Why It’s Not E-mail Versus Twitter.

Bill McClosky wrote a thoughtful article for ClickZ on the prospect of Twitter replacing e-mail in E-Mail Versus Twitter. He says that “the debate was kicked off on a blog post by Bob Frady, a marketer most recently at Live Nation.”

Well, my first reaction as a B2B marketing copywriter is how can one possibly tell any kind of a beneficial product story in 140 characters?

But then I realized that people’s learning, researching, shopping, and buying habits are not universal. For instance, there was never a true conflict between catalogs and retail stores. The fact is, some people prefer shopping from catalogs while others prefer shopping at stores.

People are people. Some may get introduced to a new product idea on Twitter. Later they may look for content about it online. Next they may register and download a white paper. Then they may get e-mails from the company making the product telling them more about it and inviting them to see a demo or attend a Webcast. And so it goes.

This is just one scenario, of course, but there are no absolutes in how each person likes to get his or her information at each stage of the buying process. An understanding of human nature makes it clear that it’s not probable for one contact option to win out over all others.

Like Bob Frady, I am not a personal fan of Twitter. But as I reported in an earlier post, Getting over our own marketing bias, looking at things from our own point of view is a common marketing problem. Good marketers find ways to get over it.

So it’s not e-mail versus Twitter. Twitter is just another channel to add to one’s integrated marketing and PR programs. That’s all there is to it.

Any B2B marketers feeling guilty about social media?

Social media is, well, everywhere. Nielsen NetView reported that, as of February, there were 7,038,000 Twitter users, an increase of 1,382% from the previous year. In April, BtoB Magazine reported that 58% of best-in-class companies have dedicated resources devoted to social marketing.

Blog articles are everywhere, and each has an important element to add to the conversation:

• On Savvy B2B Marketing, in “Social Business – Where Will It Lead?,” Jamie Wallace points out the powerful connection between being social and social media. In it she envisions a hopeful future for social media that goes far beyond marketing and profit.
• In “Social Media Use Soars Among B2B Marketers: Really?” on B2B Marketing POSTs, Laura Ramos questions social media survey results and wonders if they truly represent the participation and the impact of that participation.
• Then, of course, there’s Writing Boots’ David Murray’s humorous but true take last spring on how lives are endangered by an obsession with Twitter in “Shel Holtz vs. Kurt Vonnegut.”

Social media Webcasts and conference sessions attract the greatest attendance, and marketing directors are feeling guilty if they haven’t added a strong social media presence to their marketing mix.

Unfortunately, most of the B2B companies I have the pleasure of working with don’t have the dollars or the manpower to keep up with this new channel and take advantage of it in any sort of a formal way. Individual employees may participate here and there, but most companies are too busy trying to generate leads and sales to deploy any formal or effective social media implementation.

So how guilty should non-participants feel? The first session I attended on social media included the advice that, “rather than create your own company blog, you can achieve the same impact by getting other blogs to talk about your company.” This sounded suspiciously like PR to me and not direct marketing. In fact, blogs themselves are (just like white papers and other content) a way to position a company as a thought leader and support the brand.

So should B2B marketers feel guilty about not having a strong social media presence? Your first job is to generate qualified leads that can lead directly to sales. That is, to build a pipeline of companies and contacts that can be nurtured and turned directly into sales and revenue. Until social media can directly generate those leads I say keep an eye on it; but, for now, ignore your guilt and move on.

If you have more insight on how your B2B company is handling its social media, please share it.

What you don’t know about your prospects could put you out of business.

Recently I received an invitation from BtoB magazine to attend a Webcast entitled “Online Marketing Revolves Around Content: When Content IS Marketing.”

I am guessing that the presentation is to educate marketers on the value of using and leveraging content as the focus of their marketing.

I’m sure it will be a good presentation. But it is BtoB’s invitation that I’d like to comment on. It contained four bullet points about what skills and knowledge I would gain by attending. It included:

• Understand who your customers are
• Determine your customers’ needs as they relate to your product or service
• Establish what you want your customers to do
• Settle on the product and content mix

The fact is that the first two bullets are so critical to all marketing that not having an intimate knowledge of them is a sure path to failure.

My partner once accepted a position with a company (that shall remain nameless) that had secured $40 million in venture capital money based on projections of how quickly it could win a percentage of its target market. The market was huge, and all the company needed was a reasonably small percentage of that market to achieve its goal. This company is now out of business.

What didn’t the company know? It only used the size of the market and the perceived value of its product for that market to make projections. The company did not “understand” its target market at all. It didn’t understand how the market made decisions or what its priorities and prime motivators were.

So as BtoB magazine promises in its invitation, understanding your customers and knowing who they are and what their needs are as they relate to your product or service is ultimately the most important thing a business needs to know.

How to handle new B2B leads.

There’s hardly been a single marketing conference that did not have at least one session on getting marketing and sales to work better together. Everyone agrees that there have been huge gaps over the years between what sales wants and what marketing delivers. There’s way more intelligence about it today. But I must take my hat off to Ardath Albee of MarketingInteractions. She wrote a guest article for the BMI (Business Marketing Institute) that appeared in its August 18, 2009, Tuesday Marketing Notes. Entitled “The Payoff for B2B Content Marketing is Movement,” it is the all-time clearest and most accurate description of what should happen after a lead is obtained and why that I have ever read. Please, marketers, print it out, share it with everyone in marketing AND everyone in sales.

 Then, for more valuable detail about mapping content to buying stages, see an article by Russell Kern written for Target Marketing magazine called “Leverage the B-to-B Buy Cycle.” Follow what you learn and you’ll never have to attend another sales vs. marketing session again.

In B2B marketing it’s no pain, no gain.

I’m on a diet. No, it’s not one of the official diets like the South Beach Diet® or Nutrisystem®. It’s not Jenny Craig® and it’s not even Weight Watchers®, though I’ll admit I have the Weight Watchers cookbook and it has wonderful recipes in it. No, I’m on the “Duh Diet.” How does that work? The “Duh Diet” requires that I eat less and exercise more. Duh! It’s a bit painful to have to forego desserts, but the exercise isn’t painful at all. So who started the “no pain, no gain” exercise mantra?

According to Wikipedia, “No pain, no gain (or “No gain without pain”) is an exercise motto that came into prominence after 1982 when actress Jane Fonda began to produce a series of aerobics workout videos.”  She was wrong, of course. Walking daily makes a huge difference, and it’s not painful at all.

What does require pain is B2B marketing.
It’s not the pain of the strategizing, the cost, or the effort I’m referring to, but the message. That is, if your message doesn’t immediately identify with your target market’s biggest pain, or a promise to solve that pain, your qualified prospects won’t read your message.

It’s simple, really, as these email or direct mail opening lines illustrate:

“Like many manufacturers, today’s rapidly changing markets and customer demands may be challenging your ability to react and stay competitive.”

“You know how costly it is for your company’s telecom system to go down unexpectedly — productivity stops, customers get frustrated and angry, sales virtually come to a halt.”

“Your school is now under added pressure to please policy makers, demanding parents, and even the media. Part of that pressure includes the Americans with Disability Act (ADA) regulations.”

“Your SalesForce.com is a powerful tool for sales and customer relationship management. But is the data in it telling you all you need to know about the real health of your pipeline?”

“Keeping your cardiac medicine practice successful requires a focus on two critical areas: making the right patient treatment decisions and keeping your practice profitable.”

Whether you’re using email or direct mail or other channels, if you don’t leverage your buyer’s pains in the message, there will be no gains.

Will your B2B prospect take time to read your message?

Just read this great article: “Three Tips to Engage the ‘Short Attention’ White Paper Reader.” by Jonathon Kantor in a guest post at Savvy B2B Marketing. As the title implies, it talks about tactics you should follow in your white papers to improve their chances of being read.

He’s right. The little time our business prospects have to read anything should be very much on our minds when conducting B2B marketing. Want prospect to pick your email to read out of the often hundreds received daily? Want your letter read? Want your prospect to ask for, and then read your offer?

In Jonathon’s article you’ll see that current research shows that shorter is better for white papers, as long as they are not too short. This should be true of your other marketing tools as well. Here are the best practices I try to follow when writing marketing communications:

Email: 250 words
Subject lines: 40 characters with spaces
Direct mail lead letters: 1 page
Paragraphs: No longer than four lines

In today’s busy work environment, to get a message read, we need to get to the point — and do it fast.

What motivates business buyers to buy?

Geoffrey James on BNET writes about the “The 7 ‘Emotional Hooks’ for B2B Selling.” It’s a great reminder that human nature plays a role in all decisions. He asks if he missed any in his article. The answer is actually “yes.” His list of emotions that influence buying decisions is not quite complete.

For instance, as a B2B copywriter, I often use the “hero” approach (which always works by the way). There’s nothing more emotional than wanting to be the hero. I first used it for FirsTel, an early US WEST company (now Qwest), back when people wore ties to the office. It’s an emotional approach that even works on IT Executives.

So where did I learn that the underlying motivation for all decisions is emotional, even B2B decisions? By reading Successful Direct Marketing Methods, originally by Bob Stone, now by Ron Jacobs.

In it are listed all the emotional drivers for a decision. They fall into two categories: 1) the desire to gain and 2) the desire to avoid loss. Here is what is listed in the book:

The Desire to Gain
To make money
To save time
To avoid effort
To achieve comfort
To have health
To be popular
To experience pleasure
To be clean
To be praised
To be in style
To gratify curiosity
To satisfy an appetite
To have beautiful possessions
To attract romantic partners
To be an individual
To emulate others
To take advantage of opportunities

The Desire to Avoid Loss
To avoid criticism
To keep possessions
To avoid physical pain
To avoid loss of reputation
To avoid loss of money
To avoid trouble

Because this is such an important topic to B2B marketers, you’ll see more about it here in the future. But I’m glad others like Geoffrey are spreading the word.

One more way marketing can help make sales.

For 8 years at the beginning of my working life, I sold radio advertising. The place was Denver which was, at the time, the second-most competitive radio market in the nation. It was beat out only by Phoenix which had more radio stations per capita than any other city. It was hard work.

I figured out which businesses might be trying to reach the demographics of the station I worked for, made cold calls, showed up on the businesses’ doorsteps, hoped I’d get a few minutes with the decision-maker and made my pitch. I had a business card, a rate card and a page of the latest ratings results.

Unlike most B2B companies today, there was no marketing department generating leads and then nurturing those leads until they were ready to be turned over to sales. I generated the leads, and the nurturing was me showing up over and over until the sale was made or I was told to go away.

I’m not saying that salespeople in companies with marketing departments have it easy. Just the opposite. The station I started at was selling radio spots for $12 each. That’s a huge difference from selling $100,000+ enterprisewide software to companies that often take as many as 18 months to make a buying decision. It’s a tough job, and today’s B2B salespeople need all the help they can get.

So besides generating the lead and nurturing it, there is one thing marketing can do to help in the sales process. That is to arm sales with one-sheets targeted at overcoming common buying objections. Why? Because it’s not practical for a salesperson to personally speak to every influencer and decision-maker in a given company. When a strong objection arises and sales feels they are at a barrier in the process, they can send the appropriate one-sheet to their primary contact via email. Then this contact can be encouraged to distribute it to others involved in the decision.

Here are the simple steps for getting these sales sheets done:

• Call a meeting with sales reps so they can tell you the main objections they hear in the sales process.
• Ask sales what they typically say to overcome these objections.
• Have a front-only or front-and-back 8 1/2″ x 11″ sheet written that addresses the specific challenge in the opening copy, then clearly present the product benefits that overcome that particular objection.
• Include highlights of the full sales story in case the document gets into the hands of someone unfamiliar with your product and company.
• Be sure to include a strong call to action at the end.
• Run the copy by sales to make sure it’s on target before taking it to design.
• Use your company logo and graphic standards in the design, but it’s not necessary to make the piece fancy, as it should look like an informational piece and not like a brochure.

In the scope of marketing materials these sales sheets should be fast and easy to create — and sales will thank you for them.

Lead generation marketing is not about selling your product.

“Build it and they will come”

No, this post is not a rip-off of a Kevin Costner movie. It’s about product managers who think their company’s product is so great that just telling people about it is enough to generate sales. Unfortunately, those folks do live in a “Field of Dreams.”

A better product does NOT guarantee sales. The classic example of this is Betamax vs. VHS, the two rival home videocassette tape-recording technologies that battled it out in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Even though Betamax was generally considered a superior recording format, VHS’s better marketing and lower cost won out so many more consumers that Betamax was pretty much obsolete by the mid-1980s.

The main difference between a sales message and a lead-generation message is that, to maximize response, lead generation does not sell the product — it sells the offer that gives prospects a reason to show they are interested in getting the benefits the product delivers.

This is a difficult concept for product managers to accept. They are convinced that all a marketing message needs to do is tout the fabulous product and its innovative features and prospect companies will buy it. Actually, some will. But those that respond to a pure sales message are already deep into the buying cycle and are ready to buy — your message just happened to hit them at that magical moment. But that group represents a very small number of the total potential buyers.

Lead generation reaches those that are ready to buy. But, at the same time, it fills the sales pipeline with prospects from every stage of the buying cycle, including those that have not yet started researching solutions for the problem your product or service can solve.

A message that focuses on the offer reminds your prospects of the pain they are experiencing, then invites them to request information on how to relieve that pain.

Offers can be dozens of informational items from white papers to guides and checklists to Webinars with content that focuses on ways your target market can get control over the problem your product or service can solve.

Lead generation is the marketing approach that will maximize response and fill your sales pipeline with qualified leads. Once leads have been generated, then and only then is it appropriate to start selling the product.