This week I moderated another Social Media Today webinar as part of their Best Thinker webinar series, this time on the topic of How to Market and Sell to the Modern Buyer. This webinar was sponsored by Act-on Software and featured Amber Armstrong (@ambarmstrong) Program Director of Commerce, Social and Mobile Amplification at IBM, Jeff Soriano (@sorianojeff) Senior Director of Demand Generation at Offerpop and Rachel Rosin (@rosin_rachel) Marketing Programs Manager at Act-On Software. We discussed the changes marketing departments need to make or address in order to keep up with today’s buying habits.

Here are three key takeaways from the webinar:

1. Customer is driving not the marketer – Rachel laid out a 4 step content marketing plan (LINK) that really gets to the heart of the modern marketing department they include: creating buyer personas, developing a persona matrix, mapping the buyer journey and mapping your content to the buyer journey.
2. Break with Brand Boredom – Amber discussed new ways to tell your story that are more engaging – more like a conversation than a brand talking. A great example was startup competition for millennials and entreprenuers which you can learn more about here: www.ibm.com/newwaytostartup
3. Be Relevant – Jeff talked about the challenges associated with marketing the modern buyer and how to move your “suspects to prospects” with relevant content.

To get a copy of the slides or to listen to the replay, please click here. You can also scan the highlights of this webinar on Twitter by reading the Storify below.

Our next webinar is titled Social Data Made Simple: Getting Started with a Strategy; be sure to sign up for it or view the schedule of other upcoming webinars here.

This week I had the pleasure of reading a new report from Smart Insights on the State of Digital Marketing 2015 and decided to dig in a bit further with an interview. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Dave or Smart Insights – Dave Chaffey is CEO of Smart Insights, a publisher of planning templates and articles focusing on Digital Strategy with channels on B2B Marketing and Marketing automation. The following is an excerpt from our discussion, I hope you enjoy it.

1) What do you think the biggest change to Digital Marketing for B2B firms will be in the next year?

I think content personalization is the biggest opportunity into 2016 for B2B Marketers. Most B2B service marketers know the value of tailored landing pages to drive traffic and capture leads for niche B2B buyer personas. Let’s face it, these options have been around for fifteen years – your question takes me back to a workshop I did for Siebel systems around then, before they became part of Oracle. We were looking at optimizing targeted landing pages through Siebel for different search behaviors even then before some of today’s well-known marketing automation services like HubSpot, Marketo and Salesforce were even established. These types of services and many others have made scalable lead generation affordable for businesses, but I often feel the potential for lead scoring and lead nurture through personalization isn’t being exploited as much as it could.

At SmartInsights.com, for example, our home page and member benefits pages are tailored by role based on their registration – so a marketing manager gets a different message and different content than say an agency manager. We setup our personalization rules in WordPress, but for marketers who don’t role their own there are many plugins and services to support greater B2B personalization, for example BrightInfo, Evergage and Marketizator to name three players. Again this approach isn’t new technically innovative, but it is underexploited. It is getting more sophisticated with automated content recommendations based on profile and content consumption – for example Idio can be used by larger businesses for this.

2) What do you see as the biggest mistakes being made in Digital Marketing by B2B firms?

The most common mistake I see is getting the balance of Content Marketing activities wrong. We all know content marketing is at the heart of digital marketing, yet often content marketing strategies don’t invest sufficient in the right range of content across the buying cycle and by content I am referring to our Content Marketing Matrix which helps businesses review the best types. The CMM also helps you think about the right balance of what Michael Stelzner of Social Media Examiner called nuclear and primary fuel. You need to invest in that emotion-inducing or shareable content that cuts through otherwise others who have made that investment will win across the channels whether that is SEO, Social media or Email marketing.

Then there’s content distribution… putting the investment into marketing the content you have invested in. Here there must be the right balance between paid, owned and earned media. Paid media, remarketing or retargeting through AdWords, LinkedIn or Facebook helps remind prospects about your services so it’s a mistake to miss this – it gives probably the best paid digital media ROI available. With Earned media it’s about putting the time into influencer outreach – it’s a popular buzz word, but few do this as well in my experience.

3) What one Digital Marketing tactic should a B2B Marketer adopt in the next year?

Simple – Retargeting using paid media as mentioned in my previous answer – if you’re not doing already it’s a great opportunity. If you are, there are new options available all the time, like the recent launch of the LinkedIn ‘Lead Accelerator’. You can review the options on our Content Distribution matrix.

4) What one Digital Marketing tactic should a B2B Marketer stop in the next year?

That’s tricky Paul, because we believe that any tactic can be optimized and most techniques can be made to work. If you’re not getting ROI from digital media that has to stop! But I’ll give you a simple marketing automation technique that any B2B marketer can apply – stop sending out welcome sequences that aren’t targeted, i.e. one-size fits all welcome emails. Since you collect the profile information of a prospect when they subscribe it’s a ‘no-brainer’ to target by role or vertical or need – whatever will give you the biggest uplift and different points in the lead nurturing.

Talking of Marketing Automation, we have a new survey on the opinions on Marketing Automation of B2B marketers in 2015 just launched. We’d love it if your readers can share their experiences and of course they’ll get the research report when it’s completed.

With mid-year coming up and summertime upon us, many marketers are taking stock of the first half of the year and re-checking their Digital Marketing plans to finish out 2015 strong.

So I’d like to offer you some statistics I found eye-opening from a recent report published by Smart Insights:

• One half (50%) of businesses surveyed do not have a defined digital plan or strategy, although they are active in digital marketing.
• Nearly 60% of peoples’ time is now devoted to digital marketing activities, showing the importance of skills development in this area.

The point-counterpoint is just so stark I couldn’t help but write about this.

For any CMO, developing the skills of their team should always be a top issue. You can’t have a high performing team with spotty skills especially in the area of digital marketing. Whether that’s as simple as; how to write an effective tweet, to how to write for the web, or how to write a pay-per-click advertising the common denominator is content and writing.

Summertime is a great time to do a bunch of Lunch and Learns across your team why not consider a series of weekly lunch and learns to get the skill level across your entire team up! Here’s an infographic with more great stats – hope you enjoy!

Knowing how the human mind processes information and images—and putting that knowledge to use—can help you become a more engaging and effective marketer.

Here’s a look at some fascinating facts about the human mind, from a marketing perspective.

Whether you completely neglected to build a website for your mobile platform or there’s a lacking call to action, there are common mobile faux pas than can result in lost loyalty, brand following and even support.

I had a chance to catch up with fellow author, Simon Sinek to discuss his book called – Start With Why at the World Business Forum held in New York at Radio City Music Hall on October 7-8. My goal was to go a bit more in-depth on how to get started for B2B marketers, hope you enjoy the interview.

For those that follow this blog but are not yet familiar with your book Start with Why, give us little background.

A few years ago, I discovered that every single organization on the planet, even our own careers always function on the same three levels: what we do, how we do it, and why we do it. Everybody knows what they do. It’s the products we sell or the services we offer. Some know how we do it. It’s whatever you call it, your differentiating value proposition, your USP, the things that you think make you different or stand out from the crowd. But very few people and very few organizations can clearly articulate why they do what they do. But why I don’t mean to make money. That’s a result. I mean what’s your purpose, what’s your cause, what’s your belief, why does your company exist. And those that understand the why can clearly communicate it have an unbalanced amount of influence and success and loyalty in the marketplace with greater ability to innovate on all the rest of it.

Can every company have a why?

Not only can a big company have a why, every company does have a why. It comes from the founder. It’s the reason why they started the company. Those that are started from market opportunity, I read this article in a magazine and I realize that those tend to be very weak and they tend to not do well. But when a human being personally suffered or people close to them personally suffered something and they found a solution to whatever that problem was and that was the birth of the company, that’s a clear purpose.

Where’s the right place for a marketer to get started?

A good place to start is when companies are formed around real problems. It has to be born out of the cause of the founder. If it wasn’t a specific problem, then that founder has their own why, and the company is formed in their own cause.   Virgin is Richard Branson. It’s the same thing. So you can usually go to the personality or the cause, the why of that founder.

How do you make it stick with the organization?

The why is the sticky part because it’s the visceral part. The why talks directly to the limbic brain, which is the part of the brain that makes decisions. It’s the emotion and feeling part of the brain. So when we start with why, that’s what makes it sticky. You can start with what and people might enjoy it for a moment. You describe the product, what it does, and it may or may not appeal to some people. But it’s the why that makes it interesting and makes people viscerally connected to it.

How do you make a strong why work in a B2B professional services organization?

The good news is that even consultants, accountants, or engineers are still human beings. So as much as they like to believe that all of their behavior is rational, it’s not. Otherwise they would only buy the cheapest product and they would never be loyal to anything. When the why is clearly communicated, it viscerally appeals to people, and they feel connected. And being a part of an organization with a clear sense of why becomes part of our self-identity. We wear the tee-shirt that they gave us at the company picnic. We don’t wear it to bed or paint the house. We wear it with pride and don’t want it to get dirty because it’s part of our self-identity.

I had a chance to catch up with Columbia Business School professor and fellow author, Rita McGrath to discuss her latest book called – The End of Competitive Advantage: How to Keep Your Strategy Moving as Fast as Your Business (Harvard Business Review Press, 2013). I also look forward to seeing her speak about this topic at the upcoming World Business Forum held in New York at Radio City Music Hall on October 7-8.

Tell us why sustainable competitive advantage really a failed notion these days?

Because it causes companies to do a lot of dysfunctional things like just focusing on the bottom line.  If you’re looking for things to stay the same and you’re looking for reasons to keep just doing what you’re doing every day, then chances are that you’re going to be taken by surprise by the changes in the environment or changes in the competitive intensity of your business or things that are just not going to take you in a positive direction.

So the assumption that change is the weird thing and stability is the normal thing is something that causes a lot of companies to get taken by surprise.  That’s why I argue that if you have this bias for sustainable (as in long-lasting, not as environmentally sustainable) it sets you up to make a lot of poor decisions in an environment that’s changing rapidly.

So how should companies think about and organize themselves to take advantage of short-term sustainable advantages?

The first big thing that companies need to do is to look at the elements of their business portfolio as an integrated whole, see that some things you’re doing that are driving today’s core business and that are going to continue to drive tomorrow’s core business.   And you should keep doing them.  Then you’ve got some things that you’re investing in which may be candidates to be part of the next generation core business, things that you’re doing today that could lead to a big, healthy business in the future.  When Apple – just to take a common example – goes from making computers to making music players, but that’s an investment in one of these new platforms.

Then you’ve got to have things that you’re working on that are what I call “options,” which are small investments you’re making today that buy you the right but not the obligation to make some kind of future investments or take advantage of some future opportunity but that you don’t necessarily have to follow through on.

What does “good” in this new age look like?

If you look in the book, there’s this set of ten growth outliers that I think get a lot of this right. The kinds of things that they’re good at doing are letting their structure change as their business opportunities change.  Things like making sure that leaders don’t get too calcified in any one role or any one spot.  Making sure that they do things fast, they make decisions quickly.  Their pace is quicker than a lot of other firms.

The problem with a lot of companies, particularly with respect to things like innovation, is that their structures were built to serve some of their business purpose in the past.  So the structure they have today was built to help deliver yesterday’s business.  When tomorrow’s business requires doing something different, you might need a different structure to go after it.  But very often, the phrase I hear all the time is it “falls between the cracks” of the existing business.  So what you want to be thinking about is building the right structure to deliver the business of the future.

What role can marketing play in helping to define a new opportunity?  Is it the classic role that marketing plays, or is it something more?

I think it’s something different, and I think the world of marketing is about to undergo the most ginormous upheaval.  And it has to do with the fact that on the one hand, the analytics that form the cornerstone of traditional marketing are really changing rapidly.  When I was doing my PhD, it was all about conjoint analysis and co-word grouping and feature-function maps.  Today with the advent of big data and the ability to combine data across many different, previous-unrelated databases, the onus on marketing to get really smart about how they use data and what discoveries they find from them is going to be very strong.  There’s going to be a huge amount of pressure for that.

So I’ll give you a specific example.  My colleague at Columbia, Oded Netzer did a big data project involving the use of the entire Edmunds database.  It was a big, involved study, but he was able to use social media mentions from the Edmunds database to identify the General Motors push to rebrand the Cadillac to be more in line with a European luxury car and less like an American family car, which is how many people were beginning to think of it.  He was able to demonstrate that that a particular set of investments actually got traction in the perception of the brand using only social media.  I think that’s totally different than a lot of the tools that are in the marketing toolkit today.

What could this mean for the average marketer’s career?  What does the ability to take advantage of these sorts of transient advantages mean for marketers?

I would suggest – don’t let yourself get stale.  My watchwords are – if you come to work every day and all you’re doing is coming to work every day, you’ve got a long-term problem!

Moreover you’ve really got to know what’s going on out there.  And I’ll give an example of a friend of mine at a big publishing company.  She’d been let go and was meeting with a friend of mine who runs the learning and development department of this particular company.  This marketing woman was saying I can’t get interviews.  Or if she got interviews, she didn’t get offers because they want to know about things like search engine optimization, big data, social, and she had never had to learn any of that stuff.  My friend meanwhile was completely outraged because she had arranged for online courses this woman could have taken advantage of, but she didn’t.  The woman just came to work and did her job.  As a consequence, she wasn’t even aware that a lot of this stuff was beginning to become a real for any company she considered going to.

So the point is I think you’d need to constantly be thinking about where are your skills in relationship to where the demand is going to be?  Are you learning new things?  Even if you don’t directly and immediately see the connection between your job and those skills, are you learning something new on a regular basis?

This week I moderated another Social Media Today webinar as part of their Best Thinker webinar series, this time on the topic of Transforming Events into Meaningful Experiences: Lessons in Real-Time Marketing. We had an esteemed panel consisting of Amber Quist, the Vice President of Brand Marketing and Communications at Spredfast; Greg Weiss, the Vice President / Business Leader of Social Media at MasterCard; and Adam Buchanan, the Social Media Manager for Cabela’s. This webinar was sponsored by Spredfast.

Amber set the stage with a discussion of Real-Time Marketing (RTM) and some examples of companies doing it right. When you hear RTM, you often think about the Super Bowl Oreo moment or this year’s Arby’s tweet at the Grammy’s, and we all agreed that is a form real-time marketing, but we want to widen the aperture a little on that definition and also talk about how brands are not only engaging in real-time moments, but also how they are using content in real-time in their owned media to engage their audiences and drive their brand forward. This set the stage nicely for Greg and Adam to discuss their companies success in RTM.

Adam then discussed the intersection of RTM with User Generated Content (UGC) and how that help drive the Cabela’s experience both online ad in-store. Cabela’s is leveraging UGC by “passing their customer the microphone,” because as Adam put it: “There’s a good chance your customer’s content is better than yours.” They leverage tweets and photos online to express the joy that fishing and hunting enthusiasts have when using their products. They also created a “digital brag board” in store to showcase some of the create UGC.

Greg took over and give us an inside view of how social experiences can be “priceless.” MasterCard’s theory was built on the idea that a brand that replies to a tweet can be worth more than years of advertising. They are currently running a campaign as the latest incarnation of their landmark “priceless” campaign, which started back in 1997 (17 years ago!), and it’s called “priceless surprises.” In this campaign they have surprises like Justin Timberlake showing up at your front door or surprise tickets to go see your favorite sports team playing a game. So far they have surprised over 60,000 loyal MasterCard customers!

Now, if you have ever been on a Social Media Today webinar before, you know they are very “participant-driven” and we love to ask your questions of our panelists. Many of the questions from our audience revolved around topics such as: How to handle the legal issues of using photos from customers? How best to organize for Real-Time Marketing? How does Real-Time Marketing work in a B2B environment?

If that piqued your interest, you may want to hear the replay of this webinar or review the slides: please click on this link. Otherwise we hope you will join us on another Social Media Today webinar! The next webinar is onAllocating Resources Across The Marketing Mix: Where to Spend Socially. Sign up for it, or view the schedule of upcoming webinars here.

The industry is constantly changing and it can be a challenge to keep up. How can you tell the difference between the skills that are necessary and those that are just hype?

Checkout Formstack’s new infographic on the “7 Skills Marketers Need to Succeed.” They studied the trends and crunched the numbers to help digital marketers prioritize their goals. You might be surprised by which marketing skills are worth developing.

Have you made Google Plus a part of your marketing strategy yet? If not, you could be missing out on a great opportunity to grow your audience. After all, it’s not every day that a social media website goes to great lengths to make your business more visible, but that’s exactly what you’ll get from Google’s services. By giving every plus profile a page rank, Google makes it easier for everyone to show up online in the search engine. And, with every comment, mention and +1 your content receives, you will rank higher on one of the most popular search engines in the world. If you don’t believe me, just check out the following infographic.

This handy guide will show you exactly why Google Plus is such a useful tool for businesses and B2B marketing. Even if you’re not sure how to get started, this infographic, provided by SmartVirtualPhoneNumber.com, will show you how to create an account and become active on the site. The more active you are, the more noticeable you will become. In addition, you’ll be able to take advantage of all the tools associated with Google’s social media service, including Google Hangouts.

If you’ve been looking for another way to reach out to potential business partners or create a larger following, Google + might just be able to provide the boost you’ve been looking for. Don’t wait any longer, make Google + a part of your business plans today!