MarketingMuses

Does “Like It” Mean They’ll Buy It?

Social media is now an essential element of many companies' marketing programs, but how should social media marketing and advertising be planned, executed, and measured.

Yesterday, I was at the San Francisco headquarters of Racepoint Group (RPG), a public relations agency that is very effective at combining traditional PR with social media. I’ve worked with RPG at a couple of my prior companies, and I was introducing a present consulting client and RPG to each other.

We all had heard a couple of reports about Facebook on NPR that morning: GM Will No Longer Buys Ads On Facebook, and Pizza Delicious Bought An Ad On Facebook. How Did It Do?  Both reports raised questions about the value of Facebook advertising.  A quote from the GM report, attributed to the Wall Street Journal, stated:

"Asked about the move, GM marketing chief Joel Ewanick said the Detroit auto maker 'is definitely reassessing our advertising on Facebook, although the content is effective and important.' Content refers to the unpaid Facebook pages many companies use to promote their products.

"GM, started to re-evaluate its Facebook strategy earlier this year after its marketing team began to question the effectiveness of the ads. GM marketing executives, including Mr. Ewanick, met with Facebook managers to address concerns about the site's effectiveness and left unconvinced advertising on the website made sense, according to people familiar with GM's thinking."

The report on Pizza Delicious details how Facebook advertising performed for a New York-style takeout pizza vendor in New Orleans.  After targeting people who had other New York likes failed to produce results, Pizza Delicious targeted New Orleans fans of Italian food.  As the graphic shows, Pizza Delicious got close to 20 times the number of Facebook fans it usually gets in two days.

Unfortunately, the new fans didn’t turn into new customers.  According to the report, “After a long night of asking every single customer where he found out about Pizza Delicious, not one said it was through Facebook.”  The report concludes, “Maybe at some point, the new Pizza Delicious fans will show up and buy some pizza. But social advertising is so new that nobody knows for sure. It's still unproven, untested and largely unstudied.”

After this interesting diversion, we returned to the specific question of how to use social media effectively in a B2B, rather than B2C, marketing program. Social media can be very effective in the first two stages of the three-stage B2B buyer’s process. In the first stage, buyers want to understand opportunities and gain more knowledge about solutions. Videos, podcasts and white papers that describe the opportunities and solutions can be effectively distributed through social media channels. In the second stage, buyers want to define their specific problem and evaluate different solutions.  Case studies that show how companies have used your solution to solve their specific problem can be effectively presented in different media (video, audio and print) through social media channels. Social media is less effective in the final stage of the B2B buyer’s process, when the buyer is selecting the best option and negotiating terms. 

Research by SiriusDecisions shows that while B2B buyers spend 80% of their time in the first two stages of the purchase decision process, and only 20% in stage three, sellers devote 80% of their marketing resources to stage three and only 20% to the first two, most formative, stages. In my experience, social media is best used in the first two stages of the B2B buyer’s process using the following guidelines:

A Social Media Strategy – Understand how social media can best serve as part of your larger B2B marketing strategy.  I described this in a previous post Groundswell: A Guidebook for the Social Media Journey.

Understand How Your Audience Uses Social Media – When developing a B2B social media strategy in 2009, I reviewed research from Outsell that showed while 50.8% of scientists and engineers had Facebook accounts, and only 28.0% had LinkedIn accounts, the target audience firmly segregated their use of the two: Facebook was almost exclusively for personal use, while LinkedIn was used for business. Although LinkedIn had lower overall use, it was, by far, the best choice for B2B purposes.

Think Like a Publisher – In The New Rules of Marketing and PR, David Scott Meerman describes the content that is best suited for social media, “What works is a focus on your buyers and their problems. What fails is an egocentric display of your products and services.  When you understand your audience, you can construct an editorial and content strategy just for them.  In order to implement a successful strategy, think like a publisher.”

Integrate Social Media into a Unified Digital Marketing Operation – A unified digital marketing operation integrates social media along with other new and traditional marketing techniques in a manner that aligns with the B2B buyer’s three-stage decision process and allows you to measure the effectiveness of all marketing and lead generation channels.

 

How to Create a New Technology Category with Gartner (Redux)

In January, I posted How to Create a New Technology Category with Gartner. It described a three-step process used to create a new online-security category:

• Use Specialty Analyst Firms as Advisors

• Develop a Market Model and Competitive Landscape

• Land a Marquee Account

I've developed a short eDoc that can be downloaded at SlideShare.

 

Creating a New Technology Category

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A Unified Digital Marketing Operation

 

A unified digital marketing operation can help small and mid-size B2B companies:

Compete successfully with much larger companies

Produce a better return on investment (ROI)

Generate incremental revenue

Increase enterprise value

This short eBook describes how a unified digital marketing operation can be designed and built to fully utilize new digital marketing and communication technologies and achieve optimal demand generation performance.  

 

A Unified Digital Marketing Operation

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Developing a Whole Product Roadmap for Applications Software

“The point of greatest peril in the development of an emerging technology-based market lies in making the transition from an early market dominated by a few visionary customers to a mainstream market dominated by a large block of customers who are predominantly pragmatists.”

“Pragmatists evaluate and buy whole products.”

“Any company that executes a whole product strategy competently has a high probability of mainstream market success.”

     – Geoffrey Moore, Crossing the Chasm

 

Developing a Whole Product Roadmap for Applications Software

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The whole product concept, initially described by Theodore Levitt, plays a central role in Geoffrey Moore’s classic book on technology marketing, Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers.  The whole product includes everything necessary for the pragmatic mainstream customer to derive immediate value without having to build or buy additional products or services. 

Application software poses special whole product issues, given its abstract nature. 

• Where does the whole application software product begin and end? 
• What are the complete dimensions of a whole application software product?
• What whole product capabilities should be built into the application software?
• What whole product capabilities should partners deliver?

While the whole application software product strategy includes documentation, training and services, it begins with a whole product roadmap.

 

What I Learned in School: Making Marketing Relevant (Again)

 

Hamid Ghanadan, President of The Linus Group, is one of the brightest and most thoughtful marketing practitioners I know.  He and his company specialize in marketing to scientists, especially in the biotech and pharmaceutical industries.  I am attending a dinner and roundtable discussion this evening on “The Future of Science Marketing—Emerging Models for 2011 and Beyond,” hosted by The Linus Group, and I’ll post a review within the next few days.

The reason I mention Hamid today is due to a recent post by him on his blog, Linus Report, and how it intersects with a subject I recently covered as a member of the 2010 Strategic Marketing Management executive education program at Stanford GSB.  Here is a link to Hamid’s post, “Do We Know What’s Expected from Marketing,” and here is my comment (in italics):

 

"The business enterprise has two and only two basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results, all the rest are costs."

Peter Drucker wrote the Practice of Management, which included this statement, in 1954. My 20+ years experience with scientific and technology marketing is that "marketing" has at least faded, if not completely disappeared from this statement for most companies. The five responses focus mainly on the role of marketing in product management. No one mentions marketing's role in generating demand and creating enterprise value.

In many science and technology companies, product management has been separated from marketing and placed in the R&D function with an emphasis on technology and product development. The rest of marketing is viewed, generally, as a service function providing tactical sales support and marketing communications. Unfortunately, marketing personnel have not done much to change this perception.

Most surveys of CEO's concerns list many "marketing" issues near the top, including identification and engagement with prospective customers and loyalty and retention of present customers. However, most CEOs do not look to marketing, but rather to sales, service and other functions, to address these issues.

Marketing needs to demonstrate that it can produce end-to-end results throughout the marketing value chain, and strategically assist the CEO in meeting his or her top priorities for customer loyalty and retention, revenue generation and enterprise value creation.

 

While the quote at the beginning is from Peter Drucker, I initially read it just over a month ago in, “From Marketing as a Function to Marketing as a Transformational Engine,” by Nirmalya Kumar, excerpted from his book, “Marketing as Strategy: Understanding the CEO’s Agenda for Driving Growth and Innovation.”  Here is a short description of the book:

“CEOs are more than frustrated by marketing's inability to deliver results. Has the profession lost its relevance? Nirmalya Kumar argues that, although the function of marketing has lost ground, the importance of marketing as a mind-set—geared toward customer focus and market orientation—has gained momentum across the entire organization. This book challenges marketers to change their role from implementers of traditional marketing functions to strategic coordinators of organization-wide initiatives aimed at profitably delivering value to customers.”

If marketers want the respect and responsibility so many say they deserve, they have to change their role in the enterprise.  If marketing acts like a service organization, that’s the way it will (and should) be viewed.  If you want to change the situation, expand your marketing vision, knowledge and goals.  Quoting from the book, “Transformational marketing efforts should focus on initiatives that:

• profitably deliver value to customers;
• require a high level of marketing expertise;
• need cross-functional orchestration for successful implementation; and
• are results oriented.”

An Essential Handbook for Senior Managers

True general managers understand how actions taken in one functional area impact all other areas of the business. – Rob Waite

In The Lost Art of General Management, Rob Waite says these nine elements constitute the general manager’s basic skill set:

1. An understanding of how your company makes money.
2. An understanding of how your customers makes money.
3. An understanding of the market (necessary to add value to customer relationships).
4. An understanding of how your competitors relate to the customers.
5. An understanding of the industry beyond customer relationships.
6. Customer relationships at multiple levels.
7. Solid technical knowledge of your company’s processes.
8. Solid computer and internet skills.
9. A sincere interest in developing your employees and yourself.

In an age of specialization, executives and senior managers need more than expertise in a specific domain to fully contribute to an enterprise.  This quintessential handbook is a great place to identify what additional expertise is needed, and how to acquire it.

The Sound of One Hand Presenting

Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity. – Charles Mingus

Garr Reynolds combines his communications expertise (narrative and design), his experience as a jazz musician, and the tenets of Zen simplicity to undertake a noble endeavor: improve the quality and effectiveness of slide ware presentations.

His book, Presentation Zen, summarizes key points at the end of each chapter, and uses visual examples throughout to illustrate these key points.  But his goal is much more than simply providing a handbook with tips for making better presentations.  The real ambition of the book is revealed in the text where he attempts to change the way you think about presentations.  

I suspect this will be the most difficult part for most readers, especially those who may be looking for a quick fix or checklist.  Putting yourself “in the audience” to develop your presentation and using slides to illustrate and punctuate your “spoken” narrative (the real presentation) will be a challenge to most business and technology presenters.  But the greatest challenge may be the time it takes to achieve a “less is more” presentation.  It is so much easier and quicker to stuff everything into a slide deck than to take the time required to achieve the simplicity, clarity and restraint the author advocates.  As he states, “Simplicity is not easy, in fact, it is hard.” 

Editing all of the information into its simplest form, illustrating it well, and practicing the presentation until you can deliver it as naturally as a coffee shop conversation takes time and commitment.  However, if you are willing to think differently and invest the time required to develop, design and deliver more effective presentations, this book can most certainly help you achieve that end. 

PS – The author also has a very popular blog on presentation design and delivery at presentationzen.com.

Crossing the Chasm is Counterintuitive

The point of greatest peril in the development of an emerging technology-based market lies in making the transition from an early market dominated by a few visionary customers to a mainstream market dominated by a large block of customers who are predominantly pragmatists. – Crossing the Chasm

The difficulty many high-tech companies have in moving from early adoption of their product to the accelerated acceptance of the mainstream market is that the sales approach is counterintuitive.  Why should you abandon the technology sale that has been a key to your early success?  Here’s why. 

 

The figure above is the revised technology adoption life cycle developed by Geoffrey Moore in his book Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers.[i]  Crossing the chasm from early adopters to early majority is important to a company’s continued early growth and absolutely critical to accelerating growth, because the early majority represents about 34% of the total market, versus about 13% for early adopters.

Early adopters are visionaries who find it easy to imagine, understand and appreciate the benefits of a new technology, and to relate these benefits to a strategic opportunity.[ii]  Visionaries drive the early adoption phase of an emerging, disruptive technology because they see the potential for an “order-of-magnitude” return on investment and willingly take risks to pursue that goal.  Because they see such vast potential, they are the least price-sensitive of any technology adoption segment.[iii]

The early majority shares some of the early adopter’s ability to relate to technology, but ultimately they are driven by a strong sense of practicality.[iv]  While the goal of the visionary is to make a quantum leap, the goal of the pragmatist is to make a percentage improvement—incremental, measurable, predictable progress.  They are risk adverse, and want to know how other people have fared with the product.[v]  They want to see well-established references before investing substantially.[vi]

Continuing with the technology sale that was so effective with early adopters will not work, and may actually be detrimental, with the early majority.  In order to successfully cross the chasm, the basis of the sale must fundamentally change from superior technology to one that emphasizes:

A compelling business case with a value proposition that demonstrates low risk, incremental process improvement, and predictable results

Case studies that show how customers, ideally other pragmatists, have fared with the product, and that supports the value proposition in the business case

---

[i] Geoffrey A. Moore, Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers (Collins Business Essentials, 2006), 17.

[ii] Ibid, 12.

[iii] Ibid, 35.

[iv] Ibid, 5.

[v] Ibid, 42.

[vi] Ibid, 13.

A Brief History of Business Strategy

The Lords of Strategy is three books in one: 1) a history of the business strategy industry, 2) a biography of major commercial and academic strategy conceptualists, and 3) a survey of key strategic concepts and frameworks. 

I was familiar with several of the frameworks for strategic analysis--including the BGC growth-share matrix, Ken Ohmae's 3C model (The Mind of the Strategist), and Michael Porter's value chain (Competitive Advantage)--from prior coursework and reading, and from applications of all three in marketing strategy development projects.  While this book does not provide enough detail for the reader to effectively utilize any of the frameworks, I did find the context as to how the strategy concepts and frameworks were initially developed and used enlightening.  Walter Kiechel III, the author and former editorial director of Harvard Business Publishing and managing editor at Fortune magazine, also describes some of the more faddish and less useful concepts such as core competencies, strategic capabilities and reengineering.

The book opens by describing the 3 phases of business strategy history (the 3 Ps): positioning (from the 1960s through the 1980s), process (since the 1980s), and people (a recent and more nebulous phase that is still being defined). Chapters 2 through 15 tell the story of strategy consulting from the 1960s to the present.  Chapter 16 poses the question, "Where was strategy when the global financial system collapsed?"  It reads as if it the author felt obliged to bolt it on, and doesn't really fit with the rest of the book.  The author also includes a coda that speculates on the future of strategy and suggests that four issues in particular--risk, boundaries, corporate purpose and adaptiveness--"will press on the strategic consciousness of companies."

I would recommend this book to someone who has little experience with business strategy and wants an overview of the field before drilling into specific topics, or, in my case, someone with a good knowledge of strategic frameworks who is interested in knowing more about who developed them, when and why.  I fear that anyone looking for an in depth examination of strategic frameworks or an evaluation of the value provided by strategic consulting firms will be disappointed.

 

Answer These Four Questions Before You Do Anything

Answer these four questions before you start any project or program (no matter how big or small):

1. WHY am I doing this? Is it for brand equity, thought leadership, learning (e.g., market research), teaching (education or training), demand generation and/or sales support. 
2. WHO is the target audience (market)? Are you targeting present or prospective customers, employees, analysts (financial, business or technology), editors and reporters, bloggers, shareholders?
3. WHAT is the goal? Is there a specific action you want the audience to take or a key message you want them to remember? Or is there specific information you want to obtain?
4. HOW will I measure success? Are you looking for a specific number of responses, opportunities or bookings, an increase in brand awareness over a specific period of time, or a quantity and quality of online and/or offline media coverage?

If you can't answer any one of these questions, seriously reconsider wether you should undertake the project.  You could be wasting time and money on something of questionable value.

I've formalized this process in a Marketing Asset Development (MAD) form. If you would like a copy, contact me.