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.

“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.

EXECUTION!

Everybody who works in SMB B2B marketing is well aware of this. The agencies, the consultants, the gurus… even the clients know it. From the client side they tell me, “Everybody wants to be a strategist. They come in and set up our blog, develop our content strategy, launch our company profiles on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, and then they go away.”

What I hear from my fellow marketing professionals is, “The clients won’t invest in the process. Nobody on the inside ‘owns’ social media marketing, so it doesn’t get done. They asked me to develop the content on an ongoing basis, but I can make much more money (and have more fun) developing strategy.”

I’ve worked with three clients so far who came to the same solution; and at first, I thought it was a good idea. They all said, “Let’s find a recent college grad. The kids all understand this social media stuff, and there’s tons of them looking for a job.” Three times tried, and three times failed. Why? The kids do understand the platforms, and the peer to peer communications in a social context. They’re too young to understand business. They don’t know how to have a nuanced sales conversation with a seasoned business person. And they don’t have the industry (for my clients, that’s IT) experience. I’m sure there are exceptions to the rule, but those young men and women won’t work for $15 an hour even in this economy.

So what do we do? Perceptions are changing. The social media gurus are beginning to understand that the land grab is over. It’s time to start homesteading. Less blue sky strategizing (and sky high consulting fees) and more day to day work (which can still be fun and rewarding). There will also be less frustration over perfectly good strategies going to waste due to a lack of execution.

On the client side, people are finally internalizing the message that marketing (including social media) is a PROCESS. It has to be worked on every day. The ROI of social media marketing is mind boggling when compared to print and broadcast advertising. Clients are beginning to understand that they have to (whether by hiring full time personnel, or subcontracting to outside vendors) pay professionals a professional rate.

I think 2011 is the year that businesses get past this social media marketing stumbling block. At least the winners will. If you want to learn more about what acSellerant does in this space, please visit our landing page about ghost blogging. We have similar services for all types of online and offline content development.

1. Include input from Sales. If you haven’t already, align Sales and Marketing. You can’t afford not to. Sales should be immersed in the conversations taking place with prospects offline. That information is critical to success in migrating, extending and amplifying those conversations online.

2. Be no longer than six months. You can’t plan beyond that. The conversations you need to be having with suspects, prospects and leads is influenced to a significant degree by the environment. Things change in a hurry. Your plan should define how you’ll adapt, not predict the future.

3. Develop and define target personas. Who are you trying to reach? What are their interests, needs and wants? If your content isn’t relevant and useful to that person; it won’t be consumed, remembered or acted on. You have to know, specifically, who you’re engaging in conversation. What’s relevant and useful to one person is irrelevant and useless to the next.

4. Include search engine optimization (SEO), link building, and probably paid search, too. Place your QUALITY content where your targets are congregating online; and take the extra step to PULL others to your blog and website. If they can’t find you on Google, you don’t exist.

5. Have a content strategy that doesn’t assume ‘existing resources’ will do the development. Beyond the strategy itself, this is the most important piece of the plan. Hire someone (either permanent staff or an outside consultant) as a dedicated resource… someone who is an expert at content development. That means not only an excellent copywriter, but one who has SEO skills, and one who understands how to deploy multimedia to communicate your messages quickly, clearly and persuasively.

6. Include distribution, outreach and socialization… the mechanics of how you’ll get your quality content in front of your target audience (which includes not only prospects, but influential people in your industry, in the blogging world, in the media, etc.); and give them the tools they need to comment and distribute.

7. Build in an analytics plan. List key performance indicators (KPIs). What are your goals? They should include traffic, blog comments, retweets, and conversions. This last, conversions, are where the rubber meets the road. What action(s) do you want your targets to take after consuming your content? That must be clearly defined up front. Google Analytics will give you reams of data for free. You don’t want reams of data. You want the half dozen or so stats that will give you a good idea of how well the plan is meeting its goals.

8. Serve existing customers. It’s easier to keep existing customers than it is to obtain new ones. Does your social media marketing plan lay out how you’ll keep your current customers informed and happy? Social media isn’t only a marketing tool. It’s also an excellent research, customer service and PR tool. Make sure your plan leverages it across all those departments.

9. Include Facebook along with Twitter, LinkedIn, and Foursquare. There are so many people on Facebook you’d be crazy not to try to reach .01% of them. Also look at niche social networks that may aggregate your targets. Once the content is developed, there are tools that automate the process of distributing to these platforms.

10. Follow through. After the content is distributed, you have to follow through. Your social networks must be monitored; and questions and comments must be answered. That’s the essence of  conversation. Listen.

11. Build your house list. It’s your most valuable marketing asset. Your plan should include integration of the various social media platforms into your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system.

12. Include a feedback loop. You developed relevant and useful content for your target audience. You distributed it. You socialized it. You listened and gathered intelligence re what your target thinks of your messaging. You’ve seen which content drives traffic and conversions, and which doesn’t. Feed that information back into the plan. Tweak, and repeat.

13. Be reasonable. There’s a perception that social media is low cost. The price of admission is practically zero, but social media marketing is a process. It requires a significant investment of time. You must listen, participate, and converse over time. Budget money and other resources accordingly.

14. Do the math. The easiest way to check on #13 is to do the math. Your social media plan should put a dollar value on a customer, and provide a worst-case cost estimate for acquiring that customer. Your customer acquisition cost, using social media, should be no more than a few percentage points of the lifetime value of that customer. If it isn’t, something is wrong with either your plan or your pricing.

It got me to thinking about how we at acSellerant might help our MSP clients build trust with their prospects. Using Covey’s universal tenets, I’ve come up with the following guidelines:

Talk Straight

Tell the truth. Be transparent. Work hard to communicate clearly so people understand exactly what to expect. Communications can get foggy for many reasons. What I see most are these three:

1. You’re rushed – slow down, make the time, think it through. It’ll save time in the long run.
2. You don’t completely understand the function/process/technology yourself – do your homework. Don’t communicate to the client until you’re confident you understand.
3. You understand a complex function/process/technology very well – be aware that the client may not be as versed in it. Slow down. Don’t use jargon or acronyms.

Right Wrongs

Mistakes happen. When they do, come clean immediately, apologize, and make it right. See what you can do to prevent the mistake from reoccurring.

Get Better

This is one I think most MSPs do well. They have the systems and the metrics in place, and they’re constantly trying to improve service levels. That’s great, but your clients are probably unaware of it. Think about things from their perspective. You know that fewer help desk calls means more profitability for you. The case can be made that fewer help desk calls also means better profitability (or at least productivity) for your clients. If you have stats that show you’ve brought the number of help desk calls down over time, SHARE THEM with your clients, and connect the dots for them re increased productivity.

How many other metrics that you work to improve can be framed as a benefit to your clients?

Listen First

We all know this is important, but most of us don’t practice it as often as we should.

Covey has thirteen tenets, but I think if you put the four I’ve listed above into practice 100% of the time, the rest will take care of itself.