Archive for the ‘trust’ Category

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How to Avoid the Seven Deadly Marketing Sins

Monday, October 17th, 2011

Here’s a cartoon from Tom Fishburne of Brand Camp. I love it because, as all good cartoons should, it reflects reality.

Seven Deadly Sins Cartoon How to Avoid the Seven Deadly Marketing Sins

What should you do instead?

  1. Get creative. Treat each new campaign as if the whole world has changed since the last one (because it has – even if the last one was yesterday).
  2. Be aware of your competitors, but don’t imitate them. Be better. Work harder. Add more value (yes, your marketing should deliver value to your prospects).
  3. Social media ‘likes’ are a good thing, but they aren’t the point. The point is to nurture prospects with useful and relevant content. Useful and relevant content builds trust. Trust sells.
  4. Fancy ad shoots are fun, and sometimes they’re worthwhile… but do a cost/benefit analysis before spending your client’s (or employer’s) money.
  5. Partnering with any affiliate who will have you is lazy and risky. Be selective. Have a good reason for linking your product/service/brand with another company’s, and research them for potential liabilities.
  6. Don’t spam. Just don’t.
  7. Everybody enjoys a pat on  the back, but awards should be a byproduct of your efforts… not their objective.

Do you have a reaction to Tom’s cartoon you’d like to share?

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Posted in acSellerant, content marketing, content/social media marketing, digital relationships, execution, social media, trust | 3 Comments »

Content Curation from Source to Influence in Five Steps

Wednesday, April 27th, 2011

I’ve been doing “Content Curation” for years. Ever since the internet and email have been widely available tools, I’ve been sharing bits and pieces of information I found interesting, thought-provoking, or just plain entertaining; and I shared with colleagues, friends, clients and prospects. Over time, I learned that it’s a great way to keep top of mind with clients and prospects without being ‘salesy’. I deliver timely, relevant and useful information to them in easy to consume bites. The timing is serendipitous – it depends on when I happen to run across something meaningful. It might be a single day between curated missives, it might be a month.

Curating Content 227x300 Content Curation from Source to Influence in Five Steps

My forwarded curations are also highly personalized. I rarely blast an item to a long list of people. The vast majority of the time I send a tidbit to a single individual, or a small handful of people. The information is highly relevant, meaningful, and hopefully valuable to these people. I’ve trained them to look forward to these tidbits so my ‘open and read rate’ is very high.

That’s on the personal level. Curated content can also be an important input into more formal marketing communications/content marketing campaigns designed to inform and gently persuade regarding products, services and solutions.

So how’s it done? Something like this:

Step 1: Identify Your Topics of Interest

  • What topics make sense for your company and product set?
  • What peripheral topics might be of interest to your sphere of influence? What industries are they in? What types of technology do they manufacture, purchase or use in their businesses? Are there political or regulatory issues that affect them?
  • Is there a specific niche in which you’d like to position yourself as a thought leader?

Step 2: Select Your Search and Aggregation Tools

There are many tools available online. I prefer to use a limited number of these, paying particular attention to the search terms I develop. The more ‘advanced’, selective and sophisticated your search terms, the fewer results you’ll get, but those results will be more valuable and relevant.

Google, the king of all things search, has many free resources that can help you to become an ‘advanced’ searcher. Spend two or three hours to learn this skill. It’ll save you hundreds of hours over the next decade.

Tools to use to find relevant information, aggregate it, organize it and deliver it to your constituents:

  • Addictomatic.com
  • Digg.com
  • DuckDuckGo.com
  • Google.com/Alerts
  • Google.com/Reader (set up via RSS feeds)
  • HootSuite.com
  • IceRocket.com
  • LinkedIn.com (group discussions)
  • Paper.li
  • Scoop.it
  • SocialMention.com
  • StumbleUpon.com
  • Technorati.com
  • TweetDeck
  • Twitter.com

There are many others. The point is to select the subset that you like, and then set them up correctly. They’re just tools. You want them to help you find the nuggets of gold hidden in the vast mountains of available information.

Step 3: Gather

Once your tools are set up, the information will be delivered to you daily. It’s up to you to skim and scan, trash and save, read and contextualize.

Step 4: Organize

You can get as detailed as you want about this. I think it’s a matter of personal style, plus the amount of data you’re dealing with. Obviously, the larger the amount of information, the more you’re going to need to categorize it, perhaps creating sub-categories and metadata to enable efficient searches. My personal style is not terribly organized, and I find this is helpful (in this context). My brain tends to sift information and make connections that wouldn’t normally occur in an organized taxonomy.

I do organize my curated content by target audience, though.

Step 5: Share

There’s no point in doing all the above (at least from a marketing perspective) unless you deliver the appropriate (and relevant) information to your various constituents (individuals, small groups, distribution lists). Remember – what’s useful and relevant to one person is irrelevant and useless to the next.

You might deliver to individuals in an informal, unscheduled way via email. For groups of people (aggregated by shared interests) you might use newsletters, social media (including blogs), podcasts, etc. and disseminate on a pre-determined schedule (once a day, week or month). What’s important here is to assess the content, and assess the audience; then select the appropriate vehicle and frequency.

Attribution

There’s an old adage – “If you take from one information source, you’re plagiarizing. If you take from twenty information sources, you’re researching.” There’s a spectrum of content curation ranging from direct quotes all the way to completely re-thought, re-contextualized, re-written material. All are equally valid… as you approach and reach the direct quote end of the spectrum, you should attribute the source including author and publication.

Did I miss anything? Are there any helpful tactics or tools that you can’t live without in your content curation endeavors?

 

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Posted in acSellerant, business to business, content marketing, content/social media marketing, digital relationships, execution, social media, trust | 1 Comment »

Content Curation – the Savior of SMB Marketers

Tuesday, April 5th, 2011

We know content/social media marketing is highly effective, yet for SMBs it often doesn’t deliver the results that it should. Why not?

Consistent, Quality Production

Everybody who works in SMB B2B marketing is well aware of this. The agencies, the clients, the consultants,Quality Control 300x225 Content Curation – the Savior of SMB Marketers the gurus… everybody knows it. Smaller businesses just don’t have the resources available to create relevant and useful content on an ongoing basis. They start out with good intentions. They write a few blog posts, get increased traffic and some comments; but the real business payback doesn’t occur until after months of consistently publishing compelling content. Content that people consume because they want to… because there’s value in it.

It takes time, skill and energy to produce all that content. What if you don’t have the time, skill or energy?

Content Curation

I define content curation as the process of assembling, summarizing and adding commentary to information from multiple sources in a context that is relevant to a particular audience. I think this discipline is essential to content/social media marketing.

Today, we are drowning in information. Most of it is poor quality and of little value (i.e. not worth the time spent to consume it). There is tremendous value in sifting through the mountains of content to find those rare golden nuggets that are high quality, relevant, useful and (hopefully) entertaining. With the ever increasing volume of information we’re faced with, businesses can bring real value to their prospects and clients by serving as a filter.

Marketers can build trust by providing focused curation in areas that matter to their prospects and clients. Quality original content has always had value, but curation is coming to have nearly equal value. The key is to stake out unique topic areas. For SMB B2Bs, those are the areas that are of professional interest to the buyers of your products and services.

The information you curate should help your target audience make better buying decisions; and it should increase the benefits of using your products and services. It might include economic or regulatory news that affects their industry, and other adjacent but relevant topics. Your aim is to become the most trusted source in those areas. You don’t need a lot of time or money to do this. You just need to have a deep understanding of your chosen niche.

In this post I told you the ‘what’ and ‘why’ of content curation for SMB B2Bs. In our next post, I’ll discuss how to do all the above effectively and efficiently.

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Posted in acSellerant, Bob Leonard, business to business, content marketing, content/social media marketing, digital relationships, execution, social media, trust | 1 Comment »

Make Social Media Easier with Target Personas

Thursday, February 3rd, 2011
Diverse Group of Business People 300x149 Make Social Media Easier with Target Personas

Different Content for Different People

This is the third in a series of blog posts where I deconstruct the social media marketing process in order to solve the content development problem. The number one cause of social media marketing failure is poor and/or inconsistent content development. This is especially acute for small to mid-sized B2B companies. Why? Because…

  1. SMB B2Bs don’t have the resources that large companies have to do the requisite content development.
  2. B2Bs sell complex products and services to professional business people; so their content must be concise, compelling, relevant, useful and (hopefully) entertaining – not an easy task.

You can’t create compelling content if you don’t have a clear idea of who you’re communicating with. What’s relevant and useful to one person is irrelevant and useless to the next. Target personas should include current customers, as well as prospects. I develop one persona for both customers and prospects. If you have more than one type of product or service, you should create a persona for each product line (and probably a different corporate voice and SM profile for each too).

You Want More of Your Best

If you haven’t created a clear profile of your most desirable prospects, this process can help you do that:

Take a look at your list of current customers. Which are your most profitable? Which are the most fun to do business with? (It’s always interesting to see the overlap between these.) Put this subset of customers into a spreadsheet and score them on a list of demographics (age, location, industry, role/title, size of business, etc.) and psychographics (attitudes, beliefs, values, personality type, buying motives, etc.).

Let’s say, for example, you determine that your prime prospect has the following attributes:

  • lives in the Midwest
  • is between 35 and 55 years old
  • works in a small (10 to 50 employee) credit union or community bank
  • is the COO, VP, (person in charge) of Operations
  • is male
  • is married and has school age children
  • is active in his community
  • and makes buying decisions based on how they might affect his career.

You now have a good idea of who your best target is, what his interests and concerns are, and how you can motivate him. Some people even name their primary persona (I named mine ‘Erica’). Print out this list of attributes and tack it up where you can read it from your desk chair. Before writing a blog post, or tweeting, or contributing to a LinkedIn discussion, review that list to remind yourself who you’re conversing with. It makes the process much easier. Try it and see.

Please let me know if you have any other targeting tips that help you in developing content, or if you decide to try this process, let me know how it works for you.

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Posted in acSellerant, Bob Leonard, business to business, content marketing, digital relationships, execution, social media, trust | 6 Comments »

Leveraging Internal Company Resources for Content Development

Wednesday, January 26th, 2011

This is our second week of diving down into specific facets of social media to see how we can leverage each to make the content development process more successful. We’ve been blogging about the difficulties that small to mid-sized B2B companies have in executing their social media strategies. This week’s focus area is:

Leveraging Internal Resources

Diverse Emplyees in Office 300x199 Leveraging Internal Company Resources for Content Development

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.

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Posted in acSellerant, Bob Leonard, business to business, content marketing, digital relationships, execution, market research, marketing strategy, new product launch, Sales and Marketing alliance, sales enablement, social media, trust | 8 Comments »

User-Generated Content via Market Research

Tuesday, January 18th, 2011

This is the third post in a series devoted to a pervasive problem experienced by SMB B2B companies. That problem is successful execution of their social media strategies. The best social media strategy on the planet is worthless if it isn’t implemented. The most difficult piece to execute for SMBs is the development of an ongoing stream of relevant and useful content. Poor quality content is cheap and easy to generate, but it does more harm than good.

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.

Business Strategy Chart 300x199 User Generated Content via Market Research

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).

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Posted in acSellerant, Bob Leonard, business to business, content marketing, digital relationships, execution, market research, marketing strategy, new product launch, social media, trust | 2 Comments »

How to Get Over the Social Media Content Hump

Tuesday, January 11th, 2011

I wrote a blog post a week ago that obviously touched a nerve. “B2B Social Media’s Big Not So Secret” garnered the most traffic of any blog post I’ve ever written. David Meerman Scott tweeted the post – that certainly goosed my traffic. I also received a few comments and a flurry of phone calls and emails. 99% of the feedback was supportive of my premise, which was:

“Small to medium sized B2B companies are not realizing the benefits they should from social media marketing due to problems with execution.”

OK. Fine. I have agreement on the above premise. So what? How does that help the companies affected? Well, admitting to the problem is always the first step, isn’t it?

I’m going to devote the next several blogs to this topic. I think I have some helpful hints for the client companies, and the agencies and consultants working with them. I by no means have all the answers, though. So I invite all to comment with any insights you’ve garnered.

Here’s my editorial content list for this series of posts:

  1. Research – the good news is that social media enables ‘lurking and listening’. It’s easy to find and listen in on the relevant conversations that are occurring. The bad news is that this is time consuming. The conversations evolve and you need to keep up to date. Ideally all stakeholders will have their ears and eyes on the appropriate conversations. A (formal or informal) back channel needs to be established for information sharing.
  2. Involving client personnel in the process. This is a biggie. They’re busy people, and they’re crucial to the success of any content marketing or social media endeavor. They need to understand this (the best way is for the CEO to make it a priority). I specifically target sales people because they know what questions prospects need answered, what objections need to be overcome, and the competitive land mines that need to be defused.
  3. Development of target personas. You can’t create compelling content if you don’t have a clear idea of who you’re speaking to. What’s relevant and useful to one person is irrelevant and useless to the next. Target personas should include current customers, and targeted bloggers/media/PR types in addition to prospects.
  4. Determine your content strategy and who is responsible for executing each task. Include an editorial calendar, deadlines, information sources, etc.
  5. Messaging – what specifically do you want to communicate to each target type, and what do you want them to do (what constitutes a ‘conversion’)?
  6. Include distribution, outreach and socialization… the mechanics of how you’ll get your quality content in front of your target audience.
  7. Develop a feedback loop. We’re back to listening here. Track blog comments and reply to them when appropriate. See who retweets or mentions your content in discussions. Make it somebody’s job to document and enter into the CRM system (there are tools available to automate this process).
  8. Budget accordingly. Social media is an extremely cost effective marketing tool, but it isn’t free or even cheap. Understand that it requires a significant investment of time. Ensure that the people assigned are sharp and experienced enough to make this a successful endeavor.

Please let me know if I missed anything (I’m sure I have). We’ll take one topic at a time and within a couple of months, we should have a blueprint to follow to ensure our carefully developed social media strategies are executed successfully.

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Posted in acSellerant, Bob Leonard, business to business, content marketing, digital relationships, execution, marketing strategy, Sales and Marketing alliance, sales enablement, social media, trust | 7 Comments »

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