The End Of Marketing As We Know It Today?

A few weeks ago I was asked “Why do you work in Marketing?” and I struggled. Truth be known, I don’t know why I am a marketer.

In college, I studied product design, innovation, and marketing, so I kept my options open. I loved design, but I was told it was too competitive. Oh, the confidence they had in me!

At one point in my life, I really wanted to be an air hostess. But as my husband always reminds me when we fly, I’d make a dreadful air hostess; my fingernails are deeply embedded in the seat in front of me throughout takeoff, landing, and turbulence.

When I was offered my first job starting out with IBM, it steered my career into technology marketing, and the rest, as they say, is history.

So that’s why I am a marketer.

In hindsight, marketing was probably the best-suited career for me. I have a service-minded attitude, I always think in the context of my customer (either internal or external), and I love communicating – simplifying complex technology messages into stories that people can follow and understand. So perhaps I found the right path without realizing it.

However, I’ve noticed trends over these past few years that have triggered me (without realizing it until I was asked) to distance myself from traditional or conventional marketing. I’ve been trying to escape!

I was quoted at an event last year as saying, “I don’t believe the marketing department will exist in the near future; it will become the engagement department.”

The Definition of Marketing

When you read the definition of marketing, it’s all about “the business of promoting/selling/advertising.” Well, guess what: We’re in an age now where people don’t need to be sold to. If the product or service is good enough, they’ll discover it via their peers, their networks – people who influence their decisions. Every decision that requires a personal commitment pretty much involves a Google search and review process, whether it’s a holiday purchase, a business purchase, or a job search.

Companies don’t need to do market research. If they have a good enough social strategy, they’ll have built a community of advocates, product users, critics, innovators, and developers. Ideas come flowing through a community. A product develops itself based on constant feedback.

Marketing Becomes Engagement

In my view, businesses of the future are moving away from marketing and looking to engagement. For me, that starts with three business essentials:

1) A genuinely good product and/or service – no fakes. In the age of digital transparency, you’ll get found out.

2) Engaged workforce – these guys deliver the customer experience. Get them on your side.

3) Customer journey – mass scale personalization is the key to winning in a digital buying world. The closer you get to knowing your customer’s journey, the more successful you will be.

So forget marketing and sales alignment. It’s about holistic business alignment across all functions – getting them all to work toward a common goal and focusing on delivering a great customer experience.

What I believe marketing will orchestrate in the future will impact the talent the organization attracts through good employer branding. It impacts the service levels provided through social customer support. It impacts the content shared by sales to their networks in order to keep relationships strong and active.

The entire customer journey and experience becomes the role and purpose of marketing – not how many leads were generated in Q4 2014 or how many website visits came from a paid search campaign. These are contributing metrics, not defining measures of success.

So why am I a marketer? Well, I don’t think I am anymore.

Originally posted on Customer Edge

Message To B2B Marketers: Go Digital Or Go Home

Last week  I presented my views on digital marketing at the B2B Marketing Conference in London – you can view the presentation on Slideshare here.   I’ve spent 18+ years marketing in the B2B tech industry in all kinds of companies.  Small and large.  Software and hardware.  I’m a classically trained B2B marketer from a traditional ‘sales led event driven’ environment that seemed to be a winning formula a few years back.

In recent years I’ve shifted my skillset into digital and social marketing.  No other reason than because I’m curious, nosey and like to learn new things.  Now I’m totally converted.

Call it what you want…New Marketing, Digital Marketing, Inbound Marketing, Pull Marketing.  The point is, the buying process within B2B has changed and marketing needs to adapt.

The digital buying habits we use in our daily lives have transferred to the B2B buying environment.  We naturally seek recommendations, reviews and want to research our options when purchasing holidays, goods and services.  The B2B space is no different.  Research shows that 60-90% of the B2B buying process is complete before a buyer contacts a vendor (Source:  Google & CEB).  81% of the time they start searching online (Source:  Demand Gen Report).  Of those, 75% don’t look any further than the first page of results.

Knowing how to win eyeballs in this digital playground is essential.

The linear funnel that we classically took our prospects through has now become a complex journey of digital enlightenment.  Just to make it more complex, every content discovery journey will be different with people finding and reading their own way through content in order to educate themselves.

For every 1 piece of content a business provides a prospect, they will end up finding 3 pieces of content themselves online about the company (Source:  Forrester).  If marketers continue to push the “event driven” tactic to prospective buyers who are early in their search process, they’ll find it increasingly difficult to engage people to attend.

Inbound marketing is no longer an option.  It’s the changing nature of our profession. 

Sure, handing it to a digital agency to will help in the short term but how will you know if you’re getting value for money?  You could pass the responsibility of digital marketing to the ‘millennial’ that recently joined the team who understands all that “social stuff” but those guys can sometimes lack business experience, so be careful.

At a basic level, a digital marketing strategy should consist of 3 components:

• Paid – PPC, Paid Media, Contextual Advertising, Paid Search
• Owned – Your .com property, blogs, branded social channels
• Earned – Your potential advocates including employees, partners and even customers

Integrate these three elements into a campaign driven model and you’re on the road to success but before you do any of that, focus on content.

Use social listening to see what’s trending, what’s topical with your audience, what themes are bubbling up.  That should drive your content strategy which should be filled with the relevant keywords and phrases you know resonate well with your audience.

Once you have the content, fire up the amplification engine – an integrated set of tactics from the Paid, Owned and Earned mix that gives your content a chance to fly and get noticed.  Choose what’s relevant to your audience  E.g. The Paid element could be Direct Sponsored Content in LinkedIn or for a more targeted approach, sponsored InMails in LinkedIn.

Constant learning and continued development is essential for any profession.  A lady I met last week gave me a great analogy.  Her sister-in-law is a doctor and she asked “If you had an illness relating to your kidney, would you want to see a doctor that had 40+ years of experience or a doctor who had just graduated” which apparently most folks answer “the doctor with more experience…naturally?”  Her reply “No, the doctor who has just left university has the latest knowledge, research and case studies.  Experienced doctors must work continuously to keep topping up their knowledge to the same level.

So, to bring this back to marketing – it’s important to keep topping up your knowledge.  In a few years’ time the ‘millennials’ entering the workforce now will have gained the business experience they sometimes lack today.  Their skill-set will be in demand as the search for digital marketing expertise increases.  Don’t miss out.  Get reading.

Here are some resources I regularly check in with to top up my ‘digital knowledge’

• Hubspot
• Marketo
• Buffer Blog
• Social Media Examiner
• Mashable
• Hootsuite

Any others you would recommend?

7 Steps To Building A Social Business

Building a social business is much like building a house.  Trust me.  I know.  As I write I have the diggers on-site laying the foundations for our Norwegian inspired home!

Last week I presented at the B2B Summit in London where over 400 marketers from all kinds of industries came together to share experiences and learn from each other.  My presentation focused on building  a social business from the inside out., the steps to follow and some of the challenges that might come along the way.

It’s fairly well-known that two thirds of the buying cycle is complete before a vendor is contacted and for every piece of content a vendor supplies to a B2B buyer, the buyer will find three other pieces themselves online.  That coupled with the fact that content shared via employees can drive up to 8 x more engagement than content shared by a brand and trust in a regular employee now outweighs the trust buyers have in the company CEO…it’s no surprise that organisations are taking this shift to a social business model seriously.

Social media marketing has moved on.  I would question whether the ‘marketing’ department will even exist in a couple of years time.  Perhaps we’ll become the ‘Engagement Department’ focused on creating relevant content and engaging audiences in conversations.  The linear lead funnel will disappear – it’s about personalised engagement on a massive scale and guess what?  The back office marketing department cannot do this alone.  They don’t have the bandwidth, expertise nor the experience to engage with prospective buyers wanting immediate answers.

The answer?  A  Social Business approach.

Here are my 7 steps to building a house…I mean a Social Business!

	Get Planning Permission:  Be sure the organisation is ready for change.  Establish a social culture internally using tools like SAP Jam.  Work collaboratively and get Exec sponsorship to support.
	Plan For Success & Get The Right Team On Board:  Get your architects, your builder and your planning officer on board at the start.  Find your social superstars (your catalysts of change) and your social wannabes.  Work together to establish business goals.  See my other post on who seems to be driving change.
	Lay The Foundations:  Establish a social office up front.  One that listens, sets the social policy and guidelines, builds the infrastructure on which employees can be part of.  This department needs to focus on keywords, digital SEO and enablement.
	Begin Construction:  There’s a whole lot of work that goes on before you reach this stage so be ready.  The fun starts here.  Build a training program that engages employees.  Focus on building their personal brand.  Give the tools and support to help them do this.  It’s good to showcase the great talent you have working for your business so invest in them!
	Add Materials To Complete The Build:  There’s no point having a frame constructed if there are now windows, roof or walls.  After training comes content. Make it easy for employees to share your brand and non-brand content.  If the content is relevant, it will fly.  If it doesn’t fly, you need to check the quality!
	Final Fixes:  Measure the social business impact.  Sure, the typical social measures of impressions, engagements and reach count but also consider other measures such as employee engagement and talent acquisition costs – you’ll be recruiting through referrals if you have a strong employee network!
	Ongoing Maintenance:  You don’t stop as soon as the house is build.  There’s always maintenance to be done.  Technology changes, new content arrives and regulations change.  You may also want to extend the model to include partner organisations or even customers!  Everyone is a potential brand ambassador

Building A Social Business From The Inside Out from Tribal Impact

Social Media & Marketing Megaphones: 5 Tips For Engaging Your Community

Social media in B2B marketing is a fascinating place to be at the moment.  The temptation to chase after the latest shiny object and figure out it can be used in social media marketing is just too easy…not to mention distracting.

I am fascinated with how social media infiltrates every corner of the organisation to make it more efficient, productive and engaged.  Whilst blasting out marketing messages to the masses seems like a great idea,  it’s not about that.  Social media is about conversations.

But engaging in conversations can’t just be the job of the social media team which would probably stretch the resource capability of a marketing department.   To be truly social and fully engaged with your customers you need to mobilise the biggest and most valuable megaphone your company can access quickly.  Your employees.

Web Strategist expert Jeremiah Owyang from Altimeter is calling 2011 “The Year Of Social Integration”.  The year when social media will not just be a function within the marketing or communications department.  It will be a culture.  Training your workforce to be social within boundaries and guidelines will be crucial.

For now, most organisations are experimenting with social media within the boundaries of marketing and more often than not I see these channels being used as an opportunity to promote, push and advertise content.   Absolutely, social media needs to be integrated into existing marketing methods.  However, it’s more than simply adding a Twitter icon to the bottom of an email campaign.   The core value of social media is the fact that you meet, greet, chat and interact with PEOPLE.

Here are my Tribal Tips for engaging your social network:

Listen Then Leap
If you went to a dinner party, sat in the hosts chair, talked about yourself all night and then left you probably wouldn’t be invited back.  Networking online is similar to networking the “old fashioned way”.  Listen first, gain insight, find something you have in common and then connect.  Use tools such as Social Mention, Twitter Search and Google Alerts.

Be a person – Not a logo
When running corporate social channels you often need to brand your channel accordingly. However, the person feeding the channel doesn’t have to be a corporate robot.  I know there are many social publishing tools, such as Compendium, around these days but most of the time there’s a human being behind tweets and posts.  It’s okay to let some personality filter out every once in a while.

Be Responsive
If someone has taken the time to comment on your Facebook post or send you a message over Twitter…respond.  Tools such as Tweetdeck, Hootsuite and Radian6 (for the large corporations) all offer functionality to help you monitor who is starting a conversation with you.  You can also easily engage from these interfaces.  No excuses.

Ask And You Shall Receive
Welcome to the world of crowdsourcing opinions –  The ability to ask your customers, prospects and employees what they think about something before you do it.  Don’t just use social channels as a way to push content.  Use them to gather intelligence, insight and opinions.  Ask them to feedback on your latest brand, product release or the event agenda you’re putting together.

Act Within Social Media Guidelines
It goes without saying that you should always act within the social media guidelines set by your organisation.  If you haven’t got any, here are some good examples.

I don’t know everything (unless I’m talking with my husband) so I’d like learn from your experience.  Do you have any “engaging” tips to share?  What’s worked for you and your business?

Sarah