Who is King of Content

The recent issue of B to B magazine has an interesting article entitled “Media, agencies battle to be king of content.”

You can find it here:  http://www.btobonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20091012/FREE/310089998/1151/btobissue

What jumped out at me right away is that the “fight” was between the media and agencies. As a marketing manager at a couple of mid- to large-sized software firms, I ALWAYS felt that I was responsible for content. Media outlets are places I can promote/place my content. But I do see the problem for media. They generate stories and see themselves as kings of content. But I don’t think that ever was the case. They were the repositories of content that, for the most part, came from vendors. Now, they do great work at compiling content, writing articles on new technologies, trends, etc. and occasional independent surveys and reporting, but they have always depended on vendors and analysts for a lot of what they regurgitate. So I don’t see a “battle between media and agencies.”

Content should come from BOTH the firm (whether they use an agency or not – personally, I only used agencies in specific situations since I know my products and customers better than they do) and media outlets. But the content is different. A company has a purpose to all its content – to get sales. Media, on the other hand, has a different purpose – to make itself a valuable resource so people will subscribe. And the distinction is significant.

As a marketing manager, I created hundreds of pieces to content all designed to generate awareness and push prospects down the marketing-to-sales funnel. Then, I used media outlets to place my “educational” content out there so people (my target audience) could find it in a non-threatening environment. Most media outlets are still seen as impartial. Or at least somewhat impartial – more so than vendor sites.

A recent Marketing Sherpa study found that 80% of B2B buyers found their vendor rather than the vendor finding them. Where did they find them? In all likelihood, from trusted sites that cater to their needs such as media sites. From the perspective of a marketing manager, I looked for media outlets that had my target audience as their readership. Then I found out how I could promote my content through them. Often, it was something as simple as them doing an email blast to a select group promoting one of my educational pieces of content (whitepaper or upcoming webinar). So for me, this whole “battle” over who is king of content is not real. For the most part, content has always come from vendors but media outlets have served as a lens and filter for that content. The best media outlets digest and interpret vendor content based on other factors such as trends, competition, technologies, etc.

Content – Free or Not?

I’ve been following a very interesting conversation about marketing and whether content should be offered for “free” or not. There is a pre-requisite for this article. First you must read two articles:

• this is the original from Ann Handley (@MarketingProfs) – a great organization with a lot of great ideas
• this is the second post from Dan McCarthy (@ProStylus) – a freelance writer who has been in the trenches and understands the core needs of organizations

Ok, I’ll give you a few minutes to read those two worthy posts.

While we’re waiting, I’d just like to comment on how well the Bruins played in their last game. Much better than that lackluster piece of crap first game they played. Damn, I almost drove to Boston to run a practice and get them fired up. No need now.

Oh, and can’t wait for our local elections. Lots of people running for a variety of offices. And I’m not one of them. Great to see.

Now, back to our program. Hope you read those two links (I did have them open in new windows so you could return here!). Anyway, I love this conversation. I was a Marketing Manager at my last three firms (15 years) but this was a particular issue at my last employer where we had several marketing managers, each responsible for his/her own area. We had many discussions about when and where to require registration for content and then, how much to ask. And here’s a surprise – we all had different opinions.

I think what it all comes down to is:

• how are you (as a marketing person) measured?
• what is the goal of the specific piece of content you are using?

For the first point, if you are judged on “traditional” metrics like page views, downloads, re-tweets, etc., then you are happy to make all content “free” and hope that people come back to you. Although I enjoyed David Meerman Scott’s book on “The New Rules of Marketing and PR,” I don’t fully agree with him.

Here’s the pendulum problem. If you go the route of free content, you get lots of people looking at your content. But many are worthless and if you pass them to your sales team, you just cost your organization a fortune in wasted time and effort. If you make registration necessary for your content, you lose people who may have eventually become customers but were just in the beginning phase of their learning. You just lost customers.

So the answer (as it usually is) is somewhere in between.

At my last firm, I was probably the biggest proponent of free content. But I had a plan. Content that fits early in the funnel – that content which is designed to generate interest and awareness, should be free. It’s the hook you are putting out there. But from that point on, as Dan McCarthy points out:

“The answer isn’t a matter of which approach is better, but rather which approach applies, and when.

It’s unwise, for instance, to demand registration for content early in the buying process when customers are beginning to gather information about you and your competitors. High-level perspective, such as industry articles, buyer’s guides, web copy and case studies help customers place your value against a larger context.

This content should be offered gratis.

Make it easy for prospects to get educated about what questions to ask. You build trust by making it safe to learn those questions from you.

As customers move further along the buying process, their questions become more knowledgeable and specific. They’re better equipped to recognize content of value to their research. If you’ve already built trust by helping them learn what questions to ask, they’re more likely to submit a name or an email in exchange for more specialized content.”

Couldn’t have said it better. Content needs to be mapped to the buyer’s progression through the sales process. You need to make sure you have quality content that moves your prospect from interest to buying – and you need to make it a natural progression based on their buying process. To add to the complexity, people will be jumping in and out of your “planned” content continuum so you need to plan for that. Also, if you sell to a group (such as enterprise software), you need to get your content to several different target segments. Figuring that out is why you earn the big bucks. Or, if you need help, just ask me so I can earn the big bucks. It’s definitely worth the investment.

Inbound vs Outbound Marketing

For the past 15 years, I’ve been working in one guise or another as a marketing manager responsible for lead generation and driving revenue through the marketing-to-sales funnel.  I read as much of the trade rags as I can and I keep up on marketing trends and issues. As such, I was caught completely by surprise by this whole “inbound” vs. “outbound” marketing. To me, this is a false division of a discipline. Yeah, maybe you can specialize in certain areas like SEO or email marketing or landing page design, but a marketing manager needs as many arrows in her quiver as she can get. I never discounted any possible avenue for generating quality leads and building customer relationship. Anyway, I was going to write more about this but then read this great post from Ardath Albee. I have not much more to say.

Ardath does touch briefly on the need and importance of content as I do too in this article. This is one of the most critical link to any successful marketing initiatives. You can also read more about the importance of content – and how to develop it – from one of the best marketing copywriters I’ve ever encountered.

Good marketing all!

State of Lead Gen-Working with sales

Recently, I read a very interesting post by Jeffrey Ogden about the state of lead generation in today’s economic environment. In it, there are several findings from CSO Insights from a recent survey they did on lead generation. And many of these findings are interesting. This blog posting covers SO much ground (each worth plenty of discussion) that’s it hard to focus on something you can do. Here’s my quick list of topics that need to be ironed out within any organization:

• Sales quotas (realistic vs. un-realistic)
• Optimizing lead generation (many firms COMPLETELY fail to market well to both existing customers and people already in their database; getting new leads is EXPENSIVE – leverage what you already have)
• Need for Telemarketing (to me, this means you need to better qualify marketing leads – interest – into sales leads)
• Lower marketing budgets (due to the economic downturn)
• Lead scoring (entire whitepapers have been written on this!)
• The buying process and matching content to it (if you aren’t doing this, you must be an idiot, sorry for being blunt)

Anyway, any one of these topics deserves time and discussion. But perhaps the most important in my experience is this quote:  “Marketing and sales should sit down and agree on what is a lead.”  After over ten years with two different software providers, this is perhaps the most important issue any mid- to large-sized firm probably faces. Aligning sales and marketing is critical. In a small firm, this isn’t too hard. Often, sales and marketing are either the same team, report to the same boss, or sit so closely together, that alignment just happens. But as firms grow, that notorious wall develops between the marketing and sales teams. It’s time to “tear down this wall!”

And the first step is agreeing on what makes up a “sales lead.” To me, this means that you need an expanded understanding of what the “sales funnel” is. It’s not a sales funnel. It is a marketing-to-sales funnel – a seamless progression for the prospect to move from awareness to interest to understanding to desire. And you organization needs to figure out that point that best makes sense to pass the prospect from the marketing process to the sales team.

Sales time is valuable and variable. You need to have a spigot that feeds sales people qualified leads. And you need to have continuous communications w/ between the marketing and sales teams. Sometimes, the sales team is busy and only wants the highest qualified leads passed to them. Other times, they may be willing to work just about any lead you get. Even better, this situation may vary for a team at the same time – some reps need as many leads as you can get them while others are all set and working relationships.

For marketing, this means that you really need to understand what sales needs at different times – and maybe on an individual sales person basis – and be able to deliver as needed. Flexibility. Understanding. Adjustment.

Planning – The necessary Evil

Faced with ongoing economic turbulence, successful companies understand that more than ever, the key to not only surviving but thriving is planning ahead. SiriusDecisions notes that best-in-class sales and marketing organizations were already focusing on strategic “resource planning” to determine their best moves for 2010.

-          SiriusDecisions press release

Around this time every year, if you work on the calendar year, you are facing the planning and budgeting cycle. Or, budgeting and “investment” cycle as I like to call it. Just hate it when organizations see marketing as a budget (meaning “cost”). Investment is a much more accurate word as what you put in should be delivering a return.

Anyway, planning is a critical component if you want to have any chance at success. For marketing, I like to have a series of plans:

• 5-year plan – the big, vision thing; where you want to be when you grow up
• 1-year plan – very tactical; where are you going to place your resources (money and people) and HOW in order to meet your goals/targets
• Next-quarter plan – very detailed; includes items you probably don’t have in your one-year plan (like specific PR or analyst engagements), specific content creation (like a new whitepaper or webinar), and more

When it comes to planning, many organizations make a mistake in doing it alone and in a vacuum. Overall direction (BHAG goals) often comes from on high – the upper management folks. “We need to grow revenue by 17% next year.” Hopefully, they have come to this conclusion based on reality and input from the trenches, but regardless, it will now become your reality. Marketing still should do its planning in conjunction with the rest of the company, especially sales. This is a critical time when marketing/sales alignment can get totally messed up.

Sales is being given revenue goals and is trying to work those goals into individual sales quotas. They will be providing direction to sales reps on how to reach those quotas. But if marketing is seeing growth in different areas and planning on campaigns around products or services that sales is ignoring, you are setting a table of delicious meats for vegans (OK, maybe it’s the other way around – those sales people often are depicted as carnivores). Disaster (or a food fight at least) is sure to follow.

This is a great time for marketing and sales leaders to get together and spend the time needed to figure out the next year. Don’t short change this exercise as both dollar investment and significant human resources will start working on these plans in short order. This is one investment with a very high ROI.

For more on the marketing-to-sales funnel, check out this earlier blog entry.  Or visit my website.

Email abuse – it’s coming your way!

I’ve been in marketing for almost 20 years. And, for the past 10 years in particular, I’ve leaned on email marketing to generate leads (and hence, revenue).  CAN-SPAM came along and all of us leveraging email worried. Including me. But now, several years after the fact, many expert marketing people (me included ) have realized that CAN-SPAM is just common sense. And basically, the way we were doing business anyway.  But there are the outliers…

At my last firm, we have just such an outlier. He worked in the sales department, not marketing, so he seemed to have free rein.  Since sales usually is not tasked w/ lead gen, they don’t have the expertise to understand how it works. And this person leveraged that. Even worse, he truly believes in what he does. Reminded me of Jim Jones and the Kool-Aid. Anyway, he is effective. But the question has always been – at what cost?

Please watch this video.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=spJjsuwIiBQ

In it, he talks about taking email addresses (could be you and me) from websites.  He’s basically harvesting them from your company website, LinkedIn, Plaxo, etc. If you match the target audience, he’s stealing your email address and adding it to his database. And then using it to blast you for sales purposes. You have not opted in. Hell, you may not even know who the firm is. You probably have no interest (not his problem – he just gets paid to drive attendance).

And many people probably ignore it. Maybe at best you add him (his client!!) to your spam filter.

Anyway, at my last firm, we (the marketing group) wouldn’t let him use our email firm since he obviously violated their terms for common sense email practices.  And now he has a business doing this.

Here’s how marketing and sales should work together:  http://wp.me/pwQCG-1F or http://wp.me/pwQCG-Q

NON-permission email lists (as he calls them on his LinkedIn group; literally with the caps on the NON) is just something I don’t believe in. Harvesting email addresses off web sites and social media sites just seems slimy to me.

Abuse your friends and family

Marketing input on the Cheap

Are you working on a new campaign, web site or product offering? This is a great time to use your friends and family. I’m sure you’ve done things for them in the past – bought a round for your friends, watched your sister’s brats so she and Billy could go out to a movie, ordered pizza when Mom blew up the turkey on Thanksgiving – the point is, they owe you. And now is a good time for payback.

When you spend day-after-day in your company, at your desk, talking with many of the same people, you tend to get “group-think.” What appears obvious to you isn’t to the normal human being. So what you need is to step out of your normal environment and get a better understanding of the “real” world and how they interpret your messaging.

One way to do this is to do testing. A typical example is crafting two different email messages, subject lines, etc. and sending them to two subsets of your database. Useful and worthwhile but hard to do every time, especially when time is critical. This is where family and friend abuse becomes useful.

I’ve leveraged these relationships many times to help me by reviewing web content, direct mailers, etc. They probably aren’t the best for reviewing deep content like a technical whitepaper but can provide really good feedback on many other items. And they are free!

So when you are designing new web pages, a direct mailer, an email blast, print or banner ads, video content or other similar items, think about using family and friends for review. They may not be your target audience but they can provide useful input on design appeal, imaging and wording, navigation and more. Questions to ask them include:

• Does this ad catch your eye?
• Would you look at this postcard?
• Would you open this letter? 
• Tell me what you think about this web page (probe for eye-catching items, intuitive navigation, easy-to-read and understand text)

The idea is that, even if your target is a CIO audience, the first cut appeal is common among most people. Interest and motivation often starts in similar ways. So this really is seeing if your bait is attractive enough to get the hook in the mouth. After that, it’s up to you to reel them in and your family and friends may not be able to help. But for curb appeal, they are a useful and CHEAP resource!

Sales support

Lots of companies confuse marketing with sales support, especially when you are a small- to medium-sized firm. There is a very big difference and if you are treating your marketing people as sales support, you are seriously hindering your company.

As a marketing person, I was often called upon to not only help sales on accounts but also join them on customer visits.  Personally, I loved it.  I love visiting both customers and prospects. It keeps me in touch with the market and helps me both identify possible new product/service offerings and fine tune value propositions and messaging.  However, the down side is that all the time I spend on a single account is time away from doing true marketing – getting the message out to a broad market.  It’s a catch-22. You need to get that revenue in the door but the time I spend on one account could have been used to generate hundreds (if not thousands) of new leads.

So what this gets down to is roles and tasks – and understanding the value of marketing.  For software firms in particular (but also, many other firms), the framework laid out by the Pragmatic Marketing group can be helpful.  And you can customize the framework to your organization to help you better define roles and tasks. In my opinion, it is very good at the interaction between product management and sales but misses the mark with marketing and lead generation.  But you can fill that in on your own as I have in the past.

Using a framework like this, you can quickly see that sales support is not marketing. Marketing needs to be implementing campaigns that deliver brand and solution messaging – and result in lead generation. For more information on where marketing should be working, check out my post on the marketing to sales funnel.

Why does marketing get dragged into these sales engagements?  There are likely many reasons but here’s a big one:

• Marketing people would like to think that sales people are lazy, they didn’t learn the new product/solution, don’t use the collateral you created, forgot or didn’t pay attention to the training, etc.

Some of that may be true.  But if I were a sales rep and knew a marketing person would spend the time to customize a presentation or even go on a customer visit, I’d use them.  The deeper issue likely is, the sales rep doesn’t have the materials they need to close the sale.

Take a step back.  Maybe create a task force of marketing, sales, and customers if you can. Map out the buyer’s journey and figure out what you need at each step to meet their need or concern.  And if you are selling to a group (like most B2B), add a third dimension of target audience to this.  Then your whole organization will better understand what the buyer is going through (the gatekeepers, the hurdles, the due diligence) and you will be able to have something prepared for each step.

At the end of the day, marketing, product marketing and product management should only have to step in on a small percentage of sales engagements where an extra push is needed.  Otherwise, they should all be spending their time in what their jobs are designed for; just make sure sales are enabled with all the tools they need to close the deal.

Sales funnel

Most people call it the sales funnel but I think that is wrong.  It’s a “marketing-to-sales” funnel.  And it needs to be seamless for the prospect who is making the journey.  Here’s my quick (ok, a little cheesy) graphic on what the funnel looks like:

The funnel is loaded primarily with content items but also with events like trade shows, possibly telemarketing (not sales) phone calls for qualification, even free trials if you have the ability to do that (like many software firms I’ve worked for could do).  Anyway, the idea is to take a “marketing lead” (someone who has stepped up and expressed interest) and turn it into a “sales lead” (someone sales wants to talk to). Marketing needs to work with sales to define what a sales lead is (another topic).  You (marketing) need to move them from one end to the other  through a series of coordinated and planned out steps that take the prospect from realization of a problem/opportunity to solution/implementation to achieve it.

Marketing managers generate the interest by using both outbound and inbound marketing to drive prospects to a piece of content like a whitepaper.  That’s the hook that gets them into the funnel.

Before I move to the next graphic, one thing I want to point out because many firms don’t do it, it to turnback leads.  If a lead gets passed to sales because it is deemed worthy but sales can’t close the deal (for any number of reasons like the budget just got cut), that lead needs to go back to marketing for a nurturing program.  Marketing has spent a lot of time and money to get that lead to the point of purchase.  By nurturing it (read my previous post) , you keep yourself top-of-mind when the prospect is back in the market for your solution.

Now the next graphic:

This is the same as before but looks at the stages in the funnel at a high level. At the beginning, you are striving to get people interested by introducing them to a problem they may have, a way to cut costs, a way to become more efficient, etc.  But the key is, this content needs to be educational , not salesy. Once they raise their hand and say “I’m interested,” you need to now qualify them to see if they are worth the time and effort of your sales team.  Sales people’s time is valuable.  They shouldn’t be talking to someone who just stopped by your booth or read a whitepaper.  They should concentrate on leads that meet certain criteria that your organization needs to define.  That is a “sales lead.”  To read more about content, check out my blog entry.

Although I generalized content types (like a whitepaper as educational), it’s really up to the content itself to determine where it fits in the funnel.  A webinar can easily be educational; or it can be all about your solution and hence more qualifying.  Typically, trade shows are all three stages.  You probably get a handful of “hot leads” that should go straight to sales, some leads who know you but need more qualifying (maybe send them to a solution webinar), and the majority which are educational (just stopped by the booth to see what you do or maybe you have a neat giveaway) and need to enter the funnel at the beginning.   The point is that you don’t need to let the content type dictate the delivery mechanism.  Although items like whitepapers (by definition) should be educational, other items like webinars, podcasts and videos can fall anywhere in the funnel based on the content.

This blog is getting long so I’m going to bullet a few more thoughts.  They may end up being blog posts on their own in the future.

• Put yourself in the place of a prospective buy and try to align your content items and marketing activities with your buyer’s journey.

• You also have to realize that, although you may plan for a person to move from left to right, in real life, your prospects are jumping in and out of your funnel at any stage.  They may find out about a webinar (you placed half way down the funnel) from a colleague. This shouldn’t upset your plans for a funnel, just realize it happens.

• If you can, use marketing automation to help you qualify interest to sales qualified lead. You can use surveys to gather info on prospects as they move through the funnel (such as job title, purchase timeframe, budget, etc.).

• I mentioned using both outbound and inbound marketing. There’s lots of buzz about inbound marketing and social media nowadays. I think it’s great! But as a marketing manager, I see them as new arrows in my quiver. I’m adding them to my (I guess it’s now called “traditional”) marketing activities such as email, purchased lists through firms like TechTarget, direct mail, even print ads. Not everyone digests information in the same way.  Some like to read it in traditional trade magazines; others like podcasts; others recorded webinars. The point is, you need to be active in all.

• Lastly, you need metrics.  I have two posts already on this (post one and post two) and will likely add several more in the future. You need to measure each content item/marketing activity to determine how effective it is. And you need to do it consistently over time. For example, you may find that a whitepaper that works great for 6 months starts to fall off.  They content may be getting stale. But you won’t see that unless you are measuring.

Please let me know your thoughts and comments on this framework.  It is a work in progress!

Marketing metrics – Part deux

This is an update on my previous entry on marketing metrics.  Kinda extra thoughts.

First, you really need to look at your process and figure out those areas you CAN measure.  I’ve worked for a couple of firms where we wanted to measure some metric but couldn’t because the systems just can’t deliver the data.  Don’t try to follow a lead to revenue if it’s a broken chain like I mentioned in my previous posting.  So figure out what you can measure.

Second, figure out what you SHOULD measure.  If you don’t have the math/finance background, find someone who does.  Engage an analyst who knows your database.  Try to find those actions that lead to revenue.

Third, and by far the most important step, engage the CFO or someone on that team to help you develop the metric.  Finance knows (or should know) what drives the company revenue and profit.  The closer you can tie your activities to revenue and profit the better off you (hopefully!) will be.  In addition, and perhaps most significantly, the CFO can help you sell your metrics to executive management.  They need to buy into the measures or you’re still a cost sink.

In the past, I’ve had, how should I put it….rambunctious relations with executive management at several of my employers because I couldn’t understand why they would be so stupid as to not understand what marketing does and how it significantly benefits the company.  But, as I “matured,” I realized that upper management has a lot of pressures on them.  And, if they are any good (which isn’t always the case), they rely on metrics to help drive their decisions.  You really need to get to know and embrace numbers.  If you are scared, take a finance or statistics class.  But you need to move in this direction.