Wednesday, March 10, 2010
The Call to Action Has Become a Call to Knowledge
As many have said, the B2B "sales cycle" is becoming a "buying cycle" where the prospect has control over the relationship. Although the graphic of the sales funnel will be with us forever, the days are numbered when Marketing and Sales can claim to be the ones moving prospects through the funnel. In the social media world, prospects move when they want to move.
It's time to shift our thinking from "call to action" with a "call to knowledge." (B2B marketing strategist Ardath Albee calls this the "takeaway.") As stated by our friends at Response Mine:
Specifically, the call to knowledge helps the prospect think--and is therefore essential to a content strategy in which thought leadership is a goal. It's a tip or technique with a built-in "it depends on your situation" clause. The reader is then in control to take it or leave it, or adapt the information for her own use, and move on to the next bit of content. The next step might be a more technical white paper, a case study suited to their vertical, or a detailed online demo.
Do your white papers need a registration page? Do they need to say "Call us today" after the company's boilerplate? It depends on your situation. But marketers are building trust by allowing their prospects to move--and think--at their own pace, guided by calls to knowledge.
- If a prospect doesn't want to register for your white paper, he has options online; he will search the blogs and online trade pubs for product reviews.
- Rather than schedule an hour on her calendar to attend your live webinar, she will fast-forward through the on-demand version at her own convenience; or even better, read the attendees' comments in five minutes.
- And before the first sales meeting, the prospect has Googled all your executives, industry blogs, PR pieces, financial data, and the same for your competitors; that meeting is never your company's "first impression."
It's time to shift our thinking from "call to action" with a "call to knowledge." (B2B marketing strategist Ardath Albee calls this the "takeaway.") As stated by our friends at Response Mine:
Put the right content in the right places so that prospects can self-select. By responding to relevant, compelling content, prospects qualify themselves.By answering the call to knowledge, prospects move themselves through the funnel.
Specifically, the call to knowledge helps the prospect think--and is therefore essential to a content strategy in which thought leadership is a goal. It's a tip or technique with a built-in "it depends on your situation" clause. The reader is then in control to take it or leave it, or adapt the information for her own use, and move on to the next bit of content. The next step might be a more technical white paper, a case study suited to their vertical, or a detailed online demo.
Do your white papers need a registration page? Do they need to say "Call us today" after the company's boilerplate? It depends on your situation. But marketers are building trust by allowing their prospects to move--and think--at their own pace, guided by calls to knowledge.
Labels: business to business (B2B), thought leadership
Friday, February 19, 2010
Social Media Automation: How to Drown the Seeds of Leads
We enjoy a good debate here at The Content Factor, and we're watching one play out on the Demand Gen Report Blog.
- Marketo's Jon Miller blogged on "Seed Nurturing," suggesting some new practices for using social media to "turbo charge" lead nurturing.
Miller writes:
"For example, after identifying a prospect’s Twitter username, follow his or her Twitter conversations that include relevant keywords, and track this data in your marketing automation system." - Malcolm Friedberg of Left Brain Marketing makes an engaging counterpoint in "Seed Nurturing? Not Unless You're Walt Whitman."
Friedberg writes:
"Call me cynical, but I’m not comfortable betting my job on whether anonymous leads will 'likely' surface from the social media world and appear on my front door."
Although on a high level I agree with "seed nurturing," (as stated in a previous post, "Are We Torching Our Leads?" which advocated the registration-free white paper download), the detailed practices that Miller describes in his Demand Gen Report post seem far-fetched to me. The B2B marketers I work with don't have the resources to follow prospects on Twitter, trend their topics, and look for signs that they are in the early stages of a buying cycle.
And, if getting a phone call ten minutes after downloading a white paper wasn't bad enough, a demand generation solution that provides Twitter-trending functionality is even more "Big Brother." (Will I get a phone call from Marketo after I tweet this blog post?)
Social media is the realm of public relations and thought leadership marketing, not of metrics-driven lead generation. There are some amazing tools emerging for marketers to analyze information as it travels through the social media, but is it realistic for these tools to help marketers warm-up prospects for sales? I will side with the cynics for now.
Labels: business to business (B2B), lead generation, marketing automation, thought leadership
Thursday, January 28, 2010
Are We Torching Our Leads?
A survey by Spiceworks reveals that IT pros--key influencers in B2B buying cycles--are increasingly resistant to downloading white papers, because of the registration forms. In an interview on the Savvy B2B Marketing blog*, Jay Halberg of Spiceworks says:
I myself am wary about offering my contact information in a reg form because on several occasions, I have hit the submit button and gotten a call from a sales person trying to close me--within a minute.
If we can all relax a little bit and remember that great content is a better way to qualify prospects than registration forms. Great content helps educate prospects and lets them "self select" and raise their hand when they are ready. Prospects become buyers when it's their idea--not when they get enough phone calls and register for the webinar.
That's why B2B marketers are adapting their content strategy to thought leadership. To this end, white papers must deliver useful new information that plants the seeds of the idea to buy. Ten vendor calls in 30 days kill the seed. (Ardath Albee's post, "When Thought Leadership Isn't", and comments there, provided inspiration.)
By the way, The Content Factor's white papers are "Free Downloads." --without reg foms.
* Interview by Stephanie Tilton on the Savvy B2B Marketing blog, discovered via Dale Underwood's blog, B2B Conversations Now, which was recently aggregated in the B2B Marketing Zone.
Those that do share their [contact information when downloading a white paper] obviously don't mind doing so, but they DO mind a pesky vendor that calls them 10 times over the next 30 days. We also found a lot of people – more than 75% – DON'T sign up for papers requiring registration, which means the vendor is missing the opportunity to share and disseminate their knowledge.B2B marketers are asking, "Is the White Paper Dead?" Of course not--the white paper is simply a medium for content. But what is rapidly aging the white paper as a tactic may be the over-reliance on automated marketing systems and processes--compounded by the incredible pressure on sales teams to close a deal.
I myself am wary about offering my contact information in a reg form because on several occasions, I have hit the submit button and gotten a call from a sales person trying to close me--within a minute.
If we can all relax a little bit and remember that great content is a better way to qualify prospects than registration forms. Great content helps educate prospects and lets them "self select" and raise their hand when they are ready. Prospects become buyers when it's their idea--not when they get enough phone calls and register for the webinar.
That's why B2B marketers are adapting their content strategy to thought leadership. To this end, white papers must deliver useful new information that plants the seeds of the idea to buy. Ten vendor calls in 30 days kill the seed. (Ardath Albee's post, "When Thought Leadership Isn't", and comments there, provided inspiration.)
By the way, The Content Factor's white papers are "Free Downloads." --without reg foms.
* Interview by Stephanie Tilton on the Savvy B2B Marketing blog, discovered via Dale Underwood's blog, B2B Conversations Now, which was recently aggregated in the B2B Marketing Zone.
Labels: lead generation, thought leadership, white papers
Wednesday, January 06, 2010
Enough is Enough ... Or Is it?
BtoB Magazine's recent article "When Enough is Enough" describes how Cisco Systems straddles the fine line between spamming its existing customers, and keeping Cisco top-of-mind.
The article quotes John Coe, president of the Sales & Marketing Institute, on the role of content:
The difference between content and spam is in the quality of the message, and the interest of the audience.
Anil Dash has been blogging about the non-benefit of having nearly 300,000 Twitter followers. (His conclusions parallel our question, "Is Anybody Following Your Thought Leadership?" When "thought leadership" is measured by Twitter followers, the answer is clearly no.)
Anil Dash does have valuable, relevant things to say--but they are not of value or relevance to all 300,000 random followers. Even major brands with huge Twitter followings have seen no increased results, Dash reports.
Sheer numbers--number of names on an email list, number of Twitter followers, number of Tweets, number of blog posts--build equity when they communicate the right message to the right people--not to the masses.
Unlike advertising and old-school PR, too much low-value communication is hurtful, or at best wasteful, because now the audience gets to say "enough is enough."
But when the content is useful, credible, and informative? We would follow tweets like that all day long.
The article quotes John Coe, president of the Sales & Marketing Institute, on the role of content:
Isn't the same true of social media?In fact, Coe said, if your messages bring value to your customers—beyond your company's latest product offerings—there might not be an upper limit to the number of times you can reach out to them.
“If you're sending information of value and relevance, you can probably do that all day long and they'll be happy,” Coe said. “That's a relationship-developer, not a relationship-decayer.”
The difference between content and spam is in the quality of the message, and the interest of the audience.
Anil Dash has been blogging about the non-benefit of having nearly 300,000 Twitter followers. (His conclusions parallel our question, "Is Anybody Following Your Thought Leadership?" When "thought leadership" is measured by Twitter followers, the answer is clearly no.)
Anil Dash does have valuable, relevant things to say--but they are not of value or relevance to all 300,000 random followers. Even major brands with huge Twitter followings have seen no increased results, Dash reports.
Sheer numbers--number of names on an email list, number of Twitter followers, number of Tweets, number of blog posts--build equity when they communicate the right message to the right people--not to the masses.
Unlike advertising and old-school PR, too much low-value communication is hurtful, or at best wasteful, because now the audience gets to say "enough is enough."
But when the content is useful, credible, and informative? We would follow tweets like that all day long.
Labels: social network content, thought leadership
Tuesday, December 29, 2009
Thought Leaders are Curators of Content
I enjoyed this series of short videos by Brian Solis titled "Ideas Connect Us More than Relationships." There are several points here that are relevant to thought leadership, and how social media changes the game.
Overall, I appreciate Solis's comments for bringing social media down to earth a bit. Other analyses about social media boil down to: "it's so cool because everybody can say anything about everything, whenever; aren't you doing it yet?" That's mind-boggling but not useful.
Solis states that the democratization of information does not give us license to say anything all the time, but gives us the opportunity to be curators of content. The notion of a curator implies responsibility and control, which I appreciate. "The folks that we network with will find those curated updates to be more profound than others," he says.
Solis's notion that we are connected by ideas, and not our relationships (e.g., Twitter followers, Facebook friends) is important. "It's not a popularity contest," he states, "It's about changing the way you share information, and how people are getting information."
Sheer numbers of "friends" and "followers" are meaningless unless the content published at the hub of relationship has meaning to all the people connected to it. In fact, the groups connected to content are always in flux, but the content itself needs integrity and consistency to find its audience.
Companies with something to say will be thought leaders when they embrace the role of content curator.
Labels: blogging, social communities, thought leadership
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Ten Ideas of the Decade: The New Thought Leadership
AdAge has published its Book of Tens, and one page is the ten Ideas of the Decade. In sum, these ten ideas tell the story of the new role of thought leadership in business.
Please refer to the article for complete descriptions. The ten Ideas of the Decade are:
- Consumer Control (i.e., consumers having control)
- Brand Journalism
- Branded Utility
- Crowdsourcing
- Marketer as Media
- Earned Media
- Long Tail
- Tipping Point
- Madison & Vine
- Lovemarks
Brands are no longer pushed out, launched, and proclaimed to the public. The media are no longer one-way channels for marketers to exploit. Marketing is a conversation, not an announcement.
Marketers who ask themselves "Is Anybody Following Our Thought Leadership?" might be asking the wrong question. If they are trying to hard to lead, but not to participate, they'll be lonely.
Labels: thought leadership
Friday, December 11, 2009
Whither Web Content?
Since the story about AOL's pay-to-play model broke last week, several more stories in the blogosphere raise the question, "What's happening to web content?"
This post on the SEOmoz blog, "Great Content Equals Great Rankings, Right? Wrong." is followed by a long string of comments where quite a few SEO pros argue that content is not king--links are king; quality content doesn't drive traffic.
As a purveyor of quality content, I find this trend difficult to ignore but difficult to accept. Underneath the retweets of retweets and rehashes of aggregated blog posts, driving the unwieldy engine of social media, there must be content that people want to read.
(I'm reminded of the old story with the punchline: there must be a pony in here somewhere.)
Without quality content somewhere in the fray, the unwieldy engine will stop turning. (In fact, bloggers are above average in education and wealth; one might assume that many of them have something to say that's worthwhile--not simply laden with search keyphrases.)
Look at TV--the supply of programming includes a lot of crap, but also some ponies. In fact, there's a case to be made that at the high end, the bar is pushing higher. Yes, we have Bromance. But we also have Mad Men.
So my prediction for 2010 is remains optimistic for content. While the average marketer will continue on a downward trajectory, the leaders in 2010 will differentiate themselves by caring less about open rates and page ranks, and more about changing the game. They will be the ones who use content to carry big ideas and to create clever, memorable and useful content that gets read, remembered, shared, and appreciated.
This post on the SEOmoz blog, "Great Content Equals Great Rankings, Right? Wrong." is followed by a long string of comments where quite a few SEO pros argue that content is not king--links are king; quality content doesn't drive traffic.
HubSpot's blog post, "What Google's Launch of Real-Time Streaming Search Means For Marketers" paints a picture of a world where marketers generate content in real time to satisfy real-time demand. The blogger advises:
Keep working to transform your company website from stagnant pages into a mini-publishing house that produces timely, interesting content that your prospective customers are searching for right now, at this very moment, somewhere out there.She doesn't advise on how to manage the costs of running such a mini-publishing house. My hunch is that quality may suffer in the race to publish the next tweetable article.
As a purveyor of quality content, I find this trend difficult to ignore but difficult to accept. Underneath the retweets of retweets and rehashes of aggregated blog posts, driving the unwieldy engine of social media, there must be content that people want to read.
(I'm reminded of the old story with the punchline: there must be a pony in here somewhere.)
Without quality content somewhere in the fray, the unwieldy engine will stop turning. (In fact, bloggers are above average in education and wealth; one might assume that many of them have something to say that's worthwhile--not simply laden with search keyphrases.)
Look at TV--the supply of programming includes a lot of crap, but also some ponies. In fact, there's a case to be made that at the high end, the bar is pushing higher. Yes, we have Bromance. But we also have Mad Men.
So my prediction for 2010 is remains optimistic for content. While the average marketer will continue on a downward trajectory, the leaders in 2010 will differentiate themselves by caring less about open rates and page ranks, and more about changing the game. They will be the ones who use content to carry big ideas and to create clever, memorable and useful content that gets read, remembered, shared, and appreciated.
Labels: content marketing, Search Engine Marketing, thought leadership
Monday, November 30, 2009
Chief Culture Officer: Gatekeeper to Thought Leadership
I enjoyed this book excerpt by Grant McCracken in AdAge, "In His Nike Work, Dan Wieden Is the Prototypical CCO" (McCracken's forthcoming book is Chief Culture Officer: How to Create a Living, Breathing Corporation.)
McCracken identifies the trend called the "generous stranger," which is akin to "Pay It Forward" and "Practice Random Acts of Kindness." He tells of how Nike embodies this trend in a recent groundbreaking ad.
If corporations can put aside any aversion they may have to the touchy-feely nature of the "generous stranger," they can take a lesson from the concept in developing a thought leadership strategy.
Thought leadership requires generosity, as we explain in "Is Anybody Following Your Thought Leadership? Five Best-Practices." Corporations can be thought leaders when they create a corporate culture that is about "paying forward" their vision and expertise.
Corporations may waffle on the idea of actively developing corporate culture, but almost all want to be thought leaders. Thought leadership requires culture. Culture galvanizes the passion and generosity that makes thought leadership possible.
McCracken identifies the trend called the "generous stranger," which is akin to "Pay It Forward" and "Practice Random Acts of Kindness." He tells of how Nike embodies this trend in a recent groundbreaking ad.
If corporations can put aside any aversion they may have to the touchy-feely nature of the "generous stranger," they can take a lesson from the concept in developing a thought leadership strategy.
Thought leadership requires generosity, as we explain in "Is Anybody Following Your Thought Leadership? Five Best-Practices." Corporations can be thought leaders when they create a corporate culture that is about "paying forward" their vision and expertise.
Corporations may waffle on the idea of actively developing corporate culture, but almost all want to be thought leaders. Thought leadership requires culture. Culture galvanizes the passion and generosity that makes thought leadership possible.
Labels: business to business (B2B), thought leadership
Friday, November 20, 2009
B-to-B Marketers Will Press the "Reset" Button on Thought Leadership in 2010
Custom content is up, and trade publications are down. This week, BtoB Magazine published these two stories, and it is up to me to connect the dots.
I see the opportunity for marketers--in b-to-b, particularly--to push the "reset" button on their thought leadership content strategy. BtoB published two other articles this week forecasting bigger marketing budgets 2010 ("Making a splash after the crash" and "2010 Outlook survey shows marketing budgets to grow"). The crash of '08-'09 has already forced b-to-b marketers to abandon old habits; with new money to spend in '10, they will be looking for new habits.
2010 will be a big year for content.
Related white paper: Is Anybody Following Your Thought Leadership?
Public companies shedding b-to-b mediaIt's official. As the trade pubs struggle, the vision of content marketing is borne out. Thought leadership is no longer controlled by publishing companies. Marketers are becoming the publishers. Why wait for a trade magazine's editorial calendar, when you can publish your own micro-site and YouTube channel?Incompatibility with volatile ad cycles has big publishers selling off properties
The global downturn has underscored advertising's cyclicality, with ad pages plunging an average 30% this year. The decline's magnitude has left trade magazine publishing a diminished business that appears increasingly incompatible with publicly traded companies.
Custom publishing on the upswing
With corporations competing with media companies, content marketing makes everyone a publisher
There was a time when custom publishing entailed a few pages of “advertorial” in an appropriate trade publication or, more ambitiously, an extended advertising vehicle in the guise of an actual magazine. ... Today, ... companies are turning eagerly to digital content, providing customers and potential buyers with business and technical intelligence that's high on credibility and low on promotion.
I see the opportunity for marketers--in b-to-b, particularly--to push the "reset" button on their thought leadership content strategy. BtoB published two other articles this week forecasting bigger marketing budgets 2010 ("Making a splash after the crash" and "2010 Outlook survey shows marketing budgets to grow"). The crash of '08-'09 has already forced b-to-b marketers to abandon old habits; with new money to spend in '10, they will be looking for new habits.
2010 will be a big year for content.
Related white paper: Is Anybody Following Your Thought Leadership?
Labels: business to business (B2B), content marketing, thought leadership
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
Thought Leadership: A Spirit of Generosity
We've received some interesting questions in response to our white paper, "Is Anybody Following Your Thought Leadership? Five Best-Practices." One, in particular, describes the dilemma marketing departments face: How can we prevent our thought leadership efforts from being interpreted as sales propaganda?
The answer lies in the fact that thought leadership isn't built, it's nurtured. It is up to the followers--readers, listeners, and viewers--to certify the thought leader with their trust, and that takes time.
Thought leadership doesn't have a landing page. There is no string attached between thought leadership and lead generation. Instead, it requires a spirit of generosity, as Elise Bauer says. Thought leaders attract followers by virtue of the freely given value they offer. The payoff to the organization is cultural, educational, emotional--but generally not measurable.
It is counter-intuitive to our lead-generation habit, but thought leadership strategy takes the company and the product out of the story. It leads with thought. Guided by generosity, marketers can strategize effective thought leadership campaigns that won't be considered sales propaganda--because they won't be linked (directly) to sales.
The answer lies in the fact that thought leadership isn't built, it's nurtured. It is up to the followers--readers, listeners, and viewers--to certify the thought leader with their trust, and that takes time.
Thought leadership doesn't have a landing page. There is no string attached between thought leadership and lead generation. Instead, it requires a spirit of generosity, as Elise Bauer says. Thought leaders attract followers by virtue of the freely given value they offer. The payoff to the organization is cultural, educational, emotional--but generally not measurable.
It is counter-intuitive to our lead-generation habit, but thought leadership strategy takes the company and the product out of the story. It leads with thought. Guided by generosity, marketers can strategize effective thought leadership campaigns that won't be considered sales propaganda--because they won't be linked (directly) to sales.
Labels: lead generation, thought leadership
