Five Challenges for Marketing in 2014

After reading "Segal reflects changes" in the last printed edition of BtoBonline, I think it's easy to take for granted the significant changes that have occurred in just the last decade (Rick Segal takes the perspective of 32 years in the business).

I don't agree with the first, entirely, but here are some of the challenges he identified:

• B2B is dead -- "What it comes down to is the way that work is just part of life. Individual people are so extraordinarily empowered by technology and by newly democratized models of management that people make little distinction between their personal and professional exertions and diversions."
•  The new model of marketing is humanity -- In the new model. "Individual men and women are actors in the task of business decision-making, which is one part of people's work lives. B2b, as I have lived it and known it, has always been arithmetic and rational, but humanity is geometric and emotional. I don't think we've begun to scrape the surface of the strategic, creative and tactical transformations required for the new model. I don't think an entirely new model has emerged yet, responsive to the dramatic changes that we're seeing."
• Big challenge is smaller targets -- "The degree to which everything has become smaller and more dispersed. The easy, almost instantaneous replication of value is a principal challenge all marketers face, whether they are in what we'd call b2b or b-to-c. It is very, very difficult to command positions of longstanding market or segment domination as was once the case."
• No more patience for patience --  "Marketing used to be about seeding and planting innovations that would grow into mighty oaks of market domination. Today's world has no such patience for that kind of processed growth."
• Technology has made marketing better and more difficult --  "We have all of these technologies and all of these tools that allow us to be more precise and measured and to reach more people. The fact of the matter is, all these things have made the task of marketing more difficult than ever. The good news is, there is more work to be done in more places, both in time and in geography."

According to Segal, "The opportunity for smart marketers to figure these things out" meaning how technology can be harnessed. That's the real challenge for marketers in 2014.

Two Worthwhile Articles about B2B and Social Media

Every once in a while, we meet a prospective client who is unsure whether their company, always a B2B tech company, should engage in social media.

Often, they tell us, their series customers aren't engaged in social media.

However, according to Forrester Research analyst Josh Bernoff, "Parametric Technology Corp., a company that makes product development software, found in a survey that more than 80% of its customers were consuming social content. This helped persuade the corporate executives that its customers were ready for a community." Check out his article, "Four social tech tipsfor b2b professionals."

In "Your social marketing strategy needs some big ideas," another Forrester analyst, Jeff Ernst, made a key point about using social media as part of a thought leadership:

This is a great opportunity for you to use social media to reach and engage potential buyers early in their problem-solving process and start to build a trusted relationship with them, so they're more likely to consider your company when they do enter a buying process. But you won't do it by tweeting product announcements.

Why? Business buyers don't “buy” your product or service; they “buy into” your perspective and approach to solving their problems. To attract these folks to your company and engage them in a conversation, you need to share big ideas and compelling positions on the issues your buyers face, and establish your business as a thought leader in your market.

We've got a B2B client that has recently started a thought leadership program via social media, and they're finding that they've started reaching other major thinkers in their space -- and are helping achieve the "buy into: their approach.

Check out the two articles -- they're worth reading.

For Social Media, The 90-9-1 Rule May Be More Accurate Than the 80/20 Rule

The 80-20 Rule is well known because it can be so adaptable in terms of what the 80 and what the 20 mean. The first time I heard it, the 20 represented the percent of your clients who generate the 80 percent of your revenue. I recently read someone say that 20 percent of your work is more effective than the rest -- so eliminate the useless 80 percent of ineffective work...and keep on improving, I guess.

For social media, BtoBOnline magazine has identified a new rule: the 90-9-1 Rule, based on the concept that 1 percent of the members of an online community contribute 90 percent of the content. That's why it is important to listen to a community before joining in -- so you can understand the dynamics and personalities involved, and then identify the 1 percent who are the most influential.

The 9 percent, by the way, refers to people who add occasional comments.

The 90 also refers to the percent of people who just read.

Check out all 5 tips for B2B socual media marketing.

Marketing Tips from American Express -- Do they make sense for today's economy?

In an interview in BtoBObline, Marcy Shinder, VP of Brand Strategy and Marketing at American Express OPEN, offered up these tips (in a different format):

• A downturn is a good time to identify ways to transform a company.
• A lot of companies look at delivering better customer service as a differentiator. (For service organizations, this can be a challenge since your competitors are likely to be trying the same things. Instead, think about what improvements would deliver the most value.)
  
• Companies need to stay relevant. (In other words, think about the problems customers buy from you, and make sure that what you provide truly solves their problems.)
• Provide tangible value. (We have a client with a fascinating vision of the future of technology in their sector, but we've advised them to make that game-changing vision a secondary message because their first goal is to sell product. So they need to focus on ways they provide real value to their customers. A compelling vision of what's to come is good, but that doesn't always help customers when deciding to buy now instead of putting off the purchase for later.)
• Companies need to market differently from the day of the 30-second spot. They need to provide insight, inspiration and advice during every customer interaction.
  
• Companies need to answer what they can do for their customers.

Some good common sense advice, yet I'd bet a lot of companies don't follow up on this. Check out the complete article, "American Express' Shinder on marketing to small businesses," and let me know what you think. Do these tips makes sense? Will following them make a difference to customers and bring in new or incremental business?

Measuring Tips for Social Media

One of the challenges of social media, one of the reasons clients often have difficulty in being able to pay for social media is the lack of standard metrics. Remember: it's not that organizations don't want to use social media. They often don't know how to justify allocating resources towards social media.

BtoBonline ran a sidebar, "Common metrics for social media" that provides a list of metrics to evaluate. Unlike newspaper circulation or broadcast viewership, there are still no standards of success.

And some of the metrics may not apply to every situation, client or campaign.

But it is at least useful to start.

Why "Portfolio" Closed?

Conde Nast has been a very successful magazine publishing company for decades, and its Vanity Fair magazine has done extremely well since its relaunch 25 years ago.

But when it decided to launch a business oriented Vanity Fair called Conde Nast Portfolio, I had some doubts.

The magazine was well-written. But just as Vanity Fair often seems like an upscale People magazine, with a strong focus of inside Hollywood and inside Manhattan scandals, Conde Nast Portfolio seemed like it was primarily focused on hedge funds, Wall St. and the media world -- which left most of the business world.

For our clients, it was unpitchable. They didn't cover tech, for example. There was not way in, from our perspective. Nor would our clients be interested, really, in the readers of the magazine -- even though I was a subscriber.

In "Lessons learned from a closed "Portfolio,'" BtoBOnline quotes a disgruntled former editor, Jeffrey Chu, senior associate editor of Portfolio from early 2007 through last August, who said that when it came to pitch meetings -- the meetings in which reporters pitch stories they'd like to write -- "every thing could be a business story, but it had to be about rich people, hedge funds or finance...It was about rich people's toys. It was about dressing a diamond mining executive up in a fancy dress and making people look glamorous—but from worlds that kind of already were famous.”

The rest of the article looks at Portfolio as an advertising failure. But from my perspective, a business magazine that really doesn't cover business was the problem.

After all, people reading business magazines are not looking for scandals or glamour. What they want are either investment opportunities or management advice. Forbes provides the former; Fortune provides the latter; BusinessWeek provides news coverage with a smattering of the former and the latter.

But Conde Nast Portfolio provided neither. It often served up scandals among the wealthy, frequently those well known within Manhattan -- and the market for those stories and the people interested in them already have media outlets for that: Vanity Fair, the New York Observer and New York Magazine.

There wasn't room or interest in another option.

Measuring Social Media ROI, According to Paul Gillin

Journalist-turned-social-media-guru Paul Gillin provides some good advice for addressing the Holy Grail of social media.

Well, one of the Holy Grails.

The first Holy Grail is the viral video: that cheap-to-produce video that generates millions of downloads.

But the second Holy Grail, and the one with a greater likelihood of success is finding appropriate metrics to measure the impact of a social media program.

In my (old-fashioned-now-recycled-paper) files, I came across an article from 2006 that said social media (then comprised only of blogs and podcasts) was great, but that the big challenge was to measure the impact of a social media program.

Three years later, that still hasn't changed.

The need to measure continues to be the big challenge. Especially for client organizations headed by people who don't think social media is right for them. (And, by the way, I think there are some organizations for whom social media is not the right solution.)

So, back to Gillin's metrics, in "You CAN measure social media ROI." He lists 10 variables and details, but here are the ones I think most important:

• Focus on the business goals and five metrics that matter most.
• Know what works. This isn't always easy, but with experimentation, it can be easier to determine what doesn't work, and go from there.
  

The rest seem like guidelines or recommendations. For example, he says, "It's not just about your site." And he's right: there can be important sites for your company that are not your website. But that's not really a metric.

He also reminds us of what I call Gillin's Law: Successful programs build affinity over one or two years. Ditch the 13-week thinking." That's very important, but more of a guideline than a metric.

So, alas, the quest for this Holy Grail continues.

Does Social Media Help with Branding?

The answer, of course, depends on the organization, its culture and skill sets.

BtoBOnline asked the question, "Does my brand campaign need a social community component?"

And I think if clients or management asks the question, the answer should be: In 1995, it was big news when Fidelity launched its website -- it was a large, mainstream company and it signaled that the Internet was ready for business. (Before that, Internet users complained when companies used the Internet and email for advertising/marketing.)

Now every company has a website. You can't think of launching a business without one.

The same is true for social media. In a short time, companies won't consider not having a social media presence. I've even seen TV commercials now that point viewers to the brand's Twitter feed.

Yes, I know, some organizations are not ready yet. But they will need to be soon. There are conversations going on without them.

Of course, it is important to figure out where your customers and partners are so that you can develop a strategic campaign. That's why the discussion about metrics and case studies is so important.

Five Tips for Facebook Marketing -- But in social media, one size does not fit all, and five tips won't work for everyone

I'm a sucker for quick tips, but increasingly, I've found that many of the tips I come across are not necessarily appropriate for our clients.

It's not that the tips are wrong or stupid. Just not right for the way our clients operate, their budgets or their goals. After all, our tips may not be appropriate for other situations and clients, too.

With more than 200 million users, Facebook represents a great opportunity to reach an engaged audience.

So I checked out "5 tips for optimizing your Facebook marketing" in BtoBOnline only to find that the first tip was obvious -- "Have a strong presence."

And yet, many companies do not have a regular strategy posting updates and interesting content. Most companies are not enlisting their employees to sign up as fans of their corp. Facebook page so that their friends and people doing Facebook searches can find your company.

The next two -- "do some advertising" on Facebook and "create an application" -- make sense for consumer companies, but I don't think make as much sense for B2B companies. (I admit I don't really dig widgits.) And, yes, I realize that the article I'm citing is from BtoBOnline.

I think "Throw an Event" works for most B2Bs, though I've got a friend who runs a marketing company that uses Facebook to announce wine-and-cheese events at his office. Since he's half-way across the country, I don't know if these event notices work; I'm sure they do, but you have to pick select markets to make it work.

Of the five tips, I think the most important one is "Syndicate your content." For example, you can use your Notes page to import blog posts or the My Del.icio.us app to imporant bookmarks (if you've saved bookmarks). You can also use Simply RSS to bring all your RSS feeds to your Fan page. By the way use get RSS on Facebook, click here.

So, I'd mark this a 1.5 out of 5, which, scored on a sliding scale basis, is actually quite good.

Why Did an Unlikely Media Land Ahead of Forbes and BusinessWeek on a List of Top B2B Outlets?

Back in May (I’m playing catch up), BtoB Magazine presented its annual list of top media. Some of their picks are not surprising – like Wall Street Journal (1), Google.com (2), The Economist (3), Yahoo! (4), Forbes/Forbes.com (7), and BusinessWeek (9).

My nine-year-old could’ve come up with that list (since he’s seen me read most of them or search for info on them).

But a re few are surprising, like TechTarget (6) and InformationWeek (10).

Please keep in mind: BtoB editors and reporters used “both objective and subjective criteria” in compiling their lists. “They evaluated data such as ad revenue and audience, and interviewed top media buyers, advertisers and industry analysts for their opinions on the most powerful and targeted b-to-b advertising venues” so these may not be the best outlets for every B2B client, but it’s a decent starting point.

As for why TechTarget scored higher than Forbes or BusinessWeek, here’s what BtoBOnline noted: “With the recession putting tremendous pressure on marketers to deliver ROI, “we've been focusing more than ever on helping advertisers prioritize leads and nurture them,” said Greg Strakosch, co-founder and CEO of TechTarget. “We're giving advertisers much more information about those leads so that they can take the proper actions and get revenue more quickly.”

TechTarget is also helping its customers get to know their IT customers better. “We've partnered with Google on research on how IT professionals use search and how their search habits change at different stages in the buying process,” he said. TechTarget held half a dozen regional meetings to disseminate the findings and produced two annual Online ROI summits for high-level technology marketers and agency people.

Interesting.

Here are some other sections to check out:

• General News
• General Business
• Information Technology
• Vertical Media
  
• Websites, social media
  

Paul Gillin Offers Social Media Case Studies

Paul Gillen, who has transformed himself from a journalist to a social media guru, has some advice for B2B companies in BtoBOnline magazine. His "Tap into social communities: 5 tips for marketers seeking to connect with prospective customers online" doesn't provide new ideas. But it does provide come interesting mini-case studies -- and that can be useful when talking with clients or others who might be reluctant to jump into social media.

Lead generation continues to be a big issue for many clients, and Gillin does provide a good case study of using social media to generate leads.

It's worth reading.

Social Media Advertising: IDG launches new initiative

Social media is coming to the advertising world through a new initiative, IDG Amplify.

According to B-toBOnline, "IDG creates social media ad opportunities," the way it works is:

“An advertiser would run an ad on our site. It would look like a regular display ad, but it could say, "Question of the day. What do you want to see from a smart phone: option A or option B?' And the user could click on that and say, "I want to see option B.' ”

Without leaving the IDG site, visitors could join the conversation about either option A or option B.

What's interesting about this is the that it blurs the line between advertising and editorial, for example:

"The online conversations could also be started by editorial content. For instance, in an article about networks, a user could roll over a highlighted word—say, “routers”—and join in a conversation started by a question from Cisco Systems. However the conversation starts—either from editorial content or an online ad—the b-to-b marketer would pay a marketing fee to start this conversation."

This opens up new ways of working with IDG properties. Of course, we would recommend that organizations be transparent in posting content to articles that mention -- or should have mentioned -- their client or company.

The future of newspapers' business sections in the Internet age

The tightening ad market is claiming more victims. The latest: "The Denver Post—which folded its business section into other sections on every day but Sunday—last month became at least the eighth daily since early 2007 to cut its stand-alone daily business section," according to BtoBOnline.

As it is, many newspapers have been pushing their readers to their websites to check out the stock pages, in part as a cost-savings initiative because the cost of newsprint continues to rise (if only I could invest in the futures market for newsprint). And in part because most active traders, these newspapers feel, already check their stocks online.

But getting rid of standalone business sections means:

• Business news becomes a less important section within the newspaper hierarchy.
• Business sections will get fewer resources and reporters. The level of business coverage will decrease because staffs won't have enough time to cover news they would like to.
  
• Business sections will be smaller sections and more difficult to find.
• There will be less room for local coverage.
  

All this will lead to a more challenging ad environment, and a downward cycle.

This is good news for local business weeklies...which should be able to beef up their pages with content and ads.

Meanwhile, the BtoBOnline article cited "a study by Arizona State University's National Center for Business Journalism found that about 75% of daily newspapers today run, on average, one page or less of business news a day, and only one in eight daily papers runs a stand-alone section."

The implications for B2B PR programs is that we need to shift our focus to the business weeklies and AP, Bloomberg and Reuters, and away from local market daily business sections.