The most fundamental role of social media for B2B is listening

Business marketers increasingly understand the value of a content led marketing strategy.

Engaging current and potential clients through thoughtful and useful content is now more powerful than any other form of marketing for establishing and growing sustainable commercial relationships.

I have found that an effective content strategy needs a clear picture of what content to publish where and when – and that’s needs insight. 

In my recent webinar for BrightTalk I spoke about two important activities for extracting that insight from social media, reporting and analysis.

Reporting is a regular time based activity – setting out volume data what topics, users, channels are most active?

Analysis goes beyond reporting, helping you to become conscious of the conversations about your brand that your organisation is currently unconscious of. An essential part of social media for enterprises; its power is going to help organisations that master gain a real and tangible competitive advantage in the 21st century.

I hope you find this rerun of my 8^th November 2012 webinar useful. I love hearing your views on how to effectively collect insight to drive a B2B content strategy, please comment here or through Linked In.

Pay sales and marketing people the same to get the best results

In my last blog I introduced the importance for marketing to have meaningful metrics in order to justify its performance. In short term sales driven cultures (yes they do still exist), marketing needs metrics to justify its very existence.

Effective marketing throughout the mix has a meaningful and sustainable effect on the long term sustainability of the business. Yet the outcomes we measure seem obscure to the rest of the business, especially the two axis of power in any enterprise, finance and sales. These functions measure their success and the success of the business using currency. ‘A Mark, a Yen, a Buck or a Pound’ are a lot more universal than conversion rates, share of voice and recall. ‘Money makes the world go around.’

But just as marketing needs to move the way that it measures to reflect what the business values, so sales has to evolve to recognise business is no generated at the point of sales but over months and years beforehand. Sales start when the product concept is tested and evolved or when the brand vision is planned and introduced.

Sales people generally believe all the hard work happened at the deal close. They choose to ignore there wouldn’t have been a deal to close without credible brand positioning and competitive products.

Interestingly, I was sent a video by a consultancy called Software Advice that shares my view. You can see the video at CRMSoftware.TV

When I led a sales channel of nearly 100 people, I worked closely with the product people to ensure my incentive schemes gave larger rewards for the most profitable products, or products that generated the most customer loyalty. Not a scheme to meet my phenomenal targets that rewards the bulk sale of the easiest to sell products.

My approach led to dramatic falls in customer churn within 6 months of its introduction and although I made new friends with the product managers; I disappointed the acquisition-marketing people. They wanted to lead on discounts and promotions to drive customer volumes, and not a sustainable share of wallet approach. Had we all shared objectives and incentives I have no doubt we would have been more focused on collaborating to deliver the overall business outcome, sustainable revenue generating customers.

Ever since that time I have been a strong advocate for product managers, sales people, marketers, and indeed fulfilment (operations) teams working to the same objectives with a shared bonus pool. Everyone across business development, including the teams that have to fulfil and service goods and services should put their compensation at risk and share in the success.

I predict that businesses that fail to grasp the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration will soon grasp the fact they are failing customers, themselves and their shareholders.

Successful investment management businesses formula for social media

In my second blog for Visible Banking, following an event I chaired at London Social Media Week.

I share two shining examples of investment management firms that demonstrate their formula for achieving success in social media. Click here

What gets measured by marketing gets valued.

One of my all time management hero’s, Jack Welch, often uses this quote from Peter Drucker “Because its purpose is to create a customer, the business has two – and only two – functions: Marketing and Innovation. Marketing and Innovation produce results. All the rest are costs.”

Everyone in marketing recognises this to be true, but few follow through with the responsibility it places on us

I have relied on this quotation on more than one occasion to help protect mine or a client’s marketing budget with varying degrees of success. In each instance, my success came down to how effectively I could demonstrate the value of the activity produced to date.

B2B marketing teams must be able to measure the things that lead to sales, just as sales must understand they have a responsibility to marketing to provide valuable insight and genuine feedback on leads.

The most obvious (and I would suggest minimum) metrics that all B2B marketing functions should publish are:

The number of leads generated from marketing activity

The number of opportunities generated from marketing activity and

The number of revenue generated from marketing activity

Now I know this can be difficult for some businesses. Different lead times and buying cycles mean that a sale today can be from lead two years ago and reporting is rarely perfect at first attempt. But we can’t let these challenges become excuses not measure. We can all get bogged down in figures and statistics but we have to rely on some metrics everyone buys into to demonstrate the value being delivered. The process can crafted over time with input from both sales and marketing.

While this collaboration to report with sales is going on, marketing can get to work on benchmarking how many interactions or reach £1 can buy. This doesn’t measure the things that lead to sales, but does indicate the value for money on the volume of the activity being delivered.

I have done this for an entire marketing budget in the past by taking a base year of activity and budget to cost a primary lead, interaction and reach. It works something like this.

Let’s say you are planning to attend a major trade show that will cost £100k, excluding travel, subsistence and time. The event will have 10k visitors, of which you expect 500 to visit your stand over 3 days.

     £100k ÷ 10k visitors is a potential reach of 100 from a £1 unit cost.

     £100k ÷ 500 visitors is a potential interaction of 2.5 from a £1 unit cost

We can now bench mark this event against all activity in the previous period/year. Let’s say all the activity last year including direct mail responses, web visits over 3 minutes, social media posts and PR cost £600k. Let’s also say it generated reach of 900 and 2.8 interactions for £1 cost respectively, we know the event is in the ball park and is worth investing in.

I hope that helps. Of course the one thing that all B2B marketers know that the text books will never tell you. You only have to generate one lead per year that generates a big enough deal for you to have no trouble securing your budget next year. The trouble is, you have to rely on the sales team to admit it came from marketing.  Infographic