What do B2B decision makers and purchase influencers care about?  Reducing risk!

They want to make a buying decision that will enhance their careers. They want information that will help them make the best business decision possible – a decision that will result in cost savings and/or increase top line revenue.

Sounds easy enough.

Just deliver the information that tells them why your product or service will make them the hero of their company, right?

Wrong.

That path results in overly salesy materials that will turn off your prospects. Instead, you first need to understand their perceptions about the business problem that your product or service solves. One of the best ways to uncover this information is through qualitative research, which can help you develop the strategic B2B content that potential buyers of your product or service are interested in. It’s the first step in continuous marketing improvement.

Market Research that Digs Deep

One of the primary reasons to do market research is to understand why people behave and think in the way that they do. The best insights can’t be obtained by surveying hundreds of people, or by monitoring and analyzing social media mentions. These insights come from deep (but loosely structured) interviews with a small number of highly targeted individuals.

Qualitative research methods rely heavily on the skills of the interviewer to interact with the interviewees and to dig deep into their motivations and experiences. Such methods are defined as qualitative because they seek quality information over quantity. Qualitative research is exploratory.

So, how do you do qualitative research?

I like the methodology outlined by Kristin Zhivago. Kristin is a revenue coach who helps CEOs and entrepreneurs increase their bottom lines by understanding what their customers want to buy, and how they want to buy it. I have ‘borrowed’ Kristin’s qualitative research methodology (which she outlines in clear detail in her books), to elicit the information I need to develop content marketing strategies for my B2B clients.

Kristin eschews the use of focus groups and instead recommends one-on-one interviews. People in focus groups are surrounded by peers from within their own company and/or peers from another (possibly competing) company. So, they provide careful answers that don’t reveal the whole truth.

Aim for completing about 10 personal interviews. Depending on the quality of the responses, you may be able to scale back, or you may find that you need to conduct a few more.

NOTE: Many marketers shy away from asking busy client executives to give them an hour of their time for an interview. Don’t! As long as you make it clear that this information will be used for important purposes (as the foundation of a major marketing campaign), your client executives will be flattered that you asked, and will have a more positive opinion of your business as a result.

How to Conduct One-on-One Interviews

Kristin recommends conducting interviews via the phone instead of face-to-face. In her experience, people are more forthcoming over the phone because they’re sitting in their own environment, and they’re alone and relaxed. I prefer phone interviews because they’re easier and less expensive to execute (no travel).

The two most important factors for these interviews are selecting the right people and asking the right questions.

Find the Right People

Your best target interviewees are current customers. You want to select:

• people who made the buy decision,
• people who influenced the decision, and
• people who are using the product/service.

You want happy customers and not-so-happy customers. If this is a brand new product launch, you’ll need to find appropriate prospects, which is more difficult to accomplish, but is doable.

Ask the Right Questions

Here’s the kind of information you want to gather:

• What questions did they need answered – at the different phases of the buying cycle?
• What objections did they have? How were those objections overcome?
• What land mines had been placed by your competitors?
• What information did they have trouble finding?
• At what point did they feel ready to talk to a salesperson?
• What helped them to sell your product or service internally?
• Now that they’re using your solution, what didn’t they know about it prior to the purchase?

Finally, ask them what question you should have asked but didn’t.

The Key: Really Listen

During the interview, LISTEN.

Your interview subjects may go off on a tangent. Let them. That’s often when the most valuable information is uncovered.

The resulting information, once organized and analyzed, will give you a good sense of what your content strategy should be. You’ll learn:

• which topics need to be covered at what points during the buy cycle,
• what information specific titles (CFO, CTO, VP Sales, etc.) are interested in,
• and what the best vehicles will be to deliver the information.

I originally wrote this blog post for the Content Marketing Institute where it appeared under the title ‘How One-On-One Interviews Can Reveal What Your B2B Audience Really Wants‘. Please share your adventures in B2B market research by contributing a comment below.

Closed-loop marketing has been the exclusive domain of major corporations until very recently. Smaller companies with limited resources can now also reap enormous benefits from it. Closed-loop marketing is the process by which market intelligence learned during a marketing campaign is fed back into the strategy and plan; resulting in more focused targeting, more effective messaging, and improved resonance.

Until the past couple of years, closed-loop marketing could only be achieved through expensive, labor intensive market research. Imagine being able to automatically feed your prospects’ reactions to your marketing content back into your strategy, messaging process and choice of delivery vehicles. It isn’t just doable… it’s within the reach of even the smallest companies. What follows is a brief overview of the Closed-loop Marketing Process. In subsequent CMI posts I’ll dive down into each of the processes and show you step by step how it’s done.

1.  Research

At the launch of any marketing campaign, it’s ALWAYS a good idea to make sure you have a realistic understanding of your product, the marketplace, your value proposition and competitive positioning. In this closed-loop process, I’m depicting a research step only at the inception. The process itself will automatically deliver new, deeper market intelligence as you roll it out.

2.  Strategy

A clearly defined strategy is essential to the success of your content marketing campaign.

• What are the objectives for the campaign?
• Who are your prospects?
• What industry are they in?
• What roles and titles do they have?
• What business pains are your targets experiencing (related to your solution)?
• How will your product or service solve those problems?
• What are the resulting benefits?

3.  Buyer-Centric Processes

You can’t build relevant and useful content unless you know exactly who you’re talking to. Refine your definitions of target prospects from Step 2 into actual personas (representative individuals). Construct a map of the steps that your prospects go through in making a buying decision. Prospects have different informational needs depending on where they are in the buy cycle. Message maps identify the key messages that must be successfully communicated to prospects to move them to the next step in the buy cycle. Click on this hyperlink for more detail on Message Maps.

4.  Editorial Calendar

Content marketers are publishers. Publishers develop editorial calendars to give them a road map of where their publication is going – which topics are going to be covered and when. Today we publish in many different formats. Look at your message map and determine how best to deliver your content (via blogs, case studies, emails, magazine articles, podcasts, presentations, videos, web pages, webinars, white papers, etc.).

5.  Content

Prioritize using all the information you’ve gathered in the preceding steps, and start building your content piece by piece. You don’t have to create everything from scratch. Odds are you can find existing in house or third party materials that are appropriate and effective. Don’t just appropriate the content, Curate it. That means you acknowledge the source, and then put the content into context by explaining how it relates to your solution. Optimize with SEO key phrases.

6.  Promotion and Socialization

Once the content is built, you need to let your target prospects know that it exists. If you have a permission-based email list, or blog subscribers, you can deliver your content directly. Otherwise you need to pull your targets to where your content is located online, or push it to where your targets are congregating in social networks.

7.  Feedback

Google Analytics, click thru tracking in emails, social media monitors and other tools enable you to cost effectively see how your targets react to your content.

• Where do they immediately bounce off a page?
• Where do they linger and learn?
• Which pieces do they forward, post, or tweet about?
• Where do they convert and take your desired action?
• What do they have to say in their blog comments?

For more on this, see Scott Frangos’ CMI post “How to Get Results After Creating Compelling Content”.

8.  Document

To leverage the valuable information you’ve collected in the previous step, you must gather the information, organize it, and store it where you can search it and sort on it. The more information there is (and tools like Google Analytics can generate tons of it), the more you’ll need automation in the form of an integrated Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system.

9.  Analysis

Once you have the market intelligence you’ve gathered in a format that’s easily manageable, it’s time to measure how you did. This is an analysis process that translates the market intelligence into action items to course correct and tweak your campaign.

• Where did you do well?
• Where could you have done better?
• What should you change regarding your target descriptions, personas, message map, vehicles and content?

Today’s buyers are moving targets. Their needs and issues are constantly evolving. The economic environment is always changing. Technologies are continually being developed and upgraded. So it makes sense that our marketing campaigns should also morph in an attempt to keep up.

Closed-loop marketing is ideal for B2B marketers who need to nurture prospects over extended periods of time. By continuously analyzing customer responses and refining your communications process and messages, you can adjust your campaigns to deliver highly targeted, relevant and effective marketing content.

I’m a contributor to the Content Marketing Institute blog. This blog post first appeared there:

http://www.contentmarketinginstitute.com/2011/04/content-marketing-improvement/

Look for my blog posts on the steps of the Closed-Loop Content Marketing Process and on Content Curation at CMI.

A message map should be created for each solution that a B2B marketer promotes. The maps identify the key messages that must be successfully communicated to target prospects.

Here’s how it’s done:

A brainstorming session is held among sales people, marketers, product managers and external agency people. Once everyone has shared their thoughts, key messages that truly differentiate the solution from the competition are generated. Validation of the messages occurs when supporting facts are delineated. Finally, and most importantly, the benefits to the customer are defined. The benefits should align with the needs of your target prospects. If they don’t, you have a product problem.

When there’s agreement on key messaging, the marketing team doesn’t have to define the message every time it creates new content. A message map provides the basic messaging for everything from articles to blog posts, podcasts to press releases, white papers to webinars.

Message maps make it easier and more cost effective to work with outsiders. If you outsource content creation, message maps give external resources the guidance they need to create material that supports and elaborates on your essential positioning.

Message maps can help keep the sales team on message. Some enterprising sales people may create materials for specific sales situations. By giving them the essential guidance they need in a useful, accessible and approved messaging document, you’ll make it easier for the sales team to create one-off presentations, individual letters and emails that are accurate and effective.

You’ll find that some of the sales team’s improvisations are entertaining and persuasive. The sales team interacts with your target audience on an ongoing basis. They understand the buyer. They know which questions must be answered and objections overcome to close the sale. They may discover information about target prospects’ pains and buying factors that you didn’t have before. By maintaining a common message map and soliciting sales input up front, you can integrate their market knowledge into your messaging.

A message map accelerates content marketing. Time spent up-front in developing the message map will be repaid in full during the content creation cycle.  Fewer iterations and faster content development cycles will support a timely and successful content marketing initiative.

How about you? Have you deployed message maps? Have you experienced increased efficiency when using them?

Leveraging Internal Resources

Maximizing Internal Resources for Content Development

Almost all employees at SMBs are stretched to the limit. They have very little time or energy to spare. Yet, they are essential to the success of social media programs. So, how do we maximize their contributions while minimizing their exertion?

Start at the Top

Whether you’re an internal marketing professional, or an external marketing consultant, no social media campaign has a chance of success without the support of the CEO/Owner. Make it clear to that person that there’s no sense in embarking on the campaign unless s/he’s on board and publicly pledges support to the project. Employees need to know that this is important to the boss. Other input needed from the C suite includes the goals and objectives for the campaign. Everyone has to be clear on what constitutes success, so you know:

1. what you’re all working toward, and
2. when you’ve arrived.

The nature of social media is that it’s an ongoing process, so you want to develop an over arching long term goal; something like, “An average year over year growth rate of 40% for the next 10 years.” Then develop smaller, shorter term goals (e.g. “One conversion per week from a prospect pulled in via social media.”).

Depending on the executives and their personalities, they may also become contributors of blog posts, tweets, LinkedIn discussion group Q&As, etc. If you can position one or more of these executives as a thought leader in your niche, it could result in a significant increase in the ROI of your campaign.

Sales Leaders

Successful sales people are an extremely valuable resource. They are also typically the most difficult to track down and get information from. In addition to the direction from the CEO mentioned above, you must communicate to the sales people why they should spend their precious time with you, rather than with a prospect or customer. Here’s how:

• be overt in communicating that you’ll respect their time, you value their contribution, and that the result will help them be even more successful,
• tell them exactly what type of information you’re looking for (typical questions prospects have, objections that need to be overcome, competitive land mines that need to be defused), and
• offer to make it as painless as possible – tell them you’ll spend a day with them to observe and learn from their interactions with customers, and to conduct your interviews in the car, as you travel from appointment to appointment.

Subject Matter Experts

These are the engineers and product managers that can give you nuts and bolts information about product/service features, new versions to be released, etc. You want to establish ongoing, symbiotic relationships with these people. The best way to do that (plus give them an understanding of the value of social media) is to do research for them. Use social media to answer questions they have about the competition and the market.

Going forward, maintain an ongoing conversation with them based on the two-way transmission of relevant and useful information concerning your industry, new breakthroughs, what’s on the drawing board (and the likely market reaction), etc.

If you have any other tips re leveraging internal resources in an effective manner to help develop SM content, please share in a comment to this post.

In my last post, Getting Over the Social Media Content Hump, I listed all the ingredients of a successful social media campaign (that I could think of at the time). My intention is to take each of them – one per week – and delve deeper in an attempt to answer, “How can this facet of social media be leveraged to help develop and/or distribute quality, highly readable content.”

This week’s topic is Market Research.

Social media is a great tool for market research. You can research your clients and your competition, and improve your products and services via crowd sourced surveys. Knowing what your prospects and clients are saying, as well as what your competition is up to, is highly valuable in itself. Anticipating and validating product changes through social research, polls and surveys can be of extreme value. And these polls and surveys will also develop user-generated content.

This is a tactic that market research firms (e.g. Forrester, Frost & Sullivan, Gartner) have been using for decades. It’s no small task to develop a survey questionnaire that elicits valuable information, but there are consultants who specialize in this.

Can’t afford a consultant? Send an email around to your department heads: C-suite, Customer Service, Engineering, HR, Marketing, Product Management, Sales; and ask them for two or three market-related questions that each would love to have the answers to.

Then place these surveys on relevant sites like Facebook, Foursquare, LinkedIn, Twitter, and industry specific networking sites. The answers will give you a treasure trove of information that is, by definition, relevant and useful. The information came directly from your target audience!

Use this user-generated content to feed your blogs, group discussions, tweets, etc. And take another sheet from the research firms’ playbook – every year (or quarter, or month) update and re-post your polls and surveys. You’ll get more fodder for your content needs, and more up to date insight into the needs and wants of your clients and target market.

Beneficial side effects may include tighter alignment between your social media people and the rest of the company (and a new found respect for what social media can accomplish), and a closer digital relationship with customers and prospects. This blog post by Scott Frangos makes a crucial distinction between content and true connection (the kind needed to close high ticket B2B deals).