Wide Angle

It’s no surprise to marketers – especially those who frequent Wide Angle – that the power of relationship-based selling strategies is waning.  To build consensus across customer decision makers, Marketing needs to shift resources into producing valuable content rather than building relationships with advocates.

A necessary function of content that can convert the buying center is establishing the supplier’s credibility.  This is key since decision influencers must feel comfortable sharing content with their peers.  Previously a close supplier-customer relationship might have built the needed credibility – now, marketers achieve it through content.

One approach is using social proof.  This concept in organizational theory suggests that when we are uncertain about a decision, we are strongly influenced by choices we see peers make.  A supplier can tap into social proof by showing prospective customers peers who are in similar situations and choosing the supplier’s services.  This could be done with tactics like online communities, case studies or word-of-mouth initiatives. Read More »

Advocate amplification will always have a place in the B2B marketer’s toolbox, especially as the trend toward consensus-buying strengthens.  However, shortcomings of the strategy in today’s environment are causing marketers to scrutinize the investment.  Three factors seem to be sapping the power of advocate strategies.

#1 Ever More Customer Stakeholders Are Involved in Deals

This key change in customer buying behavior (noted in this Sales Executive Council post) makes an advocate’s job much more challenging.  Coming out of the downturn, businesses are keeping a tight fist on the moneybags by increasing the number of folks needed to sign off on a purchase or bringing in outside consultants to audit deals.  These moves severely limit an advocate’s capacity to influence broadly and deeply enough. Read More »

My colleague Aaron dubbed 2010 “Year of the Re-Org” in January – and the member interest we’ve seen in organizational structure bears this out.  As planning season rolls around, we’ve been examining various org designs.  We’ve identified six archetypes that optimize to different benefits: Read More »

The concept of a linear purchase funnel from awareness to purchase isn’t realistic for B2Bs today – most everyone agrees on this.  With so many digital and social information sources outside the company, prospects start the purchase process though various channels and at different points on the path to conversion.

Marketing’s challenge is to create tools and messaging that will educate and motivate this diversity of prospective customers.  No small feat!  Folks we’ve spoken with are still adapting to new customer behavior. Read More »

In talking with marketers about Social Media, we hear about good and not-so-good experiences with vendors in the space.  In many cases, calling on outside expertise makes sense – but matching Marketing’s needs with a vendor’s capabilities can be tricky in this rapidly growing market.  Here are a few things to consider (for those primarily interested in the iPad … skip to #3!) Read More »

The marketing applications for social media data can seem endless – and overwhelming. At the MLC we’re doing our best to stay on top of emerging opportunities to put social data to use. On May 4th MLC members can tune in to our webinar on Cutting Edge Uses of Social Media Data. We’ll be joined by three experts from leading social media data companies (Radian6, Rapleaf and Tealium) who will discuss effective and innovative ways they’ve seen customers use social data to achieve marketing objectives.

A few things we’ll cover:

• Use social data to identify behaviors and demographics in your current customer base – and target your marketing campaigns to similar people.   I touched on similar possibilities in my previous post on Social Media Value Many Marketers Are Missing.
• Measure awareness and find new places to connect with customers using data from a social listening platform. My colleague Laura posted a good introduction to social media listening, Be a Better Listener: Three Things You Should Be Paying Attention to Online.
• Track the effectiveness of social media marketing campaigns – even if clickthru data aren’t available. I introduced this topic a couple weeks ago in my post on Measuring Social Media Effectiveness Without Clickthru Metrics.

MLC Members: Register for the May 4th webinar Cutting Edge Uses of Social Media Data and learn more from the experts.

Measuring social media campaign effectiveness is a topic near and dear to the marketers we speak with – and justifiably so.  Experimentation is a key element of social media strategies, and evaluating the impact of experimental campaigns helps marketers maximize future investments.

For marketers who target viral campaigns to the blogosphere or use online PR as a marketing channel, measurement can be especially challenging.  Mentions of a brand can be monitored, but if they don’t link to the brand’s website, it’s hard to tell which mentions are leading to web visits, online purchases, or other objectives.  Certain third party sites might be especially influential in directing traffic to a brand’s website – but without the direct link, how do you know? Read More »

The Sales and Marketing relationship at many B2B companies can be characterized by the term “managed dissatisfaction”.  Competing goals and time horizons prevent the functions from seeing eye-to-eye, resulting in Marketing and Sales doing just enough to placate each other while pursuing separate agendas.

Marketing and Sales have traditionally seemed resigned to this, content to work around each other if they couldn’t work together.  That’s changing.  We’ve seen a dramatic rise in the attention marketers are paying to alignment with their sales counterparts.  Three factors are driving this interest in improved coordination across the commercial organization: Read More »

Looking for help developing your social media strategy?  Want a new Facebook application but don’t know where to start? The growth of social media has given rise to a flood of new vendors proffering solutions to almost every aspect of social media marketing.

To help harness collective knowledge of vendor performance, the Marketing Leadership Council launched a Social Media Vendor Review Tool, where marketers can review vendors they’ve worked with and access other reviews from peers.

We’ve collected 36 reviews to date, and we’ve noticed a few general trends across these reviews: Read More »

It’s no secret that increased social media participation has given B2C marketers unprecedented access to customer data.   With just a customer email address, the right “data crawler” goes through blogs, networking sites, video sharing sites, and other social media outlets to report on a customer’s age, location, gender, social site participation and more.  Collect this data for thousands of customers and you have some potent information.

In our conversations with marketers, we’re coming across a variety of creative uses for these data sets.  At the most direct level, marketers are using social data to choose the best social media sites to invest in.  Some are discovering that their customers are spending time on social sites they (and their competitors) weren’t aware of—and are moving quickly to capitalize on these undiscovered opportunities. Read More »