B2B Marketing to Men vs. Women

Is it politically correct to talk about the differences in B2B marketing to men vs. women? Maybe not, but working with a new client this past week revealed a bit of the reality related to that issue.

It all started with the client implementing the proven, accepted best practice in direct marketing that involves including an offer tied to an expiration date or deadline.

The purpose of employing this tactic is to overcome natural human inertia. Here’s how it works.

A prospect, customer or member receives a direct marketing email, direct mail piece, or even sees an eye-catching Google™ Search Engine Marketing Ad. But because of today’s over-the-top workloads and time demands, these folks put off responding to the message by thinking, “This looks interesting. I’ll do it later.”

The offer is the device that stops that thought and says, “You must respond now or this inviting ‘extra bonus’ will go away.”

Making an offer to generate quick action is effective with both businessmen and businesswomen. The difference lies in which offers work with men and which are attractive to women.

Trying to get a selected target to participate in an Industry Trend survey, marketers are safe with something like, “The first 200 to complete the survey receive an Amazon.com gift card.” This allows respondents to choose the gift that appeals to each one personally — regardless of gender.

My client, a business products company whose market is 75% female, was using an offer to try to increase the size of each purchase. They tested two offers:

• Order $200 or more and get free shipping

vs.

• Order $200 or more and receive a certificate for a Free Box of Name-Brand Chocolates

The men responded to the free shipping. The women chose the reverse — in overwhelming numbers.

What this tells B2B marketers is that, when building in-house prospecting lists or even populating a CRM program, it’s important to include a field for gender. That’s because there may be times in the marketing process when knowing the gender of your prospects could make a huge difference in the response to your campaigns.

Are B2B marketers offering too much stuff and not enough information?

In his latest blog, “Getting meta,” Seth Godin shares his usual instant insight into the world of sales and marketing. This little gem describes the state of the Internet and how services that appear to be the information are really just tools to find the information.

His conclusion: “Right now, there’s way too much stuff and far too little information about that stuff. Sounds like an opportunity.”

That’s what I think about a lot of the B2B marketing content I see — “too much stuff and far too little information.”

It’s important that marketers make sure the content they are offering has real value to the prospect asking for it. To have value to the reader, content should include one or more of this type of useful information:

• A better understanding of the causes of a specific business problem.
• Some best practices for solving a specific business problem.
• What peers or experts are saying about the problem.
• Some kind of self-assessment of how the prospect’s company is handling a specific problem.
• Industry advances being made to make solving the problem easier.

Informational content should not sell the company’s product or service directly (there can be a sales story and secondary offer at the end of the content), but it should educate the reader and position the company offering it as a trusted resource.

So how does a marketer make sure the content they are offering has value? Here are four tips on how to do it:

1. Provide content information that matches the specific needs of each pipeline lead.
   Send a short survey to your pipeline asking them to identify their three biggest challenges. Then target the content you are offering them (white paper, checklist, guide, Webinar, self-assessment) to the issues they have identified.
2. Create content that has how-to take-aways that can be implemented without buying your product or service.
   For example, if your solution is collaboration software, include usable advice on how to improve collaboration without buying your product. That approach positions your company as a trusted “thought leader,” and shows that you truly care about helping them solve their problem — not just selling them software.
3. Offer a mix of some content that is available without registration and some that is not.
   By not requiring registration for content, your company instantly positions itself as a valuable resource. With no registration, B2B marketers can boost the number of downloads of their content to expose their brand to a larger audience of potentially qualified leads. However, a B2B marketer’s ultimate goal is generating qualified leads that can be nurtured and turned into sales. To do this, one must require registration for access to the more in-depth content or informational offers being made.
4. Provide content that satisfies the focus of each decision-maker and influencer in prospect companies.
   Need the approval of the CFO? Provide content that positions the financial benefits of the company’s product or service. Do the same for the CEO, user, department manager, HR manager or whatever titles have influence on — or decision-making power over — the purchase.

Content is not designed to directly sell products or services. It is designed to educate prospects on how their peers are handling similar challenges and subtly edge them along toward choosing the marketing company’s product or service.

Seth Godin got it right; we all have an opportunity. Let’s use it.

Content by any other name would smell as sweet.

A new LinkedIn group I joined, “DemandGen Specialists,” featured an article by Jon Miller that appeared on Marketo talking about the value of using content to position a company as a thought leader. “Why Thought Leadership Is Your Most Valuable Asset” covers how providing content is the key to achieving thought leadership and provides excellent tips for how to make sure content delivers real value. Then a BtoB online post by Christopher Hosford reports that, when providing collateral, “White papers remain most influential for tech buyers.”

The conclusion from both of these posts is that getting the edge in B2B marketing today is all about content.

As a direct response marketer, I’m pleased to see that the rest of the world has finally discovered what the direct response marketing community has known for about 100 years. That is that giving someone something of value to their business in exchange for making contact with you is the most effective way to generate qualified leads – or, as it is now called, “generate demand.”

In direct response, what is now called “content” was once called an “offer.” Although the percentages will differ, depending on who is presenting them, here are the influencers that determine the potential success of any direct marketing program — and as you can see the quality of the offer is right up there:

The accuracy of reaching the target market can affect response by 200%.
The success of a direct marketing program can increase by as much as 200% by accurately targeting the email or mailing list chosen, the Web site on which the banner appears, the ad words used in SEM, the trade show attended, the print advertising placed and much more.

 The strength of the offer (content) can affect response by 100%.
The offer, or the content, is the second most important element in successful lead generation, whether it is a free white paper, Webinar, checklist, case study, demo or all the other options that are so nicely outlined by Michele Linn of Savvy B2B Marketing in “Need Content? 20 Formats to Consider.”

The quality of the messaging can affect response by 50%.
My specialty is writing content offers and the messaging (regardless of channel) used to get prospects to request the content. However, I am constantly humbled to know that unless the market is well targeted and the offer has value, the marketing messaging will not have the impact it could have.

 The design of the marketing communication can affect response by 50%.
Just like the marketing copy, effective, eye-catching design has no impact unless the channel targets the right market and the offer has value to that market.

So whether you call it content, or an offer or collateral material, after 100 years, it’s still the sweetest tool for successful demand generation marketing.

Two ideas in 20 seconds.

The days of “all I know is what I read in the paper” are long gone. I still read the newspaper, but it’s so small these days that it provides just a fragment of what’s going on in the world. Since much of my world is about B2B marketing, the newspaper is virtually worthless.

So to keep up with what’s being said and done in B2B and direct marketing practices, I take a quick daily visit to LinkedIn, then review the blogs that I’ve marked as having frequently valuable insight and information. Reviewing these favorites yesterday, I said, “This must be sweeps week — everyone seems to be putting out their best.” It was so good, in fact, that I thought I’d share two of them today:

Casey Hibbard of Stories that Sell announces the new SocialMediaExaminer.com online pub started by Michael Stelzner and colleagues. It’s the perfect resource for folks like me who need to get up to speed on the best use of today’s social media tools. Thanks for bringing this to our attention, Casey.

Ardath Albee on her Marketing Interactions blog talks about an often-overlooked option for creating lead nurturing content in “Articles are Food for Lead Nurturing Programs.” I’ve always liked using articles because they are quick and easy to create. She provides many other reasons why and how businesses can leverage articles as effective marketing content.

So I am a bit wiser today thanks to the bloggers in the word — hope you are, too.

How to boost B2B content downloads.

Like most marketers these days, I have opted into sites that provide regular access to articles, white papers, reports, surveys and Webcasts that, hopefully, will make me better at my job.

Many of these are marketing sites (Target Marketing, MarketingProfs, Marketing Sherpa, Ziff Davis eSeminars, DM News, BtoB, eMarketer and more). Then, because most of the clients I serve are technology companies, I try to keep up with that world as well (Information Week, Web Buyers Guide, IThound, CIO and IDG Connect, to name a few).

With all these emails swirling into my inbox every day, I’m exposed to invites to review hundreds of pieces of content every day — and so are your prospects. Will they take the time to read your marketing intro or abstract and download your content? Only if the headline catches their eye and their imagination.

To be effective, content headlines need to instantly communicate what the piece contains. If your headlines read more like these real-life examples, then you may be diminishing interest in what you have to offer:

• “Unified Communications and Process Automation Combine to Maximize ROI”
• “Managed data centre operating IT infrastructures successfully using innovative services”
• “Cover Your Assets with Desktop Managed Services”
• “Transforming Data Into Relevance and ROI”
• “How Virtualization Changes IT Costs”
• “Don’t let CRM push you over the edge: how to build your business case”

I’m sure the people who wrote these felt that they represented the content very nicely. And they may have. But these headlines are mushy. They provide no intrigue, no big promise, no revelations, no specifics. For example, “How Virtualization Changes IT Costs” doesn’t tell me if the change is positive or negative. Heck, for all I know “Virtualization” could be really expensive. Something like “5 Ways Virtualization Cuts IT Costs” is a clear, strong and instantly understood title.

As I stated in an earlier post — “Great B2B marketing demands you do your prospects’ thinking for them”– you don’t want your prospects to have to think, you want them to react to your message, or in this case, your content title.

Strong titles should instantly communicate a clear picture of what the content contains, as these examples do:

• “Enterprise VoIP PBX: What to Know Before You Buy”
• “4 Things Your Anti-Virus Should Do, but Doesn’t”
• “20 Questions for Smart Business Decisions”
• “How to Defend Your Network Against New Hacker Tactics”
• “Top 5 IT Budget Killers: What You Need to Know”

With just a few active words, your content can move past sounding like another ho-hum white paper and become information your prospective customer sees as a “must read.” So I recommend you pay as much attention to your title as you do your content. It will make a difference.

How white papers help make sales.

Savvy B2B Marketing is a blog I recommend for powerful, well-researched advice on a broad range of B2B marketing subjects. It’s a perfect complement to the tips and techniques I cover here. I encourage you to visit it now to see a new post on white papers by Stephanie Tilton. It tells the psychology of why leads generated by white papers and other “informational” offers are more likely to lead to closed sales.

Powerful lead generating alternatives to white papers

In the world of B2B lead generation, far be it from me to knock the value of White Papers. IT professionals looking for information on any technical issue search for and find just what they want to know in White Papers posted on content syndication sites including TechTarget, WebBuyers Guide, IDG Connect, Network World, TradePub — the options are too many to list.

Posting White Papers on those sites puts your insight right where it needs to be — where your prospects are looking for solutions.

White Papers also make great lead-generation offers. A letter, email, or search engine marketing (SEM) ad offering a White Paper on a topic pertinent to your product or service does a great job of filling the pipeline with qualified leads.

But for those of you who are saying “Oh no, not another White Paper,” there are alternatives. Consider these two:

Self-Assessment Checklist

A one-page checklist that prospects can use to

measure their practices against best practices. The

topic, of course, relates to the product or service you

sell.

Guide

Rather than communicate the industry knowledge you want to share in a White Paper, turn it into a “how-to” guide. Include checklists and steps on issues related to the problem your product or service can solve and you’ll have a winner. Print this one out in a bound booklet and it becomes a great hand-out for trade shows.

So don’t reject the White Paper for lead generation. But do look to these other tools to deliver a fresh boost to your B2B lead generation marketing efforts.

Afterthoughts:

Whereas the above post covered some excellent tools for lead generation, Michele Linn at Savvy B2B Marketing does a beautiful job of covering ALL the major options that businesses have for providing content in “Need Content? 20 Formats to Consider.”

In the world of direct marketing, we call these “offers” that can be used to get prospects to interact with a company at the lead generation stage and throughout the nurturing process. It’s a very handy list. Thanks Michele.