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.

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.

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).

A January article in McKinsey Quarterly raised the old question of how much emotion really comes into major purchase decisions – particularly after hearing recently from one decision-maker who said that the first projects to get budget approval are when the mandate comes straight from the Board for an urgent action or to get something new in place (JFDI was the acronym he used).

McKinsey’s article (Data to dollars: Supporting top management with next-generation executive information systems – free registration required) highlights an opportunity for CIOs to ‘make their roles more critical than ever’ by making the benefits of Business Intelligence directly visible to the Board. [Off the topic of this post, the article contains some great examples of models to visualise complex BI in action]

The article uses an example to show precisely how poor information can become a personal and emotional issue for the CIO:

“Executives intent on reviewing key performance indicators (KPIs) had to sort through a jumble of onscreen data, so the CIO needed to take several IT analysts offline every month to comb through the figures and create the desired analyses. Frustrated, the company’s board pressed the CIO to explain why group reporting costs were climbing upward and so much IT support was necessary. As the chief information officer, the CIO should play a more central role in designing next-generation executive information systems that can help a company’s top managers extract value from the data that surrounds them.”

Considering this kind of personal argument can often lead to the best response when we’re taking a proposition to senior buyers. It’s where the heart (in this example, ‘I need to be seen to do something’) can multiply the effect of the head (’there’s a better way for us to work as a company’).

Other more ‘emotional’ sales angles could include  playing on how you can make their department into a hero, or help it to prove its worth. Staying with the example of Business Intelligence, it struck me at our recent S&M Forum that the Finance decision-makers would be keen to invest in BI simply around the promise that it could help them track the performance of all the other investments they are making (ability to measure results being one of the main things they are looking to improve). This kind of thinking doesn’t normally come into a BI proposition, but it may be closest to the buyer’s heart.

This more ‘emotional’ angle  to selling can be matched by a more ‘psychological’ approach to marketing. When we look at the programmes that are delivering the best results, we can see that they are tied to some level of psychological or behavioural insight.

For example, people are more likely to respond to a lead generation activity if you make the next step ‘visible’ (giving a phone number to call if people want more information is one thing – but explaining the first stages of your sales process could actually be more powerful in helping them to see how they can take their interest forward). We also know that response or interaction can be prompted by factors like a fear of falling behind (ultimately tied to job security), a desire to be seen as posessing (and sharing) greater knowledge than peers, feeling indebted for a valuable experience…

It’s certainly too simplistic to apply B2C models of emotional buying behaviour to B2B purchases, but we do need to remember that decision-makers aren’t simply automated decision-taking machines. Our work will always be more powerful if we consider the people as well as the business that we’re marketing to.

Are there any suppliers who don’t aspire to a ‘thought leadership’ position? It’s an admirable objective, but fails to deliver on the promise all too often. Meanwhile, a more practical approach seems to be delivering ever-stronger results…

So last week, a colleague proposed the possibility that – with every man and his dog creating a ‘thought leadership’ position – the real thought leaders might be doing just the opposite.

The impulse behind a thought leadership programme is to have something interesting to say to clients and prospects, ideally something that stands a business apart from the competition as more forward-thinking and creating new solutions to existing challenges.

Which is great as a principle, and when it works it can pay massive dividends. But too often, after this great start, people put the ’stand apart from the competition’ before the ‘interesting to clients and prospects’ – which typically means taking an ever more tangential/futuristic view on a subject. And so the thought leading position gets farther and farther away from where the majority of clients/prospects are fighting their day to day battles (and spending the majority of their budgets).

When we researched the people making buying decisions worth millions of pounds, we found that the ones taking the decisions weren’t necessarily in the c-suite, but departmental heads/programme directors – people with day jobs too big to worry about what might be possible in the future and all too concerned with what’s happening today.

There’s also a tightrope to walk between innovation and delivery – at our recent S&M Forum we heard from Finance decision-makers who explained how they prioritise budget for suppliers who can clearly show what they will deliver and how they are capable of delivering (having done the same thing 100 times before being more important than some potential but unproven competitive advantage).

This won’t be true for every proposition or every audience (some companies are less risk-averse than the norm and are typically good target early adopters for new solutions), but the current environment does seem to call for a more practical, pragmatic kind of leadership.

Maybe the really innovative thinking would be to stick to what worries today’s decision-makers – details of where your proposition fits their budgets and priorities, stories about what’s going right and wrong, implementation pot-holes, war stories…

So what would we call the opposite of thought leadership? Well, if the balance is between thinking and doing, perhaps it should be ‘deed leadership’.

In one of this week’s TechMarketView updates, IT analyst Richard Holway predicted that we have hit the low-point in a ‘U’-shaped economy – but that we’re in for a long bottom and that when we return to growth (sometime in 2010), the market will be very different.  According to Holway, “Just surviving through to the 2010 up-tick is not enough.”  Holway has stressed the importance of preparing for the upswing and not crippling the business by adopting cost-cutting strategies that might weaken the IT department.

A recent research note from the Hackett Group underscores the importance of making long-term strategic investments during the downturn, while balancing them with short-term cost-efficiencies:

Given that most companies have sharply cut costs, there is an immediate need to realign the IT investment portfolio, understand how to define IT investment categories… and set goals for allocation by investment category.  Achieving these goals will require the development of an IT portfolio management capability comprising the processes, skill and supporting tools.

Hackett recommends allocating 60% of IT budgets to innovation and improvement, but Michael Krigsman of IT Project Failures, thinks organisations should not adopt a “cookie cutter” approach – instead, portfolios should be optimised on a company-by-company basis as a function of business strategy, technical requirements, investment capability and the features of the competitive landscape.

So, what can IT suppliers be doing now?  As the downturn has become a recession over the past 18 months, CIO.com has posted more and more articles to help CIOs demonstrate their value to the business, culminating in their article last August, ‘7 Tips to Make Your Business More Competitive’, which highlights streamlining costs without sacrificing long-term capability.

As CIOs begin to plan for the impending upturn, you can position yourself as an advisor and guide through the economic bottom and eventual upturn.  In my post, “CIO SOS: Help me influence the business“, I point out the benefits of working with a CIO, rather than just selling to them – for every IT supplier bypassing IT and trying to build a case with the business, there’s an IT department that wants to do exactly the same thing.

Another thing to try is provocation selling – identify a high-impact issue, develop an original point of view, lodge your provocation, prove your point.  CIOs are focusing on defending their value to the business, so take the time to understand what’s getting under your prospect’s skin.  (You can read what one CIO looks for in marketing direct at him in my interview with Tom Ilube.)

…your messaging could follow.

Whatever their other flaws, retail banks have to understand the psychology of their target market. It’s been interesting to see in the last 6 months the new angles that are developing in their advertising (and especially interesting to think that these same angles could be the things that we should be promoting to our markets).

So what have the banks been up to?

There’s Lloyds TSB, who have been heavily featuring their ‘most trusted bank’ accolade:

And NatWest’s latest adverts, featuring the new ‘MoneySense’ service, promoting a ‘Helpful Banking’ approach and clearly acknowledging the sudden increase in customers hoping for ‘impartial’ advice from their bank.

The point that these adverts make for IT lead generation is twofold:

1. A basic point that anyone selling to banks may be able to build a case around helping banks deal with the sudden rise in demand for ‘advice’, and will have to fit in with the more cautious, ‘trustworthy’ direction that banks are taking.
2. A wider point whichever industry you sell to: it isn’t just ‘consumers’ who are reacting to the current economy by looking for advice and worrying about trust/reliability. Just one example of this: we’ve seen in recent months that promises of information-rich working sessions that will help a decision-maker understand how to de-risk their project or business are one of the most powerful calls to action.

Building lead generation programmes for 2009? We’ve put together our 7 critical success factors – the things we’ve seen the best lead generation programmes have in common.

The 7 factors below are in order chronologically. Approaching them in this order (starting with the data, moving through the development of a reputation, building access at the right level and then a concentration on timing) has the greatest cumulative effect.

Factor 1: The best campaigns have a deep understanding of the data set to be campaigned on. Typically, the data set and a joint go-to-market strategy around it have been developed with the sales team at the outset. Marketers who use the sales teams’ knowledge to help segment and tier target organisations and develop specific programmes for each will have best success.

Factor 2: The internet is rapidly becoming a fantastic source of information. Both to get your data (sources such as LinkedIn and ZoomInfo) and to work out who should be in it (searching Monster for job descriptions similar to those of the people you are targeting, reading end-user blogs (ie Waitrose’s MD kept a blog for the whole of last year). Real-time information helps targeted campaigns strike at the most opportune moment.

Factor 3: It’s not just the data you have – you need to ensure you are positioning to attract the right kind of customers. If you occupy the right position in people’s minds, they will come to you, or at least meet you halfway. In building a compelling set of content using to communicate intelligently with it, you’ll find you are attracting people, and your data set will grow organically as contacts and colleagues add themselves to your database.

Factor 4: In the lead generation space there’s a lot of debate about spend on brand awareness versus lead generation. The best campaigns acknowledge that it’s never about one or the other. Continuous campaigning builds brand through the very process of a longer term communication strategy that adds value, changes opinion, positions… and in doing so, generates leads.

Factor 5: In designing the content of a campaign, first consider the prospect’s next step. In enterprise B2B marketing, the next step is very rarely to click and buy. Think through the journey you want the prospect to go on, and sell the next step more than selling the product or service.

Factor 6: The quality of the content you’re providing is critical. In the spirit of reciprocity, people receiving your campaign will only give once they’ve taken – it’s all about a value exchange. It doesn’t have to be big on spend, but rather big on thought. What do they really need to help them do their jobs better? Become a resource for your target audience  – crack this and you’re streets ahead of a traditional campaign.

Factor 7: Work hard to know when it’s right. Industry statistics suggest that only ¼ of leads generated are ever sales ready at the point of generation. Monitor news and accounts and keep good records of purchasing cycles. Work a mixture of useful information and harder sales messages through your ongoing communications, pushing harder when your intel suggests you should, and taking a softly-softly approach at other times. Factor 2 can help you here as well, intelligence from the research (the web, your sales team etc) can tell you when you approach a company or industry.

Computing.co.uk reported this week about the rise of the interim CIO. In a very useful article, they looked at the reasons behind the increasing number of interim appointments, and made a good start at getting under the skin of this new breed.

 John Hall, who works as an interim CIO, describes how the role has come to be popular for driving through change:  “more recently it has become about change implementation. We are used to coming in and ramping up quickly, taking control and driving something forward. Also, because we are interim we are unencumbered by thoughts of our careers, any hidden agendas, or indeed office politics.”

What does this mean for IT marketers? Among the range of consequences, here are three trends we have picked up.

1. In my recent interview with the former CIO of Egg, Tom explained the importance of the ‘trusted advisors’ around him (subordinates, peers in other departments, key suppliers) – with CIO change becoming more common, it’s essential to have programmes that reach out to these other audiences.

2. Other marketing programmes may need to move from a company focus to an individual focus. We have seen great examples of event series that someone attends as CIO of one organisation, moves companies and then gets back in touch to request an invitation. Web 2.0 strategies can also be very powerful for keeping track and maintaining relationships (in a very simple example, we’ve seen more and more people subscribing to email newsletters with personal rather than business addresses).

3. Timing becomes even more important – seeing when a new CIO is brought in, understanding the change that this is intended to drive, and building your messages around this (whether advising as an incumbent supplier or making a speculative move to break into the business). Equally, it means that now more than ever it is important to be very strict before qualifying an organisation out or stopping a programme around a specific proposition – things can change overnight.

We don’t have to look far for examples of the power that these individuals hold – see the recent post on the most popular man in IT.

I’m pleased to be able to make available our web 2.0 planning guide. We’ve had a lot of interest in this document, as marketers look to introduce more “pull” techniques into their programmes. You can download it here for free: B2B web2 blotter

It provides a process for thinking through your approach, suggests how different tecnhiques can be used to relieve pressure at points in the sales funnel and provides management considerations for marketers using web 2.0 for lead generation for the first time.

Easy to use, fill in, make notes on, and share in a brainstorming meeting. Do drop me a line or reply in the comments field with any questions.