Archives for category: Marketing
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

The One Thing a Good Marketer Must Have

August 24, 2015 //
0

The one thing a good marketer should have is – a good eye.

A good eye for what looks good. Good marketers know good design when they see it. They appreciate a well designed page, product, thing. They know what to look for and they know how to brief others to create ‘good’.

A good eye for detail. The devil is in the detail, which means he – or she – is in the data, the words, the images, the emotions.

A good idea for what reads well and sounds good – for which you probably need a good ear too. Remember that what reads well and what sounds good are not the same thing. You’ll find few good marketers who are not good communicators, not good at writing, not good at speaking, not good at listening.

You can learn to get a good eye, you don’t have to be born with it. But you must have this one thing to be good.

 

Categories Communication, General, Language, Marketing, Planning

The Tenth B2B Marketing Step

August 19, 2015 //
0

In our ninth B2B marketing step we decided the marketing mix elements to execute our strategy and achieve our objectives. We have some momentum now. We know what we’re going to do, we have to get into the specific, measurable detail.

In the tenth B2B marketing step, then, you need to map out the specific marketing activities you will undertake for your specific project. If this is an ongoing marketing strategy, then I recommend you do it on a quarterly basis, as a quarter is a reasonable B2B timeframe for your efforts to bear fruit, and it’s the fruit you’re measuring. All of your specific activities should have measurable targets against them, which, when added up, get you to your overall target for the project or period.

I suggest you put together a table with each numbered activities listed down the left side, and the following 12 headings across the top. You then need to populate your table:

  • Campaign – that the activity relates to
  • Audience – the segment or sub-segment you’re targeting
  • Launch date – so you can work backwards and figure out when you need to start it
  • Call to action – the thing you want them to do
  • What – what are they getting for completing the action (eg registering for an event)
  • Medium – what do you need to build to allow them to complete the action, eg email, web site landing page and piece of content
  • Who – who in your organisation and /or partner ecosystem is on the hook for delivering this work
  • Target Leads – target number of marketing qualified leads for the activity (eg webinar registrations which marketing then qualify)
  • Target opportunities – of the target leads, the amount of sales qualified opportunities that you plan to generate
  • Target pipeline – the total pipeline this activity will generate
  • Total deals – the total deals or that should result from the activity
  • Total business – the total deal amount that should result from the activity

Leave extra columns for the actual leads, opportunities etc that result from these activities once the project or period is over, but that’s a topic for another post.

Make sure you build in buffer, so that you plan to exceed your target with the sum of your activities, even though you’re only promising or are being held to the target itself. Over time, and with successive efforts, you should get better at forecasting the results of your activities.

Notice too that these are all demand generation activities. You will do other activities that may not generate specific demand, like brand awareness initiatives, but you should still attempt to survey and / or measure the results. If a demand generation activity does not generate one SQO with a value that covers your activity investment by a multiple that you feel is appropriate, don’t do the activity.

Once you have an activity plan that looks reasonable, you need to cost the plan, which comes up next :-).

Tags , , ,
Categories Marketing, Planning, Strategy

It’s Not About Starting Something

August 17, 2015 //
0

It’s not about starting a project. It’s not about coming up with a great idea that could make millions. It’s not about deciding to walk coast to coast for charity.

Anyone can start something. Kids start new things every day, but how many do they finish before they get bored and move onto the next shiny metal thing?

It’s not about starting something.

It’s about finishing something. It’s about following through, executing, closing the loop, learning from the experience and moving on to the next thing.

Tags ,
Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Planning, Sales, Strategy, Technology

The Ninth B2B Marketing Step

August 14, 2015 //
0

In the eighth B2B marketing step we reached the summit of the 15 steps and crafted our marketing strategy. It’s downhill from here, from steps 9 through to 15. There’s still a lot of work to do, but it should feel easier. It should feel like you’re gaining speed as you move downhill, rather than breathing heavily as you climb uphill.

The ninth B2B marketing step is deciding your marketing mix. You know your strategy, so now you need to figure out the combination of which marketing elements will get you there. These are the tools of your trade.

There is potentially one blog post for each of these marketing mix elements – and perhaps we’ll revisit this area in more detail another time – but for now I’m going to list the main elements you need to consider. This list of 10 is not meant to be exhaustive or all-inclusive – there are myriad possible elements – but hopefully I’ve captured the main ones.

  • Public relations. Are you going to use an agency or do it yourself?
  • Influencers. What analysts, influencers or mavens in the space will you leverage?
  • Traditional advertising. Will you pay for space in TV, radio, newspapers, or publications specific to your space?
  • Events. What conferences will you attend, exhibit at, speak at, to build awareness and pipeline?
  • Seminars/webinars. Will you organise your own events or perhaps partner with others to do the same?
  • Email marketing. How will you use email to create demand, nurture demand and create opportunities for your sales and partner sales teams?
  • Direct marketing. What physical items will you send to the places where your prospects work to attract them to you?
  • Digital marketing/social media. What presences, portals, platforms and plans (sorry, the urge to alliterate was irresistible) will you curate to let people find you when they’re at all stages of the buying process – especially the beginning – and / or who are currently invisible to you?
  • Online advertising. What search engine optimisation will you do, and what paid search, banner ads or sponsored opportunities will you adopt to convert browsers into prospects?
  • Collateral. What websites, micro-sites, web pages, landing pages, brochures, ebooks, white papers, data sheets, slide decks, videos, will you produce to reward your customers for their attention, in whatever stage of the buying process they are, and educate them as to how you can solve their business problems?

OK, you’ve got your blend of marketing elements you want to use. Time now to figure out the specific programme of activities that makes up your execution plan.

Tags
Categories Marketing, Planning, Strategy

The 3 C’s of Customer Intimacy

August 12, 2015 //
0

This is not so much 3 separate Cs as one rule with 3 C’s in it.  Here is my golden rule of customer intimacy:

Customers Crave Consistency.

Consistency is a comfortable armchair after a long day. It’s a familiar tune, or a fly ball to centre field. Easy.

When you’re consistent, and deal with your customers in a consistent way, they know what to expect. They grow with you, they’re comfortable with you, and the relationship deepens and develops. Remember the ‘one more thing’ of Jobs-led Apple product launches? We know it’s coming, and it sucks us in.

When you’re unpredictable, haphazard and inconsistent, customers are confused, discombobulated, frustrated. It turns them off.

I try to keep my posts consistent, to a consistent standard. It’s not a case of ‘this is getting stale, let’s change it up.’ It’s more like ‘I’m going here, it feels like home.’

For more on my consistency soapbox, see here.

Tags , ,
Categories Customers, Marketing, Sales, Strategy

The Eighth B2B Marketing Step

August 7, 2015 //
0

The eighth B2B marketing step is the middle step of what I see as a 15-step process. You should view it as the summit of a mountain. You’ve done the hard work, climbing up the previous 7 steps, doing your research and closing by positioning your company, products or services to your chosen segment. After the eighth step you’ve got the last 7 steps down the hill, with the end in sight.

The eighth step is where you craft your strategy. At this point it’s worth revisiting step 1 of the process and confirming that you’re still trying to do what you originally set out to do, that there’s been no change. It’s by no means unusual for scope or goals to change mid-process, and it’s a good time to sense-check and adjust course if necessary.

Secondly, it’s time to set some targets for the strategy. What kind of sales over the coming reporting periods – typically the rest of the financial year, and the next financial year, split into quarters – are you looking to achieve? What is realistic and achievable? What will be deemed successful? What will be worth the investment?

Then you need to work back and establish what kind of marketing numbers do you need to hit your sales target. How many sales-qualified opportunities, how much pipeline – which I would define as the total of your qualified opportunities as anything less developed shouldn’t really be clogging up the pipe – how many leads, how much traffic, clicks and leads do you need?

Finally, what specific behaviours or tasks do you need to do by when to generate these marketing numbers? Examples might be to finish the research by a certain date, get the plan signed off by a certain date, start executing the plan by a certain date. If you don’t get these leading indicators done in time, you’ll not hit the lagging indicators, the all-important numbers.

Armed with your targets, you can now craft a high level strategy for how you will accomplish the goals or targets of the project. Strategy is all about the how; how you’re going to get there. The what – the activities that make up your strategy – come later. There are a number of buckets you need to cover.

Brand and brand awareness – how will you raise and maintain your profile as leaders in your chosen category? What public relations will you do? What analyst relations will you develop? Which other influencers in the space do you need to be known to?

Business development – how will you promote and generate demand for your product or service? What content will you create, curate and disseminate? How will you disseminate it? How will you attract people to engage in dialogue with you, in person or digitally?

Route to market – how will you go to market? Will you use mail, email, or call centres? Will you have field sales people? Will you sell direct or will you sell through partners? If you’re selling through partners, what types of partners will you use and how will those commercial relationships work?

Product – what components will be in your product or service? Will it be a solution, combining technology or engineering and professional services? How will you package the product or service?

Pricing – what will be your pricing model? What discounts or incentives will you offer? What commercial – and legal – terms and conditions will you wrap around your offering?

Customers – how will you retain your existing customers? How will you upsell your new offering to existing customers? What’s your customer advocacy strategy, ie how will you use your customers to inform your product and service development and endorse your offering to new prospects?

Competitive – how will your end-to-end offering – your marketing, product or service, delivery and after-sale services – be different from and better than the competitors? How will you protect your advantage in this area?

Bit of a long post this one, because it’s a pivotal step. When it comes to crafting strategy, there are a lot of pillars to get right so that they support the building as well as possible.

Tags , ,
Categories Marketing, Planning, Strategy

The Seventh B2B Marketing Step

August 5, 2015 //
0

Congratulations. You’ve climbed this far, up 6 steps of the 15-step B2B marketing process. You’ve reached seventh heaven, you’re nearly half way there.

The seventh step is positioning. This revolves around how you position your company, products and services to your chosen segment or segments. This positioning is verbal, requiring the careful crafting of the right message to resonate most strongly with your prospects, strong enough to cause them to take action.

There are probably a bunch of messages you want to cram into your positioning, and it’s sometimes really hard to discount any of them. It’s natural to want to cover all the bases.

It’s not about you, however. It’s about your prospect audience, and how they view what you say. You have to put yourself in their shoes and figure out what is most important to them. A useful structure to follow is this:

[Your product or service] helps companies solve the challenge of [whatever business challenge you’re helping them fix] by [how your solution does it], which, unlike other solutions, delivers [whatever key benefits your product or service delivers] because it [say why the prospect should see your product or service as different].

The great thing about a positioning statement is that you get to de-position the competition as well, thereby promoting the fact that you can uniquely help your prospect solve their problem or capitalise on their opportunity.

When you have to come up with a short, pithy tagline to go alongside your company, product or service then you have to extend this approach and distil your positioning into only one message of a few words. In the beginning of a relationship, companies will only remember the scantest detail on what you do, so they might as well remember the most important thing, the think that will make a difference, right?

Tags , , , ,
Categories Marketing, Planning, Strategy

The Sixth B2B Marketing Step

August 3, 2015 //
0

In our previous post on the 15-step B2B marketing process, we saw how crucial it was to segment your addressable market.

Now you have to select and target the segment or segments you will go after first, and identify some of the companies in that target segment.

To give your marketing process or strategy the best possible chance, you want to build on the excellent analysis you’ve done so far and go after the juiciest segment, the segment that you think is your best shot. This approach is exemplified in the approach recommended for products that represent discontinuous innovation and disrupt the way that market has previously been served. The excellent Crossing the Chasm book by Geoffrey Moore talks about establishing a ‘beach head’ and owning that segment before expanding to other segments.

Regardless of your company size, my strong recommendation is that, in addition to targeting a specific segment you also shortlist and maintain a list of specific companies within that segment that you want to do business with. If getting 5 of your ‘hot list’ prospect customers on board would make a great year for your business, then draw up a list of 50-100 of them to give yourself a decent chance of hitting your goal.

When you’re marketing to the whole segment, then, your outbound efforts will also provide ‘air cover’ for you to supplement with direct, one-to-one conversations with the companies on your hot list.

So, you’ve decided which segment you’re targeting. How are you going to tell that segment about what you have and why they should pay atttention? That’s the next step in our 15-step B2B marketing process.

Tags , , , ,
Categories Marketing, Planning, Strategy

The Fifth B2B Marketing Step

July 31, 2015 //
0

In our fourth B2B marketing step we profiled our addressable market. Now we have a detailed picture of the market we’re trying to market and sell to. This is good. If we don’t understand the market and where it needs our help, then we can’t help.

The fifth B2B marketing step is segmenting our addressable market. That’s right, we’re going to further divide our market. Imagine that your market is a pizza and you’re going to slice it up. These slices are market segments, except that the process of deciding how you slice up your market is not that straightforward. It’s also crucial.

Many companies segment their market by the obvious factors like geography, size and so on. They’re perfectly valid, but they may not be the best ways to divide the market into alike groups. You could segment by attitude to risk, openness to your type of solution, cultural bias, stage of maturity, type of business problems, type of buying process for your solution; the list is as long as you want to make it. The trick is to to segment according to what is most compelling for your offering and by extension your marketing.

Imagine that you can only segment your market in 2 ways, and each way is an axis on a graph. The x axis is your first segmentation ‘knife’ , the y axis your second. Then you have to plot the companies or company types on the graph according to where they fall on each axis. Then you have to decide which cluster of companies or company types you are going to target. When you see your market visually laid out like this, according to the segmentation axes you have picked, then you understand how important it is that you segment in the right way.

Get your segmentation right and your next two steps are easier and more accurate.

Tags , , ,
Categories Marketing, Planning, Strategy

The Fourth B2B Marketing Step

July 29, 2015 //
0

In the third step of our B2B marketing process we eliminated the customer groups we weren’t interest in pursuing so that we could concentrate on our addressable market. Now we need to understand more about that market.

The fourth B2B Marketing step is to profile your addressable market. Fortunately for us, we might have done some of this work already when we researched the whole market in our second step.

Now comes more homework. You need to find out and record the important things about the addressable market that can help you shape your offering to it. Here are some of the things it would be good to know:

– the obvious stuff, like location, industry, size, how the market operates

– any legal or regulatory aspects to the market that govern how it works

– pressure and drivers on the market. What are its players trying to do and where do they feel pain?

– the typical buyers in this market. Job roles, personas, other people of influence

– the decision-making process in general. Simple or complex, short or long, few hurdles and people involved or many?

– the cultural aspects to the market. Is it a good cultural fit for you to sell to? Do you think and work similarly to it?

You can find out much of the standard stuff from publications like annual reports and resources like the web or social media, but the more esoteric information can really only be gleaned over time by networking, personal experience and asking around. The better you can profile your addressable market, the better you can segment it and decide where to go first.

Tags , , ,
Categories Marketing, Planning, Strategy
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »