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, Jun 11, 2010 @ 08:58 AM
While methodologies and approaches abound for understanding where customers or prospects are in the social channel and how they use it, we've found no better guide than our buying cycle. I'll use this post to cover our buying cycle concept and the roles within it, while a future post will discuss how these notions should play a key role in your social strategy and execution.
If an organization doesn't understand — even at a basic level — the way prospects buy what it sells, it will never be able to use social media outlets and marketing to facilitate these decisions. This is due to the fact that as prospects move toward a purchase, the tone, message, offer and even communicator for a specific marketing effort should be altered.
Buyers don’t go through a straight-line process of getting information through the Web or social outlets, weighing one solution against another and finally making a decision. Instead, a typical B2B buying process comprises a series of smaller decisions involving a variety of audiences that move into and out of the buying process.
SiriusDecisions has created a model that describes six macro stages that B2B organizations typically go through (see diagram, below). These six stages can be rolled up into three higher-level phases: education, active buying and closing.
As you are identifying the distinct activity phases within a buying cycle, you should also be uncovering who the key “actors” are in each phase and the specific roles they play. Typical actors include champions, CXOs, influencers (can be external or internal to the company), users and ratifiers (usually purchasing, procurement or negotiations). It is common for groups to enter and leave regularly, and to play multiple — and very different — roles depending on the type of product or service being sold. While a CTO might play a significant role during the Exploring Possible Solutions stage in one case, he or she will wait for the Justifying the Decision stage in another. Users may be brought in early or late, while other executive groups play no role whatsoever.
An understanding of actors and roles by stage is a tremendous advantage to your sales and marketing teams; not only will they know whom to target (and who to ignore) and what channels (social or otherwise) to use, but messaging, programs and specific content can be developed and delivered at the right time. You also will avoid common mistakes such as targeting the CXO level with Loosening of the Status Quo and Committing to Change messages and demand creation efforts when these executives do not play any role at the beginning of the buying process.
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 Jonathan Block on Wed, Jan 20, 2010 @ 09:22 AM
Social media monitoring is a popular topic these day, and deservedly so. From our perspective monitoring is one of the four cornerstones of an effective social media strategy, which consists of Monitoring, Engagement, Awareness and Demand Creation. But where vendor functionality regularly outpaced a B2B organization's skills and process capabilities, users are finding such monitoring tools lacking in some key areas. This is not unlike the the marketing automation platforms (MAP) space; it's only in the last couple of years that B2B marketers have evolved to the point where they can take full advantage of MAP capabilities.
Let's look at what we're hearing from clients on two fronts:
- Integration: Again, not unlike MAPs, ease of integration of social monitoring platforms with other enterprise systems will become a differentiator for many customers. And we mean true integration, not just importing and exporting data. If you're only interested in tracking mentions, keywords and sentiment, as well as some indication of your level of engagement, then a standalone monitoring tool will be sufficient. But most B2B organizations look beyond communication goals to social media marketing, which requires tracking all customer and prospect interactions (what we call "following the social media breadcrumbs"), and integrating this data into MAP and CRM systems is critical. This explains why social tools are finding their way into such systems, either through partnering, acquisition, or the vendors building such functionality themselves.
- From reporting to analytics: Most clients tell us that social media monitoring platforms are good at reporting what people are talking about, where they're doing that talking, and offering some indication of sentiment, but many B2B marketers are disappointed at the lack of analysis they get. To be fair, agencies are still a significant user base of monitoring tools and many provide this analysis as a value-add to their customers, but more and more marketers are interested in leveraging these tools themselves. If monitoring solutions don't provide the analysis customers need, they'll need to integrate with systems that can such as a web analytics or business intelligence solution.
Social media monitoring is a still a relatively new market and growing pains are to be expected. While some users complain about usability issues (whither the concept of robust online help?), B2B organizations realize they must continue to evolve from a skills and process perspective to best take advantage of social monitoring tools. But these solutions also need to evolve from data aggregation to a solution for insight and action, providing not just activity information (read: who, what and where) but some indication of the impact these activities.
How would you like to see social media monitoring evolve?
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 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.
Posted by Jonathan Block on Thu, Nov 05, 2009 @ 12:56 PM
The communications organization should monitor itself to ensure its activities align with other marketing efforts. Key to maintaining this alignment is conducting a periodic reputation audit, at least on an annual basis. A reputation audit can tell us how effective we are in driving engagement and achieving results with our external audience (such as customers, prospects, analysts, media and other stakeholders) as well as with our employees and partners. It is an evaluation of where the organization is currently regarding its communications efforts and a diagnosis of where the organization needs to focus additional time and resources. At the end of the audit, we should know what’s working, what’s not, and what might work better if optimized.
The first step in a reputation audit is to define the activities you must analyze. Think of these from the perspective of higher-level functional categories within your communications organizations, such as advertising/branding, PR, AR, corporate communications (including your Website), community management/social media strategy, creative, internal communications, and public affairs. From these categories, determine the activities that are typically performed; then, you can rate your current level of effectiveness for each function based on the results they deliver. For every functional activity you should be able to identify the target audience, what you are trying to accomplish, and if these goals are being reached. Using the ratings you’ve identified for each functional activity you can begin to identify the areas that need improvement (based on their lack of alignment) and begin to develop a strategy for improving these goals.