Here are 11 concrete ways I [...] No related posts. Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.]]> Around this time last year I wrote about the 10 B2B Marketing Predictions for 2010 and while I would say 7 out of 10 have already materialized and the others are on their way. So that begs the question – what’s on the horizon specifically for B2B Marketers next year?

Here are 11 concrete ways I think the environment in which B2B Marketers operate will evolve in 2011.

Enjoy!

1. Facebook Advertising – will continue to improve and unfortunately get more expensive. After 9 years of Search Engine Marketing – I think it is safe to say any keyword you are going to buy is maxed out when it comes to the Google AdWords auction process. So people are looking for an alternative and that’s Facebook Advertising. I even wrote a book this year on just this topic called Facebook Advertising for Dummies (Wiley). And as more people find out about this gem of an advertising experience CPC and CPM prices will continue to march upward – I have already begun to see this in my own ad buys!
2. Mobile Marketing – I know I said last year was the year of mobile marketing but I just saw a stat from a Mary Meeker presentation that smart phones will eclipse PC sales in 2012 (that’s just a year away) which will lead us to more mobile usage than PC usage so you better start your Mobile Marketing program now. Keep in mind we all start in the same place and that’s at ZERO! Mobile it totally optin and you need to start building your mobile optin list now.
3. Facebook will move into Mobile Ads – having said what I just did about us marketers not having a good mobile optin list – its just so natural for Facebook to ask you (you will ask us first Mark right?) if he can extend his advertising into your mobile device which he already has (if you put it on your profile). I have been thinking about this play for Facebook for a while – glad I am getting it down on virtual paper for my grandkids to see!
4. Social Media Strategists will become Chief Customer Officers – ok so you know I am also @Avaya_Support on Twitter so perhaps this is a closet fantasy for me but it may just come true – perhaps not this coming year but in years to come. Think about it marketers have been given this gift of Social Media which is reinventing areas of your company on the fly. In my company alone we have seen it touch Product Development and R&D, to Billing and Finance, to HR and Recruiting, to Customer Service and the Contact Center. You need someone to own the customer experience now in all those external channels and your internal channels as well!
5. Ecommerce will hit Facebook – Next year the deal that Facebook has with oodle.com for the Facebook Marketplace will be over. My predication would be they cut the cord there and open up a marketplace of their own. Startups like Payvment, and Alvenda will help companies large and small to open up shop in Facebook. Delta, Levis and 1800 Flowers are already there – can Victoria Secret, Brooks Brothers, and Godiva be far behind?
6. NFO is the new SEO – that’s News Feed Optimization on Facebook. Basically .2% of fans return to a fan page and in some cases it’s more like .02% (hat tip BrandGlue) So people on Facebook who “like” your Fan page basically never go back to it. So stop thinking of it as a micro site and making it all fancy. What you need to focus on is the content and optimizing the content to get comments and likes which will help you drive amount of people that Facebook will show your page to. It’s all based on Facebook’s algorithm called EdgeRank.
7. Advocate Marketing comes into Focus – you know all those people we are delighting with great customer service using Twitter – well they have become a strong voice for our brand. Now we are looking at ways of collecting and harnessing them. Tools like Zuberance are helping to do just that and allowing firms to do special things with their advocate base like provide them special events, invites to live events etc. We are just scratching the surface on this one but I can tell you its going to be big!
8. Reputation Management emerges in organizations – Toyota, United Breaks Guitars, Dominos Pizza, Motrin Moms, Dell Hell – we have had some major disasters all brought on my lack of speed in this market. Many firms are listening now for their brand (I know I spoke to 50 of them this year about this issue) but I don’t think they are ready for a crisis. I did a Reputation study on this topic two years ago and it proved how many companies lack the infrastructure then – we have come a long way since but do you really have a process to react quickly?
9. Real Time Marketing makes headlines – ok so I am reading David Meerman Scott’s latest book called Real Time Marketing but you know what – he’s right! He’s got tons of examples of firms that capitalized or failed to capitalize on Real Time issues (United Breaks Guitars!) We all need a lesson on how to be more real time – it’s a great book, I can’t put it down – I have read every book David has published and I can tell you – you need to read this one!
10. Someone better win the SmartPhone Application race soon – I can’t keep building 4 versions of the same application in order to cover the SmartPhone market – Blackberry aps, iPhone aps, Android aps (what the growth rate on Android) and Windows aps. Ok yes HTML5 should help this but throw in iPad and various other tablet aps and marketers are starting to look like Technologist which brings me to my next prediction.
11. The Rise of the Marketing Technologist – Marketers for the last few years have been closet techno geeks and its time for them to rise up – companies need digitally fluent marketers who can apply technologies to help make marketing more measurable and scientific. Then we can really change the dynamic from marketing as a cost center to marketing as a profit center!

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Social customer support I would argue is the single best place to focus your social media efforts since it [...] No related posts. Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.]]> If you follow me you know I talk a lot about the ROI of Social Media since I happen to have stumbled on a great ROI using Social Media in providing support for our customers at Avaya.

Social customer support I would argue is the single best place to focus your social media efforts since it can reduce customer churn and increase your retention rates faster than any other program I have ever seen before thereby delivering a strong ROI. Listening for and spotting a customer issue, responding to them and solving their problem in minutes using social media not only lets you conquer social media but delight your customers in the process.

But I think there are 3 more ROIs out there where you can build a great business case with Social Media

Conversations – PR needs to move from publications to conversations and if you take that concept and really track and engage in conversations where you brand would fit – I could see that leading to an ROI over time – similar to the way the long tail works for books or movies – this is the long tail of conversations and it would be like having 100s of ads out there for your brand that were all relevant and in context. Which leads me to my next ROI …

Leads – Listening for mentions of your brand or product or even competitors brands is a great way to find leads – evidence I have when listening for the competitors of Avaya – if I hear someone say “replace Cisco” – don’t you think that’s a conversation Avaya should be engaged in? Grant it there haven’t been a ton of those conversations but if you add up all your competitors and your own brands product lines it becomes meaningful.

Advocates – Here is the last one where we have had some success as well. How are you building and taking care of all those really avid followers on Twitter or die hard fans on Facebook – perhaps if you were able to harness them like some companies are doing now with service like Zuberance – you can get them to make recommendations and build your brand with the power of their voice. We are seeing some success with this but some clients of Zuberance are really killing it with this one strategy.

Dell has been talking about how they made $3 million dollars off their Twitter site – how did they do it? With a Coupon Code! – We have plenty of tools both old and new at our disposal to measure and track so many things on the web – so much so – that I have lost all patience for the concept that “we cant measure social media” – if Dell can measure with a coupon code just think what can you be doing to track the flow of social media with special 800#, special email addresses, special landing pages.

That’s how we did it at the beginning of the web – I don’t see why this time is any different!

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This struck [...] No related posts. Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.]]> Last year I wrote about how the balance of content has shifted. Bottom line is there is more content being produced by Users than by Publishers these days. Which means Publishers (or Marketers) are now the “white noise” in comparison to User Generated Content. Our messages are being drowned out by user generated content.

This struck me recently at a concert I attended in Madison Square Garden where everyone around me was either texting, taking pictures or video taping (using their smartphone) the concert and sending to their friends. Of course, I ended up doing the same! All 20,000 of us must have created and shared a teraflop of data that night in about 4 hours. Which reminds me of what Eric Schmidt recently said – that every 2 days we create as much information as we did from the beginning of time up to 2003.

So I have been thinking a lot this summer about the effectiveness of our demand generation efforts this year. The unvarnished truth is I believe it’s getting harder and harder to make your demand generation efforts stand out. And perhaps these two things have something in common.

Perhaps the “connectedness” of all this great content provides less and less time for people to take in our messages. They just aren’t making more hours in the day which causes all of us to prioritize the content we receive (whether we know it or not) based on family, friends, trusted others, peers, colleagues etc. Notice that marketers don’t make that list (duh) but also think about how much more content you have been getting from those sources now that social media has arrived. And I would argue this is exaggerated even more when it comes to B2B Marketing.

Ok so now that I depressed you – lets talk about what I have been thinking B2B Marketers need to do. Enter Simon Sinek.

I first heard of Simon Sinek from the boys over at Marketing over Coffee John Wall and Christopher S Penn. Simon’s approach to messaging is very unique in the sense that – All organizations function on 3 levels. What you do, How you do it and Why you do it.  The problem is, most B2B companies don’t have a strong why. Apple makes a great example – we all know what they do and how they do it but we also sense why they do what they do which is to “redefine the computing experience”. Which is similar to Google in the sense that we know what and how Google does what it does but we also know their mission is to “index the worlds information”!

You can go on and on about other brands (Southwest Airlines comes to mind) that have a strong mission or a strong why. And further I would argue many B2B firms are missing the boat when it comes to having a compelling why. I find myself listening to people saying “we need to create a message around this new product or service” when in reality they should be focused on creating a stronger why for their company – which would eliminate the need for a grand scheme of messaging at the individual product or service level.

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Your customers can seamlessly move from web to social to call center to your front door. But do you treat them [...] No related posts. Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.]]> Let’s face it at this point social media has gone mainstream. Customers are not only surfing the web looking for information but more and more they are relying on social media to get their information.

Your customers can seamlessly move from web to social to call center to your front door. But do you treat them the same in each channel? Do the owners of each channel interact with each other? I didn’t think so.

We need to start to think about an Integrated Experience Management (IEM) play so this experience is equally as seamless for on the management side of this equation.

Meantime here are 5 things to think about when it comes to using these channels

1) Customers just want to be heard – no matter where they are interacting with you from the call center to the twittersphere – they just want to be heard and have you acknowledge them. The same tone and transparency should be applied here equally which is not always the case with the contact center.

2) Customers will tell you where you need to focus your attention – if something is broken with your organization you can bet it will surface on the social web first. Be thinking about issues you hear about socially, how you can get them acknowledged fast and get them fixed even faster.

3) You must be ready to respond – if you are going to listen to the social web you better be ready to respond. The issue here is much the same as email (the more email you send the more you get back) so if you start responding on the social web – it will likely lead to more opportunities to respond. Some firms are seeing volumes in the 10s of thousands each week! You will need to scale your response mechanisms before this happens. Integrating social media with the contact center is a great way to do that (click here to get a FREE copy of my next book Social Media and the Contact Center for Dummies)

4) Respond like a person, not a company – try to resist the urge to automate the responses. Some companies are telling me their volume of social media mentions are getting to high and they are considering automating a response to a Twitter DM. I say – don’t do it! A good response is one that comes from an individual not a company. You can tell the difference instantly.

5) Never forget the customer can vote with their feet – and finally customers have choices not only of the channels they use but the company they keep. Be sure the experience you give your customers and prospects reflects the spirit of working with your company or you’ll never get a second chance to make a first impression!

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But for me – the real story [...] No related posts. Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.]]> In the recent Edelman Trust Barometer report they detail out how trust is rebounding in a handful of Western countries especially in the United States where trust in business jumped 18 points to 54 percent. Which was an interesting statistic no doubt for many of us in business today.

But for me – the real story was buried on page 7 of the report (see graphic) which talks about the number of times your message needs to hit target in order for it to resonate! The question is – How many times do you need to hear something about a specific company to believe that the information is likely to be true?  A brilliantly phrased question from which comes the answer – 3 to 5 times.

To me this is the story for any content marketer like myself. Using a multichannel approach that leverages traditional and non traditional channels like Social Media is the key. And Social Media can actually help accelerate this stat for you because of the viral effect. Bottom line this is great news for us content marketers.

Say you are going to do a launch of a new technology product (like I am in June). It’s great to know your target audience is going to need to hear about 3 to 5 times to “believe the message”. And I think this goes for all of your constituent audiences in my case: buyers, partners, internal employees, resellers etc …

If you know this going into the launch plan – then its just a matter of how you are going to sequence those messages (for example do you send out the eBook first with a link to the video second and the press release third with the virtual event forth and the blog/twitter buzz fifth?)  And then what is the timing? How much time do you give each of them to “soak” in the market – like cooking you start with the hardest vegetables first that take the longest to steep – so perhaps you start with more traditional channels first since they have longer lead times to get to market and then start hammering the market later in the campaign to crank up the buzz.

The choice is really yours but at least you know how to plan for the proper amount of content. And I would also argue that a single individual needs to hear your message 3 to 5 times but don’t forget there is some “breakage” in the system – not every message you send hits every target every single time. So a good rule of thumb would be – double it and plan for breakage along the way.

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At the time that I saw it and tweeted about it (of course) it really hadn’t hit me just how important this could be to any business.  What seemed like a pretty basic message [...] No related posts. Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.]]> I want to roll the clock back a few weeks to the announcement of an initiative by Facebook called – Project Titan.

At the time that I saw it and tweeted about it (of course) it really hadn’t hit me just how important this could be to any business.  What seemed like a pretty basic message about an upgrade message of their current email system which is rather archaic (you know, the one that makes you delete messages one by one!) to a full POP/IMAP supported email account, which means users will be able to configure it with any e-mail client, including Microsoft Outlook, Entourage and Apple’s Mail applications.

But what does that really mean. Well first that means that Facebook will issue 400 Million email account – which is no small feat. Second those email accounts will be tied to your Facebook profile Vanity URL in my case PaulDunay@facebook.com. Third, Facebook says they will enable this feature for Pages (the business version of your Profile). And fourth those Page email addresses will be tied your you Page Vanity URL such as Avaya@Facebook.com (which by the way they significantly lowered the minimum number of the Fans you need to get a Vanity URL from 1000 down to just 25!)

Facebook made its initial announcement of Project Titan to the market on February 5th and was candidly thought to be a Google Gmail killer. So 3 days later on February 8th Google announced Google Buzz! This is clearly an all out war between Facebook and Google. Facebook quietly surpassed Yahoo last year to become the second largest website (according to Alexa.com) and is slowly closing the gap with Google which is now less than 10 million unique visitors per month!!

The point here for B2C and B2B Marketers is that as Facebook makes their platform rich in interaction and captures more users and hence more conversations about your brand – you will need to be there and engage with their user base. I still get questions from B2B firms asking if they should start a presence in Facebook and the answer is unequivocally YES.  Facebook should be your social media hub of everything you have from company news, announcing events, offer tutorials, highlight videos, conduct polls and create community around discussions. But now with this new email feature you can upload your email lists and invite them to truly engage with you on Facebook.

If Facebook can create this type of rich interaction with their Fan Pages and now their email systems – then why would you need an external email vendor? Did I forget to mention all of this is FREE!

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