Digital on the Rise in B2B, But Audience Engagement Lags

Filed under Uncategorized by Aaron Pearson on 5 December 2011 at 23:40 {no comments}

Recent research from Forrester has good news and bad news, from my perspective. On the one hand, Tracy Stokes, in “Marketing Budgets for 2012 Expose a Fear of Commitment,” notes that B2B marketers are moving to digital even faster than their B2C counterparts. Unfortunately, how they are doing so seems to be putting immediate gratification (i.e. leads) over the kind of richer relationship-building enabled by social media and creative digital programming.

First, the good news. According to Forrester’s research, which I would treat as directional rather than quantitative because of its small sample size, more than half of B2B marketing leaders see an economic recovery in their industry next year, compared to less than a third of B2C marketing leaders. Also, digital media now comprises 28% of B2B marketers’ budgets, ahead of their B2C counterparts (22%).

Are you investing in the long-term relationship?

Wow, right? Except what are they spending it on? Not innovation, which is expected to be cut in half from an already small base. Not brand building. Not relationship building. Transactions. Or at least that’s where the emphasis is.

I understand, I’m empathetic, really.  If you don’t win today, there is no tomorrow. But that’s a little like the federal government cutting taxes to spur economic growth without a plan to address long-term deficits. Ultimately, there’s a nasty price to pay.  What are some of those costs? Here’s four:

  • Commoditization
  • Reduced customer loyalty
  • Declining pricing power
  • Reduced market focus

Ouch. As with everything in life, success is about finding a healthy balance of investment through the marketing funnel – and beyond it to nurture customer advocates too. I’ve been part of award-winning communications plans that piled heaps of interest into the top of the funnel only to be plugged up at the bottom, and that’s no good either. But we have great opportunities now to do build stronger B2B brands and increase customer and prospect engagement all while effectively driving sales.

Building an positive and engaged bond between your brand and your customer is a powerful defense against commoditization. Leveraging social media to improve product development and customer service grows advocates and reinforces loyalty. A real commitment to listening to customers through social channels is effective (and cost-effective) at reminding you what your brand really is all about, and what it’s not about, so the organization stays focused on where it can be most successful. Here’s to a digitally engaged 2012!

Need a Strategy? Start By Playing Games

Filed under Discussion, Soap Box by Allan Schoenberg on 13 September 2011 at 08:32 {one comment}

One thing that has always bothered me as a communicator — as a business manager — is when meetings start by talking about “tactics” without a mention of strategy. As soon as that happens it’s time to stop and restart the meeting.  I wrote about this before on B2B Voices when I focused on, “The Most Important Question You Can Ask.”

One way to get better at strategy is to start by playing games. I don’t mean by goofing around. I mean by actually playing games.

Instagram: Stratego -- How do you practice developing your strategy skills?

As a father, I have to say one of the things I enjoy most with my kids is game time. And there’s nothing better than taking on my oldest in a game of strategy. Here are three games we enjoy playing.

  • Stratego: One of the great strategy board games focused on capturing your opponent’s flag. It sounds simple enough. But the trick is you don’t know what  your opponent’s piece are — the values are not facing you. Since you are not allowed to see the other player’s pieces, the game is just as much about deception as it is about being aggressive.
  • Chess: The ultimate game of thinking and strategy. My son won the chess championship for his grade last year in London  so I was especially proud of him.
  • Slay: This iPhone game is similar to Risk where you compete against other “kingdoms” for land and resources. There are no alliances to be made but you need to decide which upgrades to make, where to move, and how you will defend yourself. You can only play against the computer, so this is a great team game for me and my son.

But how do these games — and others — teach you about strategy? Here are my views:

  • Games of strategy teach you to not just think about your moves, but you need to consider the other factors that impact you. You need to take many decisions into consideration before the game begins and as it is played out.  Because of this, you need to remain agile and flexible in your thinking, knowing that your strategy may need to change along the way.
  • You need to play a lot to be good. Learning how to develop a strategy — just like playing a game — takes practice. The more you do it the better you get at not only developing it but also articulating it to others.
  • Know when to take risks and learn from your mistakes. I love when I play against my son and I can literally see the next time we play that he’s learned from his mistakes. While our work tends to be repetitive — product launches, partnership announcements, new research releases — there’s something to be said about making adjustments and trying new things.
  • You can learn from others. There’s a reason there are so many books about chess strategy — to learn and benchmark from others. Are you doing the same across other companies and communicators you emulate? We have so many case studies, blog posts and news stories talking about communication success stories that taking the time to read and learn from them should be second nature. If you help, Mashable and PR Daily News are two excellent resources.

If you enjoyed this you may also enjoy reading:

Getting Your Degree in Business Acumen

You are What You Read

Is Motivation the Key to Success?

There’s No Such Thing as B2B Social Media

Filed under Discussion, Soap Box by Aaron Pearson on 23 July 2010 at 12:45 {4 comments}

A group of us here in the office have been having some discussions lately about our digital and social media capabilities in the B2B social media space.  If you work in an agency, you know how it goes – the big, splashy, sexy B2C stuff tends to get all the attention. After all, they have Ashton Kutcher. We have engineers, analysts and ROI models. We had a diverse group of pros in the room – a former technology analyst, several people from our financial services practice group, one from our tech practice group (me) and the head of our digital and social media team here – and so it’s not surprising that we started talking about what we even meant by B2B social media.

I came upon a realization that I think was shared by others there, that the concept is so broad as to be all but

Tower of Babel
Image via Wikipedia

meaningless. Maybe that’s self-evident but there are some consequences borne out of that realization.

What might come to mind when I say, “B2B social media”? Customer service? Social CRM? (social BPM, Social BI, etc. yikes!) Online lead generation? Online crisis management? Customer community development? Thought leadership? Brand building?  Influencer relations?  Corporate social responsibility?

You see where I’m going. If all of these areas indeed fall under the rubrick of B2B social media, then it doesn’t mean a whole lot. It also means it’s going to be difficult to avoid Tower of Babel misunderstandings, turf wars, ineffectiveness, and of course expert consultants with expertise in entirely the wrong areas for many B2B social media “initiatives.” After all, any B2B social media expert is unlikely to have deep expertise in more than 40% of those areas given their diversity.

Eventually, we will stop talking about social media and just go back to talking about media channels and communication programs that use a varying mix of them according to the business objectives to be achieved. In the meantime, two recommendations come immediately to mind as you sort out your B2B social media strategies.

Prioritize: We recommend as a best practice the formation of a social media council formed with a balance of people from across the organization with a stake in your company’s social media success. The first question that group should be asking itself is, “What really brought us together?” And you need to go deeper than, “We have to get our social media house in order.”  Agree on what you mean by that – what threat-oriented and growth oriented issues brought you here. Don’t “boil the ocean.”

Don’t Hire B2B Social Media Experts: You may then decide you need outside help, in the form of hires or relationships with consultants or agencies. You are not looking for a B2B social media expert. You are looking for something more specific: someone with expertise in one or more critical areas such as online crisis management, community building, blogger relations, search engine optimization and lead generation, community relations, etc.

You can all tell me if I’m off base. I’m interested in what you all think here.

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Looking for the Method Behind Your Competitors’ Madness

Filed under Soap Box by Aaron Pearson on 5 April 2010 at 12:16 {no comments}

I recently finished an extensive social media analysis of a client’s competitors recently to help inform the client’s go-forward digital strategy. It was undeniably a valuable effort, an interesting look at who’s using Facebook, who’s using Twitter, who’s getting audiences to engage, who’s not.  Not only do I recommend it but the research gets even more interesting when you revisit it every six months or so.

In this case, I paid particular attention to the client’s largest competitor, a company’s that’s diving into social media aggressively – YouTube, bloggers, live tweeting, Facebook, everything. It’s clearly a well-orchestrated effort guided by a team of dedicated individuals that are also connecting the social media effort to a broader traditional media campaign. It was very effective in getting the client’s attention.

The other companies were tapping one or two social media channels, some with some apparent success – or at least they were generating a fair amount of activity.

But what do you do with this information?

I would offer that compared to competitive research around other components of the competition’s communications strategy (advertising, media relations, trade shows), you ought not to read too much into some of this competitive social media activity.

The fact is, there is a distinct chance that your competitors might be flying without a flight plan, hoping that by getting some social media initiatives off the ground, they’ll arrive somewhere of consequence. It may be tough to know the difference between a well-planned social media strategy and program with  no real strategy at all. So you may be looking for lessons that aren’t there. In fact, odds are your competitors are leaving gaps in their strategy that you can exploit – that may be the most valuable part of the effort.

The biggest issue I’m seeing right now with larger B2B companies is they are able to generate a lot of activity – blog posts, tweets, retweets of the tweets by the personal accounts of everyone on the communications team, Facebook wall posts, even videos. After all, it only takes enough time and/or money to generate activity. But a lot of them – I’d say most – are getting precious little audience engagement in return.  I’d learn from those mistakes, look for where there are glimmers of engagement, and then do better. Be creative on the backs of the failures of those that went before.

In fact, in that study I recently completed, it was one of the smaller brands that had the most intriguing success. Whether purposefully or by luck (but what difference does it make?), this was the one and only brand that managed to accumulate piles of fan posts on their Facebook pages – heartfelt posts of their memories of this nostalgia brand that reinforced that company’s brand positioning beautifully. Facebook was the perfect channel for sharing recollections of their experiences with this brand. They were capturing a sentiment and helping advocates share their stories in a way other competitors could not because their brands stood for something else.  I liked that kind of sustainable differentiation.

Until social media grow up, creativity counts for a lot. That said, competitive research is imperative – if nothing else to tell you what NOT to do.

Weber Shandwick’s SocialPulse capabilities can handle almost any competitive research challenge. As an example, here’s a study we published on the Twitter habits of Fortune 100 companies.

Curious George Goes to the Office

Filed under Discussion by Allan Schoenberg on 18 February 2010 at 03:17 {3 comments}

Who doesn’t love a good story? I’m particularly at my best reading these Curious George books to my kids at night. There’s always something about George getting into trouble and learning a lesson that I enjoy — but I think my kids just like how I goof around and tend to get creative with the plots each time I read them.

While the enjoyment is spending time with my kids, the challenge is always trying to make the same story interesting again and again. Does that challenge sound familiar at your job?

I was lucky enough to speak to a group of Northwestern Univerity IMC graduate students a few weeks ago on this topic of storytelling. I started my discussion by asking a simple question — what are the two things that every business does? The first answer was easy — sell. Obviously to exist companies need to make revenue and they do this by selling. The second took a little longer to get, but as you can tell by the theme of this post the answer is — tell stories.

That’s it? Sell and storytelling? In my opinion, yes. We just don’t call it storytelling. Words like differentiation and branding come to mind as do tactics like case studies and third party influencers.

But those words and tactics are parts of the story. So what is storytelling and how do we use it? Here’s a great post by Kevin Dugan on the topic. You should take a look at what he has to say.

I like stories for a few reasons and try to use them as much as possible. Here’s my line of thinking:

1. Stories make your organization come alive. Telling stories gives depth and perspective to the products and people of your company. While you only make “widget123″ there is a reason you make it, people who make it and customers who buy it. Providing background on how it “widget123″ was invented, examples of how customers use them, and why they are important to your industry (and perhaps the economy) gives your product and company life.

2. Stories give you credibility. While fact sheets and statistics are nice and get to the point they rarely get you anywhere on their own. Stories can demonstrate why there is a need for your company and the things you do. And face it, facts and figures do support your stories — not the other way around. I don’t think I’ve ever had a reporter write a story about my company or clients based on a fact sheet, but giving them a story — buttressed with facts — makes my pitch that much stronger.

3. Stories differentiate what we do. While competition can drive us all bananas (Curious George pun intended) it only forces us to tell better stories. The next time you’re stuck in a competitive situation start asking your product teams about the stories they can tell. You may be surprised at how many ideas you can generate to really stand out from your competitors (and hopefully they’re not reading this post).

Now it’s your turn. How do you develop stories for your company? What stories work for you? And of course if you have any children’s book recomendations I’m open for ideas (so are my kids).

What is social media success in B2B… and some examples

Filed under Discussion, Soap Box by Kate Brodock on 23 October 2009 at 00:10 {10 comments}

I’d like to use this blog post to spark a discussion on the idea of “success.”  It was brought on when Arik, fellow B2B Voices writer, brought the following blog post to our team’s attention.  The post, entitled Finally! A B2B social media success story, describes a humorous use of video by a printer manufacturer in Massachusetts.  The “Destroy Your Printer Video Contest” allowed for submission of user-generated content that shows the best-ever destruction of their printer, which, as Office Space taught us all, is the bane of the office-place existence.

[Short pause to insert Office Space clip... can't let that opportunity pass]

YouTube Preview Image

The winning submission of the Destroy your Printer Video Contest was Cottage Revolution, seen below:

YouTube Preview Image

I’m not disputing the success of this contest, in fact, it’s pretty darn good (full list of videos is on the ELS blog…).  I would probably want to learn more about how many people called back etc, and might agree that the sale reported on the blog post was probably luck, but it was definitely a great way to engage people and bring eyes to the company.

What I’d like to talk about is what “success” means.  Was it the sale in this case?  That seems to be so for the author of this post.  However, Nathan Dube from Expert Laser Services, had his goals laid out from the get-go, as quoted:

“The focus of the contest  was not ‘let’s get customers’,” he said. ” The focus was to drive more traffic to the website, build inbound links, and create good content.  The fact that we landed a new service and repair customer was not our goal, but it happened.”

By all counts, this was a success.  But there have been numerous, numerous, counts of this sort of success for B2B social media use.  It wasn’t the first.

Look at HubSpot, for instance.  They are strictly B2B with their product offering, but through an incredible content production program, they have significantly increased the awareness of their product, their website traffic has grown exponentially, and their inbound links/SEO have benefited enormously (although, that last part better be true, since that’s their entire business!).  I would also add that if you asked them for their conversion rates, they do find a good amount of actual revenue opportunities from this program.

Another example that I always like is Kinaxis, which offers supply chain management solutions.  To the average consumer, this is not only just B2B, but could be perhaps….a bit dry.  However, their blog is one I use often as a great example of building customer and industry relations and positioning them at the top of their space.  In my opinion, it’s also a great example of following blogging best-practices quite well.  I don’t know the numbers behind the Kinaxis blog, but I would guess that their brand awareness in an industry where most players aren’t thinking about social media or SEO has benefited from their program.  I also wouldn’t be surprised if they too had actual conversion result.

A few months ago we posted a case study on ShipServ. John Watton, VP of Marketing, seemed to think that the program was successful according to the goals he set forth.

You can also check out Social Media B2B for a load of what many consider to be “successful” B2B social media efforts.

So this brings me to my question.  What is success? My answer is that success first of all depends on your goals.  I talked about 4 reasons a B2B company should start a social media program back in April, and many of those weren’t directly sales-related.  The most important process is to decide what you want to achieve and build a strategic plan around that set of goals.

If your goals are much like Nathan’s at ELS, then success is seen with an increase in website traffic, producing great content, and increasing inbound links.  Landing a sale wasn’t on that list.  But that’s ok, because ELS sat down and they identified what they wanted out of a social media program.  There is tremendous value in increasing hits to your website.

Additionally, the entire concept of brand equity originated because there is inherent value in the amount of reach your brand has, and what it’s level of awareness is, as well as whether that image is positive or negative.  So much so that it can be a line item in accounting and is part of valuation.

But I digress.  The most successful programs are the ones that go through that process of goal-setting, and their success is dependent on the decision points of that process.  It’s sometimes difficult from an outside perspective to know what those internal goals are, and we assume success – or lack thereof.  It’s also a lot less clear what the various uses for B2B social media use are from an external standpoint than it is for B2C.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on the topic. Does success mean a sale?  What does success depend upon?  Are companies that focus on non-sales related goals wasting their resources with the program?  Is their really enough value in things like driving more website traffic or creating a body of content?Do you have other examples of successful programs in the B2B space?

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Other Voices: Ellis Booker, Editor, BtoB magazine and BtoB’s Media Business

Filed under Other Voices Interview by Allan Schoenberg on 13 May 2009 at 15:24 {no comments}

I had the pleasure of meeting Ellis Booker at the Chicago Social Media Club event in March 2009. As the editor for BtoB magazine, Ellis oversees content for the only publication devoted exclusively to the intersection of business marketing and business strategy. He also is editor of BtoB Media Business, the Magazine for Business Publishing Executives.ublished monthly by Crain Communications Inc., the publication reaches an audience of more than 45,000 readers. In addition to the print edition, BtoB offers online content and a weekly e-mail newsletter. Prior to joining BtoB Ellis was Editor at Large for CMP’s Internet Week, Senior Editor for Mecklermedia’s Web Week, and Senior Editor for Computerworld. He graduated from Oberlin College with a B.A. in English and Philosophy. You can find Ellis on Twitter at @ellisbooker.

Q: What changes in B2B marketing and communications have you seen since you’ve been at the magazine?

A: Two things. First has been the embrace of marketing metrics. It’s significant, I think, that during this latest downturn, marketing continues, albeit at reduced budgets. In other words, marketers have succeeded in demonstrating their value to the business bottom line. There will be no going back to “let’s throw it out there” campaigns. Even newfangled viral executions are being monitored closely, and modified if they are not meeting some pre-determined success metric. The second thing, I’d say, is how much more playful and creative the executions have become in the nine years I’ve been editor of BtoB. I would credit Ogilvy’s brilliant work for long-time client IBM as helping to create this new, creative landscape.

Q: The economy has obviously been under a tremendous amount of stress lately. How do you see B2B communicators coping?

A: It’s sector by sector, as you’d expect. What will be interesting is how the hardest hit areas, such as construction and financial services, find their voice in the recovery. And how the survivors, many in merged situations, handle their merged brands.

Q: How do you see B2B companies embracing social media?

A: Cautiously. But they need to engage these new channels, at the very least as listening posts for how their products and brands are being discussed by customers and prospects. Another healthy outcome of social media is that it is forcing companies to look at how their customers consume media. The old assumptions about target audiences–the trade magazines they read, shows they watch, conferences they attend, etc.–are being considered with fresh eyes. Also, the smart companies are giving their young employees more and

more responsibility for setting the strategy for these channels, which are consumed by young professionals like themselves.

Q: With all the press about print diminishing, how do B2B companies feel about print advertising? And how is BtoB dealing with this?

A: We’ve had a multi-page NetMarketing section in BtoB since relaunching the title in 2000. So Internet topics are not new to us. We also have a standing section on business media, which provides very insightful coverage of media companies. Regarding the future, what I think you’ll see is the media print brands in each category surviving and growing integrated print-Web-event-data businesses. The second- and third-place media properties are on the bubble, unfortunately.

Q: What marketing programs are they doing for brand retention and awareness?

A: Answering this slightly differently… one of the things that has concerned me is marketers being too myopic about, if you will, transaction-based campaigns and having less patience for long-haul, multi-year efforts that build brands. This problem is magnified in the current economy, of course.

Q: Where are B2B companies investing most of their marketing dollars?

A: No surprise here. Online is still growing at double digits, although far less than a couple years ago. Within that online spending, paid search and search engine optimization take the lions share.

Q: If you could give advice to B2B communicators, what three things would you tell them they need for being successful?

A: First, I’d say communicators must learn to listen before they can talk. And by “listen” I mean listen across all channels, using analytic technology to make informed decisions. Second, they need to coordinate their efforts. It’s simply not acceptable these days to have online and offline efforts out of sync. Third, they should be ready to adapt, and adapt quickly. Companies that adopt the right technologies to listen, monitor and manage their messaging should be able to modify these efforts quickly when the data indicates X or Y

isn’t working.

Q: Finally, what’s really the best way to pitch a story to you these days and what are you looking for?

A: The best way is e-mail. I live on e-mail. But before sending me a pitch, please read BtoB (and our many, subject-focused e-mail products) to see how we organize our coverage. That’ll give you the best idea of what we’re interested in. And on last thing. Despite my many comments about enabling technology, our focus here is about how marketers, practioners, are using these tools. We don’t do product reviews. We want to talk to users.

So you want to be a B2B communicator? Know your customers.

Filed under Uncategorized by Allan Schoenberg on 17 April 2009 at 13:50 {no comments}

As an adjunct professor it never comes as a surprise that the majority of students I teach do not know what B2B communication requires, let alone even define it (Hint: it is not Back to Beer).

So let’s discuss what I feel is one of the key distinctions of doing successful B2B versus B2C communications – understanding your customers.

As communicators one of our basic mantras is to know who the end users of our products and services are in the marketplace. All of our strategies and tactical outputs should remain focused on communicating our messages and delivering on our brand promise to end users. No matter if you sell consumer goods or technology services, you need to recognize your customers’ wants and needs. That is a value-add from our efforts to our companies and clients.

So what makes B2B customers different? Here are five distinctions I see of B2B v. B2C customers

1. Customers in the B2B space typically have longer purchasing cycles. So instead of purchasing your products or services in a day or week it may take weeks or even months. This presents great opportunities to drive home our messages and value proposition, but at the same time it allows your competitors to do the same. The focus during this time now becomes building trust and differentiating our brand against our competition.
2. Customers in the B2B space often buy from our competition and can even compete with our other customers. We need to emphasize in our communications that we have to treat our products and services individually to each customer in order to build trust, loyalty and deliver on their needs. Remember, it is a long purchasing cycle and over time you can build strong loyalty or lose it all.
3. Both B2C and B2B customers are interested in customer service. The difference is that B2B customer service begins well before any sale is ever made or even considered. From a communicator’s standpoint we need to build our winning argument with case studies/references as well as third party endorsements during this time. These “outside influencers”, such as industry analysts, become a key component of our efforts to build trust with potential buyers. Find the people outside of your company that matter to our customers is always an ongoing initiative.
4. A B2B customer is typically more sophisticated than a B2C customer and has a deep understanding of our products or services (which means they also can be very skeptical). Since there already exists a great degree of knowledge or a high interest in learning about our offering, we must communicate in a way that talks specifically to them. This means you need to have a very complete understanding not only of what your company does but what your customer needs.
5. B2B customers buy your products because they will use them to help their company grow, become profitable, and stay competitive. This means you need to stay focused on communicating the value of your offering to them. They will not be entertained by funny animal mascots or snappy slogans. They want (need) a product or service to keep them competitive.

Even though this is a brief list, it feels like asking someone to name the top baseball or hockey players of all time. The list will change or evolve or could even be missing something. So tell us what you think.

Allan Schoenberg
Director, Corporate Communications
CME Group — A CME/Chicago Board of Trade/NYMEX Company
www.cmegroup.com
@allanschoenberg
@cmegroup

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