Remind me - What does marketing actually do?

I love it when you stumble across something you created a few years ago and, upon re-reading, decide that it still holds up.

A few years ago I was part of a small workshop at IBM that was challenged with the question of "What is our strategic vision for demand generation?". Grand terminology that can be translated to "What the **** do you do?". The sentence we came up with was a little dry, but I think it captures pretty well what marketing's role is around demand generation (clearly marketing has other responsibilities beyond DG, but this was the focus here).

This is what we came up with:

"Our purpose is to:

Engage in remarkable conversations...

With the right customer communities...

Through the most relevant method(s)...

Which builds relationships...

And creates value for both parties..."

Let me clarify just a little:

Marketing is about conversations rather than a monologue; those conversations need to be sufficiently interesting (remarkable) such that they make people think, engage, share; we know that the decision making units have grown and so it's essential to engage more broadly in the various communities of influence; What is the most relevant method? Actually it's not for you to say - the relevant method is the vehicle chosen by the client/prospect. Demand generation is not just about today's transaction - it's about a dialogue that builds a deepening relationship and that delivers value to both parties - you are looking for immediate and longer term revenue, and the client is looking to solve a business issue.

I keep coming back to this piece of work as a useful checklist to evaluate whether a set of Demand Generation activities is doing what it needs to do. 

Many thanks to Sarah Chatterton, Tony Whitelaw, Martyn Christian, and several others who made key contributions to this output.

Does this work for you? How would you improve upon it?

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Well I guess you COULD automate your marketing....

... But would you really want to?

This was the question I tried to address in a 45 minute webinar for BrightTalk yesterday as part of their Campaign Automation online summit. The proposition was pretty straightforward: before you start to Automate your marketing, you better be pretty clear about what the purpose of your marketing actually is. There's no escape from this - no tool is going to do the thinking  for you (at least, not until IBM's Watson computer joins the marketing team), or make your content interesting and engaging.

Marketing Automation and Marketing Transformation are not the same thing - the first is a component of the second.

You can catch the full recording of the webinar below (you may need to register for BrightTalk first)

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Please Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood - Agency & Client Alignment

Clients and Agencies are different animals (excuse the pun)!. In a sense it's a little like Sales and Marketing - they are not used to walking in each others shoes. This general misunderstanding of what clients expect (or hope for) when they meet an agency results in significant opportunities to create additional revenue being left on the table

I am in the unusual position of having spent most of my career client side, but now find myself selling consultancy services to clients. But I've also had the opportunity to work with several marketing agencies and more recently provide them with more of a client-side perspective.

I use the term "Agency" loosely. These days everybody wants to sell to the Marketing department. As well as media agencies, marketing agencies we now find ourselves increasingly in conversations with various shades of technology supplier, all hoping to relieve us of our marketing budgets with promises of astonishing ROIs (always amusing, since most agencies don't even have the visibility of the sales pipeline in order to even measure the ROI!)

Over the years I have had the pleasure of working with some great agencies and some great people within those agencies. Just to be clear - I do mean YOU. However I've also worked with a number of distinctly average people from both great and average agencies. For clarity - yes, I mean THEM! I also used get approached on a very regular basis by agencies wanting to get 30 minutes in my diary to explore how they might be able to help me.

So let me give you a few personal observations on my experiences in dealing with agencies of various shades over the years. If you are client side and can add some further observations, I'd love to hear from you. If you are in an agency, I'd be delighted if you want to get in touch - perhaps I can help...

(BTW - as I write this I am currently updating my iTunes library. That explains some of the headings and pictures)

That's Entertainment

I used to despair when I looked at my calendar for the forthcoming week. I would protect a few hours to get some of my work done, but otherwise my day would be a succession of meetings and reviews with various stakeholders (mostly outside of the marketing function), conference calls, reviews and managing the odd crisis. All very internally focused. I had a 90 minute train commute into the office and that was my only way of keeping on top of my email. Gosh how I miss it all :)

One of the only things that kept me sane and fresh was interactions outside of the company - with clients, at conferences, or with agencies. But time was very limited so the default response to any approach had to be - "sorry I can't make a meeting, but if you want to send me something I'll probably ignore it". 

Entertainment? Perhaps that's not how you want to be seen - but in that case you had better demonstrate that you're merely an interval between meetings.

That Don't Impress Me Much

Most initial agency meetings went down a familiar path: Initial chit-chat, followed by presentation of the agency's credentials deck, followed by a loose "so how could we help you" conversation.

I rarely felt this was a great use of my time. I wanted more than credentials. I'm not silly. I know that you will put, for instance, the Coca-Cola logo in your credentials even all that you did was design an internal email header 10 years ago. I get that - would probably do the same. That's why I'm not impressed. Oh and  by the way - my business is nothing like Coke's, so only focus on relevant client stories.

Think!

My recommendation would be to move past all that stuff really quickly. More positive meetings occurred when someone did something that made me realise that this was not just another agency, and made me want to explore further. Think about the following:

• What make you any different from every other agency I've seen this month? I'm looking to make a quick decision on whether we will ever have another meeting. No matter how affable I may seem - I've not invited you in for a chat.
• Can you clearly articulate the breadth of your agency's capabilities? I want to have relationships with as few partners as possible. That means I want to see understand what you can do beyond some nice creative. What value can you and your colleageues add to help ease my business pains. Otherwise I think you are just another creative agency, and that you are the only talent there.
• Have you come to the meeting with a provocative point of view on something I really care about? Do you know what the key challenges are for a business marketing leader today? Have you researched to get a sense of my particular challenges and focus areas? Do you have specific capabilities that could help me address my key challenges? Do you share the passions I do?
• Will you disagree with me? I don't want an agency full of yes men. That simply means you will do what I want rather than what is right for the customer/market. If all I wanted was resource, I could have secured it much cheaper than talking to you. I want someone who has opinions and real insight - not just telling me what they learned in a 5 minute Google search.
• Will you educate me? I like to learn about new approaches that I haven't previously considered. Give me a fact or two that I might be able to use into one of  my next meetings. 
• Can I talk to your clients? I was always keen to engage with other people in a similar position to myself on a peer to peer basis. If you can make some connections for me I have an immediate reason to start building a relationship.
• What are the next steps? I used to be constantly surprised at how many initial meetings ended with a limp "I'll call you again in a few weeks". What are you going to do next? What do you want me to do next?  

Don't You Forget About Me

Of course the meeting is just the first step. Just as important is the follow up and progress against the key actions - don't let all the hard work to secure that meeting simply fizzle out. 

That's my take on it based on my years in client side marketing leadership roles. If you can demonstrate that you understand my world, have a confident perspective upon it, and can offer me something tangible to progress the discussion - then you are already ahead of the pack.

What's your views on the gap between agencies and clients in those critical first meetings? I would love to hear from you.

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8 Steps Towards a Winning Content Marketing Strategy

As marketers, we are unleashing increasing amounts of content into the marketplace. And as consumers we know that we do our best to ignore most of it! So how do we ensure that the content that we produce stands out from the crowd, and does so on a consistent and cost-effective basis?

That was the topic for a B2B Marketing panel discussion at the Paramount in Centre Point at the beginning of this week, sponsored by Waggener Edstrom. Other panellists besides myself were Prelini Chiechi from Lithium Technologies, Sue Pryce of Unipart Logistics and Nic Shaw from Waggener Edstrom.

In a lively debate some common themes emerged that thought were worth sharing:

1. Marketing needs to focus on more than just Demand Generation. In order for our DG activities to be landing on fertile ground, marketing needs to invest in market conditioning activity (aka thought leadership). One of the negative impacts of the current obsession with ROI of everything is that important non-DG activities are overlooked. Unless this can be overcome it will be difficult to make a case for the validity of content marketing activities (other than as a direct component of lead generation programmes)

2. It's Not About You! This was the morning's recurring theme. The value of our content is measured by the recipient - period. Consequently anything we create must have the customer/prospect in mind. We should audit the content we have to determine where it would fit in a buyers' journey, and challenge ourselves on whether it really adds value to the customer or actually really only serves our own agenda.

3. Content = Creation + Curation. Given that we are trying to build a relationship on our prospect's terms, it's essential to think about curating and sharing other people's relevant content Not only does this reduce our workload but it increases the potential value to our readers.

4. Be Interesting. We are looking for the sweetspot at the intersection of the buyer's passions and our expertise. Having done so we can take an authoritative and individual stance - one that is not the same as the rest of the crowd. And when it comes to standing out from the crowd, give some thought to visual design - unless we can grab our reader's attention everything else is wasted.

5. Keep Delivering. We can't treat content as a one off tactic - we are trying to build a relatiionship with the reader and that can only happen if we are persistent in the frequency of your delivery, and consistent in the quality

6. Integrate across all channels. Of course we need to ensure that your content is made available in the delivery channels that the consumer prefers - be that mobile, blogs, video, social, podcasts. But also we need to ensure that the experience we offer in our content is replicated across our functions. What a shame if we produce some outstanding, engaging content only for the experience to be ruined by a an over-aggressive telemarketing follow up - "I see you've looked at our video about the challenges that CMOs face around data, now would you like to buy our fancy database software?"...

7. Listen. Listening and measurement shouldn't just occur at the end of the process - we can use it across the spectrum from initial research onwards. Don't plan too far in advance, since our listening exercises will almost certainly make us want to adjust our plans significantly

8. Skills Gap. Creating compelling content - whether text, video, or other vehicles - is not simple. Above all it requires an understanding of the pressing challenges of the intended reader. It's unlikely that this skill will be found in our most junior staff members, yet it's surprising how often that is exactly the individual we ask to take ownership for these tasks.

I'd love to hear from you about your content marketing challenges - perhaps I can help...

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