Did the new rules of marketing happen in 2012?

As 2012 draws to a conclusion it is traditionally a time when the events of the year come up for review.

Probably the most intriguing marketing event of 2012 was the IPO of Facebook in May. The initial stock offer was priced at $38 a share, valuing the company at many $ billions. Much of the revenue was to be from advertising. It was the first real test for the company - would people invest? Could the huge Facebook membership be converted into money? Well after some teething problems the shares started trading and currently stand at $27. Not the overnight cash bonanza the average investor might have hoped for.

A significant factor in all business models that rely on advertising revenue is the size of the pool of funds available to spend by companies and their agencies. The overall size of this pot fluctuates with the ebbs  and flows of the economy. New media opportunities are evaluated as alternative means rather than additional, so someone's gain is generally at the expense of the incumbent media. B2B advertising agencies are cautious about investing client funds in untested media and typically wait to see how a new title or media channel shapes up.

One thing advertising account managers and PR account managers have tended to agree on in the scope of their respective activities, is that display advertising is not in the PR camp. But pretty much anything else in marketing communications can be laid claim to by the rapidly evolving role of PR. The so called 'new rules of marketing and PR' have been to the fore as PR moves into social media. But the anticipated death of the printed media didn't happen in 2012, so the need for traditional press releases to editors remained while also writing content aimed directly at readers without editorial intervention was added to the PR portfolio. But like the size of the advertising pool of money, the pool of genuine news does not grow either. Whether most B2B companies with a Facebook presence have even researched their audiences and their appetite for frequent trivia on the news feed, if 'liking' a news item has any connection to actually buying the company's product, who knows? And what about Pinterest? Great concept, but getting great images from the average client is tougher than getting good news stories.

Meanwhile QR codes largely fizzled out in 2012 as it became clear that the intrusive chequered patches that had exploded over print advertising in 2011 were too much bother for target audiences. Although more and more, but still a minority were viewing social media, emails and web sites via smart mobile devices - not desk top computers. A lot of marketing communications were not designed with this in mind.

Content is king. Not just the written word, but images and video content and not just for information, but the all important search engine optimisation holy grail. Creating compelling content that is authoritative depends on knowledge and insight - not something easily gained or usefully fed out in 140   character tweets either.

Summing up 2012 on the assumption ancient Mayan prophecies of global apocalypse don't materialise rendering this blog irrelevant, things might be changing in marketing communications, but generally slower than advocates of the new rules predict. What is clear is that there are more and more marketing channels, traditional media is proving resilient, social media is joining the mix and Google remains almost the only act in town for getting visitors to your web site. The western economies are still struggling to pick up and it looks like a long haul. We continue to experience the new economic reality. Looking back two years to 2010 the overall marketing situation was much the same and had been in 2009 as well and hardly likely to change much in 2013 I guess.

PR - Who, What, Where, When and Why

There is a swell of opinion that the old PR approach is over now that companies can be their own online publishers.

There are even 'new rules' for publishing news such as detailed in David Meerman Scott's book The New Rules of Marketing & PR  described as 'A Businessweek Bestseller'' and yes, it is printed on paper. But wait. Despite the onward march of online publishing, there has not yet been the expected death of the printed medium. In fact within the b-2-b sectors we handle for clients the media we deal with has remained surprisingly resilient with only a few titles failing - but they would probably have done so anyway, not because of Internet competition. One or two have moved to online versions only, but most, albeit late in the day have developed an Internet business model to work with the traditional printed magazine. Pricing has evolved for email news delivery and web site news publication rather than use the free news model funded by general advertising revenue. Instead, charging for the news delivery, maybe with banner options in the package too, has a direct relationship between editorial content and payment. So for some publishers - and this is by no means all of them - there is a different approach needed for PR where editorial is part of the advertising deal. Writing for the trade press is evolving away from a single press release to attract the attention of an editor. As well as the traditional press release, there can be other versions which include what are in effect short articles commissioned on the back of an advertising package as well as news published free online in various ways.

Writing for news publishers in your b2b sector is no longer one press release suits all. Your press release may initially go to editors or news desks for editorial action - to publish or not, to edit to suit the publication's house style, edit to abbreviate, edit headline only or even where the originator is a trusted source, to publish  as received. Of course there is another audience to write for and that is your customers and prospects, because every business can be a publisher too - on your web site using a Virtual News Office or basic news page, on social media, via eNews and in company newsletters.

Traditionally press releases have been organised in a particular way. Usually editors will want to write their own headlines so the press release headline should be factual, concise and informative rather than some witty pun, for example. But where the story is to be published unedited or on your own site, then a good headline should attract the attention of your readers and draw them in. The headline is the first thing they all see. The opening paragraph is likewise  crucial and must communicate the essence of the story - the who, what, where, why and when. Because if this fails to raise interest, nobody - editors or customers are going to bother to read more. This is far from the whole story but if readers don't get this far, the other content is lost anyway.

Does your written communication have the right choice of voice?

Does the average B2B company pay the same attention to 'tone of voice' in written communication as to visual communication compliance in line with corporate identity guidelines?

To gain an insight into how tone of voice impinges on brand values take a look at this article by Ted Albrighton.  When working with clients we strongly advocate that three key documents are at the core of the marketing mission - a marketing plan, a marketing budget and a corporate identity (CI) guide. The CI guide is there to provide a reference for visual communication so that the brand is consistently presented  and advertising material produced in Hong Kong will have the same look and feel of work commissioned in Los Angeles or London.

But what about the words? The way the message is communicated demands consistency too, otherwise your target audience will receive confusing messages about what your brand represents. For example for a B2B claiming market leadership in its chosen sector the tone of voice could be authoritative, building consistently a position that the company knows what it is talking about with the inference that its products can therefore be trusted. The main reason we did not have a written document providing such guidance is that we typically created the words and effectively set the style. This was mainly in the form of press communications and company documentation such as sales brochures, web site copy, data sheets and white papers. The audiences being editors for PR and customers and specifiers for company literature. Press releases  invariably open with the who/what/where/why of the story that unfolds in the following paragraphs and the equivalent of the advertising tag line qualifying the brand is used consistently.

Style is another matter. It should be pitched at a level to suit the target audience. Generally this means stripping out jargon and complex technical terminology while not under valuing the knowledge or intelligence of the reader. The trade press offers a useful guide to the style their readers are comfortable with. Cut and pasting copy from several in-house authors to produce a document needs to be carefully reviewed to eliminate a mixture  of styles which will appear at best disjointed and at worst confusing. Where PR is generated by multiple agencies, then a style guide becomes essential to maintain quality and consistency of output.

Finally companies need to think carefully about tone of voice and style when it comes to social media and not least of course who has authority to write and say what. With target audiences less understood than for traditional B2B communication media, the opportunities to damage the brand through ill chosen tweets or Facebook news feeds is high.

Follow us anyway you like

Social media agencies have a tendency to talk in terms of building audiences through adding 'followers' and gaining 'likes'.

Traditional outbound b-2-b marketing defines the audiences to target based on analysis of the job function and role and perhaps even the persona of people who are prospective customers or specifiers of the products or services offered. Audience categories are detailed by the publications' readership profiles. Publications  cultivate readership that meets the needs of a specialised sector through editorial content the readers want and providing a platform for advertisers to present their messages to this specific group. Advertising is sometimes referred to as 'interruptive', intruding into the space where selective audiences are consuming information. Awareness through advertising of the important vendors in their market is also valid to buyers and specifiers so they may view display advertising as informative rather than interruptive. But this cosy business model of publishers, editors, PR agencies and advertisers is out dated claim other voices. It is the search engines dominated by Google and AdWords that are the way forward. This business model is not only trackable but paid for only when clicked on. It is a different media channel, but depends nonetheless on matching places where advertising is displayed in response to visitor defined search terms. The advertisements are presented because through search selection the audience has effectively defined itself as people the advertiser would like to reach.

So how does this work for social media? Are the audiences acquired through accumulating 'likes' and 'followers' the same people that traditional marketers would identify? In short are they buyers or specifiers of b-2-b goods and services? How many b-2-b companies have done the research to find out if social media channels are the preferred route to receive information from potential vendors? Do any of their customers even go there and if they do are commercial messages in a social forum welcome?

If the information offered by a company Facebook page is of great value then maybe a traditional engineer or consultant might be motivated to click 'like'. Consider now the more likely content on Facebook or Twitter. Well we know Twitter is probably going to be headline news rather than an in-depth analysis because of the 140 character limitation and Facebook is unlikely to be any more informative. It seems that the content posted on social media sites is at best what is left once the interesting stuff is published as press releases and white papers or magazine articles. Most PR people will know how difficult it can be to coax news worthy stories out of the average b-2-b client in the first place. Consider next the target of 5 posts a day advocated by one social media specialist. What is the chance of generating 5 quality items, but then the aim seems to be less to inform and educate - more to amuse and generate a warm fuzzy feeling rather than prompt a call to action and engage in the buying process.