Understanding the psychology behind why people say “yes” can really improve both campaign planning and content. Psychologist Robert Cialdini has spent many years researching the factors of influence and persuasion and has identified the core ways in which they can be encouraged.

His book Influence is fascinating, but it’s how to exploit these techniques day-to-day campaign that’s important. Clearly there’s no substitute for great content and compelling communications, but using these methods as we’ve suggested below will definitely increase your chances of success. Here are two of the factors of influence and some ways that you could use them, I’ll cover the others in future posts:

“Much obliged…” If you feel indebted to someone else, you believe you have an obligation to return a favour, and will often go to quite staggering lengths to do so. Cialdini cites an experiment where a university professor sent Christmas cards to complete strangers and was staggered by the high number of cards received in return. In B2B marketing, we can use this technique in a number of ways:

-help someone do their job better – become a resource for them. If you can provide them with slideware or research that helps them prove their point, back up an investment case or provide a “quick-scan” guide to a new concept your content will be credited, circulated and used.
-be thoughtful – invite them to a genuinely useful event (see the Tom Ilube interview, where he says “All CIOs understand the game – they know that if they attend the event and get value from it, that they would give value back to that supplier by giving them some time face to face later on”)
-make someone feel you empathise with them and brighten their day: for example, someone sent me a very relevant Dilbert cartoon on marketing in the mail this week with a note attached, great for the standout factor
-consider the timing of your different communications too - if your recipient gets a useful download or research piece before you contact them, they’ll be more likely to speak to you than if you blasted out a non-personalised email saying “buy our stuff”.
 
“I do…” We all have a mental picture of ourselves, and we will always look to act in ways that back that up. Basically, we all try to act in ways that are consistent with our previous actions and beliefs. This is known as consistency, and when used in combination with commitment it’s very powerful. If you can get someone to commit to an idea or goal, they are more likely to honour that commitment. Cialdini describes an experiment where researchers, posing as sunbathers at a beach, picked fellow sunbathers at random and put a towel down nearby. Pretending to go for a walk, another researcher posing as a thief then stole the radio the researcher had left on the towel. Only 4 in 20 of the sunbathers said anything to stop the “theft”. In the next test on a different group, the researchers asked the sunbathers to “keep an eye on my stuff”. In 19 of the 20 cases the sunbathers turned into veritable vigilantes, chasing the thief and even holding him down to stop him running away. Some thoughts on ways this can be used:

-read quotes, keynotes, results presentations (from the individual you’re targeting and the company) and approach them in a way consistent with their stated goals and previous behaviours (as well as the company’s brand values). If they’ve made a commitment to something (best company to work for, green goals, locally-minded) then use this in your approach
-make a strenuous effort to confirm people’s places at your event as soon as they have indicated they will attend. Mention who else is attending, how they’ve also made the commitment to go, explain what’s being done and laid on, what the benefit will be, reinforce the exclusivity and the limited spaces
-consider how your calls to action can encourage people to act in a way clearly in accordance with their self image, and how you can encourage them to make a commitment on this basis. If it’s likely people will perceive themselves as time-poor then openly acknowledge this in your communications and provide them with multiple quick ways to respond
-Personalisation comes into its own here. Just a small amount of research into name, role and function can have a big impact

It’s worth noting that these work best between people, rather than companies. If the recipient thinks it’s a real person inviting them to a useful event then it will clearly bring obligation into play in a much bigger way than sending the invitation from sales@companyx. That’s why in almost all cases, something that feels hearfelt and personal will work better than even the most stunning branding.

Tomorrow night sees the November gathering of the ever-slinky S&M Forum.

Our topic couldn’t be more timely – the need to justify the business value of marketing is perhaps more pressing than ever. Why, so the boardroom argument may go, should we invest in marketing when propping up our sales team would surely get more money in? When such a claim is levelled, marketing needs the numbers at its fingertips to respond. Why then, are they often so far from reach?

How can the marketer quantify what he or she does in terms of boardroom-friendly raw numbers? How can ‘marketing success’ be measured? What activities are generating a good return on marketing investment? Is answering any of these questions actually possible? In researching tomorrow’s event, we dug up a number of useful articles and interesting commentators on the B2B marketing measurement debate…

Starting with the basics, Jim Lenskold’s recent study (2008 Marketing ROI and Measurements Study) showed that many marketers are struggling with the fundamental measurements required to manage and improve marketing’s contribution to an organisation’s business plan.

Thus those who do measure are already ahead – the study showed that simply the act of measuring marketing in the first place has a direct effect on performance.

Respondents who described their marketing as highly effective all showed better measurement and ROI practices than those lower down the table, and they are using business information that ranges from sales reports, financial data, lead gen data, marketing spend and sales pipeline details to furnish their measurements. Perhaps most revealingly, these ‘highly effective’ companies comprised only 9% of study respondents.

Arguably, the main reason for this paucity of highly effective marketing measurement lies in collecting this data and presenting it in an actionable way to those in the marketing department, and an understandable way to those outside it. There are certainly tools that can be deployed to assist in this process, for example marketing dashboards, but the key is to have not just the short-term, but also the long-term view driving all analysis.

This long-term view was touched upon in a recent series on B2B marketing measurement in which Forrester’s Laura Ramos urged for customer-centric metrics to be employed to measure the impact of marketing over the entirety of the customer life-cycle. Ramos recommended that marketing measurement should move away from focusing on the basic lead-gen approach and towards building and maintaining brand loyalty by measuring how prospects buy, using demand management to build further customer dialogue and align marketing and sales around common objectives.

This latter point, the disconnect between marketing and sales, is often the shadowy figure lurking at the back of this measurement debate.  So much so, in fact, that one article in the Harvard Business Review from a couple of years ago, set about ending the war between sales and marketing once and for all by tackling the economic and cultural differences that usually cause the tension. But what relevance would such a sales and marketing peace treaty have to effective marketing measurement?

Unsurprisingly, it is value. With an aligned sales and marketing team communicating with the market in a consistent and timely fashion, the ROMI is not muddied by conflicting sales activity – the marketing effort put in at the beginning of the sales cycle will have a direct effect right through to the end.

Indeed, Laura Patterson develops this point when she states that marketing isn’t an island. Pulling the lens out so the focus is on sales, product, customer service and finance as well as marketing can really add value to the measurement process by placing all campaign activity into its real-world business context.

Brian Carroll’s call for a marketing funnel is another case in point. Carroll takes the view that most companies use only sales funnels to collect all their leads, qualified or not. The result is less a funnel and more a bucket riddled with holes out of which the less-qualified leads leak. By creating a marketing funnel, leads can accurately be filtered through to sales only when they are sales-ready. And Carroll agrees with Patterson when he says that measuring the effectiveness of this sales-marketing interaction is central to its success.

Generating actionable leads rather than just leads is important here too, and certainly something that should be the focus of any measurement. Lead quality is vital in the context of marketing value. For example, if a lead is measured purely as a cost-per-click (CPC), does this mean that each resulting sales opportunity is treated as equally valuable? CPC certainly has its place – if the average sales opportunity return isn’t expected to be high compared to the number of click-throughs, a decision would be made about using such a model. But if a relatively few click-throughs (with a higher-than-normal CPC) results in one or two significant sales opportunities, the value of this kind of marketing must be properly measured.

The damn lies inherent in such measurement statistics are ably demonstrated by email marketing. As Stephanie Miller points out, a study conducted by the DMA for marketing activity throughout 2007 showed that email marketing had 150% more ROI than non-email online marketing. Great, but behind these bare figures lurks the spectre of spam and the Gatling gun approach to some email marketing. Because there is simply so much of it out there, hitting thousands of potential targets with a broad email sweep usually has a negative effect of alienating potential sales leads. With a smaller but more targeted email campaign approach, the opposite can be true. Miller urges us not to be blinded by the glittering promise of gold with email marketing but to measure emails in exactly the same way, using customer take-up across different styles and sizes of email campaign to guide future success.

So, is there a danger of measuring too much? Perhaps not, if the right activities are measured in the right context. And, no matter how difficult the economic climate is, marketing value will always come down to money: the sales that are generated directly from a campaign.

As Paul Dunay suggests, in the grand scheme of things, sales is the only metric that really counts. This is, he argues is the ‘right context’ for measuring marketing value, based on three tiers of marketing metrics, with the first two tiers feeding into the most important third tier:

1. Reach metrics: the straightforward campaign hits – e.g. webpage click-throughs

2. Efficiency metrics: how cost-effective each form of reach activity was and whether it achieved the desired result – e.g. cost-per-clicks and the number of downloads of a whitepaper

3. Value: the contribution to the sales pipeline – e.g. the ROI for the number of attendees at an event

Of course, saying that marketing reach and campaign efficiency impact on and drive the overall value of the campaign is nothing new, nor is it astounding. But this is a very tidy way if thinking about it.

Measure what you’re doing to make sure you’re doing enough of it. Measure how you’re doing it, to make sure you are learning and getting better. Finally, measure if it’s working for the business. So, in the end, it’s all very simple.

(Although setting up the lean, mean marketing operation that can get hold of those figures and track them is a whole new blog post!)

In the last week I’ve met two marketing directors at global B2B companies. Both with similar challenges: in 2009 they need to do more.

Both are looking to us to make the most of their money. So what did I do? I stepped through our lead generation engine approach – how more concentrated investments in sales-aligned marketing can deliver greater results at lower costs.

Why are B2B marketing departments increasingly seeking a longer term lead generation strategy?

First, because we have to work harder now than ever to identify the parts of the market where there is opportunity. It’s still there, arguably more of it than before, but in very different places than a few months ago. Longer term campaigning actually shows you where do market next (Sign up to our IT Boomhunter series via RSS or email to keep abreast of IT market developments as they happen.)

Second, because increased cost-control is changing clients’ and prospects’ behaviour – and sales and marketing approaches need to adapt in line with this. Again, only from longer term campaigning can you see these changes before your competitors do.

Third, because marketing departments themselves are under pressure to find efficiency, increase productivity and deliver bottom line results. This can result in ‘quick and dirty’ campaigns that frustrate the sales team (see this post on selling in harder times) and actually damage your chances of selling (see this interview with Egg’s ex-CIO, explaining why one-off campaigns won’t get a hearing.)

What’s needed is a cool appraisal of the real market conditions, and a programme worked out over the long term to reduce the cost of business acquisition whilst increasing marketing efficacy.

The Marketing Practice’s approach shows that this can be done. How?

It’s not just a theory. We’ve proved it. For example, we’ve been running an executive events series for more than 2 years. Working the same set of data (because we started with a clear idea of everyone in the target audience), we’ve more than doubled the number of attendees at the events every other month, cut by 35% the cost per delegate, and delivered countless opportunities for sales engagement (exciting, because we know that the events are just a means to an end, not an end in themselves).

Or take another example – a lead generation programme running over the last 3 and a half years for a software company. Over this time, we’ve worked online, offline, through events, dinners and conferences and with ongoing teleservice. Always to the same audience, building and refining data across their target markets. These kind of programmes work right from day one and build phenomenal market intelligence.

If you want to know how, we’re running a roadshow featuring case studies of how our “lead generation engine” approach works. Drop us a line now to find out when and where.