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?

Bob: Scott, many business people don’t really understand all the three letter acronyms that seem to proliferate around you. How about we start with your definitions?

Scott: OK. Let’s start with the more common ones. Most people these days know what SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and SEM (Search Engine Marketing) are. SEO is the development and structuring of website content in such a way that it earns high search engine rankings for chosen keywords (or search terms). SEM is similar except that you pay for text ads to be placed in search results for your chosen keywords. It’s also called Pay Per Click (PPC) because you pay when searchers click on your ad and visit your site. SEO and SEM are about getting prospects to your website or landing page.

But what do you do with your visitors once they’re on your site? You want them to Convert. This has nothing to do with religion, Bob. Conversions often mean sales. You want to convert lookers into buyers. In our case, though, a conversion can be a number of things, but usually not a sale.

That’s due to the nature of the products and services our clients sell. acSellerant works exclusively with B2B vendors, so a typical sale might cost $300,000. Not exactly an impulse buy.

That’s right. So a conversion might be registering with their name and email address to receive a case study, or to attend a webinar. To get back to the three letter acronyms, the next one would be CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization). This is where the rubber meets the road and where we can really make a significant impact on our clients’ revenue. Through various means – changing the wording of headlines, changing the graphic on a page, changing the offer (what we give them for registering), we can tweak a web page to constantly increase the number of conversions. These conversions represent a step further along the buy cycle, a step closer to a sale.

So that introduces the concepts of analytics and testing.

Yes. We have to know what visitors are doing so we can interpret their behavior and draw conclusions. I set up Google Analytics. The software is free and very comprehensive. It captures and reports mountains of data. So we need to determine which data points are relevant to conversions, and separate those out from all the noise. Then we test by changing the different components and seeing how those changes affect conversions. This really is the holy grail for marketing. It used to be extremely expensive and time consuming to test different elements to maximize response. Today, online, it’s very economical and the ROI can be enormous.

Yes. David Ogilvy would jump for joy. When he ran tests in the 60s and 70s, they had to shoot different versions of commercials, and actually buy air time and run them, to see what worked and what didn’t. Millions in today’s dollars and we can do the same thing for one tenth of one percent of the cost. Of course, we’re not working with Procter and Gamble budgets either.

It’s not only the cost that’s so much less. The time needed to make changes and test them is also greatly reduced.

OK. We have time for one more acronym. How about CMS?

That stands for Content Management System. We use the industry leader, WordPress. It was originally designed as a blog platform, but it’s evolved well past that. We build websites with it, and it solves a major issue for our clients. It used to be that whenever a site owner wanted to change the content on their site, they had to hire a programmer to make the change for them. WordPress and other CMSs give users a Word-like interface so they can build web content without the help of a programmer.

Not only does that save time and money, but Google LOVES fresh, relevant content. Google rewards, with high search rankings, websites that consistently add fresh and relevant content. And that brings us back full circle to SEO.

Before we go, Scott, how about you share some SEO, SEM, or CRO tips with our readers?

OK. I’ll give one tip for each acronym:

• SEO:  All signs are that Social Media is playing a much larger role in search engine rankings… remember, Google rewards relevance, and a great way to beat the scammers and gamers is to make sure real people actually value your content.  So… get in the Social Media game with a smart strategy.

• SEM:  You don’t have to outbid the highest bidder with your PPC ads – ranking at #2 through #6 for key terms specific to your niche will get you similar results as a #1 ranking. Be specific, using three word key terms. Always keep testing different ad copy and headline versions.

• CRO:  Foster a culture of testing. Start with well conceived A/B tests and also Visitor Behavior testing (heatmaps, etc.). Adjust your content and your value proposition accordingly. Remember… you’re not optimizing your site, you’re optimizing visitor behavior at your site.

How about you? Are you analyzing your online traffic? What have you learned? What have you changed as a result? Do you optimize for conversions?

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.

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?