Tuesday, April 24, 2012

Is what a client wants what they need?

Sometimes clients have very definite views of what they want to do, but that may not be what they need to do.

Such a situation prompts the question - is the marketing brief informed by research, or because someone in the marketing team likes the idea. Consider an example. A UK division of a company within the portfolio of a major international business had some money to spend on advertising simply because the organisation allowed a percentage of the budget regardless of need to be spent on display advertising. The brief was to produce an advertising campaign. It soon became apparent that their type of very specialised capital equipment had a very limited market within the UK territory, in fact here were just five buyers of this class of product. They already knew them all personally and while there were several marketing initiatives that could help nurture and retain these key accounts, display advertising wasn't one of them.

Another wrong direction is to buy the not-to-be missed advertising deal where there happens to be a convenient page left to fill at a much discounted rate. Or to sign up for a new exhibition because "all of your competitors are going to be there." Or to invest in the next new thing, whether it it is a yet untested new publication or the latest new place on the Internet.

Few small to medium size B-2-B companies budget for formal market research, but that is no reason not to ignore researching the market. The Internet has considerably simplified what was once known as 'desk research' and made online polls easy, but telephoning just a small sample of the target market while not statistically valid can often flag up a problem worthy of further investigation. Clients often claim to know their market, but ringing a dozen or so of their customers or prospects can quickly uncover often surprising information. For example, unprompted recall of the brand might demonstrate the client is less well known than was assumed. Or the company may have a poor reputation for deliveries, or service - issues that if not addressed will undermine a marketing initiative such as a new product launch.

Market research should be at the core of new product development and marketing campaigns in delivering products with messages that answer the needs of users and provide benefits that are valued and differentiate the product from competitors. So the question of what the company needs as a marketing programme should be informed by research rather than what marketers think is needed.

Wednesday, April 18, 2012

Should marketers have a good knowledge of the technology they use?

Marketing for many b-2-b enterprises is not just about presenting increasingly sophisticated products, but using communications channels that also are reliant on an underlying technology.

The Industrial Revolution in England not only changed the way things were made. It  had a profound impact on the way people lived and worked and in turn the fortunes of the nation itself. Visit industrial heritage sites or museums to see equipment of the era and you can watch and see how the machines work. You can witness the parts turning, see cotton being spun, shuttles weaving cloth or pumps raising water. Today the technology is largely hidden buried in silicon chips and embedded computer code. Many marketers promote products without an understanding of how they work, using Internet based systems and programs they are equally unqualified to master. They become reliant on the R&D guys on the one hand and the IT people on the other.

When I started my career in marketing, working for a leading manufacturer of electrical goods, the situation was rather different. The marketing department set the agenda. We wrote the new product development specifications, we worked closely with the design engineers, witnessed laboratory prototype testing, progressed tooling development and introduction on to the factory production lines, packaging, logistics and stocking. We wrote the operation manuals, set the prices and briefed graphic designers and advertising agencies. By living through the whole design to production cycle we had intimate knowledge of all aspects of the product and trained our sales team in how the product should be presented. The marketing team were engineers, most had served apprenticeships in all parts of the company before being appointed to a marketing role. We knew how everything worked including all the outsourced graphic design processes that produced the marketing collateral. In short we had control.

Today for many companies the marketing environment has more focus on communications than new product development. They are increasingly reliant on others to engineer the systems they rely on, they don't have experience of working in a development or manufacturing operation. The products ship in from China. In short they are not engineers. They have no apparent interest or curiosity as to how products work, the effort required to make things happen and little interest in what is involved - only how cheap and how quickly can they get things done. Not surprisingly without understanding or control of the processes things go wrong.

Tuesday, April 17, 2012

Making an investment in social media marketing

For b-2-b marketers investing in social media marketing the question of how much resource to commit needs to be asked.

In a recent blog we drew attention to the time commitment and asked the question - how is marketing time budgeted? We highlighted a report that discovered marketing people are investing 20 hours or more a week and pointed out this time had a cost.  An article on Marketingnewz.com now poses the question - how much should we budget? Author Brad Shorr also homes in on the time required and proposes a minimum resource requirement consisting of a leader "responsible and accountable for results and for developing all the creative inputs." Plus "a dedicated staffer who is available 20-40 hours a week to execute" five main activities involved in building a community and "programming support to set up accounts, update templates, install applications and setup/process analytics."

Once the presence is set up for the company to participate in the various social media places, building the community calls for several activities which must be done on a regular basis. These are listed as:-

  1. Community building - connecting with your target audience on a daily basis.
  2. Brand monitoring - checking the social network space daily for mentions of your company or brand.
  3. Engagement - listening and responding at least daily, but ideally in real time.
  4. Sharing content - writing and publishing material that will be of interest and value to your community and help establish your company as a thought leader and convince your target audience of your expertise and capability. A regular flow of information, typically weekly, or at least something new to say monthly.
  5. Maintenance - deleting spam comments, adding apps and updating content.
Clearly being successful in building relationships that develop followers and lead to  conversion with them making a purchase will be the ultimate test of social media. Before making the investment some market research to identify the proportion of your target market population that regularly inhabit the social media space would be a good starting point to figure out the potential ROI. But this is not a quick fire campaign. It may take a year or two to reach a critical mass of followers that will result in order value that exceeds the cost of acquiring them.

Others might speculate that in a couple of years time the game might have changed. Once formerly cool places try to monetize what made it cool in the first place gets lost. Or people simply get bored. I have noticed some early adopters of Facebook seem to be migrating to Google + and remember Friends Reunited and MySpace, who talks about them now? On the other hand if the entry-to-ROI span is long can you afford  the risk of being left behind?



Wednesday, April 11, 2012

Who is creating content?

As the Internet offers more and more opportunities to self publish - who will create the content?

Many B-2-B companies are now facing the challenge of producing an increasing flow of interesting and quality content to populate online news pages, social media and forum groups. Take a step back to the time when press releases were the only news format. It was typically the case that many  marketing managers of smaller b-2-b companies thought they didn't have any news and stories had to be teased out of them at a monthly meeting with the PR agency. In fact by running through a series of categories to prompt the client  usually a few possible newsworthy stories would emerge. It is worth listing some of the more popular subjects as ideas for the new media too.

New products or services will always attract attention. New research or technology is even better as developments and advances help position the company as a leader in the industry. Business news such as expansion, new facilities or equipment can also be of interest  as can new staff appointments if used to show recruitment of expertise for example. Contract wins and placement of important orders serve to associate the business with success. Third party endorsements by satisfied customers and related case studies are valuable in building confidence amongst prospective customers. Another approach is for a senior company spokesman to comment on industry developments, to be available as an expert in the market or give presentations at conferences. Contributions of articles for special features in relevant publications can act as guides, provide useful advice and  help establish credibility. The PR agency would generally be writing in a style that would catch the editorial eye as being of interest to the publication's readers and the PR specialist would channel stories to the appropriate publications, or repurpose into case studies, white papers or even user guides.

But for social media publication the content is for individuals and not for editors with an experienced eye for a good story. It is more of an opportunity to engage in conversation. Take blogs for example which could be considered the online equivalent of the former company magazine, with the comments feedback similar to the letters page, and these need to be monitored. Blogs offer a good destination page for tweets which are effectively news headlines. YouTube is an entirely different medium but useful for demonstrating how products work, customer endorsements and coverage of events. Pinterest meanwhile offers a vehicle for interesting themed images. Then at the chatty level there is Facebook and LinkedIn and plenty more.

Maintaining interesting news is certainly going to be a challenge and many companies will need help to set up and implement a a news grid.


How is marketing time budgeted?

Although outsourced marketing costs might be budgeted and managed, how is in-house time accounted?

When the economy falters it is easy to take a red pen to the marketing budget and make some quick savings. It is more difficult to reduce staffing levels because of all the employment legislation. The marketing team may have to do more with less and in response set about driving down outsource costs. But the marketing budget is not just about the marketing communications costs - but in addition employment costs, facilities the marketing team occupy and of course travel and other expenses. When the complete cost is applied, staff hourly rates and overheads might well be higher than outsource costs. So why does this matter? Well one aspect highlighted in the 2012 Social Media Marketing Industry Report from SocialMediaExaminer.com is the "weekly time commitment for social media marketing."

The report found that, "A significant 59% of marketers are using social media for 6 hours or more and 33% for 11 or more hours weekly." It also seems "those with more years of social media experience spend more time each week conducting social media activities. For example 77% of people with 3 or more years of experience commit more than 6 hours weekly to social media marketing. And 24.5% of this crowd are spending 20 hours or more each week." As social media marketing begins to absorb significant chunks of marketing time it is perhaps appropriate to put a value to this activity so that the comparative  costs versus other marketing activities can be measured as well.

It is easy to think that doing marketing work in-house comes for free - it doesn't. Not only is there the actual cost in terms of time and fully allocated overheads, but also the missed opportunity costs. Presumably before the marketing team became so engrossed in social media they were doing something else. Perhaps that something else is no longer important, in which case it is time to review the complete marketing picture and it might be helpful to understand in-house costs just as well as outsourced costs.

Tuesday, April 03, 2012

New research report sheds light on social media marketing

Michael Stelzner, founder of Social Media Examiner, has launched the 2012 Social Media Marketing Industry Report and what's more he is encouraging its distribution throughout the marketing world.

Available as a 42 page PDF report the research, to which we made our own modest contribution, is based on the collective input from 3,800 marketers, so represents a bang up to date insight into what is happening with social media as a marketing tool right now.

So lets take a quick look at the major findings.

  • A significant 83% of marketers indicate that social media is important for their business.
  • A big issue for some 40% is the wish to master how to measure the return on investment (ROI) of social media and find customers and prospects.
  • Video marketing and YouTube figure at top spot for increased investment in 2012 as rated by 76% of marketers.
  • And Google+ is attracting interest which only 40% currently use, with 70% wanting to learn more and 67% planning on increasing Google+ activities.
  • The top 3 benefits of social media are:-
    • generating more business exposure - 85%
    • increasing traffic - 69%
    • providing market place insight - 65%
  • The top 5 social media networks and marketing tools, in order are:-
    • Facebook
    • Twitter
    • Linkedin
    • blogs
    • YouTube
  • But social media is recognised as taking a lot of time - 59% spend 6 hours or more each week on social media and 33% invest 11 hours or more. That's over a quarter of a nominal 40 hour week!
  • Perhaps in view of this time commitment we might expect more than the 30% who do to outsource this work.
The full report is packed with interesting questions about social media and numerous charts mapping the current state of play.