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?

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.

Consistent, Quality Production

Everybody who works in SMB B2B marketing is well aware of this. The agencies, the clients, the consultants, 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.

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?