A write-up of our latest Sales & Marketing Forum (”A very public affair: Being an effective partner to the publc sector”) will be coming soon – but in the meantime…
We’ve had some great feedback on the latest forum (and one note to make the cocktails less strong next time – you can’t win them all…). While we wait for the ‘official’ writeup, here are a couple of related links:
In a post last month (”Waitrose – showing the way for B2B content marketing?“), I was full of praise for Waitrose’s tactic of taking over an entire ad break and turning it into a ‘mini cookery programme’ with Delia Smith and Heston Blumenthal. And I’d still stand by the opinion that it was a great example of content-led marketing that B2B marketers can learn a lot from (particularly those marketing to senior executives, who share some key characteristics with the Waitrose demographic).
But the recent coverage of Delia’s latest Waitrose recipe (’I’d be ashamed to offer Delia Smith’s risotto to a guest‘) highlights the dangers of getting your content marketing (or perhaps your core service?) wrong. Complaints about the seafood risotto have been posted on the Waitrose website and featured on Watchdog and Have I Got News For You. So a slight wobble in execution perhaps – but for me, it still shows that this is the kind of marketing that is getting noticed and being talked about.
There’s a great round-up of other B2C ‘Branded Content’ campaigns on this AdAge blog. Towards the end of the article there’s a list (including Waitrose) of examples that provide some good food for thought.
We recently reviewed one of our most successful content-led lead generation programmes (it’s been running for 2 years now, draws 500 people each month to the content site and brings in details of 100 new contacts each month from a very restricted target market of EMEA enterprises across Telco and FS industries). (And we didn’t pay Delia and Heston £2m to create the content…). We’ll give a more detailed review of the campaign and our lessons from it over the next couple of weeks.
Marketing Automation Systems are a hot topic for many B2B organisations at the moment. But Ben Hanna argues in his blog that when selecting one, the feature list should not be your be-all and end-all decision point. Yes, the feature list should help you rule options in and out, but does all-singing and all-dancing really mean, all-importantly, that it’s the best choice for you. We’re using and looking into these systems a lot at the moment, so Ben’s argument is interesting to us. Gartner’s magic quadrant is a good place to start from when choosing a system, but Ben highlights four areas as having a major impact on usability and results that you might not immediately consider:
Customer Support
Online Help & Marketing Automation Training
Process for Rolling-Out New Features & Bug Fixes
Are You Impressed by How the Vendor Develops YOU as a Prospect?
The last point is the most interesting. Once you start using Marketing Automation Systems, you realise just how complicated they can be when used correctly. Done well – by which we mean completely, comprehensively and with buy-in and integration across your whole customer touch-base – they can be very effective. But it you’re trying to improve your marketing, you have to worry about vendors that let you slip through cracks in your own systems. Are the dogs trying to sell you a marketing automation system eating their own dog food? On the whole, we’ve seen some excellent examples of content-led marketing combined with accurate, timely targeting coming from a range of marketing automation vendors – we’ll share some of the high points in a future post.
Avid viewers of Coronation Street or Country House Rescue might already have seen the start of Waitrose’s new advertising campaign. Waitrose took over an entire commercial break during both programmes, showing a three and a half minute ad with Delia Smith and Heston Blumenthal that was a mini-cookery programme in itself.
Taking over an entire ad break isn’t completely new – Adidas and Xbox are among the brands to have done it before – but this is something different. It’s more like content than advertisement, more like an interaction than an interruption, and part of a carefully planned journey that the audience can be taken on. In short, everything that we’ve seen working as an approach to B2B buyers (but at a cost of c.£20m).
Whether or not it works for B2C remains to be seen, although everything seems to be geared up to meet Waitrose’s goals – the recipes are about showing that you can do your ‘everyday’ shop at Waitrose, the mix of Delia (traditional values) and Heston (21st century), the online continuation (with a prominent option to shop for the ingredients)…
If the Daily Mail’s reports are anything to go by (Achtung der Rhabarber! Waitrose forced to import German rhubarb), the tactic seems to be delivering early results: “in the first four days of the supermarket’s campaign the company sold as much of the crop [rhubarb] as it normally sells in 12 weeks – enough for 61,000 brulées”.
So what are the wider lessons?
We’ve been working with Microsoft Advertising recently on their research into what drives consumers to make premium purchases – and the answer tends to be a combination of Interest and Information. First, people need to be interested (or to be shown why they should be interested) and then they need access to information. At a high level, it really is that simple – the trick is in how you spark the interest and provide the information. It strikes me that Waitrose’s campaign is just an example of trying to meet these goals (finding an interested group – like viewers of Country House Rescue – and then explaining the value of good quality, responsibly sourced food to spark an interest that the information in the advert and online can answer.
Given that most senior decision makers will be premium consumers in their personal lives, there’s definitely a lesson to be learnt here for B2B marketers. Perhaps it’s little wonder that the most effective programmes today are the ones that have a precision focus on finding interested buyers and then take novel approaches to providing the information they need.
You may already have come across Infor’s “Down with Big ERP” campaign (positioning Infor as plucky/fit-for-purpose underdog in a similar way to Tibco’s “Greg the Architect” and Lawson’s “Lars Lawson” video series).
Infor’s campaign has created a fictitious “Big ERP” character to represent what they see as the problem with the top software suppliers. The campaign is being taken to market across far more channels than either the Tibco or Lawson examples; this video provides a neat summary of the purpose/campaign activity:
One interesting note – it seems that this video on YouTube currently has less than half the views of an unoffical response video (600 vs 1600 views).
You’re a brilliant marketer, so you probably already know this…
A post last week on Harvard Business Review made an interesting case that even seemingly irrational or generic flattery can have a lasting positive impact on someone’s perception of a person or a business.
The point that Andrew O’Connell makes is that even if flattery might seem insincere at a rational level, it can create an unconscious positive feeling or openness to a brand that is much longer lasting than any rational evaluation.
There’s some powerful thinking behind this that could apply very well to go-to-market propositions or campaigns. We talk a lot about ‘fear messaging’ or ‘hope messaging’, but this tends to presume that the target audience is waiting helplessly for the solution we have to offer. Next time, why not consider whether more ’sympathetic messaging’ might be a good option (”you’re already ahead of the game, so we’re sure you’ll be considering [insert business challenge/solution here]“)?
We discussed some other examples of ’sympathetic messaging’ in a previous post on making the most of a more psychological approach to buyers. In that post, we looked at the potential to encourage buyers either to feel indebted, or to accept a proposal based on being consistent with their previously expressed views/actions.
As the most successful campaigns get more and more personal, these psychological angles will become steadily more essential to consider and get right…
We’ve been reviewing recently our most successful lead management and lead nurturing programmes, looking at what it took to make them successful and the key steps in setting them up. (For a view on the benefits these programmes have to offer, see this previous post on lead nurturing strategies/target benefits.)
Alongside a more detailed set of critical success factors, our review suggested 4 key attributes essential for creating lead management programmes (each then breaks down into several competence questions in a kick-off process):
Detailed knowledge of the business objectives and capabilities/needs of different teams in the business/external partners
Insight into target individuals, their typical needs and decision/purchase journeys
Expertise in the strategies, content, and hooks that drive forward the audience journeys
Working understanding of the technologies of lead management, nurturing and CRM (technology must not come first, but understanding the different capabilities of Eloqua vs Silverpop vs Oracle vs Marketo vs Aprimo vs Neolane vs Microsoft Dynamics vs Salesforce etc etc will ensure rapid time to value)
Only by balancing these 4 factors is it possible to take the 4 actions necessary to build the best performing programme (while these 4 are distinct and each have several sub-actions, they can’t be treated in isolation as each has an impact on the other):
Identify areas of potential for greatest business impact from lead management (and set the right targets/measures)
Correctly set the process and scoring for management/handover of different levels of opportunities and for management/improvement of ‘marketing’ data in the nurturing process
Design the right journeys, create enticing content (or ‘wrap’ existing content), identify appropriate triggers/personalisation opportunities
Select the best areas to launch the programme, implement rapidly and scale up appropriately
It would be interesting to hear if anyone has spotted any other headline factors responsible for lead management success…
Forrester’s B2B profile tool gives an interesting perspective on how different categories of buyer currently use social media (based on over 1,200 business technology decision-makers in the US and Europe; filter by organisation size or type of purchase to see how behaviour varies).
There may not be any particularly pronounced differences across categories – but the overall numbers show yet again how clearly the case for leveraging social media is growing. Consider that less than a quarter are completely inactive (i.e. not making any use of social media), and sizeable proportions are active in the various different categories (anything from just having a profile on LinkedIn or reading information on a blog through to creating their own content).
Having acknowledged that the buyers are out there, the question becomes how to engage and then nurture their interest in the way most likely to achieve your business objectives (for a starting point, see our B2B web 2.0 marketing campaign planner).
Admittedly, the last few days may well have been a bit out of the norm at the BBC, but CIO UK has a couple of interesting articles about the priorities of Tiffany Hall, BBC CIO.
The first article is a brief ‘day in the life‘ – the kind of piece that’s always worth bearing in mind in planning techniques that could realistically fit within a decision-maker’s daily routine. It’s interesting to see further proof of our own research into the challenges of persuading senior contacts to attend events. We found that senior decision-makers receive an average of one invite every day but only attend 5 in a whole year – meaning that the content, topic and invitation process has to be spot-on. Tiffany seems to be at around the average for invitations but above average for attendance!
“Evening I have been invited to more work dinners since I started this job than the entire rest of my career. I could be dining out every night of the week.”
The second, longer, article goes into more details around current BBC IT challenges and priorities. It discusses some of 2010’s headline issues of information management, standardisation and consumerisation of IT, and also references some of the ‘day to day’ projects that seem to be rising up CIO agendas this year:
“We have reached the stage in the lifecycle of our legacy business systems when we are having a good, long, hard look at that and seeing whether now is the time to divert some of our priorities back into the business systems infrastructure…This hasn’t been a great focus for my predecessors over the last few years, simply because of where the BBC’s priorities were. I am getting a very clear steer from my stakeholders out there in the BBC business that, much as they want to put the money into costume dramas and all the rest of it, we do need some better back-office functions. Traditional back-office stuff around Outlook, when are we going to Windows 7… all of that stuff is very much on the radar.”
We’re just finalising the details for the next Sales & Marketing Forum (pencil 11 May into your diaries, and see details here of the previous session), focusing on what it will take to be a successful supplier to the public sector over the next few years.
So it was interesting to hear ‘File on 4′ this evening on Radio 4 – a neat example of how political necessity may affect IT suppliers to the public sector. Listen again to the programme here – http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00r0vxg – it covers high profile issues with projects in the Rural Payments Agency, Fire Brigade and (of course) the NHS, asking whether a new government should scrap these projects and define new ones in a very different way. Whether or not all the claims are justified, it certainly highlights a feeling that exists in political debates and general public opinion.
Suppliers are up against some strong external prejudices and preconceptions (based on headlines like the average cost per year of 100 Accenture employees on one project being £200,000 each) – as well as the likelihood of new buyer priorities and strategies after May. It’s going to be very interesting to hear expert views on what this means for supplier sales & marketing strategies. I’ll update more on the Forum as soon as we have the details.
