It’s that time of the year again, and there were plenty of April Fool’s gags that didn’t disappoint.

As usual, Google pulled some amusing pranks, including new maps for the 8-bit NES, a self-driving NASCAR, and the launch of Chrome’s multi-task mode.

Sir Richard Branson launched Virgin Volcanic and planned a journey to the centre of the Earth. And Warby Parker, an American eyewear retailer, released a range for dogs, aptly titled Warby Barker.

Atlassian, an American provider of tracking, collaboration and software development tools, released a tongue-in-cheek video introducing a new way to boost developer happiness – spooning.

Great for marketing

Ultimately, the point of all these gags is that they’re great for PR. They’re a fun way of getting the media to take notice of you in an interesting, less expensive way.

As long as your organisation’s PR and social media activity is aligned to your sales and marketing strategy, it’s a huge opportunity to improve your website’s search engine ranking, build awareness and inspire your staff.

Measurable results

The economic downturn has forced marketing departments to prove their worth by delivering against measurable metrics. Now PR is under the same pressure to keep its place in the budget.

So seasonal opportunities, like April Fool’s Day, need to be well thought out. Will your planned activity increase web traffic? Is it in line with your SEO strategy? Will it deliver tangible results?

What’s the strategy behind your tweets and blog posts? Tweeting and blogging ‘just to be out there’ doesn’t really cut it.

So, where should you start? Here are three ideas to get you started:

1. Be focused – Write down your business’s key words – and use them. Constantly ask yourself why you’re doing it and how it relates to these key words and your end goal.

1. Be consistent – Tie all your activity together. Make sure that if someone visits your site it matches the news you’re putting out – the serious stuff as well as the fun stuff.

1. Measure the results – and work on improving them. Which tweets got re-tweeted? Which blog articles are most popular? Which press releases generate a spike in traffic? Monitor and then adjust your strategy accordingly.

On that note, I’ll leave you with a look at what The Guardian considers the ten best April Fool’s Day gags.

John Crane, former CIO of National Australia Bank, spoke at The Marketing Practice’s Sales & Marketing Forum about how suppliers could more effectively reach decision-makers in his position.

The slides give an overview of what suppliers need to know about the role of a CIO in a retail bank, how they work as part of an exec team, how they interact with the rest of the business, and how their department may be structured.

There are also some prompts for suppliers looking for closer sales and marketing relationships with CIOs (including the question of whether the CIO is the right target in the first place…).

Obviously John’s just a market of one, but in some ways this detailed ‘day in the life’ info is more useful than a thousand surveys about key issues/priorities…

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).

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.

“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.

As one of the small – but growing – number of iPad users in the office, I thought I’d canvas some opinions and share our combined views on the apps that we find most useful/interesting…

Kevin (the roaming worker): Kevin’s a fan of Splashtop, an app that mirrors your PC’s desktop on your iPad, allowing you to do anything on your iPad that you can on your PC (albeit with a couple of milliseconds delay!).

Paul (the information junkie): my most frequently used app has to be Flipboard, which creates a personal magazine from all the online content that my contacts (or people/blogs I follow) are creating or linking t. Used in the right way, it’s a great antitdote to information overload. Having said that, it raises questions for online magazines that rely on advertiser revenue. And it’s also a great example for marketers of how new platforms are making it even harder to predict the way our content is consumed or even know who’s consuming it.

Nick (the assiduous note-taker): Nick’s been experimenting with SoundNote, an app we’re finding very useful for meetings/interviews. SoundNote lets you record audio at the same time as typing notes (or even drawing). So you have an audio record of your call/meeting/interview and a written set of notes in the same place. And if you tap on one of the words when you’re looking back over your written notes, the audio playback will instantly jump to the point in the recording when you were typing that word. Which makes it a fantastic time-saver when you’re looking for more detail to add to the written notes.

A quick run down on some other apps that I am/am not using regularly:

I’m not really using any of the Word/PowerPoint/Excel apps (other than to read email attachments). It’s not that they don’t have the features, just that I’m usually multi-tasking when creating a document and (even with the OS 4.2 upgrade), the iPad isn’t the ideal way to do that. But I do find the pre-loaded Notes app really useful as a way of instantly capturing thoughts if I’m not sitting infront of my computer. The other pre-loaded apps (particularly the Safari internet browser and email client) are also good for quick access away from the PC.

There are a host of webex-style apps (from adobe, citrix, cisco), but the one I’m most keen on is Fuze meeting – which allows you to run the online meeting from your iPad and share documents on screen (as far as I can see, the others only let you see what others are sharing on their PCs).

PDF Presenter is a good little app for – as the name might suggest – presenting PDFs. If you connect an iPad to a projector/monitor (via the vga connector), you can use PDF Presenter to run through your slides.  You’ll need to convert your preesntation to a PDF first – which can be good as PowerPoints aren’t always converted perfectly by the readers on the iPad. On the subject of PDFs, iAnnotate is useful for reading and commenting on/marking up PDFs.

And some that are outside the realms of work or productivity tools:

The TED app is a great source of intelligent thought on the issues facing the world – although just flicking to it now, I’m not sure about the featured talk on ‘Why not eat insects?…

I prefer the Amazon Kindle app to the Apple iBooks one – mainly because I like the option to read white text on a black background (which I haven’t found in iBooks).

Alice in Wonderland, Wired magazine and The Times all show – in different ways – how the tablet format can bring new life to publishing.

Drums! (a touch-drumkit that you can use to play along with songs in your library) is a great demonstration of the touch-screen in action.

LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter apps are pretty much as you’d expect.

Aweditorium and Photo Cooking are great ways to explore (respectively) new music and recipies – sitting back and ‘exploring’ being very much the ‘tablet’ way to interact, as opposed to sitting up and ’searching’ on a PC. It’s things like this that make me think that the tablet format is much more than just a different way to access the same information – fundamentally it could encourage a different way of thinking/interacting.

And Fruit Ninja and Angry Birds are my favourite iPad games.

B2B Marketing has published an overview of our lead nurturing programme for Oracle’s Supply Chain Management solutions. The programme won the ‘Best Lead Nurturing Initiative’ award at last month’s B2B Marketing Awards in London.

We had a great night at the awards – The Marketing Practice was a finalist for Agency of the Year, and our own Sales & Marketing Forum (a series of events for our senior clients) was runner-up for ‘Best Live Initiative’ (beaten only by Lloyds TSB).

A brief summary of the write-up of our Oracle lead nurturing programme:

“Oracle’s campaigns for its Supply Chain Management (SCM) business aimed to generate UK sales of SCM solutions to both existing Oracle customers and net-new accounts. Webinars, live events and direct mail resulted in a ROMI of some 65:1.”

“The campaigns sought to align sales and marketing in a nurturing programme, combining the strengths of sales (deep close relationships with customers); with those of marketing, by taking a cross-account view with the ability to offer an enlarged ‘footprint’ for sales – through content, events and insight that are relevant to target business contacts, tailored based on their behaviour and past intelligence.”

There are just too many cases of companies tolerating sub-standard data because “it’s never perfect” or “no-one else does it any better” or “that’s just the way data works” or “it will take too long to fix, we’ve got more pressing priorities”.

At the risk of sounding a bit evangelical, it really doesn’t have to be this way. A high-performing data platform is just too important to give up on. Because almost all B2B organisations have very poor data and data management systems, getting it right is a great potential competitive advantage and efficiency driver.

So what do I mean by “sub-standard data”? It isn’t just a case of physical contact or company records – more often it’s a case of the process that surrounds the core data. Examples would include (this is going to be a pretty long list…):

- no tiering to differentiate the treatment of a 50-person cold prospect from a 5,000-employee hot lead

- taking 2 weeks to extract and confirm a campaignable list of prospects

- existing customer records mixed in with prospects

- errors in updating core data with changes (whether the changes come from Sales, Marketing, Account teams, data services…)

- missing key contacts/job functions (or, worse, having the contacts but not recording the job functions)

- inability to record campaign histories/contact behaviour and adjust future campaigns accordingly

- trying to use a system that has been set up for progressing sales opportunities to run activities like teleservice

- no clear process/division of ownership between Sales and Marketing (for using/updating/adding contacts)

- a history of long-drawn of CRM system selection/incomplete implementations

- no valuable reporting from the data about the effectiveness/results of different marketing activities (let alone any intelligence on the target market or what to do next)

I know that these issues range from the tediously tactical to the ‘million-dollar’ strategic, but that’s the thing about data – filling in the big picture plan is (relatively!) simple; it’s the detail that can cause any data programme to stumble.

And as I said at the top, a high-performing data platform is just too important to give up on. It’s one of the 4 foundations of an indispensible marketing department (the others are content, continuous communications strategy and opportunity management).

Of all the 4 foundations, it’s the data platform that lets the others do their magic. So if you attract people in through content, then the data platform will capture them and bring them into your future activity. And the right data platform will let you focus your communications strategy on the right people at the right time.

We’ve seen enough examples now of data working in harmony with the rest of a marketing programme to know that it is possible (and we’ll post about some examples of this in the next couple of weeks). And the right answer is always deeply tailored to the realities of the business involved (the structure and responsibilities of Sales and Marketing; the way that the target market is divided and tiered; the kinds of marketing programme being employed…).

Having said that, there are plenty of things that successful data platforms have in common. The most important of all are probably that when they started they didn’t bite off more than they could chew, and that system selection came a long way after detailed working through the practicalities of what the system needed to support. There’s an interesting set of skills/experiences needed for this work, which combines understanding the things that various data management systems can offer with seeing what it is that a business truly needs from its data platform.

If you can do that at the same time as starting small, there’s every chance that your data could soon be working for – rather than against – your marketing programmes. As I said, just in case you don’t believe me, we’ll post some positive examples over the next few weeks…

James Gardner, CTO at DWP, is writing an e-book about what the enterprise sales process looks like from the buyer’s point of view. (The chapter on Tricks Vendors Play to get a first foot in the door promises to be particularly interesting…)

A recent extract posted on his blog talks about the tell-tale signs of a ‘gone native Account Director‘ (an Account Director who feels they work for the client organisation rather than their own, is building a true partnership with their customer, and is embarrassed by any overt attempts to sell to the client because they believe the client will bring opportunities to them rather than the other way round).

Now I’m putting words into James’ mouth here, but he seems to be saying that going native is a good thing for an Account Director – and ultimately for the sales operation they work in – because a true partner will end up with more (or better quality) business than they would have done through hard selling.

I would suggest that Marketing needs to think about the same principles too. We know for a fact that the campaigns we run work best when they “don’t feel like marketing” to the end audience – that’s a key principle of course for social media and it’s always been valid in real life too. But it’s very difficult to achieve, and only possible I would argue if you start from

• a real interest in the issues of the marketplace;
• combined with a deep belief that things could be better for that marketplace if they thought more about what you have to offer;
• and an interest/affinity for the people you believe you can help.

Those are the defining beliefs of pretty much all the best marketers I know. Start from anywhere else, and the sales objectives you’re trying to support will be blatantly obvious – to such an extent that they will switch off the audience. So much so that I find myself getting embarrassed when I see examples of marketing that add nothing to a bare sales message, or are obviously trying to promote a course of action that will result in a sale. (I’ll pick out some examples of this from advertising in this month’s Harvard Business Review in an upcoming post.)

Now this isn’t to say that Marketing shouldn’t be about supporting sales objectives – if it isn’t helping to sell today or creating a better sales environment for tomorrow, then it doesn’t have any reason to exist. But the point is that – for the ‘gone-native Marketer’ – successfully driving sales is inextricably tied to the belief that their product/service can make the world a better place, a desire to find opportunities to make this happen, and a deep interest in the people whose world they can improve.