What has changed in the past 4 years in B2B marketing?
Change is not always obvious when you're in the middle of it. Looking back over the past few years, here are a few things that I've noticed:
Marketing automation and lead nurturing has replaced old fashioned email marketing
Good news - more relevant, targeted communications. Powerful reporting that let's you talk numbers with confidence.
Bad news - requires excellence in content creation, which is HARD and TIME CONSUMING. So never mind the technology, it's still hard work to engage people and keep them engaged.
Social media has gone from "something we should do" to "something we're doing"
Good news - participation and experimentation are the only way to learn with this, so many brands are actually starting to do something meaningful. See, you never needed the "Social Media Guru". Just a little courage.
Bad news - It's the new shiney corporate thing...everything now has to be "social media". People feel overwhelmed with the volume and frequency of communication. The signal to noise ratio is terrible.
We've gone through the GFC, and as always, marketing budgets get slashed first
Good news - even people who used to have big budgets have started to look at more creative ways of marketing. Including social media. See point one.
Bad news - Well, I know I for one would have loved to have had a little more to spend...
Video is emerging as the killer app
Good news: People were never designed to write and read, we were designed to talk, look and listen. Now that anyone can make and publish video at little or no cost, there is a whole new world of opportunity opening up to generate interest, build a brand and convert prospects. And if I was 20, I would go head first into that business.
Bad news: As with everything online, the barrier to entry is low and so is a lot of the quality. This is not an easy game and requires people with skills to write stories, direct and create interesting stuff. No, I don't subscribe to the idea that all you need is a flip camera...
Have you seen any other trends and changes? What have I missed?
Water in Australia and blog action day
Coming from a country that was wrested from the water (Holland) and always has too much of it, living on the driest continent on earth is still strange in many aspects.
Australia, and Melbourne has had almost nine years of drought, resulting in water restrictions in many parts of the country, (including a prohibition on washing your own car and watering lawns) that have only very recently been lifted. The most important river system on the continent (the Murray-Darling basin) was about to dry up with catastrophic consequences, and it's only now that the federal government has decided to pull a plan together to avert an environmental and economic disaster.
Water has been front page news here for a number of years, and eventhough the drought has broken, it still is. The desalination plant being built here in Victoria, the above mentioned plan that will cut water allocation to farmers and the direct impact people have felt in their day-to-day life had made it an accute topic of discussion.
But we still have drinking water. Here, we may have some inconveniences, but this is the global picture (s0urce Wikipedia):
- Inadequate access to safe drinking water for about 884 million people[9]
- Inadequate access to water for sanitation and waste disposal for 2.5 billion people[10]
- Groundwater overdrafting (excessive use) leading to diminished agricultural yields[11]
- Overuse and pollution of water resources harming biodiversity
- Regional conflicts over scarce water resources sometimes resulting in warfare
In Australia, many of us have never had to consider living with plentifull supply of clean water, but the past few years have given many a wake up call. Hopefully this will translate into action to help the millions of people around the world who don't have this most basic of human necessities.
Here is one way to do it if you feel inspired.
Just published: “Age of Conversation 3 – It’s time to get busy!”
In 2007, Gavin Heaton and Drew Mclellan kicked off the idea to tap their network of fellow marketers around the world and write a collaborative book on the challenges and opportunities of marketing in a highly connected world. I contributed a chapter to the first two books, and now we're proud to launch "Age of Conversation 3 - It's time to get busy!"
Here is a little from the Amazon editor's review:
Following the success of the first two editions, Age of Conversation 3: It's Time to Get Busy! again kick-starts the discussion about how the global marketing landscape is changing. With over 170 of the world's leading marketers, writers, thinkers and creative innovators contributing chapters, this collaborative work investigates the roles that community, conversation, experimentation, engagement, and collaboration play in shaping the 21st century's economy of ideas.
As with the first and second edition, what makes this book valuable is that you get a great mix of viewpoints from across the globe on set topics. Some of the contributors are already recognised authors, some may well in the future and some are simply smart people. One thing most if not all have in common is that they are all practitioners; people who are doing stuff.
my chapter is called "Influencing people in B2B Marketing"; buy one copy for yourself, and one for a friend. All the money goes to the Make a Wish foundation.
Here is a list of all the contributors. Check out their blogs; you're certain to find some great ideas and experiences.
We’re all drowning, and all you do is raise the water level…
I started this blog in 2005, with a pretty clear purpose; share my ideas at no cost to a global audience, profile myself as a marketer and participate in a community that was vibrant, creating fantastic professional connections. Connection based on a shared interest in Marketing. Along the way, I found out where people lived and sometimes we exchanged emails of a more social nature.
We've built relationships, and I've learned more from you, (complete strangers mostly at the other end of the world) than I could have hoped to have learned in ANY other way.
Now here is the thing that bothers me....I've stopped participating the way I used to. I don't read the blogs I used to read. I don't really comment on blogs anymore. My attention switched to Twitter and Facebook rather than an RSS reader; after all, everyone in my network would use these places to promote what they had to say anyway. That was the theory.
I think I'm going back to me RSS reader and here is why. Twitter and Facebook have polluted the stream of information I actually value from the people I follow. Most blog posts are on-topic. Mostly, no more than one a day. Most Twitter post are off-topic and posted many times a day...How am I going to keep up? And why do you make it so hard for me to find the stuff I want to read?
Facebook is even more difficult. Perfect for my personal life, but I don't really want to share my personal life with my blogging friends or work mates. It's not what binds us. It's what binds me to my family and personal friends. I don't really want to read what my colleagues do on their holidays either, or that they rode their bikes this morning... not because I don't care about them, but because it is not what binds us.
Maybe it is because I don't get it. Or maybe our fundamental social make up hasn't changed and we are still made up of different personas; private and public. I'm a father, son and brother. I'm a manager at a company. I'm a participant in a global marketing discussion. I'm (very infrequently) a musician.
But I don't talk to my mother or music buddies about marketing, because it doesn't interest them. I don't talk to my boss about my private life (in any detail) because he's not interested in the detail and possibly likes to have a little distance. We are selective who we share information with, because (among other things) it makes us more interesting and relevant to the people we share the information with.
Relationships are built on the things we have in common, the things that bind us. I can't have personal relationships with the everyone I know. There is no time, for one. Of course work friends can become close friends or even family. (and I should know).
The challenge for all of us was (and is) that there is only so much you can read and create and still do your day job. It's just too much, and I don't think I'm alone.
Bing vs Google – side by side
Here is a great idea: someone created a site that let's you search one term and brings up Google and Bing side by side. The moment I saw this I realised why I liked Google so much. First, have a look that this:
The information provided by Google on the term Aconex is a summary of the most relevant pages right on the top. In contrast, Bing gives me a list of seemingly unstructured information.
Add to that the "show options" link right above the result and I can't for the life of me think what would make me change from google to Bing...
Anyone have other ideas? Am I missing someting?
Short and sweet
This product will help you increase your ROI and decrease your TCO = I have no freaking clue what the REAL business benefits of my product are, and I’m too lazy to figure it out. Source: Cranky Product Manager
Can you control the message in social media?
Trevor Cook is someone I've been following for some time, because of his insights in media and PR. He wrote this (altogether good) article. There was just one quote that got me thinking:
Business needs to keep perspective on social media – Corporate Engagement
The Obama campaign is the current gold standard of this approach – they controlled message but they allowed people a great deal of lattitude in the way they helped promote that message
I've read it a few times now, and I'm not sure.
Did the Obama campaign control message? They certainly created it, but did they really "control" it allowing people "lattitude" in the way they helped promote it?
I don't think so. I think the reason it is the "gold standard" is because they created the kind of messages people wanted to share and promote, and then created highly targeted tools and activities to enable these messages to be spread.
In fact, had they made any attempt to control the message (apart from correcting people when they misrepresented the message), the whole thing would have failed.
What do you think? Did I miss something here?
Feeling overwhelmed? Just talk to someone.
David Armano tweeted (twitered?)this article...at the very bottom, this pearl of wisdom....
The End of the Email Era - WSJ.com
"People were very dependent on email. They overused it," he says. "Now, people can use the right tool for the right task."Perhaps. But there's another way to think about all this. You can argue that because we have more ways to send more messages, we spend more time doing it. That may make us more productive, but it may not. We get lured into wasting time, telling our bosses we are looking into something, instead of just doing it, for example. And we will no doubt waste time communicating stuff that isn't meaningful, maybe at the expense of more meaningful communication. Such as, say, talking to somebody in person.
“My 6 year old son could have done that”
Anyone in marketing dealing with branding has heard that one before. About a logo design. About a tag line.
Most of the time, it is very hard to argue the point. When you look at the final product of a logo design, or when you read a final tag line, it is probably really simple. Doesn't look hard to do. But that's measuring the wrong thing. It's not about how hard it is to create something, but how strong it communicates the desired brand positioning.
For example. Kraft thought it was a fun idea to engage their customers in naming a new product. They put little jars with Vegemite flavoured cheese spread and decided to crowd source the name for the new product. "Name Me" the little jars of spread shouted off the shelves. So that was the brief. "Name Me".
The result was that thousands sent in their ideas, and the good people at Kraft, (custodians of one of the most iconic brands in Australia, Vegemite) chose one that sounded like something their target audience might like. iSpread 2.0. I won't go into all the reasons why this was a terrible choice, there is plenty of commentary from all sorts of media (social and otherwise) on that. In fact, the Wall Street Journal even reported the fact that the company has decided to pull the name and think of a new one.
What I am more interested in is how they got there. The reason you don't let your 6 year old son design a logo (or a product name) is that he is not likely to be clear on what you're trying to communicate, how you are trying to position the product. That is the difficulty in design and good branding; how to communicate an idea in the simplest, most powerful way.
The sort of thoughts you expect to go through someones mind naming a product (especially for an iconic brand) are:
Without that, how could either the people creating the name, or the people choosing the name know if it was good, bad or indifferent?
It is the difference between advertising thinking and brand positioning, and I think Al Ries should have a field day with this one, in one of his contributions on Branding Strategy Insider.
Get your customers involved is fun, but don't think that you can take a short cut to the hard work of positioning a product.
11 ways to make your life easier
Over the years, I've used (and abandoned) literally dozens if not hundreds of online and offline software applications to help me deal with information overload, get things done, or simply play. Here is a list of the ones that are helping me get on. Yes, I am a bit of a closet nerd, but if you spend a bit of time behind your computer, you might find one or two of these tools handy.
Dealing with information overload (and sharing around)
- Hootsuite - the most elegant way to manage twitter in a clean, easy to use interface.
- Delicious - one place to bookmark everything I find of interest and want to share with: 1. Everyone, 2. A select group of people.
- Feedly - a really nice little plugin for Firefox that grabs your RSS feeds from Google Reader and makes it easy to digest, share and manage what you read.
- Yahoo Pipes - a bit more techie, this is a very clever tool to combine and filter information from the web.
Getting things done
- Firefox 3.0 - The best web browser, simply because it allows you to customise with all sorts of handy tools, such as the one I am using now to write this blog post offline, but in a browser (Scribefire) or the Delicious plugin that lets me quickly manage bookmarks (without leaving the page). If you're still on Internet Explorer, you should really have a look.
- Xmind - a "mind mapping" tool that helps me organise thoughts and plans rapidly and communicate them with others in a simple, visual way
- Dropbox - so simple. Why store files on your PC? Store them in an online folder by dragging them into a your "dropbox" folder. Access from anywhere, synchronized copies on all your PC's if you install the little app.
- Logmein - Lets you remotely access and control someone else's computer (with their permission of course). I'm talking helpdesk to your Mum, or accessing one of your computers at home from work.
- Jing - a simple screen recording tool that allows you to either grab a screen image, or record a little flash movie (for US$9.95 pa you can get the pro version, which has MP4 recording and no Jing branding at the end of your movie)
- Google, of course.....In particular Gmail, Google Maps and iGoogle if you want to personalise your news and get some RSS feeds (look in the right top hand corner of the Google page) as well as the "forms" function in Google Docs (spreadsheets) that allows you to run simple, free little questionnaires online. Lots, and lots more but these are the ones i use mostly, or see the greatest application for.
- Audacity - a free audio recording and editing tool that's so powerful and easy to use it is almost ridiculous.
So what do you use? Have I missed any great apps you are using? Share!
Syndicate
Subscribe to this site's RSS feed.