Basics of B2B Branding

Does branding even matter at B2B companies? Or is branding a waste of time and budget compared to “hard ROI” activities that can be proven to drive revenue?

My belief is that branding does matter to B2B marketers, and for one main reason: B2B buyers are still people, and people are emotional. And, as research increasingly indicates, emotions impact economic decision making.  Now, B2C marketers can capitalize on the anticipation of positive emotion by appealing to aspirational feelings such as desire. But in B2B, there is an asymmetry between the upside and downside of B2B purchases: the buyer does not experience the full benefit of the solution directly and may or not be rewarded for making a good purchase, but a bad purchase can destroy the buyer’s reputation and damage job security. So, in B2B brands capitalize on the avoidance of negative emotions.

B2B brands can tap into this by building trust in the buyer’s mind. The classic example is “nobody ever got fired for buying IBM”. Since being IBM is not an option for most companies (yet), the best way to build a brand of trust is to become a trusted advisor via thought leadership early in the buying cycle.

Read more of my thoughts on B2B branding on my Marketo post, B2B Branding – Why Branding Matters in B2B Marketing.

8 Ways The Internet Changed Marketing

One of my favorite speeches is the one Tien Tzuo gave as part of Stanford University’s Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Series. As part of this talk, Tien shared how Salesforce.com transformed their sales and marketing processes by leveraging the internet.

Based on those insights, here are eight ways the internet changed enterprise software marketing.

1. Awareness. Before the internet, access to information about new products and solutions was limited to a few sources. In the internet-era, customers are much better at seeking out information themselves — and blocking out unwanted marketing messages — meaning B2B marketers must practice inbound techniques to help customers find them.
2. Segmentation and Targeting. Because anyone can find you online, you need a way to make sure that the right people find you, and possibly need different offerings for different types of visitors.
3. Education. The only way the buyer could learn more was a meeting with a sales representative from the company. That’s why buyers were willing to engage with sales so early in the buying cycle. But today, easy access to information means that buyers educate themselves before engaging with sales.
4. Trials. The number one thing prospects want to know is whether your solution meets their needs. The best way to get that information is simple: just use the product. And the internet makes it easier than ever to let potential customers try your solution before they buy.
5. Product Design. Limited information led buyers to resort to complex RFPs to make purchases; this encouraged companies to create products with broad checklists of features. But the internet, and trials, encourages companies to create simple, clean, easy to learn products.
6. Sales. The internet created the role of inside sales to qualify marketing-generated leads, and close "easy" transactions over the phone.
7. Events. The internet reduces the amount of human contact with direct sales representatives, other channels of human interaction become more important -- making events such as webinars, road shows, and conferences even more important. (The Apple Store serves a similar purpose, giving customers who buy online a place to build the relationship and trust.)
8. Post-Sales Customer Experience. The internet enables the software as a service model, which uses subscriptions and not one-time sales. If customers don’t like your service they can just stop using (and paying for) it, so companies are encouraged to invest in the ongoing customer experience.

Read my original post, 8 Ways The Internet Changed Software Marketing.

10 Trends in B2B Marketing

One of my favorite series of posts on the early Marketo blog was called Ten Practical Trends in B2B Marketing. In it, I compiled some of the key ideas on modern marketing that I'd had up until that date.  Here are links to the 10 final articles:

1. Embrace online channels: The internet has transformed best-practices in B2B marketing. As a result, spending on online advertising at B2B companies is growing at 25% a year.
2. Landing pages, landing pages, landing pages: Sending traffic to a landing page can improve conversions by 2X, and following best practices can raise them another 40%.
3. Test everything – but don’t over test: Testing is the best way to discover what works, but don’t test too many variables or you won’t get significant results.
4. Practice attention marketing – and make it measurable: Customers are adept at tuning out unwanted marketing. Leverage the internet and word of mouth to break through the attention barrier.
5. Help buyers research early in the sales cycle: Buyers use the internet to research before they engage with sales. By helping to educate the customer, you can establish your company as a trusted advisor that understands their problems.
6. Manage leads – don’t generate demand: Marketers who excel at managing leads (i.e. acquiring, scoring, nurturing, and routing leads) can more than double the number of marketing leads that turn into a sale.
7. Lead nurturing 101: 95% of the prospects on your site are not ready to speak with sales. Leads that are nurtured before going to sales buy more, require less discounting, and have shorter sales cycles.
8. Measure relationship depth: Track the number and quality of marketing interactions with each prospect company, so you know the next best marketing action to take.
9. Stop being a cost center: Help the CEO and CFO think of marketing as asset that drives revenue, not a liability that needs to be reduced, by framing the issue of marketing spending in terms of revenue and growth.
10. Invest in marketing automation: As marketing operations are become increasingly complex, marketers will need to find ways to automate key processes through technology.

Earn a Seat at the Revenue Table

One key thought that has driven much of my marketing thinking is this: marketing should be as accountable for revenue as sales.  This is especially true with modern buyers who use information abundance to seize control of the buying process and delay engagement with sales until much later in the buying process.

In late 2006, I wrote a series of articles about this process, which were then compiled into a single article for Revenue Performance How Marketers can Earn a Seat at the Revenue Table. In the article, I ask "What can marketers do in order to be seen as part of a machine that drives revenue and profits, not just the people who throw parties and buy swag?" The answer, I argue, is to recognize that at most companies, Sales is the function that owns the revenue pipeline. (Sales and revenue often go together, so much that some people use the words as synonyms.)  This means that marketing can earn their seat at the revenue table by acting MORE like sales with these key actions:

1. Speak the financial “language of busiess”
2. Forecast results, not just costs
3. Make hard business cases for spending
4. Align incentives
5. Use standardized best-practice methodologies
6. Do “more with less” using automation technology

Check out the entire article, How Marketers can Earn a Seat at the Revenue Table, for detailed explanations of each of these ideas.

Marketing Budgets 101

One topic that seems to always fascinate marketing executives, and myself, is "how much should my company spend on marketing?"  This of course comes with the implied question, "how can I justify my marketing budget to fellow executives?"

I wrote about this exact topic on the Marketo blog on October 12, 2006, in a post named Benchmarking Marketing Budgets.  Check it out for some useful stats.  Then on January 21, 2007 I wrote a follow-up, How To Sell Your B2B Marketing Budget To Your CFO. Here, I make an important argument: the best way to justify your marketing budget is to think of it as an investment that incurs costs today but delivers benefits for many years.  When we think of the marketing budget as an investment, and not a cost, we not only help convince others that marketing is not a cost center, but we also let the marketing budget to be amortized over the entire “useful life” of the investment.  This in turns allows the company to make more strategic but still rational big bets on marketing.

Read the Marketo ebook Selling your Marketing Budget to your CFO for more on this topic.

Modern Marketing Defined

I published my first blog post on the Marketo blog on August 8, 2006.  It was titled Modern B2B Marketing Defined, and it spelled out the four reasons that traditional marketing approaches were no longer acceptable:

1. Customers DON’T want to be interrupted.    
2. There are no more mass channels.
3. Marketing can’t get away with not being accountable.

​I then spelled out the four principles of modern marketing, as I saw them in 2006:

1. Attention marketing. Marketing to customers when and how they want to engage. This eventually became a key tenant of inbound marketing.
2. Community marketing. This eventually became social marketing.
   
3. Left brain marketing. The whole idea of using math and science in marketing.   
4. Accountable marketing. Using metrics to prove -- and improve -- marketing's impact on revenue, and help marketing earn a seat at the revenue table.

Check out the original article: Modern B2B Marketing Defined.