The
Voice of Effective Marketing
As I mentioned in
The Ownership Society, there's been significant debate and uncertainty over the
years about exactly what marketing is, and what it should be doing. If
your CEO is still wondering about that, time for a new year's resolution!
If you listen to Seth Godin, he'll tell you that marketing is the creation and
nurturing of great stories: narratives and impressions that circulate
among your customers and prospects. He'll tell you that discovering the
real stories about your company or your product is probably more important than
making up your own. The ones you promulgate don't have the ring of
objectivity, precisely because they come from you. "Nothing is as credible
as someone who has nothing to sell."
 If you listen to Regis McKenna,
he'll say that what the stories are really isn't
as important as how and why the stories travel around social networks. Buzz
comes from the fact that the right people are resonating, not the details of what they're
resonating about.
Fine, they're both right. Marketing is the orchestration and encouragement
of customer stories across social networks. It used to be called word of mouth, but now it can be much
more precisely monitored and enhanced, if not controlled. Yep, you really
need to take a look back at the two-parter I did on
social media
metrics.
But you don't want to leave yourself at the mercy of whatever User Generated
Content (read: drek) the customer
types into Yelp or Facebook. You've got to have an ongoing process that
encourages and produces
the right content at the right time for each of your audiences. It's those
darned segmentation
and relevance
topics again.
Content
Anyone who thinks marketing is all style and no substance hasn't seen good
marketing. Substance -- topics the audience cares about and content that
is useful to them -- is at the core of marketing influence. This is not to
say that you should run out and get a bunch of writers to endlessly churn out
documents. "Content" has a lot deeper meaning than just a bunch of PDFs.
Look at two truly effective marketers,
Apple (for B2C)
and Salesforce.com (for B2B). Almost without interruption for 10 years,
they have been delivering great products for their customers and great earnings
for their investors. Sure, they've had quality products...but so have
their competitors, so that doesn't explain the sales difference. What
gives these companies true
market power is
their product story, the narrative about why their products matter and the
coherent series of product improvements that leads the market toward the future.
You don't have to own an iPhone or use iTunes or the iStore, but you do have to
admit they've been literally reshaping the cell phone industry, the music
business, and the video business. You may think that Salesforce.com's
Chatter is silly, but a million people are using it (it's turned on by default
now) and SFDC's competitors will have to follow.
The very first layer is your identity: who you are as a company, what
you're good at ... and what you're not. You have to be self-aware and
brutally honest here, because you can't contradict your essence. Fake it,
and you blow all chance at
trust.
The next layer of content is the product and service
strategy, plus
any important business model shifts (like, on-premises vs in-the-cloud
software). That strategy needs to be wrapped in a narrative that makes
your plan not just relevant, but seem almost inevitable. This can't be
just a marketing deliverable: it needs to be developed as a collaboration
that includes marketing along with the CTO, CEO, and VP of Sales.
The next layer of content is the messaging, which must be targeted to your
company's biggest segment. Messaging needs to evolve in response to
marketplace resonance, but must not jump around. The big picture must be
stable for at least 18 months (it takes that long for repetition effects to
really work), even though the details can come and go. A classic mistake
in messaging is over-reacting to competitors' gambits. While you can't
ignore really successful competitors, most of the time the competitors' message
won't be remembered by the audience any more than yours will. Clever use
of Google adwords can help you identify which of your competitors big campaigns
is really having an impact, and which are just a glorified smoke-bomb.
Those first two content layers require the most executive attention, but
ironically they don't produce a single content deliverable -- nothing your sales
channel can actually use. The next layer of content is the classic
"collateral tree," which describes the sales document architecture for each of
your product and service lines. Usually, there's too much of it:
- there are too many documents to be kept up to date over time, and
- most of the documents don't get used anyway.
Job 1 is to identify which documents are used and which aren't.
Unfortunately, these content analyses almost always forget the step that really
matters: why aren't the documents used?
The learnings from that document-usage analysis feeds the next layer of content
-- the sequencing of emails, documents, videos, and web interactions that work
most effectively with your target audiences. This requires building a
model of how the customer makes their decisions, understanding what information
and resources they need to take the next step in the purchase decision.
This model must not be built on speculation or urban legend or management
say-so. It must be developed as a collaboration between sales and
marketing -- both at the VP level and worker-bees -- using real data from
customers. Then, the model needs to be tested with real prospects as they
go through the pipeline.
The last ten years has produced a plethora of new technologies that really help
the marketer tune and sequence their content deliveries. Survey Engines,
Web content management systems (particularly those supporting A/B testing), and
Lead Nurturing systems (aka "vertical campaigners" or "marketing automation
systems") provide the marketer tremendous leverage in understanding, reaching,
and influencing the audience. These systems' effectiveness comes not just
from presenting content, but from behavioral targeting: sequencing
content in optimal ways based on audience responses.
The bottom line is that content effectiveness depends not just on the material,
but the timing of the content delivery. That's what makes it more
relevant, more actionable. Effective marketers have always needed to be
clear thinkers, fast writers, and great presenters. But now, they also
need to deeply understand statistical methods and be power users of marketing
automation and CRM systems. I can't make this any clearer.
Ave atque Vale
For the last 9 years, I've been writing this serialized book on B2B marketing
best practices. It's been fun writing these newsletters, and it's been
really gratifying to receive the kind words and reactions from you. I
really hope they have been useful, or at least interesting confirmation of your
darkest suspicions about marketing. All the
Taber Reports
will stay up on the web indefinitely.
But you may have noticed that I wrote a real book (Prentice-Hall's
Salesforce.com Secrets of Success), and I've been putting all my quality
time into SalesLogistix,
a CRM management consultancy and Salesforce.com implementer.
Guess what: SalesLogistix has a monthly newsletter. It's a
quicker read, and has lots of actionable ideas about CRM, Marketing Automation,
and better collaboration between sales and marketing. I'm going to be moving
your subscription from The Taber Report to
Salesforce.com Answers.
As always, just click the unsubscribe link if the (ahem) content isn't relevant
to you.
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