Plenty of suppliers are focusing on ‘consumerisation’ as a topic of major interest to their customers and prospects. (’Consumerisation’ is all about what it means to a business when employees would rather use their own personal devices for work, would rather select their own apps, and want to interact with each other in ways that have more in common with Facebook than traditional ‘big’ corporate IT.) As a major change facing businesses, it’s creating threats and opportunities for IT, comms, services and other suppliers.

It’d be an easy prediction to say that suppliers will spend more time in 2012 to get their consumerisation stories straight – although it’s certainly not simple to stand out in an increasingly crowded market.

But the thing with consumerisation is that it’s not just another trend that marketers can use to resonate with the key decision-makers that they’re targeting. For many suppliers, it’s going to fundamentally change who these decision-makers are.

It won’t happen instantly, but over time some suppliers are going to see their heartlands (e.g. doing a single major deal with procurement) replaced with the new reality that thousands of individual employees (or at the very least hundreds of department heads) are free to make their own choices. Of course, some suppliers with security/consulting/hosting propositions may see little change (or even potential growth) while others (’consumer’ brands like Google and Apple) will find new opportunities to break into corporate markets that were previously sewn up (by major procurement relationships or ‘gatekeeper’ system integrators). But between these two extremes, there’s a mass of suppliers who face some tough choices in the mid-long term.

Assuming that they have (or can find) a business model that sustains a much larger volume of smaller (or even individual) deals, these suppliers will also need new marketing approaches to influence all of the people who could be buying, trialling, evaluating or recommending their services. You might describe it as a shift from B2B to B2C2B (I’d love to lay claim to that one but Google tells me it’s been used 25,000 times before…). As I say, none of this will happen overnight – but we can expect to see more and more examples of organisations reaching out beyond traditional decision-making units, and an increasing interest from others to see how they get on.

It’ll affect the buying journey, the sales process (e.g. more trials, less face-to-face), the approach to promotion and incentives, the real potential direct ROI from social media, the challenges of data (if you struggled managing 20,000 contacts, try coping with 20,000,000!) and the need for new types of content/user interactions. But it’s also an exciting time to stake a claim in a new area (where it feels like the Salesforce.com model has only scratched the surface and Apple is seeing success mainly by default).

Tom Upfold, one of our very own senior copywriters, was invited to take part in a live, online Q&A with The Guardian this month on how to start a career in zoo keeping…only joking, copywriting.

He joined a panel of enthusiastic and experienced copywriters from around the UK to give their advice and opinion on questions put to them from budding copywriters looking to break into the industry.

Questions poised included: ‘What other worlds are copywriters used in other than marketing?’, ‘What should my portfolio comprise?’, ‘Is there any specific training or qualifications I should get?’ and ‘How do I go about getting work as a freelancer?’

The full discussion can be followed here – http://careers.guardian.co.uk/copywriting-careers – but Tom is always on hand to chat with anybody looking for an insight into life as a copywriter. Just email Tupfold@themarketingpractice.com.

How many of us have been guilty in our careers of spending all our efforts creating fantastic content and then adding ‘for more information please call…’ at the end? Such a vague request makes the likelihood of a response extremely low. It’s wrong to assume that a prospect is going to commit to a sales meeting after reading one email or piece of direct mail. Yes, the content may beautifully describe the benefits of a product or service. But the time-poor reader won’t pick up the phone unless they can see what’s in it for them.

If a prospect is to respond, they need to be clear on two things: what it is we want them to do next and why it is valuable to them. It’s a simple principle, but if we apply it with an understanding of the market and the buying process, it can dramatically improve results.

Here are three key steps to creating calls-to-action that actually work.

1. Consider the buying cycle

There are probably as many versions of the buying cycle as there are books on sales and marketing. But when it comes to developing the right call-to-action, they are useful tools since they help us understand that when we ask the reader to do something, it has to be appropriate to their current situation.

A typical buying funnel contains four stages: recognising the problem; working out what caused the problem and how big it is; evaluating possible solutions; and deciding on the best course of action.

Somebody who has only just recognised they have a problem is unlikely to pick up the phone and jump straight in to a sales meeting. At this stage, what will be most valuable to them is help in understanding the nature of their challenge. For these prospects, we might consider a link to download a whitepaper, or even inviting them to a workshop that helps them think through the cause and scope of their challenge.

Even at the later stages of the buying cycle, our time-poor prospects will be wary of picking up the phone unless they can see the value they will get in return for their time. Instead of ‘arrange a meeting with one of our experts’, then, how about a ‘case study road-show’ that shows how others have dealt with similar challenges?

2. Plan a series of CTAs

So, we understand the importance of a call-to-action that is relevant to the prospect’s current situation. And we can also assume that, in any given market, organisations will each be at a different stage in the buying cycle.

What we can do now is plan campaigns that have a series of calls-to-action, each one helping to ‘nudge’ the prospect along the buying cycle. Ask yourself, at every ‘touch point’, what is the right action to motivate people along the buying cycle?

Think about the ideal next step for your prospect, based on where they are in the buying process and taking into account any other considerations relevant to the market you are in. Also, plan out the subsequent touch points you will need to maintain customers’ forward momentum. Success comes when all of these touch points tie together seamlessly.

So, our appetite-whetting email might link to a website. The website persuades our prospect of the value of attending an event. The event finishes with an offer of a one-to-one workshop that helps the prospect understand their challenge and gives them materials to promote their case internally. And then, when they’ve had that crucial meeting with finance, we get in touch and book a sales meeting to discuss the next steps.

3. Put CTAs at the forefront

OK, we are now ready to create our content. All we need to do is remember the golden rule: we are selling the next step just as much as the solution.

So often, we devote 90 per cent of the content to the end product or solution and leave ourselves just a tenth to get across the bit that really matters: what we want them to do.

But now we have planned our ‘next steps’ to work together, our content can reflect that. We can devote more space to explaining the value of taking each step, giving us a much better chance of getting a response.

Consider it as your chance to make a pitch to the reader as to why they should act. Think about the level of investment you are asking them to make. The bigger the investment we ask, the stronger the case needs to be. If we ask them to take half a day out to attend an event, the value of that half-day will have to compare favourably – not only to other events but also any way they might usefully spend their time. With an audience that is frequently very time poor, ‘do nothing’ can be the strongest competition we face.

So, rather than making your call-to-action an afterthought, it should be at the forefront of your communication. If planned in the right way, it completely changes the structure and emphasis of your content. Let’s put calls-to-action at the heart of our creative.

Ahead of our next Sales & Marketing Forum – this session will be on Supplier Marketing in Times of Transformation - we thought it would be useful to highlight a few of the pressures/opportunities driving transformation in major UK industries. From a marketing perspective, the stresses of such changes may mean that the end-user audience has less time to engage. But it’s also a golden opportunity to reach decision-makers with messages that set a brand apart from the crowd.

Retail: Pessimistic for 2012
This article in The Telegraph also highlights expected woes for the retail industry, particularly for electrical goods, furniture and fashion chains http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/retailandconsumer/8961976/Retail-predictions-for-2012.html

Manufacturing: Automotive set to shine if the Eurozone holds out
Global car manufacturers have committed to significant UK activity in 2012 and the recent defence cuts could be transformed by a potential deal for BAE to build a new fighter jet for India. This article summarises what else we could be seeing on the UK production lines in 2012: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/industry/8969193/Manufacturing-predictions-for-2012.html

Technology/IT: It’s all about BYO in 2012
This extensive report by Gartner tells you everything you need to know about where the IT sector is headed in 2012: http://www.gartner.com/technology/research/predicts/

Construction: Stuck in the mud until 2014
The private sector needs to improve before the construction industry can follow in its footsteps according to many of the UK associations. This review gives an overview of the expected changes this year and a breakdown of which sectors will see the biggest impact: http://www.theconstructionindex.co.uk/news/construction-news/5-fall-predicted-for-construction-output-this-year

As for the financial and public sector, we are sure our speakers at the The Marketing Practice S&M Forum (John Crane, acting CIO, Nationwide and John Suffolk, former CIO, UK government) will be filling us in with all of the insider tips so we’ll be back after the 24th to enlighten you all then.

“Content is King” – but maybe it’s time to consider regicide?

Wading through the morass of predictions for B2B marketing in 2012 (#irony), you can’t move for hearing that “content is King”. But I’m sure I’m not alone in feeling that there’s already a near-overwhelming weight of content out there competing for my attention. At some stage you have to switch off and trust a few sources and people in your network to bring you the best of the content – or that you’ll stumble across what you need while searching on a topic.

I certainly don’t disagree with the objectives behind content marketing – it’s just that I think it’s becoming too easy and too mechanical (heard a good comment recently about the limitations of a ‘white paper factory’ approach).

So we need to be looking for what’s next – finding another dimension to add to our content marketing that will keep it ahead of the pack.

I think there’s an answer that’s about creating ‘experiences’ over and above individual pieces of content. Content can be useful; an experience can be engaging. Experience is more likely to contribute to a lasting reputation for your brand in the mind of the prospect. And at the same time, hopefully an experience is more likely to prompt a prospect to take a next step with you (proposing this next step can even be part of the ‘experience’).

I’m aware that ‘experience’ might sound a bit vague, so here’s an attempt to define what I mean.

At one level, it could be simply about content that invites audience contribution or that they can interact with. Or about having what would pass as a proper ‘journalistic’ story (the opposite of the ‘white paper factory’ approach). Experience is also a useful way of thinking about the journey that prospects (and then customers) take with your business. Differentiating with this journey can be just as important as differentiating your core product or service.

But at a specific campaign level, the most successful programmes that I’ve seen in the last couple of years have been about actually ‘doing’ something rather than just talking about it. There’s a great example in what O2 Enterprise (disclosure: our client) has done to take it’s ‘Joined Up People’ (think ‘flexible working+’) proposition to market. Rather than create lots of theoretical marketing collateral about the proposition, they’re sharing the story of how O2 itself has implemented it and the benefits they’re seeing. This coverage does a great job of summarising how different the approach is.

“It’s rather refreshing to see a big tech company actually do this kind of thing rather than just talk about it. It most certainly makes the conversation with other enterprises highly authentic, given that o2′s done it all itself.”

When we look back at the end of 2012, I’m sure that the content marketing programmes that stand out will be the ones that head in this direction of being ‘experiences’.

If you’re wondering where to look for an idea of an experience to create for your market: it’s where your expertise intersects with the audience’s interest. There’s only limited point in making a noise about something that you can’t sell to – and no point at all making a noise about something the audience isn’t interested in.

For me, the big innovation of 2012 in B2B Marketing isn’t going to be about technology or channels or techniques: it’ll be about revenue.

I’m convinced that 2012 will be the last chance for many B2B marketers in large organisations to take more accountability for revenue (and so break out of being a dispensible ’support function’).

I don’t mean revenue in the sense of ‘we ran a lead gen campaign and it generated 100 qualified leads’ (or even ‘we think the CRM system shows that a couple of the leads converted’). I mean revenue in terms of driving an understanding of the marketplace, planning where opportunities will come from, owning the long-term conversation and conversion of the audience through to sales and proving in detail the outcome – ideally past revenue through to contribution. And, on the customer side, driving the plan of how new/expanded propositions will be taken to the existing customer base.

The economic uncertainty and shake-ups happening in lots of big B2B firms have created this opportunity. If we can avoid being overly distracted by the abundance of new channels and techniques available, there’s a chance that we’ll be able to stake a claim for a place at the top table. When marketers start taking this seriously, the fabled ’sales and marketing alignment’ will just happen.

When the CEO asks ‘what did marketing do for me in 2012?’, the answer could either be ‘we sourced 30% of pipeline and 25% of prospect revenue, grew customer profitabiliy by 15% and established measurable awareness for our top new propositions’ or ‘we implemented marketing automation and social media monitoring, grew our followers by 1000% and delivered 1,500 qualified sales leads (we’re just not sure what sales did with them…)’. I know which answer I’d rather give.

It’s possible to generate leads for pretty much any proposition. Not that you should, of course – if it’s going to be impossible to sell, then it would be a good idea to reconsider the proposition.

But let’s assume that the proposition is a sound one, and that any right-thinking buyer would bite your arm off to sign on the dotted line – if only you could spend an hour with them to explain it (followed by 6-12 months going through the sales process…).

All you need is to sell them on the idea of spending an hour with you. Easy if you’re Megan Fox. Less so if you’re a ‘leading supplier of business services’.

Let’s also assume (it’s a dream scenario) that your data is entirely accurate and you have a contact strategy which is a thing of beauty (say, an integrated campaign plan with multiple touch-points over several months).

So you push ‘go’ on your lead generation campaign, but you only get a trickle of opportunities back. Why? 9 times out of 10, it’ll be because the strong proposition wasn’t converted into a strong set of campaign messaging.

What’s the difference between proposition and message?

The short answer: it’s the difference between a campaign that sounds good to an internal audience (strong proposition) and one that actually works when it reaches customers and prospects (strong message).

The longer answer:

The proposition is the articulation of the superior value (compared with the competition) that you can bring to bear on solving an issue that a prospect faces.

The campaign messaging is what happens when you take the proposition and think about what the audience needs to know there and then, what/who they are most likely to listen to, what will capture their imagination, and what will convince them to take the next step with you.

Let’s take the 4 elements of successful messaging in turn

1. What the audience needs to know – depending on what stage the market is at for your proposition and what stage of the buying cycle your ideal prospect is at, they will respond to very different messages. The simple example would be to compare a prospect who doesn’t even know they have an issue with one who is already evaluating different solutions. Clearly you need to share very different information with people in these two scenarios – the same applies to the difference between a proposition that is brand new to the market with one in a category that’s well established.
2. What/who they are most likely to listen to – really an extension from the previous point, the idea here is to think about the kind of information people will respond to and what sources will hold most authority (analysts, existing customers, their peers, your delivery experts….).
3. What will capture their imagination – this is an invitation to get more ‘creative’ than any standard value proposition would allow. That could mean ‘creative’ in the design/copy sense – for example, we took a client proposition about joining up strategy with execution and turned it into a campaign about great weddings (complete with pieces of wedding cake sent to their key customers). Or it could mean ‘creative’ in a more business sense – for example identifying that building a ‘maturity model’ around your proposition will help you to open doors and sell more consultatively.
4. Convincing them to take the next step with you – the best campaign messaging is entirely context-aware, and is rooted in the knowledge that buyers will be going through several stages and can be speeded up by focusing on selling the value of taking the next step (e.g. an hour’s meeting) rather than always focusing on the end solution. What’s the value of the hour’s meeting? What will they get that they couldn’t get from someone else? How will it help them to do their job? (In a way, this part of the campaign message is like building a little proposition all of its own for the next step in the sales process)

Get all of these 4 elements right, and prospects should be beating a path to your door – and having spent so much time on crafting vaue propositions it would be a shame for some of the mega deals to get away for lack of campaign messages.

Why have 1 in 5 buyers been put off a supplier by information found through social media? This presentation gives a special focus on the critical issue of trust that came up in our decision-maker research on social media (see here for the full research overview).

In April, we researched 100 UK decision makers’ social media attitudes and behaviours. The findings have made for interesting reading, confirming some suspicions but surprising us in other areas. Above all, they’re intended as prompts in terms of important considerations when planning social media engagement.

You can read the results as both supporting the importance of social media and illustrating why it can’t succeed on its own:

For: We’ve seen that half of decision makers feel that suppliers should be active within social media, and that a surprising number have met and given business to suppliers following a first interaction via social media.

Against: But the influence of social media dips at some key stages of the buying cycle, and more traditional channels are becoming seen as more valuable than ever before in the face of ‘overwhelming’ digital interactions.

To summarise our conculsions:

Social media has reached a point where it is almost universally used, but is at its most effective alongside other channels – hopefully we have reached the stage where it can be sensibly considered as an element of any wider marketing strategy rather than hyped as a standalone silo…

If you are interested in any further information from the full findings (over 20 different question areas and variations by size of organisation/age/job function), please contact peverett@themarketingpractice.com.

Corning Glass’ “A day made of glass” video has reached over 11 million views on YouTube after just 2 months. Glass may not be the easiest product to create reputation-driving content around (of course, nor were blenders before “will it blend?” came along), but they’ve done a brilliant job to paint a compelling vision of the future that just demands to be shared.

So what are they getting out of it? The 11m viewers can’t all be potential buyers for Corning Glass (although they are all potential buyers of phones/TVs etc that use Corning’s Gorilla Glass). And the products featured in the film obviously aren’t available to buy yet. A few thoughts on the benefits they may see (not an exhaustive list and not done with any knowledge of Corning’s business model!):

• More strategic profile with their major customers (like Apple): the buzz and coverage around the video provides a level of credibility that Corning can’t only talk about good engineering but they also have a vision of how this engineering relates to consumer behaviour/expectations. So it opens up a more strategic position with major customers. Hopefully they have plans to turn that into longer term exec-level relationships.
• I also assume that it would be more difficult for Sony (for example) to decide to switch manufacturers of the glass components in its TVs if Corning have a greater level of consumer awareness. In fact, using Corning Glass may actually be able to be used as more of a selling point (or at least a relatively high profile feature) for consumer devices – which would also be good for Corning’s business if more manufacturers turn to them on the back of greater consumer awareness. Hopefully they have a plan to nurture/capitalise on new demand that comes their way from brands that want to tick this box for consumers.
• From the Corning website, it looks like they are heavily focused on R&D for competitive advantage. This in turn means recruiting and retaining the best talent in the industry – and showing the kind of future-thinking that’s in this video can only help with that.

My big worry is whether they are doing enough to capitalise on the video’s popularity. They’ve got an advert running alongside the video on YouTube (good) but it just goes through to the standard company homepage (bad) – what about a specific page aimed at converting visitors around the kind of benefits I listed above (or whatever the goals they’re really looking for as a business!). If you look around the Corning website, you are able to find a page that promotes following them on Facebook/Twitter/YouTube (it doesn’t really explain what benefits you will get from doing that), but the rest of the site doesn’t really seem designed to encourage inbound contact/face to face meetings at the exhibitions listed etc, or to offer/encourage any lighter-touch ways that they might be able to keep in touch with interested prospects through the buying cycle (lead nurturing/marketing automation).

But I don’t want to take away from a brilliant job conceiving and executing the video, or to suggest that it won’t have a significant impact on Corning’s reputation – just that as with any social media activity there are next steps/opportunities to integrate with wider marketing strategies that need to be maximised. Among the 11m viewers will be potential customers for Corning (or people who work with/advise/know potential customers) – and will they still be in touch with them in 6,12,24 months time?