Bradley H. Smith >

14 tips for MarkOps success: Create a 'Client Insights' position

Current clients spew off a ton of raw data that needs to be analyzed and maximized for the marketing trifecta of cross-selling, upselling and ye olde attrition.

This is a new mindset for many companies. Think of it as a client services person with marketing responsibilities. They must have a direct understanding of the full sphere of clients’ interests and clients’ apathies – and be able to articulate their insights in the context of products, services and brand.

In the past, these individuals may have become “sales specialists,” but enlisting them into marketing will create scalable programs from their know-how, rather than the one-on-one needs of “good sales demos.”

Not that those are not essential.    

 

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About Bradley:

Simply, Bradley is the most dedicated and dynamic marketer who has ever worked for me. A real conceptual thinker who knows how to execute his ideas. 

I would hire him again in a heartbeat.  

William C. Greenway
Retired
https://www.linkedin.com/in/william-greenway-8738444

PROFESSIONAL HISTORY: CEO and President ~ InfiMed, Inc.

Content Nurturing After the “No.”

Lead nurturing campaigns, both triggered and automated, should not be viewed only as pre-sale activities. The “buyers-journey” does not stop when a prospect makes a decision. Certainly, if your company wins the deal, the relationship (and the content) evolves from prospect to customer, but what about if the prospects says “no thank you?”

You keep nurturing.

You’ve built a relationship, you HAVE their permission… so keep it moving forward. In fact, you should template the lost deal nurtures at an ABM level strategy.

“Lost the Deal” Nurture

For those of us in the B2B industry, a loss deal only lasts as long as the prospect’s contract timeframe with the competitor that won the deal.

With lead nurturing, you can focus the customer’s attention onto the competitor’s implied weaknesses and set new standards for their satisfaction. The first hints of buyer’s remorse will often arise around one month after a deal is signed. Send your first piece around then. Keep it VERY informational. Industry-ish content.

Also, set a time-stamped trigger for 120 days before the anniversary of the initial contract date. NOTE: a 120 day trigger may vary depending on the onboarding and enterprise level of the product or service.)

“We Don’t Have Budget Right Now” Nurture

Of course, in B2B, you’ll often come across great prospects… but the timing is just a bit off. You see these a lot in the late third, early fourth quarter when managers use up their budgets and are waiting for a new fiscal year to reboot them. For this group, time your campaign to start just before the new fiscal year begins. For example, if the prospect is on a Jan 1 fiscal year, start a passive reminder drip of your value in early November.

“We’re Too Small to Buy” Nurture

There are many companies that will realize large value from your services, but they are too small for your fees. For these organizations, set a general “thought leadership” content nurture, however, give your products and services a stronger presence – ie case studies. This will remind the prospect of both your brand and your solutions… and what they’re missing out on.

Most importantly, create a Google or Owler Alert to be prepared to leap if the prospect publishes good news… specifically, new funding.  

“Ummm… Can You Call Me Back, I’m Too Buried” Nurture

We’re all understaffed and overworked - that’s why we automated marketing. When you are dealing with someone who is fighting a fire, your “now” may not be the best time for any number of business or personal reasons. Be understanding… we’ve all been at THAT place.

Readjust your nurture with elbow room. Pause any active nurture to give your prospect a reasonable time to put their fires out. That said, don’t take so long that they forget what was interesting about your company in the first place. 12 business days is a safe window.

Marketing automation allows your company to continually touch lost deal prospects without burdening sales people who need to nurture (chase!) unsigned prospects.

These prospects HAVE a problem. These prospects WERE shopping for a solution. These prospects ARE budgeted.

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BTW, I am hire-ready. https://www.linkedin.com/in/bradleyhsmith/ or www.iBradley.com

14 tips for MarkOps success: They aren’t targets, they are people.

Bad marketing is often borne of bad data. Make sure you begin with the right information about the right audience – and carefully parse your macro-list data (CRM, email activity, web forms, hard events, and owned & paid web traffic) together to generate precise micro-lists data. You’ll sculpt a sharp understanding of your targets – and you can then create smarter, actionable and (perceived) humanized messaging.

But, remember, data is a means, not an end. You are communicating to a person, not a datapoint, macro, micro or otherwise. The content MUST be a fit.

And importantly, creativity is always a variable.

 

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About Bradley:

In my experience, Bradley is a unique marketing talent. He is not only highly creative with excellent hands-on skills, but also works hard and works fast. As a result of Bradley's efforts, Shareholder.com was able to project a marketing presence - at conferences, in our literature, on our website, through direct mail - far larger than our actual size. As a result, Shareholder.com as acquired by Nasdaq for multiple times revenue.

He's also a real pleasure to work with.

Ronald H. Gruner
Retired
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ron-gruner-085015b

PROFESSIONAL HISTORY: CEO and Founder ~ Shareholder.com

14 tips for MarkOps success: Write for your audience, not your CEO.

 Your CEO will understand if you make a clear plan.

Begin with your readers (and prospects): take the time to understand your data and analytics, interview current customers, listen to social media. From that, create your content brand and voice – making unique content that aligns your goals with your audience’s goals.

It is crucial, especially in commodity-esque businesses, you MUST make either unique content or speak in a VERY unique voice.

Track and measure contiguously. Content is a long-play. Take the air you need. 

Be realistic, not random.

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About Bradley:

"Bradley Smith is the most dynamic and dedicated employee ever in my charge. His marketing leadership and niche expertise was a keystone for the acquisition of Shareholder.com by the Nasdaq Stock Exchange as well as the product, marketing and sales integration of the subsequent acquisitions that became Nasdaq corporate services.

A fair but fierce competitor, Bradley is extremely attuned and excited by top-line growth. In addition to an outstanding marketer, he is a true sales enabler. During our working tenure at Shareholder.com and into Nasdaq, our corporate services revenue grew from $6 million to $72 million."

Douglas A. Ventola
Managing Director ~ Consilio LLC
https://www.linkedin.com/in/doug-ventola-a83b893

PROFESSIONAL HISTORY: CEO, Shareholder.com, SVP, Nasdaq, Inc.

Read more at www.ibradley.com. 

Corporate Communications are the Avengers for Demand Generation

When it comes to planning demand-generation programs and campaigns, the content developed across corporate communications and product marketing is critical to driving leads.

Many demand-generation operations teams overlook their corporate communications department as an ally in these efforts, perhaps mistakenly thinking of the team only in terms of branding and press releases.

First off, press releases can be used to engage an audience beyond journalists, including prospects, customers and industry influencers, often exactly the audiences that marketers want to bring into the larger demand-generation framework. Plus, corporate communication develops and publishes lots of high-level educational and thought leadership content – such as blog posts, articles, and infographics – that are perfectly suited to demand generation nurture programs at the start of the buying process, or the top of the marketing funnel.

The ultimate goal is to attract, engage and convert buyers and influencers by providing the information and content they seek, so it only makes sense for marketing and corporate communications to break free from their silos and collaborate. In fact, combining the strengths of the two amplifies the power of both.

Benefits to both sides – and the overall organization

Companies have much to gain by tapping into the synergies between demand generation and corporate communications. Consider the following. Corporate communications is expert at crafting stories intended to drive buzz and early-stage engagement – that is, content aimed at those just getting started in the research and buying process. This content can take the form of more fun content, such as a “listicle” of resources related to a specific industry need, or even high value content like an executive interview on a trending topic.

Demand generation can tap into all the content being produced by corporate communications to ensure a steady flow of relevant content for consumption by the target audience. At the same time, demand generation has its hands in analytics that can help identify trending topics, better target and engage the audience and measure the results of corporate communications efforts. Marry the two and you see a significant improvement in results.

When generating demand, organizations want to hit as many channels as possible to increase the chances of connecting with target audience. With an understanding around both earned and owned channels, as well as access to traditional paid PR channels like press releases, corporate communications can offer a comprehensive and strategic channel perspective. They can help prioritize channels and offer insight into distribution across effective free or low-cost channels that could drive leads.

Demand generation and corporate communications usually own separate budgets. Perhaps demand generation contracts for a research study into industry trends but overlooks PR and a media blitz as part of the budget. Or it may consider a press release as a final “To Do” rather than incorporating it as part of its campaign from the beginning. At the same time, maybe corporate communications is looking for a compelling story to round out its PR calendar or wants to establish the company’s executives as thought leaders.

Combining efforts makes the most of everyone’s funding while working toward a shared goal.

The data that demand generation tracks can also help corporate communications prove its value and ROI in a measurable way. That said, this is only possible if demand generation and the communications teams determine in advance how to best measure performance from the channels corporate communications is using.

By working with marketing to apply these analytics to PR efforts, corporate communications can confidently report their impact to the C-suite using quantifiable data. Leveraging marketing data and analytics to move beyond outputs to true outcomes, corporate communicators can deliver information on leads they’ve added to the funnel (by tracing back to communications channels like press releases, bylined articles, blog posts, etc.) right down to bottom line ROI from these efforts.

In essence, closing the loop between these standalone departments helps everyone work smarter.

Steps to Encourage Successful Collaboration: Here’s how corporate communications can present a compelling case as to why they and demand generation should work together more closely.

Streamline and improve demand-generation efforts. Even the most seasoned marketers can get overwhelmed thinking about creating all the content needed to support the demand-generation strategy. Just consider what it takes to address different personas across the buying cycle and target existing customers with cross- and up- sell content. Corporate communications can help feed this bottomless content engine.

In fact, corporate communications is a natural content source because these professionals excel at storytelling and developing high-level thought leadership – a hole in the lineup of many organizations. A great place to start is by co-creating an editorial calendar that will serve both the brand and the demand-generation engine.

Better engage the target audience. The purpose of almost every action taken by a company is to build trust and intimacy with its target audience, whether prospective buyers, existing customers, or blog subscribers. Companies can achieve that goal by ensuring a consistent brand voice and perspective, along with a steady storyline and communications cadence.

By working hand in hand, corporate communications and demand generation can ensure consistency in the storyline and a seamless flow as the audience moves from the beginning to the end of their journey. In other words, from consuming top-of-funnel content created by corporate communications to later-stage content designed for buyers further down the path to purchase. At the same time, corporate communications can learn more about the types of content the audience seeks at those later stages of the buying cycle, along with effective calls to action. This empowers corporate communications to craft relevant content that drives new leads and that can be measured to assess the impact of their efforts. 

Early-stage or top-of-funnel content is aimed at those early in the research and buying process.

Get more mileage out of content. Through combined efforts, marketing and corporate communications can offer a winning solution to the “to-gate-or-not-to-gate” content debate.

For example, while marketing gates the white paper written by the company’s CMO, corporate communications could create and publish a non-gated blog interview with the CMO around that topic, with an invitation to download the paper. By distributing complementary content or different versions of gated content through PR channels, corporate communications ultimately drives more interest in the full, gated assets.

“Gated” content requires site visitors to fill out a registration form in exchange for a download, whereas “ungated” content can be downloaded with or without a click and without supplying any information.

To tap into the full potential of their combined efforts, demand generation and corporate communications should share their content and PR plans and agree on how corporate communications they can align to fill the marketing funnel. For example, demand generation can provide insight into how corporate communications can improve traffic to the blog. Analysis may show that blog subscribers are falling off during a certain post or are spending more time consuming certain posts and infographics than others. With this understanding, corporate communications can adjust their content to attract more traffic, and in turn drive more leads.

By presenting the advantages to be gained by working together, corporate communications can become the indispensable resource and ally that demand generation needs to efficiently boost results.

14 tips for MarkOps success: Initiate a cross-company workflow

An imperative mission for improving your marketing operations is establishing a procedure and workflow that integrates your marketing goals with sales, IT and Subject Matter Experts throughout your company. The day-to-day mechanics of these other peer teams can be worryingly influenced (interrupted) by how marketing requests projects and dictates the deadlines for whitepapers, technology builds and financial analysis. Work with the team leaders to define and set expectations.

Be realistic, not random.

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About Bradley:

"The consistency and excellence of Bradley Smith’s marketing leadership and ingenuity played a very significant role in reshaping the Vintage brand and the business itself. Bradley’s day-after-day ability to create original and compelling content in a highly-regulated niche not only differentiated our brand, which he masterly re-launched, but also generated thousands of leads for the sales executives.

He became a true subject matter expert across our niche, communicating at par with securities lawyers, CFOs and key stakeholders within public companies. From a content marketing perspective, he expanded our influencer base from a few hundred to tens of thousands. Perhaps most importantly, he moved from concept to planning to execution without delay.

Bradley was an essential strategic element to our success and eventual acquisition. Every president needs a Bradley on their team."

Liam Power
President ~ Vintage, SVP ~ Cision
https://www.linkedin.com/in/liampower/

Read more at www.ibradley.com. 

Imagine you’re sitting with a client. Ok. Now you can create your content.

My recent simple (lazy) blog post on the marketing books I read forced me to walk over to my bookshelf and pull a couple books down. The writings of David Ogilvy have always been my favorites, as they taught me HOW to think about marketing and advertising. Career stating guidance.

From my Madison Ave. beginnings, two points have stayed with me whenever I am beginning a project… regardless if it’s a complete marketing program or just a single ad.

1. The customer is not an idiot. She is your wife.
2. An ad can only sell one concept to one person at a time.

First, let’s place Point 1 in context of the late 1950s and early 1960s. This was revolutionary. Respect the audience. Don’t condescend. This is more ethical that tactical. Enough on that.

Point 2 needs no decade-based context. It’s timeless. Before you touch your keyboard or pen, think of who the content needs to reach. Don’t think of an androgynous “persona” yet, but imagine an exact person sitting in front of you.

• A specific client who has purchased from you
• A specific prospect whose business you want
• A specific journalist or influencer you need to impress

What would I say to them, outloud?

Would I really say THAT MARKETING SPEW to someone’s face? Eye-to-eye? Or am I dribbling “solution provider” jargon? Wasting the imagined person’s time and diluting my brand with baloney.

This imaginary conversation allows me to escape out of my own perspective and predispositions. This exercise requires me to draft my narratives from a third-party perspective to determine if there’s an actual point, take away or benefit.

The invisible s/he keeps me focused on answering their (unsaid) questions and creating content in the context that will be most beneficial to them (rather than me).

Once you have mastered the one-on-one dialogue, you are better equipped to scale your content creation process towards personas, working across the buyers’ journey lead generation programming.

Final point. Remember, much of what content marketing does is deliver content earlier in the sales funnel – as prospects are engaging with sales people later in the funnel.

The imagined person is, in effect, speaking with an imagined sales person. Create for that conversation.

My marketing booklist (go grab your readers)

I met with the leaders of a large marketing team yesterday, and the topic of favorite marketing blogs and marketing books came up. Sure, we all dropped names, like they were peanut shells at a ball park, but on the drive back home -  it did make me consider my favorites in a sincere manner. Here are the books currently on my shelf. 

Here they are in no specific order other than subconsciously. 

While technology might change, the rules of smart marketing never do. These books are classics and are must reads. Ogilvy had great respect for the customer and the content. He believed in the power of creative. 

Our online marketing DNA is based on the principles in this book – if you haven’t read it, you should. It marked a turning point in marketing... stopping the incessant hard push of information to your audience.

Both these books are 100% relevant today. As a marketer, you must break through and get your audience’s attention.

Another classic. It's about out-thinking competitors. 

If you know me, you know I go guerrilla on occasion. You have to when you're building your brand up from underdog to top dog. 

Clean. Concise. Polite. 

You damn well know my view on THIS leading book. 

These three were generally good train reads. I tag them as "good reminders" on what we need to do. 

Not a marketing book. Just the first "mature" book I ever read that was not assigned in school. Read it this summer. 

17 personal branding tips (from my Instagram)

There are eleventy kabazillion “personal branding” tips out there and I am currently evangelizing the best 17 I found. Authenticity is the top advice that truly matters: everything else trickles down from authenticity.   

Below are the points, and memes, from my Instagram account. 

1. Be honest and organic. 
2. Be visible and accessible.
3. Identify your unique value proposition.
4. Understand how others see you.
5. Identify your goals to guide your messaging.
6. All of your content should have the same personality.
7. Update your resume to assure it aligns with your brand.
8. Understand your industry inside and out.
9. Speak in your target audience’s tongue.
10. Become a trusted source of information. 
11. Be consistent across all publishing platforms. 
12. Share your expertise without expecting direct ROI.
13. Don't spew marketing: have a conversation when possible.
14. Demonstrate confidence.
15. Promote your content directly.
16. Write and publish. Publish and write.
17. It’s OK to be human and have fun.

Why do we personal brand? Simple...

...because everyone that you meet - especially in B2B - is absolutely going to Google you at some point.

You should try to own what they find.

(No matter how large your baby melon head was.) 

 

8 wicked pissah smart marketing tips for startups

These past few months, I have been meeting with Boston based incubators and VC firms. We’ve shared ideas and tales of success and woes of failures. Transparent insights to help startups.

As a startup, the biggest mistake you can make when building your company is failing to develop or implement a clear marketing strategy. As you probably already know, you can’t build a profitable business by simply conceptualizing, creating, and launching a great product. It takes much more than that to succeed. You have to connect with your audience, tell your story, build trust, nurture leads, and ultimately convince people that your product or service can help make their lives better or their jobs easier. To do it, you have to invest serious time, energy, and money into developing effective marketing strategies. 

You don’t need to be Boston-centric genius-savant to work these wicked pissah smart marketing startups tips. 

WP Smart 1: Set goals that are hard to achieve. Easily achievable goals are great morale boosters for your team, but they won’t help you scale your startup.

WP Smart 2: Know and listen to your audience. Let your customers guide your marketing strategy. Know what matters to them, where they spend their time online, what problems they need help with, what they think about your company and the product and services you provide, etc.

WP Smart 3: Don’t do what everyone else does, do what works. It’s tempting to go where every other startup is going and implement the same strategies as everyone else, but don’t do it. Instead, implement strategies that work. If Facebook isn’t right for your business, don’t sweat it. Invest your resources where they’ll make the most impact.

WP Smart 4: Hire people who are smarter than you. It’s the best way to build an amazing team of marketers. As a founder, you can’t do it on your own. Go out of your comfort zone and learn to trust people who know more than you do.

WP Smart 5: When you see an opportunity, don’t miss your chance to double-down. You might be presented with an opportunity to spend $10K on a marketing campaign, and that can be scary. But if you have the budget and you think you’ll get the return you’re looking for, do it. Don’t hesitate—when it comes to growth hacking, content marketing, paid advertising, and PR, opportunities can often disappear as fast as they arrive.

WP Smart 6: Alway go lean first, then spend time and money refining. When it comes to marketing a startup, the key is to spend as little resources as possible when testing tactics. This allows you and your team to launch more tests in less time in order to land on opportunities that can move the needle and spark growth. Once you have proven a tactic or idea to be successful, you can then invest more resources and time into refining and doubling down on your efforts.

WP Smart 7: Don’t be afraid to fail. Marketing moves fast. Each day there are new ideas and strategies being introduced and written about by companies everywhere. As a startup founder, it’s important to understand that testing a lot means failing a lot—and that’s OK. The key is to walk away from every test—successful or not—with learning that you can apply to your overall strategy going forward.

WP Smart 8: Be authentic and show people that you actually care. You can launch all the marketing strategies and tactics you want, but at the end of the day, if people don’t trust you or think you’re being genuine, you’re never going to get anywhere. Become a master marketer, but never forget the golden rule.

Remember: I am Good Brad (job) Hunting. www.iBradley.com 

“How the heck did you become the first blogger at Nasdaq?”

I stammered at this question during a recent job interview. I had never really considered it “an accomplishment.”

It was just “the job to do.”

However, my blogging quickly became a differentiation strategy that evolved into a couple thousands blog posts.

1. I had to sign a social media policy. This was especially essential as we were a public company. Of course, I knew Reg FD better than the average blogger, so even though I was not subject to RegFD, I would follow its guidelines to the letter.
2. Selecting the platform was a no brainer. We just introduced our own integrated blogging platform. Transparently, this was my driver and sneaky leverage to get permission to blog. “Promoting our own product.” 
3. Setting a content calendar. This was a simple task, as I was the sole blogger. I worked a rotation based on products-topic drivers: IR, PR, governance, board communications.
4. Create a voice. I went for humble, fact full and a little humor. It worked well for me – especially as the niche is a little dry.
5. Begin writing with authenticity to goal. Mine was educate and sell.
6. Write with absolute relevancy to your company’s products and services… and connect the dots for your audience. It’s how you become an authority. I blog about marketing and corporate communications – not baking or home improvement.
7. Send the blog links to the sales group email.

That last point turned out to be an indispensable action.

Our dramatic growth meant we kept adding sales people at a fast rate. Filling the void from  not having a corporate L&D strategy or direction, my blog became the continuous education portal for sales. Many would pass he blog articles on to their clients and active prospects as a simple touch point. This was all before I dove headfirst into automated demand generation. 

Of course, there are a zillion blogs on how to blog – and you will get hundreds of tips.  If nothing else, retain this: once you start, you cannot stop. Set a pace you can keep.

3 base questions for starting your content marketing program

Launching a content marketing program is overwhelming - there's no way around it.

Companies that are new to content marketing or program building may try to get a grasp on the requirements by asking 3 base questions:

1. Should I commission new content?
2. How many white papers will be needed?
3. Is there an ideal content format?

Although answers like “The secret of getting ahead is getting started,” “None of the secrets of success will work unless you do,” and “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step” could be motivational, they're about as insightful as a fortune cookie is for designing a content strategy. There isn’t an easy formula to get these answers; the answers will come during the planning and execution of your content marketing program.

To get there, though, you need to back up and look at two things: the goal you want to achieve and the specific audience you want to achieve it with.

Once your goal has been articulated and your target audience identified, it’s time to dig into the audience’s mindset and motivations. When you know what concerns them and what makes them successful, you can consider what topics they’ll research, read and respond to -- and when they’ll do so.

This will help you map different paths for your customers' buying journey and choose topics for your content marketing program that will be the best fit for them.

You'll also need to think about how to put a unique spin on your selected topics so that your content stands out in the noisy digital marketplace.

Getting to the Answers

Looking inside your organization is a great place to start. Evaluate existing content, internal subject matter experts and data, then determine whether they fit within the context of your content marketing strategy.

This will lead you to the answer to the first question: “Should I commission new content?”

You may find you already have an original way to cover your topic, but if you don’t have a new perspective to offer, it may be time to do something original, e.g., conduct research, interview industry experts or survey customers.

The answer to “How much content?” will come when you’re aligning your topics to the different stages of the buyer’s journey.

Create urgency around your topics early in the process, provide options in the middle stages, and then tie it all together by relating the topics to your company's specific solutions.

For instance, if your topic is corporate compliance, you could map your content like this:

Early stages of buyer's journey -- Create urgency

• Whitepaper: What to Expect When You Work with the SEC

Mid-stage -- Present options that solve the urgent issue

• Checklist: Financial Documents You Need to Go Public.
• Webinar: Experts Speak on the Pros & Cons of Going Public

Late-stage -- Content tied to products

• How-to video: How to stay on SEC deadline with our SaaS portal

Looking at your content needs for each stage and the different channels where your audience can engage with this content will give you a sense of how much you need to produce.

And here’s where you get the answer to your final question: “Is there an ideal content format for me to use?”

The answer is still “The smart thing is to prepare for the unexpected” - and that's what makes it fun. Your audience will find your content in multiple channels from many directions, and your shiny new original content should be in the format best suited to that particular channel.

• A speaking slot at an industry event.
• A webinar to review best practices.
• A press release announcing research findings.
• An infographic to share in social channels.
• A video demonstrating how your solution resolves your audience's issues.
• A series of blog posts from your subject matter expert.
• An executive summary in an email.
• A customizable sales presentation.

With no formula, there isn’t one right answer. But if the question, after planning your content marketing program across these three dimensions, is “Have I optimized my chances for success?”, hopefully your cookie will say “Your past success will be overshadowed by your future success” or “You’re gonna generate a poopload of leads.”

To drive growth, branding must be a top-down strategy

Branding is critical to your growth strategy. But how strategic is your branding? 

• Is your brand’s story authentic?
• Is your story being told?
• Is it the “right” story? 

As growth-stage companies focus on developing their teams, product lines and operational systems, executives can lose sight of the deliberate planning and execution needed for effective branding.

But this is no time to take your eye off the brand, considering the reach, speed and superabundance in the mobile, social and web spheres. The digital economy has fundamentally changed how consumers and businesses alike come to recognize brands, research product purchases and develop brand loyalty.

(Image, right: I am ALWAYS personal branding)

Take consumer purchasing decisions. According to Nielsen/inPowered MediaLab, Consumers rely five times more on trusted content today than five years ago when deciding what to buy. This trusted content includes your own communications as well as user reviews, but more often than not, consumers are consulting third-party experts.

In the B2B market, 88% of business buyers say online content has played a moderate to major role in vendor selection, according to a report by the CMO Council and NetLine Corp. Expert influencers also predominate in B2B as well as B2C.

This is the environment in which strategic branding becomes not only more important, but potentially more effective (and measurably so) in helping your company make its mark, build a customer base and differentiate itself from the competition. How you tell your brand’s story is critical. C-level engagement in branding is essential to determine how best to drive interest in your company and solutions among prospects, customers and key influencers.

• Make your brand’s story authentic: Brand authenticity sets the stage for earning familiarity, developing trust and building ongoing relationships in your market. Authenticity must run deep. C-level executives need to prioritize brand communications for the whole team.
• Make the brand the “north star” for your company: The unifying idea about who you are as a business and what you stand for. Far more than just a visual identity or tag line, this is your commitment to the marketplace. Through your brand architecture, all products or subsidiaries roll up to this unifying idea, along with unified messaging aligned with clearly stated corporate values.
• Empower your people with the right direction, structure and processes: Don’t silo the brand. Rather, instill it across all business functions and levels, from the C-suite to brand ambassadors on the front lines of sales and customer service.
• Make sure your marketing and public relations efforts are integrated as well: These functions should be working together on earned, paid and owned media, establishing “connected communications”— an integrated approach across digital, social and offline channels such as events and print media.
• And keep the branding strategy on track with business development: Branding is not an 11th exercise as you go to market or face a crisis situation.

Right story = effective story.

This consistent, multifaceted approach leverages all channels to build an ongoing story, compounding the visibility of your brand and paving the way forward.

Reinforce your brand message continuously along the continuum from familiarity to trust to engagement with content that educates, inspires, advises or supports. Rethink your definition of news, to remain top of mind in an environment of ever-shorter attention spans and ever-faster circulation of information.

Issuing news releases and matte releases at key milestones in your company’s growth is no longer enough to keep your brand in circulation. Innovative companies are also expanding social channels, blogs and content marketing programs—using press releases to extend the reach and impact of these communications efforts, as well.

Distribution drives ongoing message discovery to existing and new constituents. Distribute messages not only to journalists on your targeted media lists, but to analysts and other experts, as well as your brand’s followers on social networks. Compelling, well-crafted messages are found by new audiences, redistributed across peer and professional networks and surfaced in search engine results. They can ripple across the web and back to your site for months after the messages are originally issued.

• Listen to your customers, potential customers and other key audiences in social media to determine what they care about and whose opinions they respect.
• Use social tools to analyze these influencers. Who are they? What are they talking about? These are the bloggers, analysts, trendsetters and other opinion-makers who can help amplify your message and build your community.
• Redouble efforts to establish relationships with key influencers. Bring them ideas that could help their audiences as a group and position your company as part of the solution.
• Use press releases to bring the imprimatur of your brand to bear on new areas of your brand strategy. Issue announcements on branded research, seasonal consumer tip sheets on your web site, B2B thought pieces on your blogs and other branded content.
• Unleash the power of multimedia. Statistics show that rich graphics and video make most communications more effective, including multimedia press releases. Here’s just one way: video increases people’s understanding of your product or service by 74%, according to recent research by Digital Sherpa.3
• Ongoing monitoring will help continually generate new ideas that underscore the value of your brand. An added benefit of monitoring is the capacity of social tools and other web techniques to measure the impact of public relations as never before—whether in terms of traffic driven to your web site, responses to calls-to-action or readings of sentiments surrounding your brand.

Even while driving a continuous flow of brand messaging, companies have to be careful to avoid volume simply for the sake of volume. You’re not going to get anywhere today if you don’t have a credible, unique story...Your content needs to provide value to the reader— be it fresh insight, entertainment or problem solving.

At some point, you may find the very reputation of your brand relying in real time on all these investments in authenticity, consistency and engagement—on your unflagging enterprise- wide brand commitment and empowerment. At times of crisis communications, it is even more critical that you and your customers have a very clear idea of your brand identity, its promise to the market, your corporate values, your key messages and how they all relate. Establish shared responsibility for monitoring to help pick up on stories—good or bad for your brand—very quickly. Plan ahead and have a SWAT team of pre-selected, media-trained company experts in place for rapid response. With crisis response that is true to your company’s inherent values, you may find that brand loyalty wins the day.

Bottomline… Stay top of mind: Brand awareness can help on many levels: building credibility, nurturing relationships, generating demand, driving revenue and attracting stakeholders to your venture. Consistent messaging continuously reinforced across channels and over time will help your brand remain top of mind in your market, with a valuable share of voice not only in the media but in all of the channels that are most relevant to your success.

Truth makes B2B transparency the opposite of invisible

Driven by my investor relations evangelism, I have written a lot about transparency, especially digitally speaking.

One of the foremost modern business thinkers on the topic (other than me, of course) is Donald Tapscott, who first wrote about it the digital economy in 1997 in his book simply entitled The Digital Economy. He has advised many global organizations on the economic and social impact of truth and openness on today’s innovations in digital technologies.

Take a coffee break and listen to Tapscott’s momentous TED Global talk in 2012 on the concept of Radical Openness.

He offers a compelling perspective on why the world and businesses must embrace — as oppose to resist — radical openness and transparency.

There are several elements B2B leaders can begin to implement to foster openness and transparency with their customers and potential buyers:

• Drop the old push versus pull mindset. The conventional mindset regarding push versus pull in marketing is prevalent. However, most of this mindset takes place outside of the wall representing openness and transparency.

• Develop a porous collaboration mindset. Develop organizational thinking around how to engage customers and buyers in open collaboration. Open collaboration means the wall comes down and there is a sharing of challenges as well as multiple networks to arrive at solutions.  Collaboration is not a fanciful idea.  An IBM Global C-Suite Study showed that 72% of CEO’s in outperforming organizations have built organizations, which collaborate closely with customers.

• Practice true transparency. As Tapscott points out, there is a difference between collaboration and transparency. Which involves the open sharing and communications of relevant information to customers and buyers.

• Conduct immersive research with buyers. To truly help as well as empower customers and buyers, via collaboration and transparency, B2B organizations should be involved in in-depth, immersive understanding of their customers and buyers.

• Rethink how to communicate with customers. Shifting from a push versus pull mindset means shaking loose from conventional means of communicating with customers and buyers. Embracing the creation of open as well as immersive experiences – allowing customers and buyers true paths of honest and open dialogue.

As we look ahead towards more radical changes in the digital economy, B2B organizations can look ahead to more openness and transparency demands by their customers. One thing we can be sure of, as the mentioned McKinsey survey points out, is buyers will be placing more emphasis on trust and openness in their evaluations and purchase decisions.

Now is a good time to start the process of openness and transparency. Otherwise B2B businesses may inadvertently create an immovable wall between themselves and buyers.

 

How to give away a car at a national sales meeting

To save you time reading, the key points of this story are:

• The power of relationships for OEM marketers
• Balancing relationships across a diverse sales channel
• Keep It Simple Stooopid

One of my responsibilities was as marketing lead and liaison with a very large ($1B market-cap) Japanese manufacturer. Not only were we the OEM for a key component, but we also shared a sales channel of about 200 agents throughout the USA, sliced into 60 regional independent distributors.  Their success was our success together everyone achieves more kookokachoo.  

Working directly with the manufacturer, in addition to continual lead generation, sales enablement and channel management, there was the “annual national sales meeting.” Each year, the manufacturer hosted a traditional sales gathering – all hands on deck – in a nice resort. (NOTE: It was never an overly elaborate event, in fact, it tended to be friendly and personal.) Their marketing team would “ask” all their OEMs to donate a large amount of cash: a sort of sponsorship. $35,000.

And thus my challenge: although they were terrific partners, the flat payment lacked legs for us. I already knew all the sales people. I already supported all the sales people. The Japanese marketing team knew me well, and they heavily relied on me for strategic and tactical USA-centric work. The payment seemed perfunctorily… it’s just what manufactures ask of OEMs, right?  

Tactically, during the sales conference, we were slotted a 60-minute presentation / product break out session.  However, as we were in constant communications and support with the sales channel, this break-out was redundant.

My company would not get direct value for the $35k. No impact at all.

The power of relationships for OEM marketers

Here is what I proposed to the Japanese marketing team, ten-months prior the conference.  Rather than a flat check, let me use that money to directly motivate our USA sales channel. I’ll run a sales contest… and the winner gets a new car… awarded at the sales conference’s key dinner event.   

They loved the idea, and more importantly, they trusted me to execute the idea to our mutual benefit. Drip by drip, over a few years, I had built a (results-driven) relationship with my Japanese counterparts  that gave them the strength to present this idea to their senior management. It was approved. Rather than the flat check, I’d buy a $35k car.

Balancing relationships across a diverse sales channel

Now to the tactics of the contest. High-level, it was a traditional sales contest.  Sell more = WIN.

However, there was a slight speed bump. If you support sales in the USA, you are well aware that as with most any USA geographically assigned sales map, not all the regions have equal opportunity. Specifically, the Ohio and New York distributors physically had more opportunity than the sales team in Mississippi. The New York state team will always generate more revenue.

The contest to win the car cannot be based on top-line revenue. The Mississippi sales person would know, from day one that s/he will never win the car. Zero motivation. How do I balance the odds?  

Keep It Simple Stooopid

I went for a raffle-lottery based contest. Simply, for every piece of hardware a sales person sold, they received a single raffle ticket. Now, of course, the sales person in Ohio would have better odds of winning the car: they would have more tickets in the bucket. Yet, the Mississippi sales person had the hope of any raffle. The play of random gravity. The luck of the draw.

Overall, the uncomplicated rules made it very easy to manage and communicate out to the field.

Not only was it successful, but it added an exciting element to the sales conference. I hammed it up. I rented an oversized spinning-bingo-raffle-cage-thingy and then – with the pomp & circumstance of a gameshow host – had the head of sales from my company spin the raffle cage crank, and the Japanese manufacturer’s president (who I blindfolded) pull out the winning ticket.

Ta-da! It’s a neeeeeew caaaaaar!

It was great fun. As a final logistic, we bought the car from a dealer local to the winning sales person.