It’s no secret these days that B2B sales requires a lot more consensus than it did before. You might have a great relationship with one buyer who can push through a small-ticket purchase on his or her own, but what happens when you want to increase your share of the customer’s wallet, or move up to higher-level solutions deals that involve more than one functional silo?

That’s one of the questions Sales is asking itself, as recessionary habits persist in the buying centers of big organizations. The dynamics of internal buying centers are too complicated to be solved with a single solution, but one way Marketing can help is to make sure those buyers that love you – the ones still receptive to “relationship selling” – are equipped to make the case around the organization.

That’s exactly what Iron Mountain, the document management company, did when presented with a similar problem. They noted that typical Iron Mountain buyers – typically too junior to engage in strategic-level relationships – faced three obstacles that stood in the way of advocating for their solutions internally: Read More »

By Claire Tassin

It seems clear that, for a variety of reasons, energy and resource constraints will continue to be key concerns for small business owners for the foreseeable future. Those constraints take a few forms – sometimes they’re around environmental concerns, other times they’re around cost. But what language should you speak to business owners concerned about energy costs?

We know that green marketing can be effective in the B2C world, but how influential are environmental sustainability and corporate social responsibility on small businesses’ purchase behavior? This year, the Enterprise Council on Small Business tested the impact of a myriad of factors on small business owners. As it turns out, value alignment – such as on green – has only moderate influence on owners.

Source: ECSB Research, July 2011, n=1099 N.A.

So, if green marketing isn’t an effective way to reach small businesses, what is? ECSB recommends positioning how members’ products and services can alleviate business owners’ pain points. In a recent study, ECSB asked owners what their biggest pain points are in all areas of managing their businesses. In the area of building and office administration, the cost of utilities ranked highest – despite the majority of owners not anticipating price increases for 2012.

At the end of the day, messaging how your products and services can positively impact the bottom line is likely to be more effective than green marketing per se in targeting small businesses. So, rather than focusing on going green, show business owners how your company can help them save some green.

Go ahead, curse me for getting the song stuck in your head. But there’s something important here that I think many marketers don’t realize or understand, and that’s that social media marketing may in fact be weakening your branding initiatives.

Typically, we hear the refrain that channel proliferation and the more information-dense lives of consumers offers companies an opportunity to reinforce – not dilute – their brands. Consumers spend greater chunks of their life connected to various information platforms and, at least so the story goes, this offers brands three things: more screen real estate to do branding, better data about which consumers to target with which branding initiatives, and more “dense”, interactive ways to experience the brand.

So, what could go wrong? One clue comes from a recent paper by Harvard Business School professor Michael Luca, who examined the effect that Yelp has on the restaurant market in Washington State. First, the good news: he found that a one-star bump in a restaurant’s Yelp rating led to a significant rise in revenue (between 5-9%). The bad news: he found that that effect did not apply to chain restaurants, and that as Yelp usage has proliferated, the market share for chain restaurants has declined.

What’s driving this? My theory is that the informational power of a strong brand is declining. Look at these two signs: Read More »

This summer, we asked the marketing community to nominate some of the best B2B campaigns of the previous year for our 2011 B2B Marcomm Awards. And now, the results are in – and we’ve created a members-only resource that looks at what makes all of the finalist campaigns tick.

Every year, we notice that the best campaigns seem to revolve around a few principles that tell us a lot about where B2B marketing is heading. Here are a few we uncovered this year: Read More »

When I was young, my parents always told me, “Don’t speak unless you can improve silence.”  That can be quite the challenge, and to this day, I’m still not sure all my words are better said than unsaid.  But when speaking meant possibly worsening the silence, I knew to keep my mouth shut.  This rule-of-thumb always comes to mind when I’m giving word-of-mouth recommendations.

As many marketers know, word of mouth is one of the most powerful consumer marketing tools, and smart marketers are learning to harness, amplify, and improve upon this medium.  Typical approaches to boosting word of mouth focus on identifying and engaging the brand’s biggest fans (or – one better – the brand’s most networked and credible fans).   To engage these fans, brands often offer discounts, exclusive information, or even live visits to the brand’s HQ etc.  The aim of all these efforts is to motivate fans to speak – and they’re often successful.

However, two things are often missing: Read More »

By Ana Lapter

We often hear that “one size fits all” strategies don’t work. But when it comes to designing mid-funnel messaging strategies, many marketers hammer on undifferentiated, non-customer specific drivers of purchase.

But, why? The main reason is the novelty of the mid-funnel role for Marketers.  Traditionally, Marketing hasn’t owned this stage of the purchasing process.  Sales did the engagement work with buyers to identify their needs, while Marketing was mainly in charge with raising awareness about a product, advertising, or a vendor’s thought leadership position in the industry.

Today’s environment is different.  As our research demonstrated, customers are delaying their contact with Sales until they are well into the mid-funnel.  As a result, Marketing now typically owns a new stage of the purchasing decision funnel and needs to address it with the right messaging strategy.  Such strategy requires customization of content and information based on buyers’ needs and outcomes associated with a purchase.

In our recent survey of 1,900 B2B customers, we identified four types of mid-funnel purchasing needs that require customized messaging. Read More »

It’s a refrain we hear often from B2C marketers: their customers are just not engaged enough with the brand. “If only we could cook up the perfect e-mail subject line – that would really wow them!” or “What channel is our demographic flocking to these days? Maybe if we’re the first brand there, that’ll really drive sales!” are how these laments typically go.

But take a step back. Marketers have been on the “engagement” treadmill for probably close to 10 years now, ever since e-mail became a viable commercial channel. Yes, in the interim, we’ve gotten a good deal closer to our consumers – in some cases, giving them a seamless, cross-channel experience both in marketing communications and customer service. Employing internet marketing and mobile marketing, brands can now reach consumers via  e-mail, SMS, Facebook, and Twitter. And the cost of hitting those touchpoints is much, much lower than in the old-media world of radio, televisions, and newspapers. But at what cost?

This year, MLC’s key B2C research effort focused on how customers have responded to the barrage of branded information marketers are throwing at them, and the results aren’t pretty: rather than feeling closer to brands, and rather than feeling more sure about their shopping decisions, they’re more confused than ever. The barrage of messages and product choice has led to all kinds of indecisive behaviors, such as endemic brand-switching and “decision spirals” in grocery aisles and retail sales floors. Customers still buy, but many make sub-optimal purchases (and, subsequently, aren’t loyal to the brands they buy), and many put off buying because they’re oversaturated with brand information. Read More »

This year, as they’ve done the past two years, the popular Consumerist blog asked its readers: “What are the worst American ads of 2011?” A few weeks ago, they released their results: ads from Luv’s, Summers Eve, AT&T, and Geico were ignominiously awarded spots in the list of finalists, while the Luv’s ad, a gleeful celebration of, well, poop, was named the “Worst of the Year”.

But we actually happen to think these ads aren’t too bad. I doubt any will ever win an award, but many get their point across – and shore up brand differentiators – extremely well, despite the little things that pushed the Consumerist’s readerships’ buttons.

Read on for the “worst”, and our thoughts on each. And please check out our Marketing Communications and Creative and Content resources, to learn how the best brands generate messages and creative to reach their consumers better. Read More »

Click it, type it or just ask Siri – today information is available as never before. Given their information choices today, the ability to process it is becoming a limiting factor for consumers. The result – a lot of marketing messaging is wasteful, as consumers pay no attention to it – not because they don’t want to, but because they cannot. So should marketers shout louder to grab attention? Absolutely not.

Focused on expanding the share of voice, marketers may be guilty of paying very little attention to streamlining the information path for their consumers. In a noisy marketplace, consumers today are faced with analysis-paralysis, and increasing marketing messaging has done nothing, but confused them. This has resulted in delayed or reduced responsiveness to marketing messages. So what should marketers do? Read More »

(this is a guest post by Jamie Kleinerman, of our sister program, the Sales Executive Council)

At last week’s annual Sales and Marketing Summit, “Inside the Customer’s Purchase Decision,” the keynote address was delivered by Dr. Robert Cialdini, author of the well-known book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion.

Dr. Cialdini’s work on persuasive techniques is always an interesting read for sales professionals, but what made his speech especially timely and relevant for the summit was that it was about persuasion during times of greater information overload and uncertainty.

Faced with more information than ever before, stricter budgets and approval processes, and greater internal consensus requirements, customers are increasingly uncertain about making purchases today.

According to Dr. Cialdini, people exhibit several possible responses when faced with decisional uncertainty:

• Freezing—a reluctance to act or make a choice until the uncertainty is resolved
• Loss Aversion—a tendency to prefer choices designed to prevent losses over choices designed to obtain gains
• Heuristic Choices—when choices are made, they are based on a single, relevant factor rather than a set of relevant factors

It’s no easy feat for sales forces – and marketers crafting commercial strategies – to contend with customers exhibiting these behaviors. Reps can help customers overcome their decisional uncertainty and hesitancy though, by using some key principles of persuasion and influence. Read More »