The winners are…..(Australia only)
Ok, this was hard.Before I announce the winners, I'd like to acknowledge the contribution of all participants in helping me focus this blog. Thank you very much and I'm sorry there could only be three winners.
The winners are:
- Jen Clark
- Scott Middleton
- Mandy
Congratulations, thanks HP for donating your wireless HP officejet pro 8500 a909.
I'll contact you via email to get your delivery addresses.
This was fun.
For all you micro/small business owners, here is something for you (Australia only)
Ok, this is something a little different. I've got the opportunity to run a simple competition and have you win a pretty cool prize; one of three all-in-one wireless scan/copy/fax/printer units, the wireless HP officejet pro 8500 a909, RRP around AU$499.
(Since you're winning this, and not paying for it, it shouldn't matter, but it did get a pretty flattering review here; lots of features, environmentally friendly etc, etc)
Clearly, the good people representing HP believe that there are enough small business/micro business readers of this blog, and that you would value the opportunity to win a free all in one printer, so who am I to argue.
Now for the fun. We're not going to make this complex; write in the comment space below and tell me what the top three topics are that you think I should write more blog posts about, and most importantly tell me why. I'll select the top three and each will get one of these wireless all in one gadgets. Can't be too hard. I'll notify the winners by email and they'll get delivery directly to their doorstep.
Closes in exactly one week - 11 July 09.
Good luck!
How much do you focus on competitors?
It's an interesting question. After all, our customers see us both and make their decisions accordingly. But where do you stop? How much information is enough, and how much is too much? It's quite easy to get a bit obsessive about competitors. If a competitor has a feature, you need it too. If the competitor enters a new market, you need to be there too. If they re-brand, we need to re-brand. If they drop their price, so should we.
Of course it is important to understand your competitors. After all, customers see you in this context and make their choices accordingly. You can't position your brand or solution in a vacuum; you position your brand in relative terms to others.
On the other hand, there are some real risks in putting too much focus on it.
Time – you have only a limited amount of time which needs to be divvied up between a broad range of marketing/business activity. If you spend most of it analysing others, you won't get much done.
Focus – you could end up following your competitors instead of leading the market, becoming a me-too provider and loosing the reason why people chose you in the first place.
Confidence – your customers don't just buy features, facts and figures. They buy on trust and you are an advisor to them. If your head is full of reasons why your competitors could be better, you'll lack conviction and confidence and people will pick up on that.
So what's the right balance?
That depends on how competitive your market is, but the first rule is to track and review with a purpose. If your purpose is to ensure your product/service development is in tune with market developments, do a quarterly review of your competitors offering and vital business stats.
If your purpose is to sell more effectively, focus on the information that is most important to your customers. Stuff that is either important to position your brand, or make to the sale. For your main competitors, write down the key reasons why your customers choose you over them, so you have a clear picture how you are positioned against each one. Equally, write down three arguments they use against you, and have a solid response. Not having to think about it when a customer asks you is in itself a pretty powerful statement.
In the end, competitors will always have features you don't have, but how often is that feature making or breaking the sale?
And how many brands do you know (and use) with products and services that may not be the best or the most complete, but you choose them anyway?
Gordon Ramsay’s Marketing Nightmare
Not sure if you watch Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmare, (or if it is broadcast in your part of the world) but I’m a little hooked. There is plenty not to like about the show, in particular his tendency to humiliate people to get a point across. What there is to like is that every episode is a marketing and branding case study.
Every episode starts with an audit - he assesses the look of the place as he walks in and sits down, reviews the menu and has a meal in the place. He reviews the service and the management.
Nine times out of ten the mistakes are the same.
The quality of food is often poor; no care, no passion. There is no positioning; the menu is confused or bland. The service delivery is chaotic. But one thing stands out: they see the world through their own rather than their customers' eyes. They live in a vacuum.
The next thing he does is walk the local streets. He checks out the competition, looking for a niche, chats to people in the street to find out what the restaurants’ brand reputation is. He talks to local suppliers and generally gets a feel for the specific environment he is in.
So he looks at the restaurant through the eyes of the customers. Brand: “The company seen through the eyes of the customer”. Mostly, he comes back with an idea of how to position the restaurant; a signature dish or direction for the menu that will uniquely position the restaurant. Because he knows his environment he positions away from competitors and ensures that the positioning is relevant to the target market: If he is on the coast it’s about fresh fish, if it is in the heart of the US it is about steak.
He does a local launch promotion with only one purpose; generate word of mouth. He doesn’t start promoting before the house is (more or less) in order though. Now I’ve never eaten in Gordon’s restaurant and although it makes great television, I don’t like his style. But he truly understands marketing and branding.
Time to sound out your advisors – online or on leave?
Overall, marketing and PR agencies and professionals haven't come to grips with the online world. Media and communications people believe that "online" and "digital" is about technology rather than media and simply haven't got their nut around it. Why is this important? Because it takes time to learn. Marketing professionals who wait until their clients demand it from them before they do are in trouble.
There are digital specialists of course. But try and find a PR agency that demonstrates an understanding of current online media. Try and find leading advertising agencies that demonstrate an understanding of online media not through words, but through their own presence and behaviour online.
Speak to them about online and they are likely to refer you to their "web guy" who "is really smart"" and gets all this "technical stuff" or "their specialist partner". Just don't ask me. Ask about social media and web 2.0 and it gets worse.
Greg Verdino is is not shocked to read the result of a survey by "TNS Media Intelligence/Cymfony that "agencies don't get it". Nor am I. (After all, even newspapers put anything to do with online media under their technology section, here in The Age and here in the "Tech&Web" section of The Times).
Why is this so? Everything they ever need to know is a mouse click away. All I can think of is that it is either laziness or arrogance.
If they had a poke around and took an interest, they would found that understanding and participating in online media is not about technology. It hasn't been for quite a while. They would see that it is all about media and communications. Which, after all, is their world.
Joseph Jaffe thinks it is almost too easy to lay into agencies, but they are the external marketing advisors to most companies so I think it is warranted. Over to Joseph with a few tips to marketing professional regarding social media:
To help you in your quest, here are 3 pieces of advice:
- Stop being so damn arrogant and deluded to think you can do this yourselves. You can't. This is all about humility.
- Stop trying to automate the whole process and solving your problems by a quick technology acquisition fix. You're drowning in your own data and laziness. This is labor intensive.
- Stop trying to scale the whole process and replicate your old bad habits. This is about planting seeds and sticking around long enough to reap the rewards of care, consideration and hard work.
Clients deserve better. If you are a client, you deserve better. The people I am ranting at here are unlikely to read this of course, because it's a blog. But if you are a client, expect more. There is no excuse for PR or marketing people not to have a solid grip on digital media. And I mean everyone, not a dedicated "Geek". It is no longer something for tomorrow or for other people. Media and communications people should be leading the way.
(image source as far as I can track it: http://www.oneletterwords.com/weblog/)
B2B + social media = natural fit
For business, words like "social media", blogging, or Youtube don't often inspire a great deal of confidence. Really, they are mostly associated with staff wasting time on "socialising".
At best, social media is seen as an interesting experiment for consumer brands, but hardly a useful strategy for business to business marketing. But if you have a closer look, you might find a very different opportunity.
Social media : "Social Media is the democratization of information, transforming people from content readers into content publishers. It is the shift from a broadcast mechanism to a many-to-many model, rooted in conversations between authors, people, and peers" (source:Wikipedia)
What are the most defining features of B2B marketing? Deep, one-to-one relationships, often built through personal interaction between individuals. We build these through face-to-face meetings, telephone contact, mail and email. We network at events designed just for that purpose. We present our ideas and innovations at industry seminars, and we know the incredible value of word-of-mouth in B2B marketing, so PR is often at the top of our list in terms of promotion.
So what is the strength of "social media"? One-to-one conversations and deep relationships. Word of mouth. PR. networking. Sharing and presenting ideas. A significantly higher profile online through improved search results.
Debbie Weil, (subscribe to her blog; it's fantastic) author and speaker on the use of social media and blogs for corporate organisations, wrote a little manifesto that sums it up nicely:
The Inflection Point of Corporate Blogging
- Blogs and other social media tools are here to stay
- Blogs are just next-generation Web sites
- Social media tools (RSS, blogs, podcasts, video, wikis, etc.) can be used by any company, large or small, B2C or B2B
- They symbolize community, conversation, mutual respect between users and an ethos of sharing
- These tools are more powerful at informing/influencing/persuading than traditional forms of marketing, advertising and corporate communications
- They help you get found online
- If you can't be found, you don't exist
Conclusion: This isn't optional
You gotta start using blogs, podcasts, online video (social media) today!
The opportunity: Carving out your niche is easier when you've got fewer competitors. When it comes to using social media in B2B marketing, there is still plenty of opportunity for you to be take the jump on your competitors. So don't wait. Get in now.
Looking for more ideas? Check out these blogs: Web Ink Now, by David Meerman Scott, his guest post on "The New Rules of B2B Marketing and PR", and Publishing 2.0, by Scott Karp.
Update: Hat tip to Bruce Nussbaum for highlighting this Business Week article by Stephen Baker and Heather Green: "Social Media Will Change Your Business"
The Brand Gap – must see slideshow
Sometimes other people tell the story so well, you just get out of the way.
Click through to this simple, powerful presentation.
“Director, Differentiation Strategy” is a title at Boeing
Randy Baseler, CEO of Boeing and noted CEO blogger writes: "My colleague Blake Emery, who has the unique title of Director, Differentiation Strategy..."
What a great idea. A person whose sole focus is to differentiate the brand, the products and the services from competitors. It's explicit, it's on the agenda. I understand that on the average payroll there may not be room for a "Director of Differentiation" but there is still something really valuable in the idea.
Maybe rather than having a Director of Differentiation, you could have a loose team of people consisting of customer service, sales, product, services, operations, finance and marketing.
Marketing might take the initiative, but you rotate the chair between the participants to ensure everyone is engaged and committed. The agenda is clear from the start: "what can we do, what do we need to do, to improve our differentiation."
Many marketing thinkers now believe that marketing success in the future will rely more on "baking in" the interest, i.e. doing things that are of interest to your customers. (see Mark Earls post here and my follow up here)
In my post I wondered aloud about how to get this type of new thinking implemented under the pressure of delivering day-to-day results. If you believe that this is the way of the future for marketing and branding, then maybe a Differentiation Task Force is a great first step.
Does blogging help your search results? You bet.
In case you wondered how effective blogging is for search results, it is very effective.
B2B marketing and branding (or business marketing and branding) is our key area of specialisation. Below you see where my blog ranked for some key search terms relating to my business:
Business branding - 3rd out of 55,300,000
B2B marketing - 5th out of 2,960,000
Business marketing - 7th out of 523,000,000
(Searching www.google.com.au, which is what my market are most likely to use)
Guest post by David Meerman Scott – The New Rules of B2B Marketing
This is a guest post from David Meerman Scott, thought leadership and viral marketing strategist and the author of "The New Rules of Marketing and PR: How to use news releases, blogs, podcasts, viral marketing and online media to reach your buyers directly".
For decades, B2B marketing and PR has focused on only two ways to get noticed, buy your way in with advertising or beg your way in with PR. B2B marketing and PR people have operated under the assumption that you either had to pay big bucks for ads, tradeshows, and direct mail, or rely on magazines, newspapers, radio, and TV to tell your story. That approach might have worked fine when the only way that people found answers to problems was to search tradeshows, Read industry journals, rely on “experts” (analysts) advice and opinions, and interact with company salespeople.
But now buyers are finding answers to their problems online. They search Google, read online portals and news sites, listen to bloggers’ advice and opinions, pay attention to word-of-mouse from peers and friends, and visit company websites
So what’s a marketer to do? The answer is to think like a publisher and create compelling online content in the form of YouTube videos, online news releases, blogs, podcasts, and online media to reach your buyers directly. Each of these things also has an opportunity to go viral, with others telling your story.
Being successful means, as Yoda said in Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back: “You must unlearn what you have learned.”
Old rule: Buy your way in with advertising
As marketing people, we’ve all learned rules that worked in the offline world. But to succeed on the Web using the new rules, old habits must be unlearned.
“Stop shouting BUY MY PRODUCT” (people turn off overt advertising, especially online). You need to unlearn the marketing habit of constantly pitching your product. Instead create content to help people answer their problems.
Old rule: Beg your way in with PR
- Your buyers are not nameless faceless metrics. They are people like you and me who want to consume valuable content.
- You must unlearn the idea that media and analysts are the only ones who can tell your story. Instead, the web has made PR public again.
New Rule: Publish your way in with great content that your buyers want to consume.
- You must unlearn interrupting people with “messages.” Instead, publish online content they want to consume
- You must unlearn the use of gobbledygook about your products and services. Instead start from the problems and needs of your buyer personas.
- You must unlearn spin. Instead, understand that people crave authenticity and transparency.
- You must unlearn being egotistical and trying to force people to adapt to your terms. Instead create online content people want to consume
- You must unlearn the assumption that you must buy access. Instead, create something that goes viral and let millions of people tell your story for you.
- You must unlearn the idea that the “clip book” is the only way to measure your communications efforts. Instead, consider how you can reach people directly.
- You must unlearn the idea that “leads” are the only way to measure your marketing efforts. Instead, consider how you are engaging your buyers and building a position as a trusted resource.
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