The Changing Social Role of Employees.
The Naysayer rockband from Richmond, VA.
(Image Source: Reaper Records)
Employers should expect their employees to be active on social media in the interest of the company. Employees should see this as an inherent part of their job.
The times when “being active on social media” was reserved for the boys and girls “at the marketing department” are gone. Today everyone in the organization has a role to play. Especially people that are somewhere involved close to a customer touch-point.
What’s a modern employee to do on social networks, in the interest of the company? Read more 
The State of Mind of Corporate Decision Makers
So are you ? (image source: Tumblr)
Reaching corporate decision makers can be tough.
B2B marketers have a whole arsenal of strategies and tactics to our disposal: buyer persona’s, content, SEA, SEO, event marketing, advertising and social. You name it.
You give yourself 100%, developing the most fantastic message you ever made.
This is it. Now you nailed it. This got to work. It’s perfect. You press the start button of your campaign. And nothing happens. Or hardly anything happens. 2% conversion. 4% conversion. Anybody want more?
And that’s what happens over and over again.
Corporate decision makers are…
… stressed-out, overwhelmed with everything they need to do. They have ever-increasing objectives, which seem increasingly difficult to achieve, which can cost their job if not reached.
They don’t wanna expose their position by taking big risks. They don’t want to make mistakes. They are drowning in information. They get on average 150 e-mails per day. Decision makers, on average, have 59 hours of work on their desk at any time.
And above all, they are immune to marketing.
Corporate decisions makers don’t want…
They’ve seen it all. Slick sales people passing by the gatekeepers. Slick stories from strangers. At the end of the telephone conversation, all these strangers want, is the money in your pockets.
You only have 1 chance to get through to them. Moments of interaction with corporate decisions makers are short and rare. If your content and your timing is off, they won’t even give you that moment.
Please don’t:
- Waste their time
- Expect them to tell you about their business
- Give them a product bump
- Expect them to infer the value
What Corporate decisions makers want
They are risk averse. They have too much information.
But what they definitely want is:
- Help me achieve my goals
- Give me ideas on how to make a quantifiable difference
- Show me how others are achieving results
- Show me the big picture
“Decision makers believe they know the destination, but they have a problem getting there”
Making Stuff Up
Usually what happens when marketers are developing content for buyers is the following: marketers and sales get together. They start thinking about how to link business issues of customers with your product offering. Then they try to imagine what customers think.
Oh, yes, then there is the mandatory review round with the VP or CEO. They don’t agree, or feels something is missing. They know less than the product manager or business development manager. But they have a stronger opinion. Or they are higher up the food chain.
The whole thing is changed, and endlessly reviewed. As a result, the whole thing is watered down to generalities. Which waste the time of corporate decision makers.
(If you recognize this situation, let me know in the comment box below, so you can comfort me a bit that I’m not alone with this thought ;-))
Giving what they want
So they want you to help them to achieve their goals. Then help them.
They want ideas how to make a quantifiable difference. Then give them ideas.
They want to know how others have achieved results. Then show them.
They want to understand the bigger picture. Then explain them.
Our job as B2B marketer is isn’t difficult. Would you agree?
Warm regards,
Tom De Baere
Killer Content along the Buyer’s Journey: A Practical Guide to Monetize Your Content
The Mafia at Cleveland’s Hotel Statler. Photo: http://markwadestone.wordpress.com
Content can be actively used to move buyers through the buyer’s journey. Organizations need to visualize this journey. Visualizing this journey allows them to better understand which content they have and which content they are missing. Visualizing the content along the buyer’s journey also allows you to actively move buyers to the next stage in their journey.
Not so long ago Eric Wittlake (@wittlake) wrote an article why you should stop mapping content formats to the buyer’s Journey. He explains how marketers tend to map formats to certain stages in the buying cycle.
This post will learn you how you can:
- use a practical method to create the right content along the buyer’s journey
- how you can actively drive buyer’ss through the buying cycle, with content
- how you can link content with marketing automation
- understand which data the method produces to show real marketing ROI
To understand the role of content in this, you first need to understand the difference between content formats and content itself. Read more
From Theory to Practice: How to become a “digital, social, and content” driven B2B company ?
Training your organization on digital, content and social media marketing
Most marketers in B2B today have a project to introduce or expand digital, content and social media marketing into their companies.
In the last few years these types of marketing have become extremely important.
I believe it is the solution to the B2B marketing challenges of today, where companies can transcend from fulfilling the basic marketing needs of their customers.
Transcend towards connecting with their audience by creating experiences that lasts. These experiences that provides your customers with the desire to share their experiences, and become your brand advocates.
But how do you move from theory to practice ?
Read more
How to show Effective Marketing Leadership?
What does it take to be an effective marketing executive?
“In many businesses (especially in B2B), the marketing department is an order-taking, tactical function that runs on the hamster-wheel of demand generation, trying to keep up with “client” orders for new collateral, press releases, case studies and, at times, marketing-qualified leads (MQLs).”
This is a quote from Robert Rose. You can find the quote on many blogs on the Internet.
It’s quoted this often because many marketers recognize the situation. Somehow they end up in a spin of trying to solve problems all day, and deliver on the internal demands. They are hard working, and provide a lot of output.
But it’s never enough. Read more
Sharing Company Secrets: Can you trust your Engineers on Social Media Networks ?
Image Courtesy of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers
Is it a good idea to have our engineering department be active on social media? That’s what Thomas asked me lately.
Thomas is a hardware circuit design engineer. I’m just calling him Thomas. It could be any engineer.
He had just followed one of the training sessions I organized around the increasing need for change towards a digital, social and content oriented company.
I’m into the bad stuff
“Very interesting stuff, Tom”, he said. Maybe the first hour a bit too much marketing stuff for him as an engineer, but still.
But that’s not why he came to me. He said : “Usually social media is all about the good stuff. But we engineers (support engineers, hardware developers or software developers), we’re also into the bad stuff: we actually fix problems! For some of us that’s even a full time job.”
Should he be active on Social Media if all he does is fix problems? And can you trust the guys on social media networks who sit on our intellectual property and secret roadmap information? Read more
CEO’s Agree: Marketers don’t show Marketing ROI. How to regain trust?
Are we blind for our own Marketing ROI?
(image source: lifehacker.com)
Showing Marketing ROI and the ability to contribute to the growth of the business is in many ways the biggest challenge of every marketer.
Every so often reports show that B2B marketers have problems showing Marketing ROI. And then marketers have to do ‘more with less’.
Why is this?
Why do we have problems in showing our Marketing ROI? What can we do to regain trust from our CEO?
What it takes to become a Digital Marketer
What does it take to become a digital marketer?
(image : http://conqueranycourse.wordpress.com/)
This is my story of what it took to become a digital marketer…
My story is not unique
My story is not unique. Hey, I’m sure if you Google a bit, you’ll find other people like me. Truckloads full of them.
But what I want to share with you is what it took for me personally to get to a level where I felt that I knew enough to start with digital, social and content marketing.
And then actually start doing that across the organization. And getting results.
A massive request for change
When I became convinced that digital, social and content was the way to go, the first step was to convince my management. Change was needed. Lots of change.
And that’s what we’ve gone through the last 2 years. And when looking back, the change that I was asking was massive: Read more
How to build Epic Content as an Organization? 5 Key Tactics Explained
Image: courtesy of Intelsat.
Successful organizations take on a content strategy as a centrepiece of their activities. It’s not an add-on. It’s strategic. Getting buy-in from the organization can be difficult, but doable. More difficult is getting people motivated to build that strategic content.
How do you get an organization to take on content as a strategic part of the business? Here are 5 key tactics that help building a culture of content.
How do you create a culture of content creation and education, internally and externally?
1. Find out what your colleagues care about?
When people do their job well, they get praised. Or get a raise. Or get promoted.
That’s what drives people.
A great way to make content creation a company wide activity is to embed it into what they care about.
- Service engineers care about solving a customers’ problem
- Project managers care about delivering a project on time, within budget, above customer expectations
- Training managers care about good feedback from trainees
- Customer support care about how they excelled in helping customers
- …
Find out what makes these people ‘tick’, and let them write it down. Let them know that you expect this from them. Help them in “airing” their personal success stories, insights and helpful stories. And if they do, praise them in public. Read more
Bi-directional Vision alignment of Company and Buyers
How do you align with your buyers vision ?
Image source : Flicker @ Thomas Hawk
So many solutions are available to B2B companies today.
Increasingly products are being industrialized to be cheaper to produce, and cheaper to sell. In B2B, and in high value goods, pricing is less important. Value is more important. But value is increasingly brought by more and more competitors. Competitors with cheaper prices. And in the end price pressure comes back.
That’s got to end one day. One day your value doesn’t cut it anymore.
Where do you differentiate when market values and prices are converging? When your market is becoming a “red ocean” again?
B2B companies don’t buy your products. They buy your vision.
Recently I had to choose a new website builder. After a short RFI procedure, three companies where selected. Pricing was ranging from low to mid to high.
Which company did I buy from?
- Not the company with the best product.
- Not the company with the best account manager.
- Not the company with the best price.
I bought from the company that had a vision that aligned with my vision.
Or, their vision aligned with my vision.
How do you align your vision with the needs of your customers?
This might sound like a sales technique.
It’s not a sales technique.
- Deloitte wants to excel in everything they do.
- IBM wants to lead in IT technology that brings value to their customers
- Cisco’s vision is to change the way people work, live, play and learn
- Philips made simplicity part of their vision.
- Apple made design and usability their vision.
- Amazon made ease to buy and choice their vision.
These are the visions of these B2B and B2C companies.
