BJREES

B2B marketing and AI

Category: Marketing Teams

Building and managing high-performing marketing teams. Org design, culture, collaboration, and practical advice on creating resilient, skilled teams that deliver growth.

  • Dissecting Thought-Leadership

    [no title] 1972 by Andy Warhol 1928-1987

    To start, I don’t really like the term “Thought-Leadership”. Like many things in marketing, it’s a bit too “marketing-ey”. It also has echoes of NLP, something I’m not a big fan of, to say the very least.

    But, I guess it’s pretty descriptive for what it means – I’d define it as something along the lines of:

    Providing insight, ideas and leadership in a given subject area, that stretches the limits of the current consensus, driving a subject in new directions and providing deeper understanding.
     

    The reason I’ve highlighted “leadership” and somewhat repeated this idea later in the sentence, is that I believe it’s important to distinguish between this sort of activity and certain types of content marketing which are merely reflecting the current consensus and knowledge in a given area. It also highlights why I think thought-leadership is so hard, particularly if you’re using this as a marketing technique.

    First, to distinguish between thought-leadership and merely “reflecting the consensus” – I think this distinction is based on whether you are genuinely providing new insight and a deeper understanding on a subject, or are you just re-iterating others’ points of views and ideas? There’s nothing inherently wrong with the latter (unless you’re plagiarising of course ? ) – a lot of great content marketing is based on this approach. The example I gave a while ago, of VW providing content on how to keep your car safe in the winter is a really solid bit of content marketing. What they’re talking about (getting tyres, brakes etc checked before the winter starts, checking tread, knowing your revised stopping distances and so on), is hardly pushing the forefronts of engineering knowledge. But does that matter? I think this is really solid content marketing, which will enhance VW’s reputation and draw in people to their site.

    But it’s not thought-leadership. I’m not sure what thought-leadership in the area of car winter safety would actually be!, and I’ve actually struggled to find really good examples, outside of the area I work in. I think this is because, although there are many personalities (particularly in marketing, where the Cult of Personality is rife!), how many of these are providing ideas where you think “Wow, I would never have thought of that! I now, fundamentally see this subject in a new and different way”. Rare, I think. As I say, there are a few I know in my work subject area (database development), but outside that?

    The two good examples I could find in marketing generally are:

    1. Steven Wood at Eloqua (now part of Oracle). Steven has written a couple of great books on marketing automation – Digital Body Language and Revenue Engine. I see these as great thought leadership because he wasn’t just repeating received wisdom on a given subject, but really trying to say something new, and to give a more in-depth point of view on the subject.
    2. Google Analytics blog. The thing I like about the GA blog is that it’s a mix of content but, more importantly, that they do genuinely try to say something new and insightful with many of the posts.

    But, I think there’s a couple of other things these examples have in common, which make them good examples of Thought Leadership – things which are not easy to replicate in a convincing way:

    1. Authority – both are respected sources of information, so you listen. If it was exactly the same content from a.n.other random individual, I think it would be more difficult to get value from the content.
    2. Relevance to business – again, both talk about topics which promote their businesses. As I mention, I think it would be relatively easy to find someone authoritative to talk on a topic of his/her choosing, but is that going to promote what you sell?

    And this is why I think effective Thought Leadership is actually very difficult indeed. You need to find someone who fulfils the following three requirements:

    1. Knowledgeable/insightful and able to push the topic forward,
    2. Is a respected influencer in the community,
    3. Is willing to talk on the subject that promotes your business.

    You can throw money at the problem of course, by hiring some big names. But even then, if you hired someone very expensive and authoritative in a specific area, but that person wasn’t already very interested in the subject matter of your business (criteria 3), you’ll still struggle to get good thought-leadership from that person.

    An alternative is to grow someone from within. May be your CEO would be willing to tour the world talking about a given topic, writing blog articles on the side to support this. Or maybe you’ve got some very smart internal people who are already authorities on a subject, but you didn’t know it. All are options, but as I say, if you fulfil the three criteria above, you’ve a lot more chance of having a real impact, rather than just pushing out content that few people read..

  • Working on the Coalface

    Henry Moore Miners at Work on the Coal face

    Everyone who works in marketing and product management should be spending as much time as they possibly can with customers. Period. This is, of course, a bit of a bland and obvious statement (like all those marketing books that promise so much and deliver so little!) – we know this, we don’t have to be told again! But perhaps we do need to remind ourselves of why it’s so important, why it’s so dangerous to let this activity slip.

    I’m currently out in the US working the booth on a tour our company runs (called SQL in the City). This is a fantastic series of events which, at a first glance looks like our company just wanting to give something back to the community – free training, free books, giveaways and so on. And this is true: this is what we’re doing, and is a primary motivator for the tour because we believe (and I personally believe this very strongly) that supporting the community in a simple and altruistic way is one of the strongest feeders for the top of the funnel for our company.

    But a slightly more cynical person might suggest – “Hang on, isn’t this just a sales and marketing event? You’re just pushing product!”. And this is also true: obviously we’re using this as an opportunity to talk about our latest products, what we’re doing next and to show this to customers. And this is fine – there’s no bait and switch here, customers don’t mind us talking about this because 1) We’ve been upfront that we will do so, and 2) Because our products are great (I was once told that the big advantage of working in marketing for a company with great products is that “You’re just providing the opportunity for customers to find and use your wonderful products – they should be thanking you!”).

    But there’s a third reason, which we don’t really advertise and is, for me, the true value of the events – staying at the coalface with customers. Over the last 3 days I’ve probably spoken to around 40-50 customers, and I’ll speak to another 20 or more on Monday. I’m speaking to them about what we’re doing now, what we’re doing next. I’m speaking to advanced early adopters/innovators* about our vision for what’s to come, late/early majority people about current new products (“What do you think of this?”), and skeptics about existing and older products that have been tried and tested by thousands. I’ve talked to people in different industries, at different levels of seniority and there are even variations in viewpoints by geographical location.

    And, as ever, this has just been fabulously useful on a very practical level. Every time I speak to customer I adjust, refine and improve my perspective on what we should be doing. Sometimes these are very subtle nudges (“Mm, may be that idea for product X isn’t quite as simple as I first thought”) and sometimes quite big changes (“I’ve really overestimated how sophisticated late majority people in finance are, for these features – I need to re-think our whole marketing approach there”). One very practical and specific example from yesterday – we’re thinking about providing training packages for some of our products and I ran this past someone currently (not) working for the Federal Government. He told me that, for his department he can easily get budgetary approval for training – not a problem. But that he will never get approval for travel and hotel expenses. So for him, all training has to be onsite at his office (for which he can easily get approval), even if it’s more expensive than doing it somewhere else. This was something I had no idea about before yesterday.

    But there always tweaks and adjustments, always. And if you’re not speaking to customers all the time, you hit the significant problem of drift. This is the phenomenon where you start with a really great idea for a product (hopefully from talking to customers historically), and then you start to talk about and “develop” the idea back at the office. So you start with a great use-case (“I’ve just spoken to 5 law firms who say they really need something to automatically read paper documents, perform some OCR and store that data in a database”). You take that back to the office and start throwing it around – what if it did more than that? What if it classified documents as well? What if it provided some interpretation on top? What if it worked for multiple languages? What if it could store the data in the cloud? Etc etc. All great ideas I’m sure, but what would the customers think of the final product? Imagine taking this behemoth to a customer and his/her response being “Erm, I just wanted something cheap to scan in my documents – what’s all this complexity?”. Better to find this out earlier rather than later. Better to make small course corrections as you go along by re-forming and re-shaping the offering with customer input than only finding out at the end that you went way of course somewhere. NB: This is actually just a reflection of the standard Agile approach to product development – the second principle of the Agile Manifesto is:

    Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer’s competitive advantage.


    How can you make adjustments to your requirements if you don’t know what the customers want?

    So, nag over – go and see your customers. Go to a conference, call one of them up, take part in forums, email (though it’s a poor substitute for face-to-face), anything.

    * for definitions of these groups see Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm – the 101 book for tech marketing.

  • How To Measure Campaign Success

    Annie Hall

    Quite a simple post this time round. Essentially how I measure the success of a given campaign or piece of marketing work. NB: This isn’t the Holy Grail of properly attributed marketing ROI – when I’ve worked that, I’ll post it up, if I haven’t retired first – but instead a framework for how to show whether what you’ve done has worked or not.

    The model consists of three stages – Inputs, Outputs and Outcomes. I’ll describe these below. For the article I’ll use an example campaign – we’re launching a new product, say a tool to monitor your website performance – and we’re using a number of tactics to promote this – a free, downloadable iPhone app, a new website, some content marketing, some Adwords, social media etc etc – the usual suspects.

    Inputs

    The first part, often forgotten about, is to measure the Inputs to your campaign. By this I mean – what is the quality of execution of the campaign? Before initiating campaign work there is, generally, a long process of research, analysis, customer feedback, market segmentation etc which gets distilled in to some sort of proposition or idea. For the web performance tool, you might have carried out all this work and ended up with a campaign idea around “Keep an eye on your global website performance from your mobile phone” (or hopefully something stronger than that!). You’ve chosen a segment – say IT managers of smaller companies in the US – and you have a lot more information about the feelings you want to elicit, the differentiators you want to promote and so on.

    But – that doesn’t mean to say all that great information gets in to your campaign. Woody Allen has said how he measures his “best” work not in terms of quality or audience response but in terms of how close the final film is to his original vision. Similarly, if you went in to a campaign with a particular value proposition and a really clear idea of what you wanted, is this what you ended up with? This is the measure of Input quality.

    In this example, if the agency you used came back with a campaign that captured everything you wanted, the right tone, the right target audience, channels, content etc etc, then you’ve scored highly on Inputs. NB: This is very much a qualitative measure – you can try giving a campaign a mark out of 10, but what does that really mean? The way I see it, if I sit there completely satisfied thinking “That’s exactly what I meant”, then I’m happy.

    Another part of measuring Inputs, which I sometimes carry out, is to look at a few quantitative KPIs covering the basic measures for parts of the campaign. For example, with Adwords, how many impressions did we actually get (i.e. it’s not whether the ads were effective or not, just whether we’ve correctly placed them and bid appropriately)? How much are we spending on different ad campaigns? And so on.

    NB: This does not, of course, mean it will work! Your research and analysis could be completely wrong – wrong segment, wrong message, bad ideas. But at least you can go in to the campaign confident that you’re giving it your best shot. Nevertheless, any boss worth his/her salt will want to know “Did it work?”

    Outputs

    There are two stages to answering the question “Did it work?” – Outputs and Outcomes. Outputs is the first of these and is the measurement of the immediate KPIs that you’re tracking for the various parts of your campaign. I.e. We changed some Google Adwords – are more people clicking on these now? We changed the website – have we increased the conversion rate? In our example promotion, we created an iPhone app to promote the product (perhaps the app shows a demo for our company’s website). We might have loved the app (scored high on Inputs), but how many people actually downloaded it!? And used it? And our new website – how many visits have we seen? Time on page? Conversion rates? And so on.

    For a given campaign, there might be 10, 20 or more of these KPIs, often at quite a low level – they provide immediate feedback on what is and isn’t working and, ideally, should be used within a Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) framework to continuously improve everything you’re doing.

    NB: Outputs is the area that is almost never forgotten about, mainly because it’s the easiest to measure (who would put up a new website and not check Google Analytics to see how many clicks it’s getting!?)

     Outcomes

    Great, so the campaign looks good, you’re getting clicks and downloads but, the question any exec should be asking you is, so what? What is the impact of this on the bottom-line? On revenue? Outcomes is the measurement of the final impact of the work you’re doing. In a commercial organisation this is likely to be revenue. However, if you’re working for a healthcare charity, this might be something like “Awareness of a particular ailment” or if working for the government, “Awareness of new policy X”. Or even for a commericial organisation a campaign may be something like “Awareness of our brand”.

    But, it’s essentially the single figure that you care most about, that is the driver for your organisation. Unlike Outputs, there should really only be one of these values. And it should hopefully be simple to measure. What is very difficult however is attributing changes in this figure (say, revenue, in our example case) to any particular part of a campaign. As I’ve mentioned, this is a Holy Grail for marketing – showing that “My work I did on Adwords last month, which is costing us $1,000 per month, directly led to $10,000 in revenue – an ROI of 900%!”. So I don’t generally try to do this. Instead, I just look at the revenue trends moving, hopefully!, up over the months following the campaign. This measurement is full of caveats – can you really attribute the increase in revenue to your campaign? Could be market movements? Could be new product features? Could be noise! But this doesn’t really matter – you still need to be looking at this figure. It’s often the case that, sadly, it’s very hard to pick up increases in revenue attributable to particular campaigns, but the figures need to be shown nonetheless.

    And that’s it – as I say, pretty simple! One qualitative measure (Inputs), multiple low-level KPIs (Outputs) and a final big KPI (Outcomes).

  • 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…

  • Product Marketing and Product Management Roles

    Simple Minds

    I wrote a brief post, about the different roles in the area of product management and product marketing, so it was interesting to read what Saeed Khan had to say on the subject in the following two posts (the first one in particular):

    http://labs.openviewpartners.com/role-of-product-marketing-in-your-startup-part-1/

    http://labs.openviewpartners.com/role-of-product-marketing-in-your-startup-part-ii/

    These posts give really great insight in to what the different roles are. In particular I think he gives a really nice, succinct description of the product marketing role:

    Product Marketing is responsible for developing positioning, messaging, competitive differentiation, and enabling the Sales and Marketing teams to ensure they are aligned and work efficiently to generate and close opportunities. Product Marketing is strategic marketing at the product or product line level.

    I agree with a lot of what he says. My one caveat is where Saeed talks about some of the poor definitions of the distinction that are used. In particular, a definition I’ve trotted out myself a few times is:

    Product Management focuses on putting product “on the shelf,” and Product Marketing focuses on getting product “off the shelf”.

    I use a slight variation on this, specifically:

    Product Management focuses on putting the right product “on the shelf,” and Product Marketing focuses on getting product “off the shelf”.

    The criticism Saeed makes of this and other definitions is that they are overly simplistic and don’t help people understand the subtleties of the different positions. But I beg to differ – I think it’s exactly this simplicity that makes this definition more useful. Less correct, yes, but more useful. Like any model or descriptive aid, this phrase is wrong in parts. For example, if a product manager wasn’t worrying herself about how the product is going to get off the shelf, then she’s not doing her job properly. Additionally if the product marketing manager isn’t thinking about how the product experience could be improved to help usage and sales, then he’s missing possible opportunities for improving the marketing/sales funnel.

    But – to people outside the product management/marketing function, I think it really helps people to get a grip on what product marketing managers do. I’m not sure that’s explained as simply with Saeed’s approach.

    The other point to make as well, is that it really depends on the people you employ. No individual perfectly fits in to one hole or the other. We have product managers who are quite product marketing-ey, and some that aren’t (and the same, reverse point for PMMs). It’s not a criticism of one type or the other, it’s just that people are generally better suited working to their strengths, and the jobs people actually end up doing rarely fit in to narrow definitions.

    Still, great post – and nice to know that what we do at Red Gate kind of fits in with how others see the split!

  • Are you doing marketing or Marketing?

    Seventh Seal

    Very interesting post here from the start of this year, from Joshua Duncan:

    http://www.arandomjog.com/2012/01/the-end-of-product-marketing/

    In it, Joshua describes how the role of Product Marketing Manager (PMM) is, essentially, moribund – not because the work done by these people isn’t required, but because these activities are rapidly being taken up by other individuals (Product Managers, MarComms etc), leaving PMMs with little left to do.

    To be fair, what he says at the end is – you’re not going to survive if you’re an average product marketer, because a lot of the day job will be done by others, so you’d better get very good at some part of the role.

    It’s nice to see some great comments at the bottom of the post (rather than the usual trolling!). And it is a very thought-provoking article. However, for me (or at least for the place where I work) the flaw is the difference between what I think is marketing, small-‘m’ and Marketing, big-‘M’.

    If the marketing function at your organisation consists of, basically, a few website updates, a bit of Adwords, check your SEO now and again, knock up some flyers for the trade-show, some banner ads and landing pages, may be even a few blogs now and again, then I can see Joshua’s point – a product manager covers the product strategy (and so doesn’t need any input from marketing-types) and the marcomms team (whether internal or external) can write the copy, produce the website and flyers and so on. And I think this would cover pretty much everything you need to keep the marketing juggernaut going. But I call this small-‘m’ marketing – it’s all necessary work (if you’re not on top of your Adwords and SEO, for example, then you’re just throwing opportunities away), but how much value is a PMM really adding to this? If the product manager is on top of the product strategy, users and benefits, and marcomms are looking after copy?

    Where I think PMMs can really add value is doing proper big-‘M’ Marketing. And by ‘value’ I mean revenue. The sorts of things I’d classify as big-‘M’ Marketing are:

    1. New markets. Sure, your existing customers see every new product new release, but what about the stack of potential customers who know nothing about you? Or would never consider using you? If you currently sell exclusively to tier 1 banks, how are you going to reach tier 2 banks? Or how are you going to reach the government sector, where you’ve never had any luck before? Or Brazil!?
    2. New business models. If you’ve always sold a perpetual license before, how are you going to start selling on a monthly subscription? Are these the same people? How are you going to change your offering to suit?
    3. Turning a product in to a proposition. You have a great product, but what needs to be added to turn it in to an attractive proposition? Support contracts? Professional services? What?
    4. How do customers perceive your product range as a whole? Does it make sense, all together?

    And so on – for me, these are the reasons why marketing is so interesting and so difficult. And, more importantly, where you can make a significant impact on revenue. I didn’t get in to marketing to figure out whether banner ads at the top of the page are better value-for-money than the bottom of the page, but to try and figure out ways to make a significant difference to revenue by doing strategic Marketing, not marketing.

  • Product Marketing, Product Management, Product Owner etc etc

    Product Marketing, Product Management, Product Owner etc etc

    As mentioned a few posts ago, I attended the Agile 2012 conference a few weeks ago. As far as I can see, one of the products of this movement has been the advent of the “Product Owner” role in the scrum team. This is someone who, as far as I can gather, does some of the work of the Product Manager, but is generally working much more closely to the Scrum team, guiding them with what they should be working on next.

    There are various articles written on what the different roles in the area of product management and marketing should be doing. The Pragmatic Marketing Framework is a superb resource describing all of the different tasks that form part of these roles.

    However, from reading a lot of these articles, many seem to be missing a fundamental point. In fact all of these roles, as I see it, are fundamentally the same – all are trying to figure out what are the features, benefits, propositions and messages that will make money from your product. If a product owner isn’t prioritising features that will make a difference to revenue (whether short term or long term) then she isn’t do her job properly. If the marketing person isn’t trying to craft propositions and messages that make some difference to the bottom line, then again, he is wasting his time. And more importantly if one of those people is ignoring factors outside of their traditional role, then this is something that needs addressing. Some of the most successful product marketing I’ve seen is where a product marketer suggests changes to the next sprint of the product or when a product owner has ideas about how to present features in a certain way, to certain types of people (maybe even writing the blog post herself).

    To be honest, I find most of the conversations around defining job roles rather dull – as long as everyone is working on the same commercial goals, the nature of different peoples’ jobs tend to fall out pretty quickly based on what needs to be done.