BJREES

B2B marketing and AI

Category: Events / Community

Learnings from events, conferences, webinars, and community engagement. How live interactions and peer networks shape brand awareness, lead generation, and customer advocacy.

  • Working from Home

    Working from Home

    Lots of people have written about the “New world of remote working” (so much so, that that phrase has become a cliche in the space of six months). But I think it’s still an interesting topic, because I have a hunch the changes we’ve seen in 2020 will become permanent, even as we start to move out of lockdown.

    I agree with the comments many have made, that “The genie won’t go back in the bottle” (another cliche…). I struggle to see a scenario where we’ll all go back to the old way of working – 5 days a week in a single, centralised office. Why? Because it’s working better now from both sides.

    First, compare the old and the new as an employee. Work pre-March was long commutes either pumping CO2 in to the air in your car, or squashing in to a train carriage, losing hours of your day in both cases, to sit in an office and stare at your screen, out for a £6 Pret sandwich at lunchtime, then home, exhausted. If you manage to fit the £80-a-month gym trip in there, great, but you’re home even later.

    Now? Count the ways in which work has improved for the employee:

    • Firstly, the instant time saving on the commute. No commute takes less than 30 minutes, and often much more, if you add in a tube ride, or traffic problems. So many people are immediately getting 1-3 hours of their lives back.
    • Cost of the commute. Either petrol savings, or season ticket. This can easily add up to hundreds of pounds a month.
    • Lunch – eating at home is generally cheaper than buying from sandwich shops. I know that’s tough on the city-based sandwich shops, but more on that later.
    • Health – eating at home can easily be more healthy than eating out-and-about. You can spend 10 mins prepping something in a kitchen, making it much easier to do something good for you.
    • Exercise – going for a run is much easier (with that saved time), or a lunchtime cycle ride if preferred. Pilates classes on Zoom are also easier if you’re not having to find somewhere to change afterwards.
    • Flexibility. A big one I believe – being able to organise your work-life balance is much easier when WFH. A simple example, if your kid needs dropping off at the school gate at 8:40am, you can do that and be back at your desk for 9am. That simply doesn’t work if you have a 1 hour commute to London. So you need to have nannies or lean on friends/family. Additionally, there are benefits like “Being in for the builder/delivery”, getting the washing done, finishing an hour early to go and see family/friends and so on. A lot of this stems back to point 1 – the time saved no longer spent on the long commute.

    Secondly, what about the employer? Unlike the list above, I think there really is only one of note – but it’s a big one, and one that matters to every employer: the cost of running an enormous office, often in an expensive central location. Recently, the city law firm, Slater and Gordon have given up their London office – why keep it? After salaries, office costs are often one of the biggest bills for an org, and it just doesn’t seem necessary any more.

    There is an additional important point here as well – not so much a benefit for employees, but a worry that didn’t turn out to be true. A lot of companies worried about productivity drops in a remote world. But that simply hasn’t been the case – if anything productivity of employees has actually improved, as people adapt to the new ways of working and gain the benefits listed above.

    Seismic shifts like this one tend to only happen when it’s good for “both sides”. Of course there are people who will lose out from this shift – property developers in the cities, sandwich shops in central locations and so on. And of course, I’ve completely ignored some of the problems caused by remote working – isolation for employees, loss of cohesive for company culture, and many more.

    But my point is that I struggle to see a way back. The new world will be one of mixed models – some WFH, perhaps visits to new, smaller offices for 1-2 days a week, perhaps for team events only. Most office work is spent starting at a screen (for better or worse), and that can now be done more cheaply, and with a better use of everyone’s time, with more people doing this from home.

    What impact will this have?

    Firstly, I think the benefits above will become embedded in company working models. Meaning – companies will lower their annual rent costs and related costs (office maintenance etc). And employees will just get used to be able to manage their work around their lives and vice-versa. This will become expected of any role – any job that asks you to be in a central London location for 8:30am will become far less attractive, as employees raise their expectations of working life – suddenly this will become a big negative on a job ad, rather than just an accepted necessity.

    But I think there are two more big additional changes that will happen, one about the towns and cities we all live in, the second about how we look for jobs going forward.

    One of the problems with everyone WFH-ing, is that the whole infrastructure around centralised office work is struggling. If you were running a sandwich shop, book shop, stationary shop, gift shop or similar next to a city law firm in January, it’s hard to see how your business will return. And that really is a shame, particular when your business is failing through no fault of your own.

    But that misses the point that, the need for these services is just the same – it’s just the location has changed. if there’s a movement of, say, 50% of office workers to be at home, then naturally the environment around peoples’ homes will flourish instead. So we’ll start to see new bakeries, new local shops, new cafes sprouting up in heavily residential areas, particularly as lockdown ends and people want to head out for lunch a bit more. This could be a real resurgence for some areas that have struggled to date.

    More than this though, I think we will see different impacts for different areas. I know the South East of England best, and I’d suggest there are two types of town outside London, whose fortunes will change. Firstly, there are cities/towns like Cambridge (where I live now) and Bury St Edmunds (where I was brought up). Both are great places to live, each with their own character. But they’ve always struggled from being just a-little-too-far from London to commute regularly. It’s possible, but a little exhausting. That’s always kept the population down for these towns, because it’s really not commuter-territory if you want to work in London. But that’s not a problem anymore! You can get a job “in London” and now work 3-5 days a week from your flat in Cambridge. This should significantly increase the numbers in these areas, leading to growth of local infrastructure.

    Secondly, there are places which have always been commuter towns – 30 minutes to London by train, but without a whole lot going on there (few local restaurants, cafes etc). These towns could go two ways – either they’ll start to get that infrastructure too, forced by all the local residents (no longer commuting to London), who want nice places to eat and drink. Alternatively (and hopefully not), they’ll struggle as people move away over time – if the only reason you lived there was the commute, and that’s no longer relevant well, why stay?

    The other side to this coin though, and I’d suggest an even bigger change, is how the world of work opens up for you as an employee (and also, as an employer of course). Most job searches start with location – “I’m looking for a Java developer role within 45 minutes of Reading”. But if you remove that constraint, the world is suddenly your oyster! Well, the country anyway. If you only have to visit the office 1 day a week (or even less), you don’t mind a 2 hour commute both ways. Suddenly you can get a role based half-way across the country. As an employee, you can start looking for the things you really care about – the actual role, company culture, the domain and so on, rather than being artificially constrained by geography.

    This democratisation of work, will positively impact the good employers too. Some employers will be worried (“What if all my employees leave, now they can all look further afield?!”). But that misses the point – as an employer you can now look further afield for talent. And this will have a positive effect for great employers who genuinely care about their employees, their culture and the work they do. The knock-on effect here will be that, good employers who don’t allow remote working will find themselves struggling against those that do.

    Again, I want to re-iterate, I’m knowingly ignoring many of the problems that remote-working will bring. I’m not denying those are there. And I think a 100% remote-working world (without any physical interaction with colleagues, either for work, team, or social events) is not something I would find attractive.

    But I feel the benefits of the new hybrid world outweigh the downsides for employers and employees both. And because it’s beneficial for both parties, I think the current changes will stick even once the vaccine is available. Why go back to something less productive, more polluting, more expensive and less flexible, now that we’ve all seen something better!?

  • There are two times when you don’t need to worry about Customer Success. And neither apply to you

    There are two times when you don’t need to worry about Customer Success. And neither apply to you

    Another thought exercise. I was trying to think of scenarios where Customer Success – i.e. genuinely worrying about whether your customers were using and getting value from your offering – wasn’t going to be a priority for a business in 2019. I could only think of two. But I think even these are slightly fatuous, I’d be surprised if I can find anyone to whom these apply.

    Why such a strong statement? Because the nature of generating revenue has shifted away from “sell-and-forget” models towards business models that rely on customer satisfaction. And this isn’t just about the move of businesses towards services and subscriptions. The rise of review sites such as TripAdvisor, Which? or Trustpilot has meant that companies who could get away with shoddy services or offerings in the past, no longer can.

    Still, I managed to think of two examples – do these apply to you!?

    1. You’re a brand new startup, so your growth and targets are based on acquiring new customers only – you don’t have any existing customers on which you need to rely for revenue.
    2. You’ve been around a while, but you’re selling some sort of perpetual or “one-off” product. Does it matter if the customers don’t come back or don’t like what they bought?

    And I can see the logic in each of these. For the first – you need to prioritise. What’s the point worrying about customers “getting value from your offerings”, if you can’t land any customers anyway! Surely you can worry about that problem later?

    For the second – if you’re a restaurant in a tourist town, you know customers are only going to come to you once. They’re not coming back anytime soon, so why worry if the pizza was burnt, or the risotto under-cooked?

    The flaws in these arguments are pretty clear, but let me work through them anyway..

    • New startups, particularly in tech, are now rarely, if ever, offering products on perpetual or “one-off” licenses. Why does this matter, when you’re just trying to acquire new revenue? If you sell your product as a one-off for £25,000 and the customer doesn’t use it then, hey-ho, that’s a shame. But you’ve pocketed your £25,000 so you and your investors are happy. But, what if you’re selling a subscription service at £1,000 per month, and the customer isn’t happy after 3 months (and therefore cancels)? Well you’ve only made £3,000 from that customer (who likely cost you a lot lot more to acquire). And worse, is unlikely to come back. So, in a world where services and subscriptions are dominant, you have no choice but to care about customers’ success.
    • What about the situation where you are selling “one-off” products, perhaps as a more mature business? The main flaws in this strategy are that firstly, is it true that customers never come back? I’d suggest that’s actually pretty rare. The majority of revenue for established orgs comes from existing customers, from up-sells and cross-sells. Sometimes they want more of the same, sometimes something new. But you can be pretty sure if they weren’t happy with the first product, they’re not going to ask about the second. Oh, and customers do return to tourist restaurants and cafes – I’ve been to The Creamery in Minehead probably every year for the last 7-8 years on holiday. A classic “repeat customer” – and it’s great every time!
    • Secondly, people do talk to each other about products! Either via review sites, word-of-mouth, at events and conferences, online forums, everywhere. You no longer can get away with a shoddy product, and hope “Nobody hears about it”. The advent of review sites, forums and so on, has made this all much much easier. 20 years ago, if a software vendor provided a poor product, then of course the people (suffering) in that customer organisation knew about it. But how would others find out? Perhaps there would be some word-of-mouth (WOM) through conferences or personal relationships – but not much. Now the word spreads like wildfire. I’ve hunted, and it’s actually pretty difficult to find an example of a low-quality product, where its poor reputation has spread across the Internet. Why – because the speed of the bad-PR mechanism would have killed that product years ago! You do see WOM spread quickly for great products (Slack, Trello, etc) – the sort of effect you want to see, based on a series of customers having a wonderful experience with your product.

    I believe that, in the past, yes, it was possible for an org to get away without having Customer Success at the top of the their agenda – in the days where “Nobody would find out”, or where subscription-based services were still rare.

    But times have changed. You need to be able to answer simple questions such as “How many customers got started with our product?”, “How many kept going?”, “How many get value out of it?”, “How much value – all that was possible, or just the ‘basic’ features?”, “How does this impact MRR?” and so on. These are key indicators for future growth, given that large amounts of that growth will be dependent on the success of your customers buying more, or buying other things from you; but also remember – people tell their friends…

  • Five Myths About The Marketing Revenue Engine

    Five Myths About The Marketing Revenue Engine

    I love the book Rise of the Revenue Marketer. In it Debbie Qaqish describes the need for a change program to move your marketing department from being a cost centre (“We’re not sure what marketing do, but we need them to do the brochures”), to a revenue centre (“They’re responsible for generating a significant proportion of our company’s revenue”). Though the journey is easy to describe, it’s a long and arduous path to take.

    We at Redgate have been on this path for a while now, and we’ve made enormous progress, particularly in the last 12 months. But one of the things that slowed us down was holding on to certain beliefs about how to measure marketing performance, how to measure the impact of marketing work – and holding on to those beliefs for too long, when perhaps they just weren’t true. Lots of these ideas came from conferences, blogs, books and make a lot of sense on paper. But when you get to the real world of implementing something, the reality is not always as expected.

    Here I’ll go through five “myths” that I found to be unfounded. Of course, these come with big caveats – we’re one specific org, with a specific market, with particular advantages and disadvantages – so all should be taken with a pinch of salt. Still, with that caveat in mind here are my five, starting with the most controversial:

    Myth 1: Attribution Models are Useful

    The idea of a marketing attribution model is that you can take every lead, opportunity or sale and somehow work out “What were all of the things we did in marketing that contributed to that outcome, and what value would we give to each of these things?”. For example, I just generated a lead, I could go back and look through the path history of that individual, find that she clicked on a PPC ad, attended an event, did a Google search, interacted with us on Facebook, and so on. I then have some smart “multi-touch” model that assigns value to each of these (maybe the first or last get higher scores? There are lots of alternatives). If you then know the value of a lead (let’s say, $10), you can work out the Return on Marketing Investment (ROMI) for each activity by comparing the “value” (e.g. maybe $3 for the PPC click), against the spend.

    But, I think this is baloney. This is a classic example where – just because you can do the maths, doesn’t mean to say the results are accurate or useful. The model is flawed for at least the following two reasons:

    1. Data. It’s impossible to get all of the data about an individual’s path history – everything they’ve done, interacting with your brand over the last few years. Not difficult, but impossible. You don’t know about the offline activity they’ve done, you don’t know about the browsing they’ve done on their mobile, on their home laptop at the weekend, you’re very unlikely to have a link to their activity from three years ago (when they actually discovered the brand) and so on. NB: some MarTech orgs promise they can deliver on all these things, but I don’t believe them!
    2. Over-simplistic view of how customers learn about a brand. The reality is that an individual will have 100s of different interactions with your brand all of which build up to a given perspective. They’ll attend an event, they’ll speak to a specific person on your stand who may or may not be great, they’ll read 100s of different pages on your site, they’ll talk to their colleagues about you, they’ll read third party review sites, they’ll kick the tyres of the software, they’ll see an ad on a news site (without clicking on it!), they’ll remember a comment from their boss two years ago (“Oh, you should check out Redgate, see what they’ve got”), and so on. All of these things somehow add up to a favourable view of your org (or otherwise!) and to try and model that with a simple sequential attribution model isn’t, I think, valid. The best you can hope to do is make sure every interaction with your brand is awesome and have faith that will lead to positive results.

    Okay, maybe it’s not all baloney – but the approach is, I believe, significantly flawed. Nevertheless, there are some things that can be measured – which brings me to myth 2…

    Myth 2: Everything should be Measured

    Not sure this is controversial actually. To quote Seth Godin:

    The approach here is as simple as it is difficult: If you’re buy­ing direct marketing ads, measure everything. Compute how much it costs you to earn attention, to get a click, to turn that attention into an order. Direct marketing is action marketing, and if you’re not able to measure it, it doesn’t count.

    If you’re buying brand marketing ads, be patient. Refuse to measure. Engage with the culture. Focus, by all means, but mostly, be consistent and patient. If you can’t afford to be con­sistent and patient, don’t pay for brand marketing ads.

    The danger is that, in an effort to measure everything and show the return on everything, you stop activities because they’re fundamentally un-measurable. The myth is that “Because you need to show a repeatable, predictable and scalable revenue engine, you need to understand and measure the impact of everything you do”. But that’s taking the argument to an extreme view – the reality is that there will always be spend in your budget where you won’t be able to tie revenue to that spend. Ever.

    Myth 3: You Need a Funnel

    Perhaps controversial again. A traditional funnel implies a sequential path for a customer from something like “Awareness of problem” to “Discovered our solution [to that problem]”, “Evaluated our solution” finally “Becomes customers [then perhaps evangelist etc]”.

    Again, we’ve never found this to represent reality. Of course all models are exactly that – models. They’re not perfect, but if they’re useful, that’s okay.

    But I feel the funnel fundamentally misrepresents how real people actually interact with a brand. From talking to customers what you find is that there are just an enormous number of holes in this approach. For example:

    • The “Awareness of problem” is just too crude. The chances are that your content was very unlikely to be the way people became aware of the problem; that actually their knowledge has built up in a fragmented way over time; that they’re still learning all through the sale, even post-sale.
    • The idea of “stages” like this just doesn’t make sense generally. Often people are already customers of yours – and they’re finding new things you offer. Their understanding of your offering is forever a slow build up (from a theoretical “nothing” many years ago, to some partial understanding now), that it goes back and forth.

    A funnel implies a single direction of travel, a path to enlightenment, ending with purchasing your tool. But, from talking to customers I find a much messier reality – people go back and forth, there are interrupts and so on. We’ve found it almost impossible to actually classify people in to different stages – it’s too over-simplistic to be useful (we’ve found).

    Myth 4: Conversion Rates Matter

    Again, controversial. But our experience is that conversion rates are the lever you are least able to pull. Why? Because for most orgs, they have a pretty well optimised process for converting leads at different stages. At Redgate, there are certain lead types that convert at a 70% conversion rate, within a 2 week period – and that has been consistent for about 10 years, almost regardless of what we do! We’ve spent a lot of time and effort on this stuff – its value is in “Can we improve/optimise this?” – and generally we find we can’t. Of course you monitor it, to make sure it’s not dropping (e.g. because some leads got lost), but otherwise – stop worrying.

    Finally, myth 5…

    Myth 5: This is an Impossible Task

    I wanted to end on a positive. 2-3 years ago, I thought the task of building out a “revenue engine” that was vaguely water-tight, believable and actionable was never going to happen. There were so many holes in the data, it was so hard linking activities to outcomes, that it wouldn’t actually happen.

    I pleased to say that isn’t what has happened. It’s been pretty arduous, but we are now on the brink of a model that allows us to:

    • See the impact of many (but not all!) of our activities
    • Track the resultant leads through to opportunity then revenue
    • Match the activities with budgets to pull out ROMI
    • Use this insight to stop certain activities (already cut a few things), start a few more, and adjust how we do other things.

    A simple example of the last point – in 2018 we ran a number of webinars of different sorts. We tracked through the leads, opportunities and revenue from each of these and found that the impact of having a “star” presenting the webinar (someone big in our community) had a far bigger upside than expected – at little or no additional cost to us, other than the trouble of finding and convincing these stars. I.e. one webinar with a star involved would generate more high quality leads than 2-3 webinars without such a person on the event. So this year, we’re changing our program a little – fewer webinars, but each more impactful with more big names presenting.

    Just a small example, but there are countless more – we’re building out a model where we know how and which levers we can pull (and which we can’t), and at what cost. It took a long time to get there, but it’s finally becoming real. Feel free to get in touch if you want to know more!

  • Building a MarTech Stack at a Small Organisation

    Building a MarTech Stack at a Small Organisation

    I recently spoke at the B2B Ignite conference in London on “Building a MarTech Stack at a Small Organisation: A Real World Example of What’s Worked and What Hasn’t”. Here are my slides from that talk.

    Rules of Thumb

    • Manual first, then automate
    • You’re either growing revenue, or saving costs. Should be able to show this benefit on a piece of A5
    • The business case has to be overwhelming
    • However long/expensive you think it will be to implement – double it
    • Step changes, not incremental improvements

    It’s a lot of pictures, so might be hard to understand without the actual talk! Any questions, feel free to get in touch, always happy to help.

  • Brand Amplifiers

    Brand Amplifiers

    I’m writing this on my way to the Sirius Decision Summit in Vegas (sitting in Terminal 3). I’m hoping to get a lot out of the conference (though I’m currently in option paralysis mode – too many sessions to choose from).

    But this post is about a very small part of that conference – though it’s something which I feel is very important for brands, and is often forgotten about.

    On the first morning of the summit, Sirius arrange a 5K run for all attendees. Though it seems like madness going for a 5K run along the Strip in the desert weather, it’s all for a great cause – the VWM Families Foundation. In particular, after a long flight, it’s just the sort of thing you need to get “back to normal” and find some energy for the days ahead.

    But what I also thought was interesting was that this is a great example of a “Brand Amplifier” for Sirius. By this I mean – the run isn’t something directly relevant to what Sirius do. There’s no “Call to Action”, there’s no surrounding “Digital campaign” with attached ROI, no “Strategy”.

    What there is, is Sirius doing a great thing that can only lead to a positive residual opinion of the organisation. Would I buy their services on the back of this alone? Of course not. Is there a clear ROI on the time and investment from Sirius – unlikely. Is it based on deep customer needs analysis and segmentation? I very much doubt it. But, should they do it? Absolutely yes!

    Activities like this (and there are many sorts) are great for “amplifying” the rest of your marketing. And most great companies do it. They provide positive re-inforcement of your core messages and campaigns in a way that is hard to measure, but still also worth doing. Note, I’m 99% certain that Sirius aren’t hosting the run as part of a cynical campaign to “Boost their brand awareness” – I’m sure they’re just doing it because it’s a good thing to do. But they’re doing it nonetheless.

    The effect on customers is intangible, but still real. It leaves me with the impression that Sirius are the sort of people I’d like to do business with. Of course, the proposition has to be strong, what I need, it has to work and so on. Like a guitar amplifier, if the signal going in is poor, then the amp only makes things worse. But if the signal going in is good, then the amplifier can only help.

    What does this mean for you? For most, it’s the sort of things that are on your website around and between your core messages. Sure, front and centre you’ve got the key benefits of your offering, all finely-honed over the years. But what does it say in your “About us” or “Company” section? Is it a series of glum black-and-white photos of aging men from the “Management Team”, or is a story about the annual charity ball that your company runs? Is it a bland and detailed description of your services, categorised and ordered, or is it photos of your colleagues contributing to a local hackathon?

    And it extends beyond that – what activities does your company do to support the community it serves? Anything? It’s not just charity work, it’s user groups, universities, local events, sponsorship and so on.

    Of course, not every organisation wants to be appear as “fun” – if I’m looking through a financial advisor’s website, I don’t want to see pictures of the team drunk at Ascot. But the “peripheral” activities that your company undertakes, have a stronger effect than you might think (both positive and negative).

    Does this matter for B2B? Yes, I think it does. To repeat – if a company doesn’t provide a great service or product, that I genuinely need, at a good price, then I’m not going to bite. But we are people, buying from people – I’ve encountered a few examples over the years where the impression given by a company’s website has strongly put me off that organisation (even if you often end up buying, begrudgingly). And there are orgs that give such a strong impression of the great company they are, that you actively seek them out when looking for a solution. Did I make the purchase because of that? No. Did it help – yes, yes it did.

    Finally, if you work in marketing today, you’re likely – and rightly – being pushed to measure the impact of your work more effectively than ever. Spending millions of dollars on campaigns without a clue whether they work or not, is no longer okay, and that’s a good thing.

    But if you’re worrying about the “ROI of the charitable work that we do” then you’re asking the wrong questions. These things are good in-and-of-themselves. For me, they require no justification, no debate. For the Sirius run, it’s a win-win-win – I win because I get a nice run after a long flight, the charity wins from the donations, and Sirius win from the brand amplification. That’s justification enough.

  • Your Primary Job as a Marketing Leader is to Prioritise

    Your Primary Job as a Marketing Leader is to Prioritise

    I’ve just finished the excellent Complete Guide to B2B Marketing by Kim Ann King. It’s very “List-ey” – it’s full of To Do lists (“Want to figure out your budgets for media spend? Here’s a 7-point list of how to do it”), which I really like. Many marketing books are rather waffly and vague, so a practical guide is always welcome.

    But, here’s the rub – by the end of the book it would be very easy to feel completely overwhelmed by the list of things you need to do to be running a world-class marketing organisation! From reading the book you’d be left with the impression that you must be doing all of the following:

     

    1. Fully integrated web, marketing, customer and predictive analytics
    2. Implemented full experimentation and optimisation platform
    3. Full marketing automation
    4. Advanced personalisation and targeting across all channels
    5. Complete oversight of the marketing funnel from out-of-funnel to leads to MQLs to SQLs to closed
    6. A clean, de-duped and pristine CRM
    7. A full inbound/content strategy
    8. Deep and extensive planning cycles from data to goals to strategies to tactics to results and back round again – carried out quarterly
    9. Segmentation, positioning, messaging, buyer personas and so on for every product group and segment
    10. A Brand awareness plan for new markets
    11. Demand generation activities across all stages of the funnel
    12. Full retention marketing plan for your “existing customer” segment
    13. A plan for organisational enablement for all of the above including budgets, staffing, forecasts
    14. On top of all this, keeping on top of new developments in marketing, self-education and so on

    ..and this is just scratching the surface. In fact she’s very open in the first chapter about how the role for anyone in marketing today can feel overwhelming, that there is so much to keep on top of.

    How do you cope with this? All of the things above seem vital, important – how can you be doing your job properly unless you’re doing all of the above?

    I’ve also just re-read Porter’s great article on Strategy (https://hbr.org/1996/11/what-is-strategy – you need an HBR subscription to read it unfortunately). One primary point he makes is to ask the question “What is a strategy?” and one of his tenants that qualifies an activity as “strategic” is whether or not you are making choices to not do something. For example, if at your business you want to “Improve the reporting system so that we can see product performance better” – this might be a big project, but you’re not choosing to not do anything. No-one would choose to “Make reporting worse so that we can’t see what’s going on”. All you’re doing is improving your business effectiveness.

    However if your company had two products, A and B, and you said that “We’re only going to sell product A going forward and stop selling product B” – that’s strategic, because someone else could choose to sell product B instead (or stick with both, or neither).

    How is this relevant to Kim Ann King’s book? You have to make choices. You have to make choices about which elements of marketing activity you are going to focus on, and to which you are going to say No. This is your job as a marketing leader, to prioritise and say no to things. Anyone can take the list above and propose “Doing all of the above”, but that road leads to a lack of focus and burnout.

    How do you choose? It’s the simple, but difficult job of understanding your business, and where your problems are. To take an example from my own organisation, Redgate. There’s a section in the book about “Building a community site, with content to build trust and inbound for your brand”. But, we are fortunate to already have this (a couple of sites, http://www.sqlservercentral.com and http://www.simple-talk.com). It’s not that these can’t be improved, but is it a priority to start a new community site at Redgate? No it isn’t.

    This is an easy one though – when you’ve already ticked something on the list. What about all the things you haven’t done yet? This gets more difficult, but then this is your job. Should you spend the next year cleaning and de-duping your CRM system so that you can implement advanced personalisation and targeting? Or re-branding your company? Or building analytical capability for the future? Or implementing a MarTech platform? Or experimenting with new channels?

    The job is to diagnose – what are your current problems? What is currently holding your business back, your constraints? What work could you do that would move you towards your company goals next year? This latter point is vital – if your company objectives are about growth rather than, say, cost-cutting, or process improvements, this suggest different activities.

    What’s very important is to recognise the different go-to-market strategy and type of company that you work in, compared to others. Perhaps my one criticism of this book is that, though it purports to be specific to B2B marketing, there’s not enough opinion on what is most useful for B2B marketing, and what’s more relevant to B2C. There’s some (e.g. that LinkedIn is more relevant than SnapChat) and there is more of a focus on lead nurturing through to sales people (more relevant to the high-value/low-volume world of traditional B2B), but there isn’t quite enough direction on “This activity is popular about B2C marketers, but really is a waste of time for you”.

    This is where your job comes in – what sort of B2B org do you work at? At Redgate, really we’re B2BC. We’re absolutely selling software to businesses – there’s no way Jo Public is interested in SQL Server comparison tools. But, where most traditional B2B orgs are high-value/low-volume with all that entails (low lead volume, high ATV, significant sales nurturing, multiple buyer personas in each org etc etc), we are much closer to B2C in our business model – low ATV, high volume, mass (1:many) digital marketing and so on. So for us, certain activities are more relevant than others. As an example, most marketing automation platforms use a nurturing model based on slowly taking leads through a number of stages (awareness, leads, MQLs, SQLs etc), using personalised content – based on in-depth data and analytics for different customer segments. This is needed because often B2B organisations have complex offerings that need to be explained and “sold” to companies, so that they understand the benefits of spending $500k with that vendor.

    But – what if this isn’t you? What if you sell software for $400 that, quite frankly doesn’t need explaining in this way? What if it’s pretty darned obvious what it does, and the free trial tells the end-user everything they need to know? In that scenario, is it worth investing millions of dollars in a new marketing automation platform? What’s the uplift going to be – will you ever get payback?

    It’s these hard decisions that you need to make to ensure you and your team don’t get overwhelmed with new activities. You’re making strategic decisions when you decide not to do one thing and instead do another. May be you put marketing automation off for a year (despite the overwhelming message from the industry that you have to be be doing it ) and focus on finding new customer segments instead? Maybe for you, it’s about starting a significant community platform this year, and everything else can just keep ticking along?

    Once you’ve decided, there’s then the equal challenge of leading the change through your organisation. Every idea (automation, branding, content, channel, sales support etc etc) will have its advocates in your company. You need to hold on to the logic for why you’ve chosen A, not B, and try to get that adopted through the company so that everyone is working to the same goals. The strategy is just the start of the process…

     

  • Increase Your Net Promoter Score to Decrease Marketing Spend

    tapestry-michelfeld-wheel

    Marketing budgets are always on the squeeze. Or may be less that money is tight and more that the expectations on Return on Marketing Investment (ROMI) are raised. “I don’t mind spend £50k on this campaign, but I want to know what return I got, or you won’t have £50k to splurge next year”.

    The point is – how do we get more return for less investment? Well there is a way, and it’s free – and it’s where the company I work for get around half of our traffic. And they’re good leads, probably the best we get.

    What’s the magic formula? What’s the source of these Glengarry leads? It is, of course, being recommended by a friend. We regularly ask our customers “Where did you hear about this product you just bought?” And the two biggest answers are “Recommended by a colleague” and the related answer “Used it in my previous job”. The latter I think of as “Recommended to myself” – if you move job it’s a great opportunity to dump old products you didn’t like using, so to take on the same products again in a new role is a real testament to your product offering.

    These two answers add up to more than 50% of responses, with things like “Google”, “Events” and “Ads” (the things we have to pay for) a long way behind.

    Now obviously there are significant subtleties here – getting to a point where people recommend your products to colleagues takes years of significant investment in R&D, support, innovation, community work and so on. Also of course, paid-for marketing is generally targeted at getting new people in from new organisations. But once you get this fly-wheel of traffic spinning, you can take your ROMI as high as you like – I suspect we could completely cut our marketing spend for certain products and not see a downward trend in leads for a year or two – some products have effectively reached escape velocity. One of the reasons this source is so effective is that not only do you get a great lead when Frank recommends your product to Joey, but then Joey recommends you to Dave and Kim and the effect, if not viral, is at least self-perpetuating.

    But enough of this self-congratulation – what has this got to do with Net Promoter scores? Wikipedia describes Net Promoter scores (NPS) as a measure of customer satisfaction. In essence you ask your customers “How likely are you to recommend our company/product/service to your friends and colleagues? ” on a scale of 0 to 10 (0 is bad, 10 is good). Then add up the number of 9s and 10s (“promoters”) and subtract the number of 0-6s (“detractors”). This expressed as a percentage gives you your net promoter score. Anything above zero is good, anything over 50 is excellent.

    So it could be argued – increases in NPS should indicate an increase in customers’ willingness to recommend you to colleagues and friends (assuming they have the channels to do so – a separate question) leading to lower marketing spend required. But how do you impact NPS?

    I think this is actually an easy, obvious, yet hard-to-implement question. A dollar invested in marketing a poor product with poor support from a badly run company is a dollar thrown away – because you’ll never fulfill the promise made by your advertising. But a dollar invested in making your product, support, sales support, community groups etc great is a dollar invested in future free marketing and revenue.

    But it’s hard to implement this because budgets for marketing and R&D are often quite separate. How do you divert the former to the latter? Not easily. Also note of course you still need to be spending on marketing – as I’ve said before you can have the finest product in the world, but if no-one knows about it you’re wasting your time. But invest that dollar in marketing your world-class product after you’ve made it world-class.

    I haven’t said anything about how to increase your NPS but that’s because it will be different for every organisation. In most NPS surveys the recommendation is to follow up the initial rating question with “What didn’t you like about company X?”. Do the things people ask for! If they all love your product but hate your support, then that’s where to invest and so on.

    The investment in quality you’re making here is an investment in reduced marketing spend in the future.

    As a footnote, we run a big NPS survey once every 6 months with lots of “What do you like about us?”, “What don’t you like?” questions. It’s running as I write this and it’s all I can do not to peek at the answers that are in so far!

  • Is it the Content or the Author that Matters for a Blog?

    St Jerome

    If, like me, you subscribe to a lot of marketing RSS feeds, then you can’t have failed to notice the almost overwhelming proportion of posts about content marketing/SEO and how choosing appropriate and useful content for, say, your blog is a killer way of drawing in early stage leads. This SEOMoz post is a good guide to improving your blog reach, for example.

    Hard to disagree with that. However, we’ve been working on a blog at our company recently (The Future of Deployment if anyone is interested!) and, if I look at the traffic on that site over time, it struck me that actually there were three primary things that affected the impact/success of any given post (NB: the blog is at an early stage, so we’re talking about the generation of new traffic here, rather than reads from existing subscribers). In approximate order of importance (IMHO):

    1. Who the author is,
    2. Whether people link to it (because it’s interesting),
    3. The SEO credentials of the content.

    To explain these a little further – the first is reasonably obvious. We’re lucky at Red Gate to have prominent, well known people who can write for us. When they blog, they promote their posts, everyone thinks “Hey, Joe Bloggs has written something new, I’ll check that out” and we get good traffic.

    The second source of traffic is, as it says, about whether the community out there, or others (for example our sales people), find the content useful enough to either link to the post, or send links to the post out to the public.

    And third is the rather narrow task of using a tool like Yoast’s SEO tool for WordPress (which I love BTW) to get the SEO right on your blog post.

    Of course, if you can, you work on all of these – you get great people writing for you, you reach out to the community to get the word out, and you work on your SEO representation. But, as ever, we only have limited time, and my conclusion, from looking at what works, is that, basically, it’s the 1st item which has seemed to work best for us. So, if you want traffic, it’s not what you write that matters but more who writes it. This then leads to the next logical conclusion which is that, perhaps, if you want to really make a success of a blog, time directed at making friends in your community, particularly with people who are already very well known, may be considerably more valuable than time spent trying to get your content just-so.

    Of course what your doing here is buying in their reputation, hoping some of it will rub off on your blog, then your company. But this seems reasonable – there’s an awful lot of great content out there (a good post here, from Hubspot about how “Everyone’s doing it, so you’d better be good”) and actually a lot of it is reasonably obvious “no-brainer” stuff (e.g. I must have read 100 times, “Make your content interesting if you want people to read it” – thanks for that). So how can you differentiate? If someone who you respect, who you trust, and who you know is an expert in his/her field is telling you something, you’re far more likely to listen, and hear what’s being said above the noise.

    So may be your time is better spent taking some of the hot dogs in your industry out for expensive lunches, rather than hunching over a laptop trying to craft the perfect erudite post on a given topic. Ah, the sacrifices we have to make as marketers…