The Internet causes us to lose our contemplative thinking skills if we don’t unplug occasionally.
Velocity Partners built this great deck about B2B content marketing and the problems associated with its newly found popularity. It’s essential reading and a potent reminder.
Now that were well into 2013, I thought it might be useful to review some ways (5 to be precise) you can commit to improving your marketing this year. New year’s resolutions are so “last month”.
1.) You will improve search performance
Google has made changes. You are very likely aware of both Panda and Penguin but what have you done to leverage them. Don’t try to outsmart Google– it’s just not worth it. Time is better spent understanding the rules and adapting to them.
2.) You will narrow your focus and broaden your appeal
The recent economic troubles have caused us to be too busy and too inclined to do work strictly for the sake of revenue. Focus is the key to winning the a position in the mind of your customer. in 2013 you will narrow your focus and broaden your appeal. Doing so will make your unique selling proposition easier to articulate and remember.
3.) You will automate and optimize your lead generation
You are fully aware that your email newsletter isn’t enough anymore. Playing with social media is not likely to deliver any results, either. You will get serious this year. Your communications efforts need to be better coordinated and you will. By building content to support every phase of your sales funnel, you’ll optimize your sales resources so that your sales cycles will be tighter and more cost effective.
4.) You will document your Customers’ experience more frequently
Everyone is talking about content marketing. The best content marketing is credible documentation of your customers’ learnings. Best practices are important but they erase distinctions fairly rapidly. The key challenge is to make your best practices readily available so that you can continue to improve on them. Today’s “Best Practices” are tomorrow’s “Standard Operating Procedures”. Insight into how to continually improve that part of the enterprise your offering can best enhance is your key to developing the kind of content that reduces risk of purchase.
5.) You will improve reporting and reduce reports
Most of your competitors and customers are awash in data. Too much data is pretty much as useful as no data. You can improve your marketing by actually putting the data you have to use. This year resolve to review your key metrics and identify the important ones you actually use to make more rational decisions. Further commit to measuring the results of your marketing efforts even when costs are sunk. You can continually improve your efforts if you are willing to accept that failure provides useful metrics from which to refine your efforts going forward. The dissonance around reviewing efforts made in the past is very strong. Resist blaming yourself or others. Make your next marketing initiative better by finding out what went wrong and how to fix it.
Our Year Preview was a little delayed this year. Hope it still counts.
People like to talk about the death of media channels. Heck, I’ve done it. Death makes for great link bait, so there is bound to be a lot of that kind of talk as digital channels mature. And while different digital media channels are always at risk, (because: Facebook), legacy media still matters because its prestige creates familiarity and lowers purchase risk. Seeing a brand on a broadcast scale demonstrates investment and commitment. Broadcast media investment and commitment gives prospects and consumers more confidence in the strength and success of the offering. Nothing provides that confidence like traditional media. 30 second spots may not ever deliver the quantifiable ROI that SEO does, but they do deliver familiarity and when it comes to purchase risk, familiarity is a soothing balm that is hard to beat. Still spots must be seen to be remembered and there is a lot less opportunity for that- Even in broadcast.
Content marketing is not just for B2B anymore.
Like any new trend, Content Marketing is sometimes derided for being a buzz word– A marketing fad that gets the kids all hot and bothered but rarely delivers sales or revenue bumps to justify the hype. Like any other marketing technique or tactic, content marketing won’t solve a product problem or lousy strategy. That said, I’m a strong advocate of content marketing to drive leads and build prospect confidence. B2B marketers have learned that Case Studies with genuine insight and credible client endorsements build report with remote prospects early in the sales cycle who have little else to go on.
Consumers need stories too. They always have. Now the web gives them access to the stories of their friends, co-workers, and peers. They want to know the experiences of those similar to them to help manage the risk that prevents them from buying your product. This is a case where B2C marketers might learn a bit from B2B marketers- how to tell the story of “challenge, solution and result” to consumers nervous about spending money in a very difficult economy.
Paid Media
Content marketing is tough in paid media–particularly broadcast. 2013 will see it get easier though. I’m looking for more opportunities for long form programming arising out of a glut of channels. I’m also wondering when we’ll see Pandora, Slacker, or Rdio find a way to use long form programming to help labels and other music marketers expose their new artists to audiences with a propensity to be interested in them. I’m expecting to see auto dealerships use long form television to do more than yell deals at channel flippers on Saturday mornings. I expect to see some interesting experimentation this year.
Owned Media
Want a better deal from your vendor? Negotiate a case study. Need to close a deal with a prospect and just can’t come to terms? Negotiate a case study. The Case Study is the magic gap-closer. I expect to see it being used this year to improve net income from both sides of the ledger-revenue and expenses. 2013 is the year to formalize case study agreement from both your vendors AND your prospects. Need help figuring out how to do it?
Ping me. (ok, no more shameless plugs. Sorry.)
Earned Media
If your PR agency isn’t discussing how to place your content into critical traditional media channels, 2013 is the year to find a new PR agency. Your brand story is an essential part of your value proposition. With shrinking staffs, it’s hard to get writers and editors to pay attention. You need to be aware of the pain your offering relieves and the novelty of your approach. Framed broadly and without the hard sell, in 2013, PR efforts will get more traction narrowing the narrative and finding the real value in the learnings of their customers.
Multitasking Effects Communication
How do you get anyone to listen to you if everyone is talking? This is the essence of the communication challenge in 2013. The ill-effects of multitasking are well known. Nowhere are they more apparent than in the communication exchange. Customers are talking more than ever and that is changing the way messaging gets interpreted.
In 2013 I’m looking for both shorter and longer messaging as marketing communication formats continue to propagate. Shorter messaging will particularly effect pre-roll online video advertising. Skip data is more useful than many people realize. And while studies suggest that skippable preroll is not as effective as standard preroll, when you factor in the ability to use skip numbers to measure creative (yea, I went there) you can begin to find messaging and communication methods that resonate more powerfully with customers and prospects. 2013 is the year we stop guessing about what kind of online video ads really work and which ones don’t.
Context Wins
While Content marketing may be on everyone’s lips in 2013, knowing how to do content marketing is a lot easier than knowing what content to actually build and deliver. In 2013, i”m watching for marketing thought-leaders to have more content that matches their prospect’s specific pain points and sales cycle orientation. Prospects need to see themselves in the stories of actual customers and learn something valuable from their experiences. That’s context. It was remarkably lacking even in the best content marketing in 2012. I expect to see much more of it in the coming year.
Big Data For Everybody
The Big Data hype has been around for years. It was largely spoken of in abstractions, though. People who really knew about it didn’t really share too much. Honestly, it got pretty boring quickly if you didn’t get all frothy about clusters and regression analysis.
Many people know that data is more valuable than money, because data can be used over and over, and money spent only once. If, for some reason, you don’t believe this, seek help immediately. Or don’t, because you will believe it this year. If you have data (a lot of it) and you are unclear how to monetize it, there is no shortage of services to help. Behavioral data from your CRM can be more valuable than traditional opinion research, too. Knowing what people have actually done in the past is often more predictive than knowing what people think they will do in the future. People are, of course, creatures of habit and not as self-aware as they think.
Of course behavioral data really doesn’t tell us why people do what they do. Knowing that is certainly important in figuring out when people might change their behavior.
Battle for the CRM feed
This really is an outgrowth of big data. Your company’s CRM database is the head of the data-well for many businesses. Until recently, in larger enterprises customer service and marketing have had a friendly, if somewhat distant relationship. I’m looking for that to end in 2013. Gloves will come off in the largest enterprises as marketing realizes The big data it needs is coming from the call center. Customer service executives will have a choice to make about how they share in a way that’s bound to frustrate C.O.O.’s. Big Data needs to serve both operations and marketing, but how those constituencies get serviced and how the data turns into meaningful stories is very much up for grabs. Grab it we all will in 2013.
Mobile First
Usability work has to focus on the lowest common denominator– now that is the mobile device. Make sure your stuff works on all three platforms-iOS, Android, and yes even Windows 8. (See platform parity.) The best way for you to think about development for new media is thinking “mobile first”. No the the desktop and lap top are going nowhere, but the growth is all mobile. Remember this when you are reviewing your email and website design changes this year. It matters more than you can imagine. So many missed opportunities when your stuff doesn’t work on the mobile device.
Platform Parity
Remember the old platform (Windows vs. Mac) wars? Well, they’re back– only this time they are on the mobile device. And instead of two platforms there are three and none of them are open (I’m waiting until next year to worry about whether Tizen will mater). In 2013, I’m watching for real passions to begin to flare as the platforms become more similar, usability improves (especially on Windows and Android phones) and device competition heats up. The truth is the platforms are becoming more similar and the devices are too. What really matters though is that the device and the platform get used. One of the most fascinating things about the platform wars in 2012 was that more Android devices were activated than any other, but way more iOS web traffic was observed. To me those findings meant that more people had Android devices, but iOS users were more adept at using their mobile device. Remember “follow the money” in the 70’s? no? well, “follow the traffic” is the same thing. While content may be king, the king is naked without usability. Usability is essential to traffic, and traffic is money. Search is money; data is money; traffic is money. There’s a lot of money disguised as other things out there. It gets confusing, but competition helps. Here’s to less confusion in 2013.
Streaming Entertainment
With Netflix, Boxee, Amazon, and iTunes all in serious adoption mode, the cable box abandonment trend is nascent. And much like traditional television, cable boxes will not die (remember, we will not fall victim to “death-hype” this year), the cable box will simply have a competitor sitting right next to it. Cable pricing models will begin to change. Customers who are not sports fans will start to figure out a way to end their forced subsidy of football (both professional and college) and baseball. I’m optimistically hoping that in 2013 carriers will need to figure out how to bundle entertainment packages that defend from the dreaded (and highly unlikely) a-la-carte pricing that would ruin their bottom line.
Branding First on Facebook
As a client recently -and quite brilliantly- pointed out to me (hi, Ellen) Facebook is the new “cigarette break”. Brands can get attention on Facebook but its very hard to get real engagement there.
Nobody likes this. Blame EdgeRank. Recent analysis we’ve completed makes it very clear that any attempts you make to send people to sites other than Facebook seem to get handicapped by Facebook’s algorithm. What to do? Create unique, sharable content that keeps people on Facebook. Treated it as the walled-garden it seems to insist on being. By all means, move people to your site with content and offers, but try harder to created a branded experience that can exist on Facebook discreetly. Use email, and Twitter to drive website engagement. You still need to organize your customers and prospects on your website. I look forward to being corrected on this observation in 2013 because Facebook doesn’t immediately strike people as the branding platform it seems to want to be.
Google+ Mattering to business and Instagram Mattering To Your Kids
There’s really no way around it, so I’ll say it: Google+ is a pain in the ass. Just admit it and get on with it, because search=money. It matters because Google (the almighty) needs corroboration to make its search results better. It doesn’t seem to trust its old simple spidery self. Google+ is the way that Google can improve search relevancy by having peerage into conversations about web content. That’s fine and perfectly understandable. Google faces serious threats. In order to improve search results businesses will need to get into Google+ and that probably means you.
As painful as it is to manage yet another social media platform, Google+ is still pretty good. It’s rather painfully complex because it allows you a lot of control and personalization that Facebook and Twitter really don’t (and aren’t meant to). I’m looking for the Google+ UI to get better and for the API to open up so it can merge into my other social media feeds more simply. If I follow my own Barnes Law of web apps (that states for every app you can think of, at least three have been built already), this app exists too. I just have to set it up… That 2013 punch-list is getting longer by the minute.
Instagram is huge with the kids. It’s Twitter with pictures and it’s Facebook without the emotional baggage. It is the perfect tool for the youngs to define themselves though sharing visual symbols. Can you speak in pictures? I bet you can. If you aren’t already, I watching for you to start in 2013.
Have a great year!
Quicksilver has engineered some quality content here:
Sick of it yet? The endless repetitive recurring death of marketing meme. Marketing is always changing so we’re always going to hear “marketing is dead–long live marketing”. It’s a dramatic way of confirming how fickle and well-informed buyers are- whether they are b2b or b2c.
Search has clearly become the primary driver of purchase decisions. Additionally, the advent of social media has increased demand for content. People like to share content to learn something new and surprising or maybe just laugh.
Content you create or curate tells customers who your brand is, what you value, and how you relieve customers’ pain. To think of content as king or queen (or duke or prince) doesn’t provide much insight much anymore. Think of content as money –or at least a kind of currency–a digital cultural currency.
If you aren’t already, you will use content to get people to make an exchange. Prospects exchange their attention and patience to hear or see your message. How much patience or attention you receive is based on the quality of your content. Simple as that. You must make sure the exchange is fair to build trust.
Years ago advertising leveraged the mountains of currency delivered by scarce media programming to gain the attention of prospects. Advertise on a big TV show in the old days and if you were responsible, you could communicate a unique selling proposition very effectively. So don’t get me wrong. I come not to curse advertising, but to praise it. Advertising still does a very good job building awareness. Paid search is advertising, and should be part of any serious marketer’s tool set. I can’t imagine not coming up via paid search when a prospect searches for a competitor. Media programming and content, no longer scarce, requires genuine insight or entertainment in order to persuade.
But advertising isn’t enough anymore. If you want customers to respond to your message you must respond to theirs too. That’s what social media is for. Content value in social media is measured by its ability to facilitate customer engagement. When customers engage by sharing attitudes, interests, and opinions, they’ve invested their time in your offering and have become invested in its success. Create and share things that drive discussion. Learn what your customers need and how to best service them to gain top of mind.
You can borrow content–by syndicating or curating- or you can create it. The best content marketers do both. Borrow content (curate) to get frequency and build (develop your own content) to get focus and attention.
Who decides what content to build or curate and then where and when to post it is the content engineer. The content engineer determines how to use digital platforms to communicate the benefits of the brand by informing the purchase decision.
Take a minute with that phrase “informing the purchase decision”. Of course you want to persuade people to purchase your product or offering. You won’t do that without trust. Your offering is likely targeted to a market segment and not ideally suited to everyone. Embrace that. Develop content with an eye toward helping people self-identify and self-serve because they will anyway. Use your content to inform them of the options and compromises they face in their purchase decision. An educated prospect leads to a shortened sales cycle and thus lower sales costs. Informing builds trust.
Content does more than help your customers– it helps you too. By providing varied content (lightly or deeply informative, humorous, etc) in different forms (video, audio, text) you can understand better where a prospect is in their purchase cycle. People who spend a lot of time researching are generally ready to buy. Prospects who spend only a little time may just be starting their purchase decision or reaffirming a purchase made recently. Watching and tracking who is using your long-form deep content and comparing them to who is using your lighter shallower content will help you deploy sales resources better.
Often the toughest aspect of content engineering is goal-setting. Performance isn’t really about quantity. Content excellence is about enabling and providing incentive for your customer community to build content for you. You want the customer to sell the product through recommendation, endorsement and involvement. Online, consensus matters. Enabling and demonstrating customer consensus lowers purchase risk and grows brand equity.
Use content to build loyalty to the extent that your customers will like your product so much that they will actively assist in its sale. Not only is customer assisted sales conceivable, we are not long from a time when customer to customer communications will be essential to market share leadership.
Celebrity endorsements have been a reliable method of marketing communication for over 100 years. Now the criteria for celebrity has been forever altered. Certainly in your customer base you have “celebrities” or experts who are widely recognized in their field for having game-changing knowledge of issues that drive your customers’ businesses or preferences. Power users need to be identified and tapped as content sources to improve the credibility of your content and the claims you want to make about your offering.
For your content to be persuasive, prospects need to see their pain in the stories your customers tell them. Those stories/content can come in the form of testimonials, endorsements, case studies, or survey research. The more forms you cover, the more likely your content will be right-sized for your prospects’ need when you have the opportunity to get their attention
Stuck for content ideas? Here are few ways to get started:
Almost every competitive space has what we call the “elephant in the room”- that ugly reality that keeps people from seeing all the value they expect from a given purchase. This is true in both B2B marketing and B2C marketing. An example might be the trouble with LAN capacity for VoIP deployments or issues arriving from trying to entertain a lot of people who will invariably have widely divergent tastes. Finding customer pain and exploiting it as content inspiration is one of the secrets of a great content engineer.
When reviewing ideas for content stop thinking viral and just think sharable.
Search optimize all your content -make sure your search terms are well represented. But don’t make search optimization the enemy of compelling content. Do your best to balance terms with content that is easy to understand and easy to share.
To start the content merchandizing process, encourage your employees and vendors to start sharing content that they find valuable. Then inspire them to add yours to their mix. It takes a lot of work and focus to find the winning thread of content themes and an appealing tone. Once you begin to leverage your customers’ sensibilities effectively, however, you’ll bring more people into your community. That community, in turn builds the credibility you need to generate a new level of confidence in your brand.
Marketing without science is fanciful. Success comes from hypothesizing, testing and repeating. Experimenting and testing can get ugly. Is your brand in the dark ages? Learn why it’s about share of mind –and share of shelf –not loyalty.
I’ve written about this before but it’s nice to see it starting to happen
From Business Week
Microsoft Corp., aiming to take advantage of a backlash against Google Inc.’s policy changes, is rolling out new ads that say its rival is risking users’ privacy to squeeze more revenue out of them.
The three-day print campaign started today in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times and USA Today. A blog posting with the title “Gone Google? Got Concerns? We Have Alternatives,” written by Microsoft spokesman Frank Shaw, was posted on the company’s website.
Invite-only Pintrest is on fire. According to a report by Experian, the site received over 11 million visits the week of December 17th, which is 40x more hits than just six months earlier.
Compare that with Facebook. In the United States it lost nearly 6 million users, falling from 155.2 million at the start of May to 149.4 million at the end of it. This is the first time the country has lost users in the past year.
Apples to oranges? Maybe. Facebook is huge. It’s not going anywhere soon. But while social media is hot, there is plenty of reason to believe that Facebook’s hegemony isn’t assured.
If you can’t trust your fans, who can you trust?
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