Tag Archives: Marketing strategy

Anecdotal evidence of success is vital for continuing any Influencer Engagement program.

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EngagementCover.peel3Point 3 of six learnings from our Influencer Engagement Programs is that anecdotal evidence of success is vital for the continuance of any program – yet companies rarely have any way to record this.

Some clients like their engagement programs to be fluid – they believe in them because they know they make sense. Others prefer them tightly orchestrated and documented to the smallest detail. Some of ours have been detailed on Excel sheets with more formulas than I’d have believed possible. But one force has been proved, time and time again, to be more powerful than almost any other, aside from the cold cash of a direct resulting sale. Executives with personal anecdotes. A hundred actions, responses, metrics and the like are nothing compared to a client exec. with the power to approve budget saying “I was at a customer the other day and he was absolutely being influenced by (Influencer X)”.

It might not be scientific proof, or even driven by any kind of data, but one anecdote from the right executive and everyone down the chain falls into place. That’s why senior salespeople are so useful, and perhaps critical, to have on-board though the engagement process. They keep the budget in place during the inevitable dips in more tangible progress.

What’s particularly interesting is how few companies have any existing framework to collate such anecdotes. If the quote comes in as an email it can obviously sorted in a particular folder, or simply printed out, but beyond this, it just doesn’t happen. Yet every engagement program needs to harness these quotes, capturing them at the time and reminding senior management of them at key points down the line. Short-form video is by far the best format, way better than just audio and a hundred times better than an email – yet none of our clients have ever established this without us suggesting it. The quality of cellphone video is now more than good enough and iOS, Android and WindowsPhone can all transcribe to text from video. Collate the various video clips in an online database, even an iCloud Photo or Flickr album will do, and integrate them into your next program or performance review. You’ll be amazed how powerful they’ll prove.

The second of six learnings from our Influencer Engagement Programs

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EngagementCover.peel2

Point 2 (of 6). Many critical influencers don’t have any existing relationships with our clients. We’ve recently concluded one of our Influencer Perception Audits for a client of ours – one of the best known global software companies. One you would imagine knew everybody who mattered.

Having identified the top market influencers in a particular business sector we conducted a one-to-one audit on how each of those identified influencers currently viewed our client in that sector. One of the questions we asked was ‘ Do you have any existing working relationship with any of (our client’s) point executives, and if not, is this something you would like to have?’ It’s a typical starting point question we ask so we’ve come to know the likely trend in responses. The findings are made more interesting by the fact that in advance of the audit, we ask our client which influencers they already have a working relationship with.

As emphasized in our most recent audit, our client’s execs typically believe they have existing working relationships with perhaps 50-60% of the individual influencers. Sometimes it’s less, but rarely more. When we ask those identified influencers the same question, closer to 20% believe they have a working relationship with any of our client’s execs.

How much of this ‘over-belief’ by the client’s execs is just the bravado of human nature, how much is “I might have met him/her only once but I’m sure they’ll remember me”, and how much is the assumption that “it may not be me personally that knows him/her but I’m sure one of our team must know them”, is impossible to say. But our experience shows that it is never the case that the influencers believe they have a better relationship with the client than vice-versa. Clients always over-estimate the strength of their relationships. Sometimes by an astonishing degree.

It makes me wonder to what degree this also relates to the executives’ working relationships with their prospects & customers. How accurate is their gauging of the strength of those relationships? If there were a similar 30-40% gap between opinions then that could explain plenty of lost sales.

Aside from informal surveys such as ours I’m not sure how many vendors seek to qualitively measure the strength of their existing relationships. The acid test most used – “did you win the sale?” – is a winner-takes-all moment in time, with no opportunity for a second attempt. So the homework needs to be done in advance. Starting with the customer’s key influencers.

The first of six learnings from our Influencer Engagement Programs

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EngagementCover.peel1I was putting together a presentation on our Influencer Engagement Programs last week and thought it might be useful to outline some of the key learnings we have. There’s way more than six but I’ve chosen six and I’ll write about each in separate posts.

Point 1. Marketing depts. are still heavily, and rigidly, compartmentalized. And that’s a problem. The influencer model requires breaking that apart. As soon as we’ve identified the key customer influencers for a client, those influencers are then typically segmented into those the client routes to the PR agency, those to the social media team, those to the AR folks etc. Those that can’t be dispatched to these teams are mentally put into the ‘others’ category. Most companies have little existing mechanism to deal with these others. Through no fault of their own, they’re considered ‘awkward’ to accommodate. The cause is that their benefits are ‘awkward’ to measure.

Let’s go back one step. Marketing depts. are intrigued by who the individuals really influencing their customers are. There’s a genuine interest to find out. And an excitement with the ‘identification’ results – the feeling of a new dawn. But when they do find out, clients rarely have the internal structure & processes to act on this new knowledge. And then they can stumble.

Marketing depts. don’t have to break anything to commission us to identify their real customer influencers. They have to have interest, and a budget. But to act on our findings they often do have to break something internally. Because much as they’d like to create a new way of interacting with these new-found influencers, they’re restricted in how to deal with them by the existing fiefdoms within their organization. And they get into people-politics.

How do they choose to engage with the single consultant, who occasionally blogs, sporadically contributes an article to a trade mag., but who regularly consults to a number of large prospect opportunities? The PR team doesn’t want to lose that person from their long list of journalists, even though they’re never going to be a priority on that list. The client’s consultant relations team hasn’t the resource to proactively engage with small consultants either, preferring to spend their time with the much larger consultancy brands. And in terms of the influencer outreach program, how do you measure the value that influencer contributes when they act only as a background advisor to one or more prospect companies? Keeping them ‘onside’ with you costs time, patience, budget, and your influencer program needs to show a return on investment each quarter.

PR depts. and agencies think they have a hard enough time justifying their own existence – yet their traditional focus on journalists & the media means their eventual return can at least be measured in column inches, site stats, audience ratings, etc. AR teams can find they have a harder job because often only the analysts’ written reports are seen as tangible returns, when their actual role can be much broader. But how do you persuade your bosses of that? Yet compared to other categories of influencer, the returns from AR & PR activity are relatively simple to display on a PowerPoint chart. And that’s what seems to count. When each category of influencer may require a slightly different RoI metric to reflect the success of your outreach, it needs a particularly motivated, secure, senior and understanding client executive to support the ongoing engagement stage.

No surprise then that so many marketing depts. opt for the instant, though sugary, gratification of social media outreach. All those retweets, shares and weblogs look so much better on a PowerPoint graph. Whether they have any effect on sales is a very different argument.

Reblog: New Study Shows LinkedIn is the Tool of Choice But Blogging Declines Among the Inc. 500

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Screen Shot 2015-07-30 at 7.22.05 AMThere’s a new study from the Society of New Communications Research (SNCR) this week that looks pretty interesting. No surprise about the continued success of LinkedIn – much as we question the B2B impact of Facebook and Twitter, we’ve never had any doubts about LinkedIn. But these are the first figures we’ve seen to state that blogging among the largest U.S. companies is declining. And a 6% decline is significant. Maybe it’s just too time-consuming for almost immeasurable return?

Here’s the original. Well worth a closer look.

http://news.sncr.org/news.php?include=145547

 

Salespeople focus on knowing the buyer, but why not those influencing the buyer?

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I’ve never known a vendor salesperson claim to know who his customer’s influencers are. Not in any detail at least. The majority I’ve spoken to – and it must now be in the high hundreds – might say “the finance boss”, “her line manager” or, even more vaguely, “usually those in the business unit”, but it’s never definite, precise or much thought about.

Salespeople do undoubtedly have a far greater understanding of the prospect themselves. They’ll likely know who are the eventual decision-makers, many of those who could potentially throw a spanner in the works and those who are likely just tire-kickers. By asking a few questions they’ll know soon enough whether the incoming enquiry has the support of the company’s bosses or not. And they’ll know with whom to start their initial cold-calling. Experience will have told them who they should be engaging with. But they still wont know who behind the scenes is influencing the eventual choice.

When I ask these salespeople why they don’t invest much effort into understanding the real influencers I’m told, “we just don’t get the time”, “buyers like to keep that quiet”, “it’s always changing” and “you never know until the decision’s made”. Salespeople clearly don’t expect much help from their marketing depts.

There has to be a better way. Using data not anecdotes. Now that’s the direction Influencer Marketing should be moving in.

B2B Magazine UK survey on how business purchase decisions are now made

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B2B Marketing mag, BaseOne, Buyersphere Report 2015,, Influencer Marketing, Influencer50, The Buyerside Journey.comAn interesting survey was published earlier this week with recent data on how business purchase decisions are being made. These were all for UK B2B purchases exceeding £20k (approx.$32k). And the standout finding for me – reaffirmation that social media is not being used by buyers to guide their purchase decisions to anywhere near the degree vendors would have you believe. 50% of all purchasing decision-makers didn’t use social media at all to shape their buying decisions.

It gets worse for Twitter. Just 5% of the >200 respondents said they referred to Twitter for help in their decision-making process. This was the second-lowest score, just edging out the 4% who used Pinterest.

Top of the social platforms was not surprisingly LinkedIn (18%) and Google+ (16%). Online community sites came in at 10%.

So why are vendors (and their agencies) continuing to invest so much in their Twitter outreach? It’s certainly not based on a knowledge of their customers.

The survey is well worth reading. Hat-tip to the UK’s B2B Marketing and BaseOne. http://www.b2bmarketing.net/resources/buyersphere-report-2015

The direction Influencer Marketing could have, and should have, taken.

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The mass-market direction for Influencer Marketing over the next year seems pretty clear to me. Today’s hype is all about brokering commercial deals between pay-for-play tweeters & bloggers and ‘brands’. Brands are desperate to get as many people talking about them as possible, to explore every outlet, and tweeters would love to be paid for their tweets. Both sides want each other, even if the customer or prospect is the one to lose.

The problem is that reaching out to real influencers is difficult, with no guaranteed RoI and certainly no predictable rate of that return. And that doesn’t fit comfortably with today’s need for guaranteed, predictable measures.

It wont last, but it’s set for the next year or so because it helps the metrics that marketers have set for themselves. Having adopted one of the many marketing automation systems (a la Eloqua, Marketo, etc.) they now need to ensure their marketing programs are well reflected in it, and # of social channels, # of retweets / reblogs / shares, size of potential audience, are valuable metrics for this. Forget they’re having no effect on sales, they are reaching an audience.

So marketing agencies, and it is the agencies who are moving this agenda, are improving their odds by reaching out to the most willing individuals. These individuals may not be influencers, almost certainly they’re not, but they’re willing, they’ll reliably add to the brand’s outreach channels. Most importantly, they’re available for hire.

I’ll give it nine months before the groundswell of opinion turns on it. But there’s so clearly a better direction Influencer Marketing could have taken.

The fundamental reason for reaching out to real influencers was, and should continue to be, to improve your chances of completing a sale. These ‘social influencer’ services divorce any connection between marketing and sales.

To reconnect marketing with sales you have to first analyze which individuals are involved in the prospect’s decision-making process – and which aren’t. Now if you could reliably understand who was important and who wasn’t to a sale, in advance of any purchase decision – and be able to scale that process across industries and across regions – well, that would be truly powerful. But it’s not a direction most in Influencer Marketing seem to be pursuing.

Reblog: Predictive Modeling Technologies Make One-to-One Marketing a Reality

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The Buyerside Journey.com, Influencer50, Influencer Marketing, Nick HayesI’ve written before about the huge potential of Predictive Modeling – for both Marketing and Sales activities. Here’s an intelligent post I’ve just read from Ted Karczewski of Skyword.

http://www.skyword.com/contentstandard/blog/predictive-modeling-technologies-make-one-to-one-marketing-a-reality/

Why paid-for bloggers have nothing in common with ‘Passion at Work’

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I once knew an extremely impressive man who wrote a book called ‘Passion at Work’. His book became the go-to reference for how to create stimulating, challenging and motivating workplaces throughout Britain and beyond. He actually made ‘passion’ sit comfortably alongside ‘work culture’. Not many can do that.

So when I get an email from a blogger outreach company advising on ‘worthwhile points when dealing with bloggers’, I immediately treat sentences like “Here’s one I’m really passionate about” with plenty of skepticism. When it leads on to “keep in touch with bloggers who genuinely love your company’s products” I’ve all but switched off.

The exact advice was, “Keeping in touch with bloggers who genuinely love what you offer is important. Send updates, new products and random gifts to stay on their minds and show up in their posts. Furthermore, when you need help promoting a piece of content or a new product, they’ll likely assist with authentic posts.”

I wondered what possible type of blogger she could be talking about.

It seems to me there’s now fundamentally three types of blogger. The first are those with something to say, an opinion they want to get across on a particular subject area – surfing, japanese design, becoming a sommelier, cloud architecture, etc. These people have a degree of knowledge and are deep-diving into the topic. They may well already be influential on that subject in the offline world and use blogging as an additional channel for their views.

The second type are those encouraged by the sound of their own voice, so they blog about everything going on in their world, however diverse or random the subjects. They go for the cult of personality. Some manage it and good luck to them. Blogging to them provides the same purpose as having a personal YouTube channel does to others. It’s personality-driven entertainment.

And the third type are those now being courted by the blogger platform peddlers. The databases now euphemistically called influence marketing platforms. These bloggers aren’t ‘passionate’ about any company’s products – they’re just willing to shuck a mention of those products in return for a payment.

I took a look recently at the most frequently referenced bloggers on a number of B2B issues over the past eighteen months. Mostly these were established consultants or journalists who use blogging as one outlet for their thoughts. I talked with five of them and asked if they’d been approached by these blogger platforms and if they knew of anyone they respected who’d accepted payments. The rule of thumb they said was that while almost 100% had been approached, perhaps 5% of their blogging peers had taken payments for commercial mentions. What’s more, this 5% were easily and immediately spotted by those inside the relevant industry sector and their credibility ‘re-assessed’. Less than a quarter of those 5% had decided to openly state on their blog that they were part of a commercial incentive.

So yes, there are influential, credible, subject-specific bloggers who are taking payments from commercial vendors. But they’re in the very small minority. Perhaps one in twenty of those approached. Do you think the vendors have thought about this?

http://maximizesocialbusiness.com/10-tips-developing-better-blogger-outreach-15106/?utm_source=GaggleAMP-Maximize%20Social%20Business&utm_medium=Twitter%20(GaggleAMP)&utm_campaign=AutoAMP%20Messages&utm_content=10-tips-for-developing-better-blogger-outreach-httpgagglcic-222699&mkt_tok=3RkMMJWWfF9wsRonv6XKZKXonjHpfsX%2B6OkuT%2Frn28M3109ad%2BrmPBy%2B24MDWp8na%2BqWCgseOrQ8mFgMV8GiS80VraE%3D

The influence marketing platform peddlers are trying to keep greasing the wheels of the marketing depts. by adding more and more bloggers to their PR distribution networks. That has nothing to do with either helping the salesforce or helping the buyer.

If the management team at each vendor was aware of this, do you think they’d allow their marketing depts. to continue supporting them?

How come no-one knows how buyers buy?

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It’s always astonished me how so much time, budget & energy is spent on B2B marketing – the advertising, the packaging, the promotion, the pricing, the launch event, the mail shots, the online outreach – when so little has been spent on understanding the process by which its buyers’ buy.

Ask any head of marketing for the four main job titles of the buyers who buy its products – and they wont be remotely accurate. Sometimes they’ll be in the right ballpark – they’ll say “the CFO”, “the head of software development”, or “whoever looks after security” – but they’re just guessing. Oftentimes they’re merely repeating phrases they overheard from a salesperson several months back. It’s just not a conversation that goes on in many marketing depts.

Ask them who’s most likely to be sitting in the room when their salesperson presents their solution to the prospect, and they’ll have even less idea. Is it typically one person, two, five, or more? If you don’t believe me check it out in your own marketing dept.

I know this to be true because of the number of times I speak with senior sales people and  how loose their explanations are. Their responses are peppered with “well, usually there might be …”, “sometimes we’ll find …” and “it depends on …”. They have to really think hard about who they’ve presented to in recent months – and it’s clearly the first time they’ve had to think about it since those meetings, so I know they definitely haven’t been briefing their marketing folks.

It’s not always the fault of those in marketing. I’m often struck by how random those sales situations seem to have been, how difficult it would have apparently been for the salesperson to predict who they’d be presenting to. It might be a new experience for a particular salesperson, but is it really that random? Or is their field of experience just necessarily narrow? With greater experience, a broader set of historical data, could it have been predicted? And would that have likely helped the outcome? I’m pretty convinced the answer to both is Yes.

But no-one has that data.