Kafka93's Blog

Manhattan Associates Takes Home An AMY

kafka93 — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 16:07:00 +0000

Congratulations to client Manhattan Associates for winning an AMY at last night’s American Marketing Association awards dinner. The win was for “Zero Dissapointment Retail,” Manhattan’s unique offering and clever campaign that helps retailers offer a seamless cross-channel (Web, mail, store, call center) shopping experience to their customers.

CMO Terrie O’Hanlon (pictured with her BOA and her AMY) was gracious in acknowledging the cross functional team (including The Content Factor) that contributed to the campaign’s success. And in case you think marketing is all fluff, Manhattan has already identified a multi-million dollar incremental sale that was due to this campaign.

The Call to Action Has Become a Call to Knowledge

kafka93 — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 11:43:00 +0000

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.

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.”

The traditional call to action is going out. “Call us today” is sounding hucksterish. And registration forms are hitting the wall in terms of effectiveness as prospects enter just enough information to get what they need.

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.

Getting out of the B2B Marketing Manager’s Muddle

kafka93 — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 15:48:00 +0000

A year ago, I was a B2B marketing manager in a muddle. I had, at my fingertips, some powerful tools to share my company’s message with the world. But I had nothing new to say.

My title as “Manager” gave me authority to drive content down a number of channels: an attractive web site, automated email campaigns, and webinars with full in-house tech support. It was my job to maintain quarterly plans using these channels within my budget.

What I lacked was the authority to devise a content marketing strategy. So I had the tools (hammer, saw), but no new raw materials (wood, nails). To borrow another metaphor, I was shooting blanks.

My job became a case study in marketing repurposing. I pushed out the same old client case studies in articles, white papers, web copy, and sales presentations. The edict “Do More With Less” applied to content, as well as to marketing spend.

The root of the problem? Content is gravely undervalued. (Validation: Kristina Halvorson’s presentation, Content Strategy: The Future of Marketing, slides #37-40, “Lies We Tell Ourselves.”) Content is expected to spring forth from the ether–or the marketing manager’s weekends. But the company’s best ideas are trapped in the minds of a few executive subject-matter experts. The effort required to move those ideas out to the market is not reflected in the marketing budget.

I suspect that many marketing managers, especially in B2B, are in the same muddle. What is the way out? After pondering this muddle from both inside and outside the corporation, I have these suggestions:

Give your subject matter expert the opportunity to blog regularly, preferably with a regular guest post on a trade magazine’s blog. B2B executives love the exposure. As bloggers, they learn quickly that blogs are hungry for compelling content. So they feel the pain and often get on board for the need for content. Even if you, as marketing manager, end up ghost-writing and editing the posts, the blog will be a vehicle to pull the latest thoughts and ideas out of the mind of your executive expert.
Outside writers and editors can do wonders–but what if there’s no budget for them? Squeeze an experienced content professional into one high-profile project, preferably one that gives them exposure to an executive.
Reorganize the “marketing plan” into a “content strategy.” Just using the words “content strategy” will help reset priorities. It’s a document or spreadsheet listing your new content ideas, how they are being produced, which marketing channels they feed, with # leads ganerated and $ spent. The content strategy can be simple, even if it consists of relatively few line-items from the overall plan. Just having one is a start.

TL #5: Take risks. Be visionary.

kafka93 — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 12:18:00 +0000

5. Take risks. Be visionary.

One year after Theodore Roosevelt lost a bid for the White House in 1912, he took a journey down an unexplored tributary of the Amazon known as the River of Doubt, where he encountered a life-threatening infection and even stalking by cannibalistic natives. But he completed the journey, and eventually the River of Doubt was renamed Rio Roosevelt by the Brazilian government.

Modern business doesn’t offer such colorful adventures, but all the same the successful thought leaders among us do takes risks, do venture into uncharted territory, and do emerge victorious as Roosevelt did. Taking that first step can seem daunting, however.

For example, many companies measure the success of a marketing effort in terms of how many leads it generates. They take a short-sighted view that doesn’t take into account the long-term ROI that a properly constructed thought leadership program can deliver. They are also apprehensive about sharing information that goes beyond what is contained in corporate collateral or on their website. They might be loathe to promote their clients’ successes because they think it would be equivalent to giving away their clients’ “secret sauce” recipe to the competition.

What they don’t stop to consider is that all organizations have a “secret sauce” or the “family jewels” that set them apart, and keeping them locked away in the far corners of the organization is not the behavior of a true thought leader, especially not in today’s blog-driven, social media-hyped world. A thought leadership program can be the best way to extract your company’s value and communicate it to the marketplace in a fresh new way, as in the Manhattan Associates did.

TL #4: Take yourself out of the story

kafka93 — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 12:17:00 +0000

4. Take yourself out of the story.

Ken Anderburg, publisher and editorial director of Health Management Technology magazine, looks for people who take a bold stand on the issues when he selects contributors to the publication’s regular “Thought Leaders” column. That means telling, not selling. It also means taking yourself out of the story. “The contributors should be presenting an overview that is not self-serving,” he said. “We’re looking for information that is useful for your readers, not a self-serving discussion of a company’s technology.”

For Anderburg, true thought leadership gets down to a matter of credibility, and that means discussing what is important to the reader, not what is important to you. The magazine’s top two “Mistakes to Avoid” for Thought Leader contributors sum it up well:

1. Avoid pitching self-serving topics. For example, “Why Healthcare Organizations Must Go Wireless,” by a wireless vendor, or “The Critical Need for EMRs,” by an EMR vendor. These always get rejected.

2. Thought Leaders is not an opportunity to get your company’s name or product’s name into print. It’s an opportunity to posture or position the company as a thought leader in the healthcare IT industry. The best Thought Leaders columns don’t mention vendor or product names.

TL #2: Be guided by generosity

kafka93 — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 12:16:00 +0000

2. Be Guided By Generosity.

Thought leadership is a commitment to a grander goal than lead generation—an effort whose reason for being is to benefit your industry as a whole, not just your own company.

The blog www.elise.com notes that a spirit of generosity is essential to thought leadership, and it’s a good summary of the shift in mindset that should occur when a company makes the transition from business leader to thought leader. “Thought leadership requires generosity of one’s time, intelligence and knowledge,” Elise Bauer counsels on the blog.3 Such generosity can take the form of:

• Pitching issues-oriented stories to the media that don’t mention your company by name or your products
• Calling and talking with media writers and editors yourself, rather than leaving it up to your PR agency
• Recognizing that the marketing department—where most thought leadership programs originate—is not just a fulfillment service for your sales team

Consider the phrase “a rising tide lifts all boats” as a mantra for your thought leadership efforts, and understand that, with a little patience, your company will benefit from your work. Companies will look to you for insight and innovation. The media will quote you and analysts will respect you. And rest assured that your brand will have earned a new credibility and glow that while difficult to quantify on a spreadsheet, will build your company’s success over the long term.

TL #3: Tell don’t sell

kafka93 — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 12:16:00 +0000

3. Tell, don’t sell.

Notorious examples of sales pitches thinly disguised as thought leadership abound in the B2C world. Consider the millions spent by the tobacco industry on studies to disprove a link between smoking and lung cancer. Most recently, nutritionists have pointed out similar transparencies in the CPG industry’s Smart Choices program. “When Froot Loops can earn a Smart Choices check mark, a new industrywide label that indicates a product’s supposed healthfulness, we know we can’t rely on the marketers, with their dubious health claims, or for that matter on the academic nutritionists who collaborate on such labeling schemes,” wrote Michael Pollan in a New York Times article.4

In the B2B world, a poorly executed thought leadership program might not make headlines in The New York Times, but it won’t win you any fans, either. The point is that in our post-credit meltdown marketplace, the consumer—whether B2B or B2C—is more skeptical than ever, and can spot an insincere bit of “trust me marketing” a mile away. This is all the more reason for companies to exercise due diligence when starting a thought leadership program. Be sure it is more “chalk talk” than “pep talk.”

If white papers are part of the program, be sure you understand that they should offer objective analysis of an industry issue or problem, not promotion or technical documentation of your products. A white paper should:

• Justify why the problem must be solved
• Objectively explore alternative ways to solve the problem
• Logically lead the reader to the conclusion that your organization has the knowledge, expertise and tools required to solve the problem

Define Your Own Brand of Thought Leadership

kafka93 — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 12:15:00 +0000

Here’s #1 of a 5-part series on best practices in developing a thought leadership strategy. For more, read the white paper “Is Anybody Following Your Thought Leadership?”.

Best Practice #1:
Clearly define your own brand of thought leadership.

What is “thought leadership,” anyway?

“Thought leadership is one of those terms people throw around with no idea what it means,” said Beverly McDonald, former chief communication office at Infor, a $2 billion software company. “People think it means repeating what has already been said in the marketplace and if they do it with more frequency they’ll rise above the noise. Or they think it’s an alternative way to get their name in the press when they can’t get attention with any real news. The bottom line for me has always been that you can’t be a great thought leader unless you have great thoughts.”

Brian Carroll extends the definition on his B2B lead generation blog: “Thought leaders genuinely influence others by creating, advancing and sharing ideas. Their objective is to help others. In business, thought leaders revolutionize the way others (both inside and outside their companies) do business. That’s thought leadership.”

Beverly McDonald adds one more quality essential to thought leadership: passion.

Before you embark, be sure you know where you are going. That means having a clear understanding of what thought leadership means in general, in your marketspace and for your company. It means finding the specific differentiating thing that your company can evangelize with distinction and passion.

Experts agree that thought leadership is one of the most misunderstood, overused and yes—abused—terms in business. Beware of biting off more than you can chew. Start small and grow.

Social Media: It Has To Have Strategy

kafka93 — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 13:19:00 +0000

Chris Koch wrote an excellent blog post, “There is No Social Media Strategy, Only Marketing Strategy,” in which he states:

Social media simply makes starkly plain what we’ve known for some time but haven’t had to face yet: We don’t have a lot of content capable of generating trust and relationships.

Chris sees, as I do among clients and prospects, that B2B marketers are eagerly adopting the next-generation tools, but are learning the hard way what it takes to use them properly. That requires feeding them with content–and the right kind of content.

Chris asks, “What do you think? Are we overemphasizing social media strategy at the expense of overall marketing integration?” Yes, many marketers are. As I blogged recently, there are marketers who want to produce content quickly, and social media turns the demand for content into a race. It is easy to rely on what’s familiar–the old product pitch–but that isn’t effective in social media. What is effective is thought leadership, which requires real strategy and forethought.

Is Your Content Small Enough?

kafka93 — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 15:23:00 +0000

Enjoyed this video, via Joe Pulizzi on Junta42′s blog, by Gary Vaynerchuk:

Linchpin: GaryVee from Seth Godin on Vimeo.

Our writers see, over and over again, B2B marketers who are accustomed, and rewarded, for thinking “big picture.” When writers write about the big picture, they get the copy featured in our jargon quiz.

What’s so hard about thinking small? It’s radically counter-intuitive. When we tell the 1% story, our gut tells us that we’re ruling our 99% of our readers. Not so. By being specific, we paint a clear picture. Readers deserve more credit–they can connect the 1% experience they read about to their own 1% experience. If they can’t make that connection, then they aren’t your customer anyway.