Posted by Jonathan Block on Fri, Jul 09, 2010 @ 09:36 AM
In a previous post, I discussed our B2B buying cycle framework and the roles within it; in this post, I'll cover how these buying cycle phases should influence your B2B social media efforts. Given the importance of buying cycles, better alignment of key social media activities with these cycles will result in more targeted, measurable results. Let's look at it via the three macros buying cycle phases.
Education. Most organizations don't have a lack of content; rather too much content is locked into specific pieces of collateral and never reused. Go through a whitepaper and highlight content that can be leveraged as tweets or posts within your Facebook and LinkedIn groups to drive more awareness about who you are and what you do. Also, the work that goes into securing quotes and data points for press releases and testimonials can be used to reinforce the connection between a specific offering and core business issues within a vertical (or sub-vertical) market.
Active Buying. The active buying stage finds buyers looking for solutions to problems they have decided are a priority, matching solution types to their specific needs and uncovering vendors that offer their solution of choice. Your social efforts should drive focused awareness and engagement not around your brand, but around specific decisions made by current customers that drove them to choose the solution you offer and, subsequently, your organization in particular. In addition to leveraging subject matter expertise for posts, content that was created to make key influencers aware of emerging issues can be recast to drive home the importance of problem solving at the beginning of buying cycles.
Closing. The closing phase includes activities such as negotiations and terms/conditions creation required to seal a deal. While there may be less social media potential here because prospects have much of the information they need, late-stage buyers often turn to their online social networks for validation, and the social reputation (or lack of) you've built through engagement will have a huge impact. Tracking and addressing any issues that a prospect may have about your organization could help tip a decision in your favor. Facilitating connections to stakeholders and influencers within your online network will help as well.
Posted by Jonathan Block on Fri, May 21, 2010 @ 10:42 AM
We'd like to thank all the attendees and sponsors for making our 2010 Summit such a success. I had originally planned on providing a recap of some of the content we presented, but a number of folks have already done a fantastic job at that so I'll just provide links to the summaries out there.
Adam Needles (@abneedles) has written the most comprehensive report on the Summit, which we encourage everyone to read:
Click here for Adam's summary
Here's a few more links to other insights:
From Kate Maddox (@kate_maddox) at BotB Magazine Online:
Click here for Kate's first article
Click here for Kate's second article
From Andrew Gaffney (@agaffney) at DemandGen Report:
Click here to read Andrew's article
From Bill Lee (@bill_lee) of the Customer Reference Forum:
Click here to read Bill's blog post
Thanks to all who took the time to write down their thoughts and if you know of any other, please post a link in the comments below. We look forward to seeing you in 2011!
Posted by Jonathan Block on Fri, Apr 09, 2010 @ 09:18 AM
This is a post that should lead to a series of questions; questions you should be asking yourself if you have any responsibility for the social media strategy within your company. Whether you're executing on that strategy yourself, have staff to do it, or have outsourced to an agency, there is certainly no lack of social data you're receiving. The problem is that it's mostly quantitative about activity and gives you very little insight. Having thousands of followers on Twitter or fans on Facebook may make us feel good, but it's fairly meaningless if we don't know what the impact of these numbers are on the business.
While we've thankfully evolved away from the notions that social media in not measurable, the pendulum is in danger of swinging too far in the other direction. In other words, too many B2B marketers are being asked to show the direct impact that social media efforts are having on revenue. We continue to advocate that focusing too much on this direct impact goal is misguided; better to focus on the impact that social media is having on the seeding and creation of demand. Many organizations are doing this by tracking the change in response rates when social media is part of the tactic mix, but it's key to discover how it can raise conversion rates at other points in the demand creation waterfall.
And this leads to the questions. Are you using social media for activities beyond the top of the funnel, such as pipeline acceleration or sales enablement? Even if you're not applying social media to these initiatives, are you even tracking these types of activities regardless? Do you know your optimal tactical mix throughout the waterfall? Do you even have any impact beyond the handoff to sales? Without insight into what you do currently (as well as historically), it won't be possible to gauge the impact that social media marketing has on activities beyond the top (or even before the top) of the funnel.
If you're already asking these questions, you're on the path to gain the most insightful measurements of your social media marketing activities. And bonus points if you got the Pink Floyd reference in this post's title.
Posted by Jay Gaines on Fri, Mar 12, 2010 @ 09:22 AM
As I outlined in my previous post Matching Brand Promises To Customer Reality," with the power shift in the business/buyer relationship that social media and unprecedented access to information has brought about, it is more evident than ever that B2B marketers no longer have complete control over how there organization is perceived — rather, much of this power now lies with the empowered customer. So, what robust brand and customer experience management strategies can a B2B business leader use to ensure that their brands match the reality of their company? The following strategies extend beyond logos, words and colors, and should set the stage for a successful re-evaluation of the brand and customer experience management initiative:
- Customer experience management is ultimately a marketing responsibility. Marketing is clearly best suited to understand the expectations their messages create as it is within marketing that the brand and its associated promise is often defined, refined and projected out to the world. Also, customer experience is increasingly defined by marketing touches in the form of content, newsletters, websites, direct mail, email, events, tweets, customer communities and much more. Finally, developing and maintaining great relationships with prospective buyers starts with marketing and is an inherent part of the entire marketing process because relationships are exactly what leading marketers use to convert unknown prospects into engaged and sales-ready leads. The CMO, working closely with counterparts in sales, customer service and product development, should assume leadership of B2B customer experience management due to this intertwined link between marketing success and an exceptional buyer/customer experience — one that marketing is most likely to ensure matches the brand promise of the organization.
- Analyze and understand customer experience. Since the goal of customer experience management is to move customers from satisfied to loyal, and from loyal to advocate, the best place to begin analysis is simple customer loyalty surveys and in-depth interviews. Utilizing open-ended questions along with quantitative questions in surveys and interviews will help establish a baseline and identify specific strengths and issues. Also, identify ways to gather “operational feedback” that comes through the normal course of conducting business, including customer service, sales, CRM data and comments left on your Website. Finally, monitoring customer comments and discussions about your company in customer communities and other online social networks is another relatively easy way to continuously analyze customer experience and perceptions. If you don’t currently have a customer community, starting corporate/executive blogs can open up fruitful conversations between customer and business that can also streamline customer experience research.
- Manage the expectations your messages create. In a business environment defined by social media and empowered customers who expect transparency over-promising has gone from unwise to high-risk as significant promise/reality gaps will be ruthlessly exposed in customer communities or other business social networks. Mapping your primary messages and brand promise to what you learn about your customers’ perception of their own experiences working with your organization goes a long way toward identifying significant gaps. In general, be vigilant to avoid creating expectations that can’t or shouldn’t be met by focusing messages on core competencies that differentiate your organization or offering and matter most to your customers.
- Proactively turn customers into champions with a customer advisory board. B2B marketers should consider initiating a customer advisory board as a crucial component of the customer experience strategy. Customer advisory boards can help to flush out any troubles that buyers might be experiencing with the company, as well as highlight and improve what the organization is doing well. Also, by engaging customers in defining processes and initiatives to improve their own experience they will quickly adopt a sense of ownership, which will help significantly with managing risk and mitigating communications crisis if they come up. It is always good to have customers come to your defense if possible, particularly in the social world.
While there’s no doubt that successful brand and customer experience management takes time and business resources, positive brand awareness and customer perceptions do more to ensure the reputation and success of a B2B company than any short-term initiative. The sooner B2B CMOs takes this to heart, the sooner the business will survive and thrive well into an optimistic future.
Posted by Jay Gaines on Fri, Mar 05, 2010 @ 09:49 AM
What B2B company doesn’t want a powerful brand that draws customers and makes the competition green with envy? After all, a compelling brand can influence buying decisions, justify higher prices, transcend cultural barriers, and create deep and lasting loyalty among customers. But in the quest to find and project the perfect brand, many b-to-b leaders risk aligning their businesses with misleading and even false brand promises that simply don’t reflect their customers’ experience or the core competencies of the organization.
Marketers have experienced increased demand to deliver a continuous stream of highly qualified leads to a sales force under tremendous pressure. The inevitable result has been an intense focus on short-term revenue supporting efforts while longer-term strategies have taken a back seat. This shift from long-term growth strategies to short-term revenue generation means that many B2B CMOs have turned their focus away from (among other things) customer experience management at critical touch points, including products/services, customer service and web sites. While short-term cash flow remains critical, leading B2B organizations understand that ignoring customer experience management could be a recipe for disaster.
This decline in attending to customer experience can lay the foundation for negative perceptions that will last long after the economy picks up and spending increases. As much as B2B marketing is about doing what is necessary to achieve near-term financial goals, an equally important responsibility is creating and maintaining a lasting, powerful (and positive) perception of the company. That’s exactly where brand comes into play. It’s through the lens of brand and its associated promise that buyers measure their experiences with the company; therefore, brands that don’t align with the typical customer experience are doing far more harm than good.
Also, due to the explosion of social media, B2B customers and buyers have very visible channels for expressing their opinions, as well as increased access to the opinions of others — and as we all know, this new customer empowerment has changed the B2B world forever. For example, a Google search for virtually any company won’t just reveal links to the company website and relevant information pages; customer reviews, raves and rants will often pop up within the first page of Google results. It is increasingly clear that customers who have been given a voice through social media now have as much influence over how a company is perceived as marketers at the company.
While astute B2B companies can play this magnified customer voice to their advantage by identifying and closing gaps between their brand promise and customer reality, businesses that don’t take action are putting themselves at serious risk. The new transparency that exists in the typical business/customer relationship means that businesses with customer experience management strategies that aren’t aligned with their brand message risk damaging their reputation, their relationships with customers and their future sales.
Posted by Jonathan Block on Fri, Feb 26, 2010 @ 01:12 PM
According to our research, vendors are the least trusted source for information when it comes to B2B buying, while industry analysts are one of the most trusted, making it more critical than ever that your AR function is able to communicate messaging and positioning to the analyst community effectively. The collective experience of SiriusDecisions has sat through thousands of vendor briefings across every industry. Based on this understanding we’ve identified four areas where AR can optimize their activities to influence the way the analyst community perceives you and impact the way they communicate about your organization:
- Know your target. Executing AR is really no different marketing your products; just as you target your messages to different audiences, make sure that you communicate with the right analyst firm as well as individual analysts.
- Analysts aren’t PR. While AR should do their best to make sure an analyst has all the content and collateral needed to influence their positions, it’s not an analysts job to do your PR and marketing for you. Few (if any) analysts will take your messaging and simply communicate them out to their customer base; they must analyze competing solutions to help them identify the the most appropriate matches based on a customer’s requirements.
- Empty claims. Many vendors tout claims that rival the statements made by politicians in an election year. You can say that none of your customers have any serious support issues, that your customers achieve ROI quicker than with a competing solution, or that you had the best quarter ever but don’t expect an analyst to be convinced or repeat that assertion without proof.
- Prepare adequately. Too often analyst relations doesn’t adequately prepare the staff who are going to give a briefing. It is the job of AR to make sure that the most appropriate resources are used in a briefing and that these resources are adequately prepared.
Beyond these first steps, AR needs to ultimately to evolve to influencer relations, a topic we'll cover in a future post.
Posted by Jonathan Block on Fri, Feb 19, 2010 @ 09:16 AM
Instead of focusing exclusively on generating yet more new leads that may or may not qualify, an effective way for marketing to impact the elongated B2B sales cycle is to help move deals that (for whatever reason) have stalled in the pipeline, an activity we call pipeline acceleration. While marketers have many tools to help prospects buy, and sales sell, there are two ways that marketing can drive late-stage pipeline: stimulus offers (specific programs extended to a prospect to increase the velocity of customer buying processes) and enablement/knowledge (internal programs designed to help sales build competence and neutralize roadblocks when dealing with stalled selling opportunities).
Social media can play a key role in stimulus offers. Giving a prospect controlled access to your online customer community shows that prospect the experience of what it would be like to be a customer. This lets the prospect see how customers interact with each other and your company; select prospects can browse and search community discussions to match their interests or concerns. Having the prospect see how issues and negative experiences with the company are resolved goes a long way in giving prospects evidence of how you treat customers. Also on the stimulus front, tap your subject matter experts to focus the critical content already available in whitepapers and other collateral into concise, customized podcast, blogs or tweets that align your message directly to known prospect pains. Podcasts can also be effective in distilling down case studies that can have direct relevance to prospect needs.
On the enablement/knowledge side, the inclusion of social media features within sales enablement platforms continues to gain steam as a more organizations leverage internal communities built around knowledge sharing and best practices; this is especially valuable for leveraging the group experience of not only other sales reps but also subject matter experts that reside in other parts of the organization. The use of podcasting as an internal training and communications tool continues to grow and is a proactive way in helping arm reps with the talk tracks and selling points to help accelerate prospects, particularly if they include the experiences of reps that have success accelerating their deals.
Remember, marketing is not just about new leads. You already have prospects in the pipeline that have a strong interest, now do what you can to help them close.
Posted by Jonathan Block on Fri, Jan 15, 2010 @ 09:55 AM
More and more B2B organizations recognize the value of having a clear strategy when it comes to social media to optimize returns and resources. According to our research data, over 60 percent of B2B organizations are doing something with social media (if only a blog) but of those only 30 percent have a documented strategy that seeks to interlock these activities with other marketing efforts. Given this reality, B2B organizations are looking to their peers but aren’t necessarily finding the answers they need. But there’s a good reason for that; most of the well-publicized success stories regarding social media are clearly in the B2C space. This really isn’t surprising since with such short sales cycles (i.e., transactional sales) it doesn’t take long to develop a critical mass of success stories and best practices. What becomes a stumbling block is when B2B organizations expect such quick hits. Well, sorry to say, it’s not going to happen. With the longer and more complex sales cycles that typify B2B, it takes a fair amount of time to be able to gauge the influence that social media is having on the business.
But this shouldn’t be an excuse to do nothing. Most likely your customers and prospects are already participating in social media (whether in online communities or Twitter) and may even be talking about you and your market. So even if you have no great social media aspirations at this time, or it’s not the way your target market consumes content, you should be monitoring to find out if people are talking about you, your competitors and market, and where these conversations are taking place. If you’re already participating you should be tracking all of these interactions. Without collecting such data you’ll never be able to determine what part social media plays among the series of interactions that typify the b-to-b buying process.
At the same time we regularly tell our customers not to ignore the internal value that social media can bring to the organization from a collaboration and best practices sharing perspective. Such internal uses, particularly between marketing and sales, can provide the quick hits you need to justify further investments that both internal and external uses of social media require. But remember that while social media may be inexpensive from a money perspective, it will require a large investment in time and money.
Posted by Jonathan Block on Mon, Dec 14, 2009 @ 09:51 AM
Social media marketing should be approached in two ways: as an additional channel to engage your existing target market and customers, and as a way to reach potential prospects that prefer to communicate and consume content through social applications. But organizations that approach social media as merely another channel to get leads will be quickly disappointed. Based on the best practices we’ve gathered from organizations leveraging social media is that while it can be used for demand creation, this assumes a high level of experience using social applications from a customer engagement and awareness perspective.
Social media in concert with more traditional tactics can play an effective role throughout the demand creation waterfall, not just at the top of the funnel to drive responses. For example, selecting key concepts typically distributed in whitepapers and using them as the basis of a podcast series that targets later buying cycle stages can provide subject matter expertise that can be subscribed and linked to. And let's not ignore the internal use of social media for sales enablement.
Social media marketing has evolved to the point where it should be part of every B2B marketers toolkit, but too often marketers want to run before they can walk. Without taking the time and resources to develop a social media presence and build up a network that has any interest in what you have to say, your links and postings to content and events will be ignored.
For more insights into the ways that best-practice B2B organizations are driving demand with social media, including the presentation a sample social media marketing program, please join our webcast on this topic on December 16 at 11:30 am EST.
Click here to register for this webcast.
Posted by Jonathan Block on Thu, Nov 05, 2009 @ 12:57 PM
When considering the level of social media participation your organization should have, the first question to answer is the extent to which your customers participate. It’s no longer a given that even in highly regulated industries social media is not used. Do your customers read blogs, download podcasts, use Twitter (or similar sites), and participate in other online communities? You may already know the answers to these questions based on direct feedback from customers or sales reps, or you may have to ask. It’s also important to learn the extent to which your competitors are using social media, as well as its prevalence within potential markets you may target in the future; if there’s little activity you have the opportunity to establish a thought leadership role.
Even organizations that aren’t participating widely in social media should recognize the value of monitoring the social channel from a customer engagement and support perspective. Most important, you want to respond as soon as possible any technical or support issues customers discuss in the social universe. In addition, monitoring tools are effective at managing employee social media participation to ensure sensitive data or inappropriate information isn’t shared (however inadvertent or innocuous). While free Web tools (such as Google Analytics) can give you some insight into the social channel, you should determine the extent to which your communications agency or existing media monitoring tools can capture social media activity. If neither of these can give you the depth you need, there’s a wide range of social media monitoring tools available, including Radian6, Visible Technologies, Alterian SM2 (formerly Techrigy) and Scout Labs, to name a few. And when most providers in the field offer a free trial so you can decide which solution is best for your company, it’s a good time to be a potential customer of social media monitoring tools.