Guest Post: Has social media finally arrived in BtoB marketing?

Today’s post is from Peter Motley – MD of Marketing Crew – looking at current trends in social marketing for BtoB.

Social Media SitesWill 2008 be remembered as the real start of business to business (BtoB) social marketing in a way that is much more than just debating whether to start a blog? Can we finally see a change in the way marketeers communicate!

The answer on social marketing for BtoB seems to revolve around the real purpose of the activity itself; whether it’s business people networking to gain personal benefit or to market their product/company brand! A new report by think-tank Demos has concluded that staff should be encouraged to use social networking as part of their business activities as it can boost staff loyalty and morale.

It would reasonable to predict that social networking sites like Viadeo, Linkedin, Plaxo, Ning and Ryze will see their membership ranks soar in the next few quarters as widespread insecurity drives people to connect with others to boost their social capital.

Can the same be said of product and service placements in blogs, podcasts, business groups in networking sites, etc? In recent months we have seen a rise in online BtoB business networking sites being offered, especially to small businesses.

Any long run success of business social networks will come down to basics, which are their ability to become a new channel to market, or to take the cost out of the marketing equation. If these are achieved we will see the seed corn that is driving current developments turn into some very big opportunities.

Large players like BT are heavily promoting BT Tradespace, in a bid to gain a foothold in the online business networking space, somewhere between directory sites like Yell.com and networking sites for boutique consultancies, dominated by online entrepreneurs like Thomas Power with ecademy. Plus there are emerging regional offerings like “Lets Do Business” in the South East and “Your Business Club” in the North West.

Add to the mix the popularity of social networking sites being used for business, such as Facebook, and Bebo, plus the explosion in business blogging sites and business videos loaded on You Tube, you have countless outlets to post entries which promote your offerings. One example that has become legend is Blendtec’s Will it blend on You Tube that has catapulted their high quality blenders from obscurity to leading brand awareness in the US.

In Mintel’s recent study of 2,000 Britons, which is based on extensive research into both social networking and viral marketing, they claim, “the emergence of online social networking is transforming the way we communicate and how we spend our leisure time, on- and offline”. The watchers are now looking to see if this success can be replicated in the business world.

Despite the fact that the report focuses on viral content and talks quite extensively about email marketing, I think we are seeing the convergence of a number of ways of sharing content via social and pseudo social networks. Be it some key marketing message, product placements, professional networking, industry watching, negative product or company reaction, all are now in the “marketing mix”.

We have seen examples of “good old” word of mouth marketing on social business media sites like twitter with London Theatre, and SEOmoz having a dramatic effect. However, the outcomes of which, if not handled professionally, could cause such rapid impact that it makes Gerald Ratners famous comments look snail paced!

The future of social marketing in this social media era is not about the next emerging happening, as I feel it did arrive in 2008, but now about understanding how it’s reinventing the way that we all need to communicate?

Peter Motley is passionate about marketing and about delivering value for money for his clients. Peter sees real business to business marketing as turning the business plan into an achievable marketing strategy and ensuring its delivery. You can contact Peter at Marketing Crew

Get Your Life Under Control with Zen to Done

Struggling to become more productive?If you’re anything like me, you’re constantly juggling priorities and deadlines and struggling to keep on top of a ton of key activities.

And since starting my own business, I’ve found that there are many more things that need my personal attention – and no PA or team to delegate to.

So I’ve found that my personal productivity has become critical to my business success.

A number of years ago I started using the popular Getting Things Done methodology from David Allen. It really helped me get control of all my activities and ensure I didn’t “drop the ball” on any of the key ones.

GTD focuses on developing a “Trusted System” to get all your ideas and actions out of your head, scraps of paper, emails, texts etc. into a limited number of physical and electronic Inboxes. It introduces a method for processing the Inboxes in a structed and efficent manner – along with key principles like the use of “contexts” and focusing on Next Actions.

Over the years I modified the system – adding in elements of Strategy, Prioritisation and Planning which I used when running consulting projects.

Of course, I’m not alone in building on GTD. Many variants have been produced, and lots of tools: from software such as GTD Agenda and Nozbe to the various varieties of Hipster PDA and paper-based planning forms like the D*I*Y Planner.

But recently I ran across what I believe to be the best – most practical implementation to date. Especially those who aren’t naturally fluent in organisation and admin. The Zen to Done system from Zen Habits founder Leo Babauta combines GTD with principles from Steven Covey’s 7 Habits system – and most importantly, a series of habits which allow even the most disorganised of us to successfully adopt the system over time. It shares a lot in common with the system it took me years to develop – but takes it even further and makes it more practical. I liked it so much I signed up to become an affilliate straight away.

You can learn Zen to Done at the Zen Habits site – or download an ebook which goes into more detail and provides examples and FAQs. My suggestion: Try out the site first to see if you like it – then download the ebook. At only $9.50 it’s an absolute steal.

Ian

New Report and Free Trial on RainToday

Rain TodayOne of my favourite and most frequently visited sites is RainToday. It’s a fantastic source of articles, white-papers and research reports, webinars and premium content – all focused on marketing & selling professional services. It features some of the best writers and experts on professional service business development – from Bruce Marcus, Ford Harding and Alan Weiss to in-house gurus John Doerr and Mike Schultz.

They’ve just released a new report on Business Networking for Professionals, including:

  • The golden rule of networking
  • Who to network with and where you can go to find them
  • 3 tips for starting a conversation
  • 6 open-ended questions to get contacts talking and to build a relationship
  • 8 common networking stereotypes to avoid

The best news is that if you sign-up for a free 7-day trial of annual membership you can download the report and all the other available tools and guides for free. RainToday’s promise is that if you’re not satisfied with your membership you can cancel at any time during the free period and not only will you not be billed, you can keep all the content you downloaded during the trial.

Given the high quality of the content and the no-risk guarantee, it’s a pretty irresistable offer in my view.

Ian

Don’t “tell ‘em what you told ‘em….”

One of the most frequent pieces of advice I read and hear for fledgling speakers is “Tell ‘em what you’re going to tell ‘em, tell ‘em, then tell ‘em what you told ‘em”.

In other words: signpost, present, summarise.

The problem is that this leads to deathly dull presentations. By the time you’re “telling ‘em what you told ‘em” half of your audience has either walked out or fallen asleep.

Don’t get me wrong – the signpost-present-summarise approach has it’s place. But it’s primarily for training-type events where you are presenting complex information which needs to be remembered. Hence the need for repetition.

As a speaker/presenter, when you are called upon to “do your stuff” you can have one of three main objectives:

  1. To make a speech – essentially to get one main point across to an audience
  2. To entertain
  3. To educate and train

Most speaking roles at conferences or for corporate events tend to be from 45 minutes to 90 minutes timewise. That’s just not enough time for education or training. So as a speaker, your primary function will either be to get a singe point across – a message the audience wants or needs to hear – or it will be to entertain. Sometimes both.

If you’re speaking after dinner, the chances are that the emphasis will be on entertainment (especially in the UK, where corporate dinners usually involve the imbibing of significant quantities of alcohol). That doesn’t mean you can’t get a more business related point across. But it does mean that you must do it in an entertaining manner. Your point must be illustrated with interested anecdotes or stories – rather than dry facts & figures.

So in reality, the signpost-present-summarise formula that works for training just isn’t suitable for most speaking engagements.

Instead you need to treat your talk much more like a book or film. It needs to have a compelling narrative, a strong opening, and a strong close.

Personally, I use one of three types of “opener”:

  • A question to the audience – to get them engaged
  • A story or anecdote related to the theme of the talk (for example, a story from my early days selling consulting services – usually illustrating a common example of “what not to do”)
  • Something shocking – perhaps a carefully thought-out insult to the group or their profession, or a prediction of a dire future unless they change

On the subject of shock as an opener, one of the best talks I ever heard was from Kjell A Nordström – co-author of “Funky Business”. Kjell (a 6’6″ tall, thin Scandinavian economist with a shaved head) stood centre stage dressed all in black and waited in silence for 10 seconds after being introduced – then opened with the immortal line: “Shopping and Fucking”.

It certainly woke up an audience of tired executives who’d spent the day planning and strategising. And we certainly remembered what he had to say about creativity.

Ian

Getting Past First Base

Getting Past First BaseHow do you turn an initial contact with a prospect into a fully-fledged business relationship? It’s the essence of sales – but it’s an area where many people really struggle.

Robert Middleton has an excellent analogy for this process which he calls “Marketing Ball”.

By the way, if you’re an independent professional (a consultant, coach, therapist, psychologist, etc.) and you want to attract more clients and win more business then head over right now to Robert’s Action Plan Marketing site and sign up for the free marketing audio and workbook. I must warn you though – within a week of reading his free material I had been so impressed I bought his “whole shebang” package.

One of the core principles Robert introduces via the analogy is the importance of progressing “one base at a time” in sales. You can’t expect to go from initial contact to a sale in one hit. In fact, it may be too much to expect to go from first contact to even a meeting directly. You need to take things one step at a time by adding value and providing information to your potential client to build up the trust needed for them to take the next step.

A case in point: one valuable source of new opportunities for service businesses is new startups. Lacking an incumbent, there’s a much better chance than normal for accountants, solicitors and other providers to establish a relationship.

When I started my new business, I had nearly a dozen letters from accountants, web designers and marketers – each keen to talk to me about how they could help me (or perhaps, more accurately, how they could get business from me).

To give them fair credit, they had at least made the effort to scan for new business formations to identify high potential clients for themselves.

However, none of them took it further than that. Other than sending a letter to make me aware of their services – none of them did anything for me that would make me want to do business with them.

If they’d perhaps sent me a short guide to start-up finances, or successful small business websites or other useful information related to their business. Or if they had offered me something of value for free – 30 minutes of their time to share some of their experiences on what works well in their field. Perhaps even mocked up a website for me or made suggestions for my marketing approach. Any of this would have demonstrated both their competence and their client-focus – their desire to be helpful and their willingness to invest in doing so.

But no. Just an advert. Just them telling me how good they were.

All that effort to find me, then they couldn’t get past first base.

Ian

Warming Up Cold Contacts

Heart on FireI’ve been “tagged” by Ford Harding to take part in an interesting concept: a “blog meme” – a series of posts by different bloggers on the same topic. You can see Ford’s post here and the original idea from “Bizzie Guye” here.

So here goes……

Warming Up Cold Contacts
In “Managing the Professional Services Firm”, leading professional services guru David Maister labels cold calling as a third-tier “desperation” measure.Certainly the vast majority of professionals intensely dislike cold calling and are more than eager to accept the many pronouncements that “cold calling doesn’t work”.

But the reality is that many professional service firms and sole practitioners have used cold calling very successfully to grow their practices.

One of the keys to making cold calling effective is to “warm up” the call beforehand. In many cases this means pre-establishing a fledgling relationship with the prospect before the call is made. Perhaps sending a letter or an article in advance, or getting an introduction form a mutual contact.

But there is another – often overlooked – method for ensuring your prospect is more receptive to receiving your call. It’s simply to focus your calls on people who actually need your services.

It sounds ridiculously simple. Surely that’s what everyone does anyway?

In reality, it’s not. The majority of cold calling is to relatively unqualified prospects. Sure, they may be in a target industry, or be “likely” to need your services. But do they definitely need your services right now? Usually not.

And that’s why most cold calls get rejected – the repeated experience of prospects that the call is a waste of time. We’re an interruption to their busy schedules, and they’ve learnt that 9 times out of 10 a cold call is going to offer nothing of value to them. So they’ve learnt not to take calls from people they don’t know.

But what if you could be sure that the majority of people you call actually do need your services – right now? If that was the case then in the first few seconds of the call you could establish your value and they would be willing to listen further. Instead of calling hundreds of prospects for a tiny and therefore uneconomic response, a small number of calls to highly qualified prospects would result in a high number of positive responses and follow-ups.

How can we do this? It really depends on the situation:

  • For certain types of product or service we can use desk research to identify the customers who definitely need our service. For example, a consultant who specialises in helping technology start-ups find their first customers will almost always get a good reception when they make targeted calls to these types of firm.
  • If emerging customer needs are visible from outside the client firm, this can be used to identify prospects with definite needs. For example, a “trigger event” such as a change in leadership or the divestment of a business can generate specific service needs.
  • The “grapevine” – networks of allied professionals and service providers close to a target client can provide information on their specific needs.
  • A “low risk” cold call can be made to staff lower down the organisation than the target prospect. By calling people less likely to reject the call, vital information and real insights can be gathered on the true needs of the prospect.
  • Allowing prospects to self-select and identify themselves is also possible. For example the typical on-line strategy of using pay-per-click advertising to offer a free report or resource in a specific area will allow prospects with needs in that area to identify themselves.

Other methods are also possible – always following the principle of investing before the call to identify highly qualified prospects.

Of course, such a strategy isn’t always possible. And it could be argued that such an investment in advanced research is more costly than simply calling a large number of loosely qualified prospects and finding out who’s interested by trial and error.

But doing detailed qualification in advance does two very positive things.

Firstly, it gives the sales person confidence that they are likely to get a positive response from the people they are calling. This confidence will come across in the call and make the prospect more likely to listen – creating a virtuous circle of success.

Secondly – and to my mind more importantly – it shows respect for your clients. Even if it costs you more to do detailed research in advance that it would to call in a less qualified manner, it shows that you have prioritised your client’s time over your own. It shows you care enough not to waste their time on a “fishing expedition”. Doesn’t that in itself speak volumes about the kind of sales person you are?

Ian

Now, I’m tagging Craig Elias and Paul McCord – both of whom I’m sure will add their own unique insights to the meme.