software Company do?” (This company chose not to be named in this blog post.), you’d have likely gotten an answer like the proverbial blind men describing the elephant.  Each person would describe the one technology the company sold with which he or she was most familiar.

He or she probably couldn’t have told you what the company as a whole stood for.

So the company embarked on a brand-storytelling project. They went through a major consensus-building exercise, interviewing stakeholders throughout the organization about what they thought the company stood for. They came up with a story that explained how all of the individual products contributed to allowing customers to work in a new way that they couldn’t before. It was this overall vision that delivered value to its customers.  The company continues to evolve this story as the company itself changes and grows.

 

Selling a Product Vision

Another challenge arises when bringing a complex product to market. Today, most technology marketers use content marketing to introduce new products. But herein lies the rub. There are three pillars of content marketing, according to Sowmya Murthy, Global Portfolio Marketing Director for Unisys:

1. The economic value proposition
2. Referenceable customers
3. A proven product

How can you do effective content marketing when all three of these elements are in their infancy?

Murthy faced this situation in marketing Unisys Software Defined Network Solution. Says Murthy, “You have to sell the vision.”

In other words, you spin a thought-leadership story. “Our buyers are on a voracious educational curve,” said Murthy. “The buying cycle is still educational. SDN isn’t a mature play yet. However, most of our clients are educating themselves and building a vision. That’s what gives us as a disruptive technology an entry into well entrenched markets.”

In this case, the teller of the story helps establish the requisite credibility. Unisys partners with Gartner and other industry leaders to develop signature research. Explained Murthy, “We speak through the voice of credible sources that are already talking about the topic and curate that content and highlight any beta customers that are willing to talk.”

Spawning a Revolution

Brand storytelling is arguably most important when your company is attempting to sell a revolutionary new concept. With Red Hat, the revolutionary concept was the idea of software built by communities outside the company that volunteer. This concept is different from the way virtually all other software is built and can be difficult to get across.

Red Hat’s “Truth Happens” video uses brand storytelling to explain the company’s vision by placing open source software into the broader concept of scientific revolution. The video details how people initially don’t believe new scientific concepts and how these new ideals ultimately come to be accepted. The video seeks to overcome the many objections that any new concept will attract and fits these objections into nothing less than the story of hundreds of years of scientific advances.  

 While each of these examples highlight different issues, brand storytelling addresses them all. By spinning abstract concepts—like seemingly unrelated products, or a new products and concepts—into  the concrete constructs of a narrative, your company can make new ideas more comprehensible, and ultimately more meaningful for potential customers.

Stop Interrupting What People Love, Become What They Love

 

The advent of social media and digital-content marketing means that every marketer can now be a media mogul. You now have a cost-effective way to serve your market a cornucopia of rich information to make them aware of and help them purchase your product in a more holistic and customer-centric manner.

“Previously, advertising messages had to be truncated. Now you can speak directly to your audience and engage with them in-depth rather than through sound bites,” observed Michael DiLeva, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Bentley Systems.

But there’s a dark side to this communication bounty. The easy online availability of all the content a customer could ever desire has trained people to expect information at the beck-and-call of a Google search. And they no longer tolerate interruptions by pesky ads or salespeople.

In addition, now that most (86%) of B2B marketers have jumped on the content-marketing bandwagon, according to the Content Marketing Institute, customers have reached the saturation point. And that means marketers must work harder to make their content more effective. 

B2B Marketers need to create content that forges relationships with prospective customers.

Enter Brand Storytelling.

Using Stories to Forge Relationships

The concept behind brand storytelling, according to Patricia Travaline, Vice President of Marketing at Skyword, is that “Even when someone is purchasing technology, marketers should try to reach them as people. We have to figure out what they love, what keeps them up at night, and what they’re passionate about. And then, to successfully connect, we have to stop interrupting what people love and become what people love.”

And what do people love?

“They love stories,” says Travaline. “Stories help people connect because, as studies show, when someone is telling a story, the brain patterns of the person telling the story are the same as those of the person listening. From a neurological perspective, storytelling is a great way to connect with people. Brands now have the power to do that well. B2B brand marketers are moving away from traditional marketing and moving into brand storytelling.”

But what do B2B marketers mean by brand storytelling and how are they using it?

Three Types of Brand Storytelling

To find the answer, I did a (admittedly unscientific) survey of B2B technology marketers who called themselves brand storytellers in their LinkedIn profiles. I asked them what they mean by brand storytelling and how they’re using storytelling to connect with customers and prospective customers. 

1. Customer Stories—The most frequent response was that these marketers tell stories about customers. In other words, they were creating customer success stories—albeit with a modern twist.
2. Product Stories—Some companies define storytelling as a way to put their company’s solutions into a larger narrative that explains what that their offerings mean for customers.  
3. Problem-Solving Stories—A third type of brand storytelling is when companies research their markets’ pain points and what keeps them up at night and then create some type of publication or portal that provides an ongoing series of useful content that helps customers address their challenges. 

In my next three blog posts, I’ll talk more about how companies are using each of these types of brand stories to develop stronger relationships with prospects and customers to advance their buying decisions.

 

 

4 Key Metrics for Measuring Social Media Success

 

One of the great things about social media marketing is that it’s easy to measure the results of your efforts.  But metrics in and of themselves are only numbers. They’re useful only when you employ them to measure progress toward your business goals.

In recent interviews, I spoke with several marketers and asked what metrics they used and what business goals they addressed.  There are four types of business metrics you can look at when using social media: audience development, engagement, content amplification, and leads/conversions.

1.       Audience Development

When marketers first begin adopting social media, one of their first goals is to build an audience to help them gain awareness for their company and products. The metric marketers use to measure awareness is the number of new followers and subscribers.

2.       Engagement

Ideally, customers would not only follow your channel, but also read, pay attention to, and engage with your content. Marketers measure engagement by looking at the number of views, page likes, comments, clicks on the company website from social media, and content consumption driven by social media.  

3.       Content Amplification

Here’s where social media really shows its power. Social Media allows organizations to not only reach their own followers, but to reach a much wider audience. One way they can do that is to insert hashtags which allows content to be found by anyone searching on that term. But what marketers are really looking for is for their followers to spread the word to their own networks because the number of people seeing the content that way has the potential to grow exponentially.

Ways to measure amplification include the number of shares and retweets. In addition, the content may end up on a syndication site which will spread the word further. Or, a reporter might find the post or tweet and write about it. As a bonus, amplification means that the original viewer was extra engaged with your content because they wouldn’t spread the word if they hadn’t read it and found it interesting.

One tip for improving the amplification of content, according to Joe Schwartz, Vice President, Digital of Kony, Inc., is to first identify the influencers by looking at their Klout Score. Klout is a website that gives people a score based on their social influence.  Once Schwartz knows who the influencers are, he suggests sharing content that can help the influencers increase their own influence. Explained Schwartz, “Using Klout we can figure out how to adjust a document that we used in nurture to something different or change the name or some element to increase the reputation of the sharer. By producing content that helps the influencers boost their standing, you ensure that your content is more likely to be shared.”

4.       Leads and Conversions

The Holy Grail and end game for all marketing efforts, including social, is leads and conversions. Organizations that have marketing automation solutions that tie into their CRM system can generally track any leads from social media down the pipeline, tracking which content ultimately contributed to a particular deal. At the very least, organizations can track gated assets by giving them a unique campaign ID which can then be tracked throughout the sales process.

Social Media’s Hierarchy of Needs

 

If you’ve ever taken Psychology 101, you probably learned about Abraham Maslow and his famous Hierarchy of Needs model.

Maslow believed that people are motivated to fulfill certain needs. When one need is satisfied, a person moves on to the next one, and so on. As they move up the hierarchy they increasingly realize their human potential. In Maslow’s original model, developed in 1943, these needs included physiological, safety, love, esteem, and self actualization. During the 60s and 70s, he expanded the model to include cognitive, aesthetic, and transcendence needs.

Similarly, when companies adopt social media for use in marketing, they also seek to fulfill a hierarchy of needs. As I interviewed marketers for this post, the stages came into focus. First, marketers look to achieve awareness, then amplification, then helping customers with research, then connection and  conversations. At the highest levels, they’re looking to use social media to create a personal brand and create a feedback loop that enables them to continually improve their marketing efforts.

1.       Awareness

At its most basic level, social media is a bullhorn for companies to get the word out and promote content to create awareness for their company. As Joe Schwartz, Vice President, Digital of Kony, Inc., which offers a platform for delivering mobile aps, noted, “The original use of social media in marketing is as PR for your content.”

At this level in the social media hierarchy, companies attempt to sign up followers so that they have an audience for their posts or tweets. The posts and tweets in this stage tend to be simple introductions with a link to more detailed content or straightforward promotions.   

2.       Amplification

Once companies have established an audience, it’s time to look for that audience to amplify the message by passing it along to their followers, who will hopefully pass it to their followers and so on until the message picks up a life of its own.  At this stage, said Andrew Spoeth, Enterprise Social Media Marketing Director for CA Technologies, “Marketers comment on influencer’s posts in the hopes that they’ll pass on their content so it’ll go viral.”

3.       Research

After content starts getting out there through social media, marketing uses social to ensure their content is available where customers are looking. As marketers are well aware, the sales process has changed so that it is driven more by customers going out and searching for answers to their problems online, rather than waiting for salespeople to call them. By making content available on social media, marketers are placing content where it will be found.  As Alison Munn, Senior Social Media Marketing Manager, for BMC explained, “When buyers are going out and looking for information, they’re looking on social media. Marketers need to be available and have a presence where buyers are researching.”

4.       Conversation

Eventually, companies realize that social isn’t just about gaining a bullhorn, it’s about connecting ideas and information to real people. “Social allows inspiration to travel among the network instead of just from the company to individuals,” said Spoeth.

Companies facilitate the sharing of information with their customers by becoming conversationalists. Spoeth explained that “it’s about replying to and favoriting tweets and becoming part of the conversation to engage with people and to set the tone for the community.”   

5.       Personal Branding

The next level of social is all about helping key subject matter experts at companies create a personal brand to make a name both for themselves as individual and for the company with which they’re associated.

BMC has used this concept to good effect. “One of our main areas of success in social,” said Munn, “has been getting our executives to blog and promote thought-leadership through their Twitter accounts. We did this as a pilot project, but we’ve seen significant progress in followers, retweets and engagement. We’ve also succeeded in driving traffic back to the corporate blog. We’ve been really happy with the results.”

6.       Feedback

In order to improve their marketing and social media strategy, marketers need feedback. Social provides that feedback because it’s a two-way conversation. As a result, companies can improve their thought leadership efforts and the conversations they have with their customers.

One company that is using Social media for this purpose is Interactive Intelligence, which provides business communications software and services. Said Denise Meyer, Social Media Communications Manager, “We do listening activities to drive insights, identify key themes and topics and conversations to determine what thought leadership we can represent or look for opportunities to create new conversations.”

As you embark on your social media efforts, think about where you are on the Social Media Hierarchy of needs and consider whether it makes sense to move on to the next level.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Content Marketing: What’s the Big Idea?

When people talk about good advertising, they often bring up “The Big Idea.” They may dredge up the classic “Think Small” campaign for the Volkswagen Beetle. Or point to the legendary “Big Brother” ad where Apple successfully positioned itself against IBM. Or bring up the more recent Chipotle Back to the Start explainer video.

Now don’t get me wrong. I’d be overjoyed to come up with a big idea for every piece of content I put out. But let’s face it, even for biggest, most well-funded brands, big ideas are few and far between.   

What’s the poor content marketer to do?

As it turns out, real marketers are achieving very good success with the pretty-darn-good idea. Rather than settling for a plain-vanilla white paper or webinar or social campaign, the following marketers came up with one new twist. As it turns out, incorporating that one unique touch can make a demand- or lead-generation campaign pretty darn successful.

The More Experts the Merrier

Lots of companies work with analysts like IDG, Forrester, or Gartner to conduct research that they can then promote in thought-leadership reports. But Blackbaud put out a new spin on the old analyst thought-leadership report. Instead of including thought leadership from just one analyst, Blackbaud brought together ten to fifteen external industry experts to write about a topic of interest to the company’s non-profit audience. It has used this technique to create a series of npEXPERT eBooks. The most recent installment shares tried-and-true donor-retention strategies, tips, and ideas.  

The company has also repurposed the eBooks into a complimentary webinar series in which each author does his or her own webinar. These webinars are tied into a lead-nurture track that ultimately leads to one of the company’s many products. Customers who register for a webinar are put on one of these lead-nurture tracks based on what the company knows about them from their registration form and from what they downloaded. 

Overall, the company has been very pleased with the success of the campaign. Said Frank Barry, Director of New Growth Ventures and Partners in Blackbaud’s global payments business, “The most recent eBook is the Number 1 asset we’ve ever published. We’ve downloaded over 15,000 copies.”

Fun with Twitter

Recently, when CA was faced with the challenge of creating awareness for its new Mobility Management solutions, it wanted to come up with a fun and creative way to get the word out.

The company had decided to roll out the new solution at the GSMA Mobile World Congress event in Barcelona in February of 2014. This event is a combination of the world’s largest exhibition for the mobile industry and a conference featuring prominent executives representing mobile operators, device manufacturers, technology providers, vendors, and content owners from around the world. CA had lined up speaking engagements and had a large booth on the show floor. A third part of its plan was to run a large social-media program to promote related content to people who were participating or interested in the event.

The company sent CA staffers to the conference and had them take pictures and sound bites that it could use to promote the company on Twitter. CA chose to focus on Twitter as it has become the default channel for real time activity at conferences, more so than Facebook or LinkedIn. Explained Andrew Spoeth, CA’s Social Media Marketing Director, “Twitter’s a very efficient way for people at conferences to share information quickly and find content that matters.”

CA tweeted three types of content:

1. Product information for people shopping for what CA has to offer who were close to the purchase decision.
2. Content about ideas, trends, and thought leadership for potential future customers. These included blog posts and infographics that would appeal to a larger group of people.
3. Fun content for everyone. Said Spoeth, “We leveraged cartoons that tapped in to the conference experience. Those went nuts. We had thousands of retweets.”

“Those three things worked together really well,” said Spoeth. “As a result, CA ended up being one of the most popular Twitter accounts (retweets plus mentions) at the conference, and among 70,000+ Twitter accounts that were tweeting about the event in total.”

Customer-Created Thought Leadership

What do you do when want to create a hugely ambitious thought-leadership program, but have only four people on staff and a lean budget?

If your company is a leader in Open Source computing, you get your customers and community to help with the heavy lifting.

I recently attended an American Marketing Association event that featured a talk by Jason Hibbets, the Editor and Community Manager of Red Hat’s opensource.com site. Designed as a thought-leadership vehicle for Red Hat, said Hibbets, “The site publishes stories about the broader impact of open-source software and highlights how open source affects the world around us.”

The site contains a wide range of content of value to the open-source community. Recent stories include case studies about how open source is used at Facebook, how it powers research at CERN, and how it’s helping to save the Odia Indian Language. It covers news, development tips and tools, and recent presentations about open source. The site publishes themed content weeks, such as Women in Open Source or Back to School with Open Source. Evergreen resources include the “What is Open Source” page or the “What is OpenStack” page. 

One of the key tenants of the open-source movement is that anyone can freely use, change and share the code. Moreover, the software is built by communities that volunteer. Red Hat thus doesn’t build the software per se; rather they donate considerable resources to support the people that build its software.

Red Hat’s Opensource.com thought-leadership portal used the same business model to create the content for the portal. The site’s four-person full-time staff writes about half of the 18 new pieces that go up each week; the other half of the content comes from the community. In addition to actively soliciting stories from the community, the team has recruited ten external moderators.

Overall, the site looks to be meeting its goal of providing thought leadership and building community. The site has 20,000 followers on Twitter. It also receives significant traffic from search.

As these examples show, putting an interesting and creative spin on standard marketing tactics can be just the edge you need to achieve success with your content-marketing efforts.

 

 

 

 

When Good Marketing Ends Badly

As a marketer, your mission is to tell stories about your brand. And to make sure those stories have a happy ending. After all, you’re Chief Cheerleader for your brand, and your job is to spur your potential customers to root for it, as well. 

Unfortunately, in marketing, as in life, not every story ends the way we’d like.

This is the tale of a brand whose marketing began with the best of intentions and tactics. But whose discord and dysfunction resulted in an ending that was more tragic than fairytale.

I’m telling this story—with the names and pertinent details changed to protect the guilty—because we can all learn as much, perhaps more, from mistakes and missteps than we can when everything sails along according to a well-laid plan.   

A Cautionary Tale

I happened upon this tale as I was soliciting people to participate in my blog series on real marketers.  

Cassandra (not her real name) had just been laid off from a marketing job at a mid-sized software company after a new marketing executive was brought in to do a marketing reboot. 

By this point, the company had undergone several years of chaos and upheaval. Three years ago, the company had completed a merger that looked good on paper but whose execution had been painful and had resulted in numerous layoffs. Before long, the CEO of the company stepped down.

In cases like this, it can be difficult to discern which is the chicken and which is the egg. It may have been that dysfunctional marketing caused the company’s travails. Or it may have been the other way around. Most likely, each one contributed to the other.    

Fire-Drill Marketing

By the time we spoke, Cassandra had had plenty of time to mull over what had happened and was anxious to share her thoughts.

“The biggest challenge we faced was the conflict between sales and marketing,” Cassandra explained. “We kept being asked to meet short-term demands from sales for us to fill the pipeline immediately with whatever leads we could find. We never had time to address our long-term needs as marketers to provide education—so we could mentor customers in our space or build trust—so we could ultimately develop customer advocates.”

Among the long-term projects that the group never seemed to get around to completing was the creation of buyer personas. Another deficit was content strategy. They’d created quite a bit of content, but they didn’t know if they were doing the right content. To make matters worse, there was no expiration date for content; it floated around for years. While work had begun work in addressing these issues, it had progressed only in fits and starts.

Rather than completing long-term efforts that would allow the company to pinpoint the right prospects and nurture them through a sales cycle that averaged nine months, the company regularly sent large, “spray-and-pray” email campaigns to thousands of people. 

Of course, plenty of companies have success with email campaigns. But they need to be targeted. That’s where the company fell down. The company hadn’t taken the time to break down the list into relevant subsections and create targeted messaging for each audience. As Cassandra pointed out, “It takes time to analyze the database, understand the prospects’ roles, and learn how to tweak the message to address what was most important to each one. And we never took the time to perform these tasks.”

Predictable Results

The results were predictable. “When they’d get 16 attendees to a webinar, people would deem the campaign a success,” said Cassandra. “But no one ever addressed the elephant in the room that this was 16 people out of 5,000 invited to the event.”

Like many more successful companies, the company also spent considerable time and effort creating integrated lead-nurturing campaigns. The team might build a webinar, a case study, and an article, and use the company’s marketing automation tool to send out email touches with links to these assets every week or so for lead nurturing.

Said Cassandra, “We put the cart before the horse. We hadn’t looked at where the person was in the buyer’s journey. Instead, because we were so rushed, we had a daisy chain of content that we hoped made sense to the buyer without our having done the analysis.”

For most marketers, the final step in the demand-generation process is coming up with a sales-ready lead. Here once again, the company’s efforts fell short. This time it was because sales and marketing failed to come to a consensus about what marketing success really meant.

“We hadn’t had discussions of what was a sales-qualified lead versus a marketing-qualified lead,” said Cassandra. “Without that understanding of when we’ve generated a lead, marketing would think something was a great lead and sales wouldn’t agree.”

Lessons Learned

During her experience, Cassandra gave a lot of thought to what her department could have done better. She came to three conclusions:

First, marketing can learn a tremendous amount from defining personas and the buyer’s journey. Those are really the foundation of getting marketing right. Moreover, it’s not something you do once and forget about for the rest of the year. You need to look at them at least twice a year and test your assumptions. 

Second, it’s critical to get sales in the same room and talk about how to achieve the goals of the company. Sales has their numbers. Marketing needs to discuss these quotas, what a qualified lead looks like, and if the lead isn’t qualified, what should happen. “A lot of the information you need for this discussion,” Cassandra noted, “comes from analyzing the buyer’s journey.”

And finally, marketers must use modern technology to measure results. “What’s exciting is the immediate feedback you can get,” said Cassandra. “Before you’d send out a direct mail and wait and hope. Checkbox marketing doesn’t work anymore. Now you can see how an email is performing in real time. That means you can test headlines and calls to action. There’s so much more opportunity to learn what’s working. If you’re given the time and inclination, you can constantly learn and improve.”

 

 

 

 

6 Ways Small Companies Make a Big Marketing Splash

Pity the poor small company marketer. Like their counterparts at large companies, they face all the challenges of reaching their target market over ever more competitive channels. At the same time, they have to outshout competitors with bigger bullhorns while armed with smaller budgets. Regardless of the quality of their product, it’s much harder for these companies to get noticed.

As Victoria Grey, Chief Marketing Officer for Gridstore noted, “One of our biggest challenges is getting our name out there for customer consideration. We’ve got a great product, so if we can get in front of a solid prospect, we’ve got a good chance of closing the deal. But we don’t have as large a marketing budget as many of our competitors so it’s a challenge.”

What’s the small company marketer to do?

I talked to a number of marketers at small companies and here are some of their tricks.

1.     Start with a unique differentiator

It should go without saying that the most important marketing strategy is having a unique product that solves a real problem. (Although with all the me-too products out there, it’s clear that many companies missed the memo).  A product that addresses a new problem in a new way can provide a true differentiation regardless of the size of the company. And these companies earn the right to claim thought leadership. 

For example:

• Blucarat is an eCommerce company with a twist. It allows companies that sell over the internet to harvest user-generated content from Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and so on and showcase it on eCommerce sites to inspire purchasing. This means companies of any size can take advantage of the same social proof as Amazon.com.
• Gridstore provides backup capabilities specifically for Microsoft’s Hyper-V.
• Druva, established in 2008, was one of the first companies to secure data in the Cloud.

2.     Keep costs in line

Smaller companies must be particularly careful to watch their pennies. Luckily, many new technologies give small companies big-company tools tailored to their needs and budgets. Said Kieran Taylor, CMO of Blucarat, “We look at burn rates and maximize every one of our campaigns. Luckily we can do that by relying on lower cost options. For example, we use MailChimp for our email campaigns and Act-On Software, which is a poor man’s marketing automation system.”

3.     Produce super-targeted content

With all the new tactics and channels available, many marketers are trying to cover all the bases. They produce content of all types (albeit often through reuse) including white papers, webinars, podcasts, info graphics, and infograms. 

Smart small companies take a different approach. They look carefully at their buyer personas and painstakingly match the content produced to their personas.

“To do things cost effectively,” said Taylor of Blucarat, “We need to be extremely targeted in terms of who we send things so we can improve the signal-to-noise ratio.”

Taylor is careful to target not only the right buyer, but also where they are in the buying cycle. “We’re constantly looking at where the prospect is in the nurture cycle and identifying the right offers for that stage,” Taylor explained.

The company also takes care to create just the right content for that audience. For example, one of Blucarat’s personas is the social media manager. This persona acts is an influencer and has a medium age of 27. The company creates more videos for this audience than it does for its personas of older buyers because millennials are less likely to read longer documents.

Druva, in contrast, is a small company that produces data security products for the cloud. Its customers are highly technical, which means that they’re skeptical of marketing of any type. Therefore, the company focuses on creating content for its demand-gen campaigns that’s highly credible. The company works with industry analysts to create research that it can use in thought leadership and reports chock full of new insights. The company also creates content based on conversations with customers in their own words about their challenges, experiences, and successes.

4.     Target your social channels

Smaller companies are also more targeted when it comes to spreading the word. Both Blucarat and Druva carefully select the social media they use to get their message across. Blucarat finds Facebook and Twitter to be quite effective in generating traffic and click-throughs because their market of online commerce companies is by nature B2C. Additionally, the CMOs and Vice Presidents of Commerce tend to be fairly social. The company also does geographic targeting to reach the prestige beauty and fashion brands in New York City that are prime targets.

 In contrast, Druva focuses on LinkedIn Groups and online developer communities, such as Spiceworks. “It’s less about one-way broadcasting and more about participating in groups and sharing valuable content,” said Jennifer Burnham, Director, Marketing Communications and Content at Druva.

5.     Collaborate with partners

Another strategy small companies choose is to multiply their efforts by collaborating with partners.  Because Gridstore is designed specifically to complement Microsoft’s Hyper-V solution, the company has the good fortune of being able to ride on the coattails of its partner.  Said Grey, “Because we have such a targeted market, we work with Microsoft and go to their events. We’re a big sponsor of Microsoft’s TechEd. We go to the Microsoft worldwide partner conferences. If Microsoft is hosting an event, it’s easy to line up leads. We also do banner ads, advertise in Redmond Magazine and other Microsoft -centric magazines, such as Microsoft SQL Server Pro, Microsoft Windows IT Pro.”

But even when the partner isn’t a behemoth with all that Microsoft has to offer, small companies can still benefit from partner marketing. In addition to partnering with Microsoft, Gridstore also partners with smaller companies.Said Grey, “Our advertising budgets are very limited, so we leverage co-marketing with resellers. We’ll provide marketing content, expert speakers for webinars, content for email blasts, etc. They invite their customers and have the opportunity to earn a margin on the sale.”

6.     Make the most of your marketing  

Any company, particularly a small company, needs to squeeze the most out of everything they do. For example, when Lisa Snyders, Senior Manager of Marketing, Denodo Technologies, embarks on a marketing program, she makes sure she looks at how she can capitalize on her efforts from every angle.

“When I go to events, I plan rigorously,” Snyders said. “I look at: Which analysts will be there? Who should we brief beforehand? Which speakers will attend? Can these speakers potentially reference our technology? If so, I’ll brief them because sometimes they might include a slide about our technology in their presentation. I’ll get a list of companies who might be there and have inside sales try to make appointments before the event to maximize return. After the event, we follow up on the leads as quickly as possible when it’s fresh on their minds.”

 

Spray and Pray 2.0

 

For today’s marketers, “spray and pray” is the ultimate pejorative. Also known as “spaghetti against the wall,” spray and pray 1.0 was when marketers would buy a huge list of, say, 5,000-10,000 names and send out an email blast hoping that someone, anyone, would bite. 

Like its predecessor, spray and pray 2.0 is an attempt to blanket prospects with the vendors’ message. But while spray and pray 1.0 sent minimally-targeted messages to large numbers of people, spray and pray 2.0 goes to a more targeted list in as many ways as possible—emails, white papers, webinars, articles, videos, infographics, tweets, LinkedIn, and more.

Spray and pray 2.0 addresses a couple of modern facts of life. The first is simply that different people learn in different ways—some are visual, some are auditory, some are kinesthetic learners. So it makes sense to present them with the type of information that helps them learn best.

The second is that buyers no longer make their way through their buying process in a linear fashion. Today’s buyer’s journey meanders across channels and social media the way teenagers wander around the state fair. They head over to the Ferris wheel, watch a little Nascar, take a detour through the heritage pavilion, throw a few bean bags to win the stuffed SpongeBob SquarePants, scarf down a deep-fried Snicker Doodle, milk a cow, then check out the baby chicks and the half-ton pumpkins.

The result is that campaigns need to be far more comprehensive. “It’s a surround strategy,” explained Todd Craig, an Atlanta-based marketing consultant and Oracle Modern Market Leader finalist. “You have to think in terms of multi-asset, multi-touch, multi-channel, multi-time period. You also have to reuse content by breaking it down and repurposing it so you can have an impact across all channels.”

Multiple Touches

Virtually all marketers begin their spray and pray 2.0 campaigns by creating a multitude of content that they can push across multiple channels.

For example, BMC used to do a lot of white papers. But now, said Alison Munn, Senior Social Media Marketing and Engagement Manager, “We’re doing more video, more eBooks, more bite-sized infograms, more blogs. Every time I create a piece of content, the first question I ask is, ‘What images can I use to promote that over social?’”

Certain, Inc. puts the word out about its thought leadership, which explains how the company’s event-management solution fits into the larger ecosystem of marketing automation, through webinars, partner webinars, articles in the press, social channels like LinkedIn and Twitter, and participation in  industry events. As Michelle Schofield, Director of Marketing explained, “We take a cross-channel approach and use all these elements in a cohesive manner to create a successful campaign.”

Different Learning Styles 

Different types of content accommodate different preferences and learning styles. Blucarat, which offers a solution that brings social media to eCommerce channels, targets millennial social-media managers with short videos because this audience prefers video to longer white papers.

 In contrast, Victoria Grey, Chief Marketing Officer at Gridstore, which provides storage solutions for Microsoft HyperV, uses not only videos, but also white papers and other written content. Said Grey, “We do everything. We do video, papers, customer testimonials and more because people have different preferences for consuming content. Some people only watch video, others like to read technical briefs or what another customer might have to say. For example, for me personally, if I’m in a meeting I can discreetly read, but I can’t watch a video.”

Concur Technologies is concerned with addressing different learning styles. Said Amy Higgins, Senior Manager of Content Marketing, “Everyone learns differently. Studies show that video and photos work best. The more interactive it can be the better. You rarely see postings on Google+ without a photo. Twitter is getting more and more into that. We might imbed a SlideShare in a tweet. As a result, our mix tends toward different learning styles. We’re still playing with that. It’s all trial-and-error and testing things out.”

All Stages of the Buying Cycle

But spray and pray 2.0 goes well beyond mere integrated marketing. More marketers are looking to coordinate content-marketing and demand-generation efforts across the entire buying process. “We’re evolving to get better at using content to address key buyers at the right stage in the buying process,” said Frank Barry, Director, New Growth Ventures and Partners at Blackbaud.

Jessica Primanzon, Senior Campaign Manager at Deltek, has created a methodology that ensures that Deltek has the content it needs at each stage in the buying process. She performed an audit of all the content her group had produced and mapped each one to where it fit in the sales process. Said Primanzon, “I use that architecture assessment to see where I need to produce new content as well was what type of content I need to accommodate different learning styles. The content architecture allows us to take personal preference off the table and produce the content we actually need.”

As companies master marketing automation, this mapping process will only become more sophisticated. As Craig explained, “Marketing automation is helping us assess impact. We can evaluate the complexion of every touchpoint. We can determine how many touches it takes to close a customer; for example, how many webinars they attend and so on. With this data, we can start to understand what it takes to go from prospect to customers and map content back to the buyer’s journey. We’ll eventually get to the point where we can create the right combination of content that speaks to multiple personas in an organization, develop a value proposition for each one, and come up with a compelling event that pushes them over to help us close a deal for with a $250 million manufacturer in Kansas.”

Marketing over the Long Term

Because today’s spray and pray 2.0 campaigns cover the entire buying process, they’re far longer than older campaigns. While older campaigns may have run for three weeks and might have included one to three email blasts, modern campaigns take advantage of marketing automation and can run for six months. 

Said Craig, “It’s really powerful when you can map things out and have a program that lasts that long. You can really start to see which channels click, where you’re moving the needle in concert, what kind of content, and what combination moves the prospect.”