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 
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
If Content Marketing is about being open, how do I hide my imperfections?
Image Source : http://commons.wikimedia.org/
If content marketing and social media is all about being open, how do I act when some parts of my business are not perfect ?
Isn’t content marketing about showing that you understand the business of your customers, and helping them to better understand what your products or services mean to their business ?
But if you are fully open and honest about your offering, doesn’t that show your imperfections?
Won’t that show your weaknesses?
The chance is high that at a certain moment you bump into a weak point in your offering.
What do you do ? You try to hide it ? Or do you try to “bend the truth” ?
The effect of hiding imperfections
If you hide your imperfections or weaknesses, 2 things can happen :
- Customers buy your products, and because you didn’t inform them enough, they are disappointed about what they’ve bought. You’ve just harmed your brand.
- Customers see your weaknesses, and assume you don’t have an answer to the competition. This weakens your position, and as such it weakens your brand.
How to act?
Competitor attacks, product weaknesses, product issues, customer service issues, … all these can be your imperfections.
Failproof Listening method for Laser-sharp Content Marketing
Image source: Flicker @digitalmoneyworld
A turkish proverb says “If speaking is silver, then listening is gold”. We all know that proverb.
We have so much to say, because it’s important, isn’t it ? No-it-is-not.
But I am in marketing, so my objective is that my customers listen to me? No-it-is-not.
But I want to speak since I have lot’s of stuff to tell my customers on how to make their business better, more efficient, lower costs, if they buy our products or services !
Our customers would be foolish to “not” listen to us, right? No-it-is-not.
How do we marry these 2 principles of listening and wanting to speak ? Yes you can!
First you listen
Recently Brian Solis posted this image on Flickr.
The intersection between listening to what buyers want, and talk about what they want, that’s exactly what you need to do to have him listen to you and start engaging with you.
Before buyers want to listen to you, as anyone in sales knows, you need to understand what makes your buyer ‘tick’: what is currently a top of mind issue today that you can solve?
Only when you can speak to him using the exact same words that he would use to describe his issues, then he will be listening.
So the trick is knowing what to talk about. And the only way to find out is to listen to “his world”. Now often, customers know their issues, or at least feel that somethings not right, but even more often than not, they don’t have a solution. In many cases it’s already hard for them to describe their problem.
So if it’s already hard for them to describe it, how on earth are you going to speak to him?
The answer, my friend, is by UNDERSTANDING HIS WORLD.
Read more
The Ultimate Content Marketing Implementation Plan: Pragmatic, Powerful, and Guaranteed Success
Atomium in Brussel by night, or at 5 am…
(picture soure : http://www.lightcatch.nl/)
If you are interested in a Content Marketing, implementing it, thinking about it, or living it, then this is for you. I can tell you, this is for you because I’ve been pondering about this post for a long time.
Ever when I started this blog, I wanted it to be a blog which give my fellow marketeers information, education and advice coming from real life experiences. That’s why this blog is called B2B marketing experiences in the first place. No bullshit, just usable stuff. I don’t need to see my blog post on Huffington, Financial Times or whatever other big and famous website. I don’t want to use high level talk and difficult concepts or difficult words. No bullshit, just usable stuff.
Imagine what happened this morning when I woke up at 5am.
Yes indeed, ^é#@!, too early. I could not sleep anymore. My mind was spinning like hell, thinking about this blog post. And here I am sitting behind my computer writing this blog post. It’s exactly 7 am. I never thought I would be doing this, because I am usually not an ‘early bird, rise-n-shine’ kind of guy.
I need to get this out of my head, this is powerful stuff.
How to Implement Your Content Marketing in a pragmatic, do-able way, which is acceptable to your organization, which educates your organization on how to do it, which delivers quick win’s and is built to be embedded for ever in your organization? Now that’s a mouthful.
So this is what kept me awake. But I think I’ve cracked it. And I-me-personally, I think it’s powerful. Maybe arrogant, yes, but if it’s useful to you, you probably don’t care.
Ready? I am sorry, this is what you call a #longread…
So here it goes… Read more
The power of Twitter for B2B marketers – and what it must mean to you personally
If you are like many businesses around the world, and not working for a marketing department ;-), the idea of being active on Twitter is crazy.
Let’s face it: why on earth would you want to invest time in a “communication platform” that can only handle 140 characters, and has an average life time of 1 to 3 hours per message? Yep, indeed, crazy. What on earth would you make decide as B2B marketers to start using Twitter for B2B in for your marketing?
Let me tell you my story on how I started understanding Twitter, how I started using it, and what it means for every B2B company out there.
The initial spark
Like many B2B marketers out there, I knew about Twitter. But as I didn’t really see the value of the platform for my job, and for my company, I only shortly looked at it and dismissed it quite quickly. It wasn’t until I read “The Conversation Manager”, a book from Steven Van Belleghem, after which I started realizing that this social stuff is something I needed to investigate (yes, painful to admit it is).
Somehow, I can’t remember exactly how anymore, I ended up reading “The New Rules of Marketing & PR” of David Scott Meerman (@dmscott). This book literally blew me out of my comfy marketing chair ! It gave me insight into how to do modern digital and social media marketing. It is still one of the best books I ever read, and I can highly recommend it to anyone.
It was time to leave my comfort zone.
Which social media network brings most success in B2B ?
Source : Flicker @cuppini
2013 is almost there. What will 2013 bring? most probably another social media network.
Who knows, they come and go as Marcus Sheridan from @saleslion wrote about it on his blog. (by the way, I am a big fan of his work, check him out if you don’t know him).
Looking at the big ones, which ones will bring you the most success in B2B? I have seen many blog post about this subject: Facebook is better for this, LinkedIn is better for that. Twitter is only useful for this and that…
When developing a social media strategy, many companies start thinking which social media networks they should start developing. Developing means to create a presence, invest in time and maybe money to fuel that network with relevant content, and then organize actions to grow your follower base. Companies start hiring “conversation managers” that monitor the conversations, trigger the discussions, answer questions, be helpful where they can, and get the conversations going.
Should we do Facebook ? LinkedIn ? Whatever network ?
It’s definitely an important question. And on the other hand it’s not an important question. It’s even a simple question.
I’ll tell you : it doesn’t matter. It’s not up to you or me to choose which network you will develop. If your customers are there, you better be there. It’s as simple as that.
But how do you know if your customers are on that particular network? Mmmm, difficult question, that much I agree.
Then maybe we should jump on every network that sticks its head above the ground?
Should we be on LinkedIn?
In the case of LinkdedIn, there should be no doubt : if you are in B2B, you need to be on LinkedIn.
Almost all B2B professionals are on LinkedIn, using it for personal branding reasons, personal networking but also increasingly to find information.
Linkedin is changing from a pure B2B networking site, towards a site that is positioning itself as an information portal: updates from your contacts, the companies you are following, and more recently thought leaders like Richard Branson or Pete Cashmore.
The Online Elevator Pitch in Marketing
Recently I bumped into a video on Youtube in which they explained how to draft your Elevator Pitch.
It made me immediately think about how we marketers build our messaging.
Too often I see advertisements, promotional e-mails or websites, which just don’t make sense, because they try to convey way too much information, which makes the message “fuzzy”.
Or if the message is very short, it is a 2-layered message which is difficult to “decode” on the receiving end.
Everyone wants to have a great Elevator Pitch. But how do we get that concept into our marketing?
How do you do that?
How do you leave a powerful and impactful impression?
If you ever wanted to defend your great idea, or your great new product, you know how difficult it can be synthesize your message to the core, which means “killing off” your favorite parts of the full story.
Most people talk way to long, write too much, and bring to much level of detail. They don’t know when to give little information, and when to give more.
Creating an elevator pitch is about “killing your darlings”.
And so is creating a strong message to your target audience: “kill your darlings”. Weed out everything you don’t need. Go back to what really counts for the end-user.
The online Elevator Pitch
We live in a digital world, where photos, images, audio and video have become really important. Just look at the success of Pinterest, Slideshare or Instagram.
And online, people will only give you a few seconds of attention.
You literally only have a few seconds to pass on your message, to make a good impression, and make them want to know more.
A few seconds.
Marketing Automation vendors: revealing strengths and weaknesses
Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/azmarshall/
Long sales cycles and complex purchase decision-making challenge B2B marketers to find the most qualified prospects and to build relationships long before the first sales call.
In this environment, automation is essential to achieving a high level of demand generation maturity, and many marketers turn to lead management or marketing automation providers to meet this need.
The clear benefits of lead management automation should have B2B marketers jumping to purchase it.
However, back in 2009 this Forrester study reviewed a number of vendors in this area, they saw an underachieving space. Market penetration was low (between 2% and 5% of B2B firms have invested selling to <25M$ companies).
Forrester named some reasons for the slow market adoption:
- Heated competition battling to grab share: because of the “big CRM players” beginning to play in this field, buyers hold back their investments because they believe they have the functionality already in house through their CRM system
- A massive amount of new players entering the playfield all with different backgrounds claiming to have similar functionality. These claims keep B2B buyers running from demo to demo and scratching their heads over which offering will best meet their needs.
MAS vendors come from different market. Image source : Forrester
Today, looking at the recent Gartner report of June 2012 the CRM market as a whole, of which this industry is very much part, enjoyed a strong rebound in 2011 with revenue reaching $11.9 billion in 2011, a 12.7% growth from 2010.
