The Brave New World of B2B Marketing - Are You Ready?

Your B2B markets are changing rapidly. It is now harder than ever for B2B vendors to get the attention of our audiences. The effectiveness of traditional push marketing is rapidly declining, marketing budgets and headcounts have been slashed over the last few years (while output expectations have increased), and the availability of new technologies for marketing automation is leaving many B2B marketing professionals scratching their heads.

Power Shift
Knowledge is power, and the balance of power is clearly shifting from vendors to the customer. B2B buyers are more sophisticated than ever. They educate themselves on the nature of their business problem, possible solution options, available vendors and products. Today's prospects filter out most attempts by companies to interrupt them with vendor and product focused marketing messages and sales pitches. As a result, many vendors don't show up on prospects' radars anymore - unless they are actively sought out, they are often simply not invited to the party anymore.

Adapt to Stay Relevant
Our entire approach to marketing has to change if we want to stay relevant and add value to the business in this new environment. While this situation can create a crisis in many marketing and sales organizations, it also offers a great opportunity. Remember that today's prospects are actively searching for high-value information to help them better understand problems and solutions, make sense of available solutions, select the best fit for their requirements, and ultimately make an informed purchase decision? Now imagine the information customers are finding is yours. Clearly presented, educating the reader along every step of their decision making process. With compelling content that is relevant, valuable, and of high quality. Remarkable content that leaves a lasting impression and engages the reader to take action such as requesting access to your Webcast or asking to get in touch with you to learn more about your solution.

Brave New B2B Marketing World
Welcome to the brave new world of marketing. This new world is at the intersection of (1) valuable content that carries your message to the prospect, (2) the social and online media that prospects are increasingly using to find information and ask peers for their opinion, and (3) the marketing automation platforms to manage all of this complexity (campaigns, content, leads, etc) without losing your mind.

This intersection of content marketing, social media, and automation is where innovative marketing teams can help their companies gain traction and develop ongoing relationships and customer engagements. I mention "ongoing" because I believe the days of linear, one-dimensional, time-limited "campaigns" on the marketing side and transactional selling on the sales side are for the most part over. The effectiveness of these traditional tactics is declining steadily, and if you are in the marketing profession you'd better pay attention because we are looking at nothing less than a fundamental shift in the way companies engage with prospects.

What we need in this new environment are ongoing, parallel conversations with target audiences that lead to engagements with qualified prospects which in turn lead to value exchanges between both parties. Content marketing is rapidly gaining traction as a truly customer centric marketing tactic that aims at educating prospects and guiding them along their journey towards an educated decision in your favor - exchanging their money for your solution.

Steps to Surviving the Transition - And Thriving in the New Marketing World
So while the idea is pretty simple, execution is not all that trivial in complex B2B environments. After my article on the 5 Steps to B2B Marketing Success, I was asked to provide more guidance on how to actually implement this new approach to marketing. So I have spent some time thinking about how to approach this new world of marketing and developed a simple 7-step framework.

Here are the key components of the framework that I see, and I will spend the next few weeks covering each in greater detail. Interestingly enough, the "new marketing world" will put more emphasis on traditional marketing concepts as they are now truly the foundation for the success of your business - so many of the concepts below will not be new to you. The focus of this article is on content marketing as I believe it to be one of the most effective approaches available to marketers today. Other tactics are still relevant and effective.

Here are the seven steps to B2B marketing success in this new era:

1 - Segmentation & Profiling
Sound familiar? While the concept is not new, the majority of B2B vendors do a poor job at properly segmenting their markets and identifying the most profitable ones they want to compete in. In my opinion, this step determines success or failure on a strategic level, as simple as that. Segmentation as a way to identify target markets that are an ideal fit and allow you to compete successfully while focusing your resources is the first step to understanding your strengths and weaknesses relative to the opportunities and threats in a market. Only with this knowledge will an intelligent marketing approach become possible. Profiling of ideal companies and everything else follows from here.

2 - Buyer Persona
After establishing your target segments at the macro level, and defining your ideal customer profile, let's look at the people within those target organizations that influence and make buying decisions for the type of products or services you offer. What are their roles, goals, motivations, frustrations? How do they impact the buying process? Have you mapped out buyer personas and built profiles in order to align your messages and content with their needs? Where are these buyers looking for information to guide their decisions?

3 - Buyer's Journey
Once we understand who we are trying to influence, let's take a look at their buyer’s journey, from status quo to ultimate purchase of a product or service. What stages do your buyers go through? What are the decisions or outcomes you want to influence at each step of the way? What messages and information do you want to convey? By the way, mapping your entire marketing approach to the customer lifecycle is one way to become a truly customer-centric organization and impact prospects behavior and decisions. More on this later.

4 - Mapping Content to Buyer's Journey
After understanding the world from our prospects' perspectives, let's look at how we adapt to it to better engage and provide value. In this section I will talk about classes of content that map to the various stages of the buying cycle. It is much less complicated than it sounds :)

5 - Content Planning & Creation
At this point, it is time to clearly plan what pieces of content you want to offer specific to your segments, audiences, personas, and buying cycle stages. If not earlier, by now you will likely have a panic moment, realizing that you would need to employ dozens of domain experts and writers to create all the content assets you have identified. Time to take a step back and think about smart strategies to re-purpose and leverage existing content. Perform a content audit to identify gaps and overlap with existing assets. Also, consider how you will make sure that your content is on message and consistent (this is not trivial when you have multiple writers) - for example, do you have message maps that capture your key messages, differentiators, value proposition and positioning - by audience and segment?

Now is also a good time to think about focus as lack of focus has consequences. The further you stretch your resources and attention span (and your understanding of your markets), the less impact you will have on any of your target segments and people, reducing your demand generation and conversion rates significantly. So prioritize and rank your markets, audiences and content assets, and cut back everything that doesn't move the needle, starting from the bottom of your list. Pareto would probably suggest that only 20 percent of your market segments, decision maker personas, content assets, and programs contribute 80 percent of your impact on revenue. Identify those 20 percent - remember the goal is to work smarter, not harder :)

6 - Content Delivery to Engage Audiences
Now that you have planned and created compelling content, how are you going to get it in front of your target audience? Are your buyers frequenting certain online communities, are they searching Google with specific keyword and phrases, do they subscribe to your newsletters? Here you have an opportunity to map out how prospects will receive your information and how you increase your odds of it actually happening. Do you hide all of your content behind registration forms? Do you set it free and make it easily shareable via Email, Twitter, Facebook? Are you building specific calls to action into your content to drive prospects to your next piece of content or interaction with you?

7 - Performance Measurement
With regular reviews of actual performance against goals, you can quickly identify areas for improvement, opportunities for resource re-allocation, process changes, and further education. Dashboards, as the "glue" between strategy and execution, can provide leading and lagging indicators and metrics to correct issues and take action before they grow into bigger problems downstream.

While this approach looks like a neat sequence of steps that can be planned and executed in a waterfall type of fashion, in reality things are often much less clear cut. In analogy to agile programming, we are looking at a highly iterative process that at each step needs to be tested, validated, and tweaked before moving on to the next step. Yes, this is messy, it requires a lot of "hypothesis testing". Don't listen to anybody who tells you they have all the answers already, they don’t. And worse, be prepared to repeat this exercise frequently as your external and internal environment is in constant flux and you will need to adapt. Start with baby steps, learn and improve. This will become easier as you develop frameworks on how to do this so you can build best practices and don’t have to reinvent the wheel with every iteration. Again, welcome to the brave new world of marketing.

Let me know what your experience in this brave new world has been so far. I will spend the next weeks to dive deeper into each of the 7 steps outlined here, and I would like to incorporate your ideas and best practices. So send me your feedback using the comment feature below or send an email to hhschulze@gmail.com.

Commencement

In every town in every state, this is the season for commencement speeches. In the next 2-3 weeks, hundreds of young adults in your community will begin new lives ... some moving away from home for the first time ... many to begin writing checks for their first bills ... still others facing larger investments like college and new cars.

So, lets look a little closer:

• Young demographic
• No current financial institution
• An immediate need for checking
• Soon to have lending needs
• Psychographically loyal if treated right

Sounds like a dream customer, huh?

But how do you reach this target?

Let's first look at their needs:

ACCESS

First and foremost, they demand access. As they are likely to be leaving your community in the next 2 months, focus on online and ATM access.

COMMUNICATION

This is not your average 50 year old member. If you want to make an impression, talk to them the way they talk to each other ... text and email. It may be hard to acquire them through these means (I'll talk about an acquisition strategy in a minute), but once you have them, make plans to continue communication electronically.

EARN TRUST

This may be the smartest banking generation yet - but the bottom line is that they need guidance. Odds are that their parents don't balance their own checkbooks on a regular basis. So, as community banking institutions, we have an opportunity to tutor. Focus on financial education ... help this demo build a budget ... show them how to use online banking and debit cards to track every dollar that they spend ... demonstrate how borrowing money from someone you know is better than borrowing online (this may be a tougher sell than you think).

Target to the Right People

Many community banks and credit unions try to target students by, well, targeting students. But studies show that many Millennials start their banking search by going where Mom and Dad bank. The fact is that Mom and Dad will be the best influencers you have - and they're easier to reach. So, think about Mom and Dad's wants for their children:

• Access: The kids will be away from home
• Security: not the FDIC or NCUA variety, but some control over Jr's spending
• Peace of mind: By co-signing on an account, you can tie the parent's account into the student's. This does 2 things:

A) Mom and Dad can track spending with online banking

B) There's a safety net. If the student's account falls low one month, the parents can easily transfer money through online banking.

As the commencement speeches are wrapping up, you can commence opening their new accounts and earning the loyalty of a new generation.

Good luck,

Eric

The Wave of Indifference

It seems that every company wants to focus their marketing message on providing, "outstanding service."

Yet most places we go, we're met with a tidal wave of indifference.

Seriously, it's when you're helped by someone with a personality that the service really stands out. That's a bit sad.

Shop

Take a day and shop your competitive branches. Trust me, it'll be eye opening. Besides, the weather is beautiful this time of year and it'll give you a reason to get out of your office.

Simply ask the first employee you see about checking accounts and see how they handle it. Do they ask you leading questions that will help them make a recommendation:

• Where do you bank now?
• What do you like about your account?
• Why do you want to change?
• What kind of balances do you carry?
• Etc, etc, etc

Or do they simply hand you a brochure and say, "If you have any questions come back and see us."

You'll quickly find out which banks or credit unions will be climbing the market share ladder and which will be sucked under the wave of indifference.

Training

When I speak on this topic, I love to use a Disney example and you can too.

Last summer I took our family to Disney. My 5 year old daughter wanted to see Sleeping Beauty. That's all she had talked about for months and we finally were there. We drove for two days to get there in a van who's A/C broke as soon as we hit the Florida border. We were at the park on the hottest day on Disney record ... 115 degrees - no exaggeration. We paid a king's ransom for the privilege of baking in the "Happiest (frickin') place on earth." By lunch, my 7 year old son was actually crying, "Don't make me go back out to Disney." But we hadn't seen Sleeping Beauty yet. When it was her scheduled time, we waited in line for about an hour and a half and finally came the moment of truth...

Now, imagine if Disney staffed their parks with the same employees that ride the wave of indifference. And how upset my daughter would have been and how I might have actually strangled someone.

The reality is that Sleeping Beauty and all of the other princesses, in heavy gowns and full make-up during the hottest day of the year, where exceptional! They all were on stage and they all brought their "A" game. It made the entire experience worth while and the rest of day quickly became MUCH better - especially when it cooled down.

The point? All of your employees are on stage. And there is no way of telling what trials our customers had to face to get to our branch on a given day. We need to jump off the wave of indifference and drown our customers in positive feelings. Smiles, sincerity, and an honest attempt to help. It's really not that hard, but it's also few and far between.

Do you want to differentiate your bank or CU? Spend less time worrying about checking rewards and focus on the faces and voices that customers deal with everyday.

Happy Friday,

Eric

Is Your Business Leaving Money On The Table?

Don't Forget Search Engine Marketing and Optimization!

Many marketers and business owners think they're doing everything they can to get the word out about their company. They allocate their marketing dollars to direct mail, e-mail, banner ads, print ads, and pay-per-click (PPC). They spend much of their time, effort, and money on getting those methods to produce a positive ROI (return on investment). But they're ignoring a major source of potential traffic... which means they are losing loads of potential new customers ... and to me that's leaving money on the table: A HUGE mistake.

I'm talking about organic (natural) search engine marketing and optimization (SEM/SEO). Organic search results are those listings you see on the left side of Google after you type in your search term. You know, those little blurbs with links to someone's website. It's not to get confused with "paid" search, which are the small text ads that typically appear on the right side of the Google search results page. There's usually a subtle line separating these ads from the organic results and have a "sponsored links" headline at the top.

Many marketers think focusing on organic search is "a waste of time." Some think there's no way to monitor, measure, and monetize the results. But they're confused. According to a survey by Jupiter Research, 80% of Web users get information from organic search results. And measuring sources of traffic and visitors is easy with the free Web tool Google Analytics.
Search engines like variety in relevant back links to your website. And one of the best ways to get tons of relevant back links is with a systematic method I develop regarding the synchronized distribution of your content (read http://www.precisionmarketingmedia.com/sonar.html for more info.).

So in addition to having optimized website pages -- having a variety of news aggregators (i.e. Google News, Yahoo News), social networks, blogs, and directories linking to your site helps give you a heavier weight in organic listing results. Your company will appear more often and higher in the organic search results ... eventually dominating the critical first three results listings. This helps build your organic market presence for little or no cost. And, let's face it, low cost is a good thing.

Using organic search strategies helped increase traffic rank and visits to a health website I launched by 3,160% and 81.5%, respectively, in only three months. In that same time this websitehad a 62.01% rate of converting that organic search traffic into subscribers. In other words, the traffic was turned into sales (or monetized)! That's about 16,000 organic names in three months at virtually no cost.

So search engine naysayers...do you still think SEM and SEO is a waste of time?

Life Cycle Financial Sales Training... Part II

The birth of a child is an exciting time, no doubt. Life changes so quickly. Values get reevaluated. New perspectives evolve. New priorities emerge. Yes, that one day when a child is born, much changes.

In our financial lives, the birth of the first child means you are now a "Charlie", as I call it. No longer a single individual or married couple, you are now a family.... and families have different financial needs than their non-parental counterparts. As we train bankers to develop deeper customer relationships, we include financial counseling tips that bankers can use to really make a difference in their customers' lives. For the "Charlies" and "Deltas", families with preschool aged children or school age children respectively, there are some important conversations we should be having.

Probably the most important is to review the topics they should already have mastered, learning the savings habit and taking care of their credit score. After revisiting that, we can move on to a few new topics, savings for the child or children's college education (or just savings for the child) and starting long-term savings for long-term goals or retirement. By now, this young family has some goals, whether short term goals or long term goals and they need to be planning to create that future....
We can help our customers by talking about the need for mortgage loans to buy that first home (or a bigger home as the family expands).
We can help our customers by asking if they have started participating in their employer's 401(k) plan. If not, that is the number 1 recommended savings vehicle, especially when the employer gives a matching contribution! You can't beat matching with any other investment out there. And if they are participating in their 401(k) plan, we can remind them that they can also deposit up to $6000 per year into their own IRA plan and build an additional retirement nest egg. When our employees are well-versed in the IRA rules and regs, they can talk to many customers and help them plan an annual contribution program ( of course, customers should consult with their tax advisor regarding deductibiity).

If we are helping our customers move through each life cycle stage with just a few of the basic financial planning tenets in place, we will know that we have not only made a difference in their lives, but that we have developed a loyal customer as well.

Next time, we'll look at how we can be helping our "empty nesters" and retired "foxtrots" also.

Are you including life cycle financial selling in your basic bank training? If not, we can help. If so, please let me know what you do. If you are passionate about financial education like I am, please email me at slovejoy@marketmatch.com.

Until next time,

Sharon

You CAN Measure Social Media (You Just Need To Know How!)

Many people have been using social media because they "think" it's what they should be doing. Afterall, everyone seems to have a Twitter or Facebook account. However, some businesses are putting all this time and effort into SMM (Social Media Marketing) because "everyone else is doing it" and they're not even measuring their efforts to see if all this work is paying off.

Since my background is direct response and PR, I was able to analyze social media goals and apply some fundamental metrics that DR and PR people use.

The Basics
In a nutshell, social media is an interactive platform where people can correspond - via chat rooms, forums, bulletin boards, networks (as in MySpace, Facebook, Classmates, LinkedIn, Bebo), user-generated content sharing (as in Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit), wikis (interactive online encyclopedias), and blogs - with like-minded individuals who share similar interests, whatever those interests may be.

Cutting-edge businesses and marketing-centric companies have jumped on the social media bandwagon to leverage the increased popularity of this phenomenon. Companies large and small got their marketers to create MySpace, FaceBook, or LinkedIn profiles in order to have their fingers on the pulse of the market, correspond with consumers, and create buzz about their products.

I have been on the Web for some time now, dabbling in all sorts of social media activities with content syndication, viral marketing, and online PR efforts.

How have I been measuring my efforts? By using the same metrics that are used to measure a public relations efforts: Outputs, outcomes, and objectives ... or what I like to call the "3 O's."

1. Outputs (measures effectiveness and efficiency)
For our example, I look at Google Analytics for spikes in traffic to the website's I'm doing social media marketing for in the days following the article's publication. I'd look specifically at traffic sources, visits, unique visits, and visit percentages. I'd also look at referring sites and search engines to see whether the traffic is coming directly from social media platforms. And I'd look for an increase in new subscriber sign-ups (leads) during that same time period.

2. Outcomes (measures behavioral changes)
For this metric, I'd look at feedback from customers... e-mails, phone calls, comments posted on my clients' websites member forum. I'd also do some reputation monitoring --by searching the Web for keywords for each of my clients' website, key personnel at their companies, the article title that I may have syndicated, and any top product names associated with their websites -- to see what buzz is going in targeted and relevant chat rooms, external forums, and bulletin boards.

3. Objectives (measures business objectives/sales)
The most obvious and directly related metric is direct sales of the product that are tied to the editorial. Orders generated from an e-mail link or ad link are coded for tracking, so attributing sales to those sources is definitive. If the sales come from a product page on our website where the true "source" cannot be tracked, I'd collaborate with my clients to review the sales that came in during the corresponding dates of the campaign and look for correlations.

Finally, for each of the above, I would compare the current campaign data versus the year-to-date (YTD) average and year-over-year data to clearly illustrate pre- and post- campaign performance. In other words, I'd check out website traffic, unique visits, specific product sales, etc. - all for the same time periods. That way, I'd have an established benchmark against which to measure our current social media efforts.

Social media is a low cost and effective way to spread the word about your company and products, as well as to conduct market research. By understanding the "3 O's" and how they work, you can actually quantify your efforts with hard data... a critical component for any online direct marketer.

Marketing Through a Recession

One of the fundamental tenets of marketing is, "Those companies that emphasize marketing during a bad economy recover faster and emerge stronger when the economy improves."

It's been proven time and again through case studies in numerous industries, but when it's YOUR institution ... facing shrinking spreads and changing regulations ... the gamble seems awfully risky. If only we had some apples-to-apples statistics to prove it...

Thanks to a Callahan and Associates article released on May 10, we now can base our marketing decisions on relevant data.

This study looked at the marketing expenditures of 645 credit unions and segmented them by:

• Institutions that decreased marketing expenses
• Institutions that kept marketing expenses relatively flat
• Institutions that increased marketing expenses

The study then compared these groupings based on factors like: loan growth, deposit growth, checking growth and member/customer growth.

Click here for the actual article

The bottom line is that those institutions that increase marketing are more likely to experience:

• Higher loan growth in all areas (except mortgage). In fact, those that increased marketing were the ONLY group to experience positive auto loan growth.
• Higher checking growth
• Higher IRA growth

With the onslaught of negative media towards the "Too Big to Fail" banks and the positive national coverage of credit unions and community banks, the environment is better today than it ever has been for you to position yourself for growth. You don't necessarily need a big bank budget to take market share, you simply need to make yourself part of the community conversation.

Awareness and differentiation can drive growth. And when you partner with a marketing firm with a ROI Guarantee, there's nothing left to chance .. and the upside is positioning your institution correctly ... moving forward with expert help at your side!

Inset is a chart from the referenced CreditUnions.com article