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A Person of Interest

B2B marketers are widely considered to be deeply rational and practical thinkers – but that doesn’t mean we’re immune to twisted logic when it comes to some things. If the latest report from McKinseyis anything to go by, ‘personalisation’ is one of those areas where we appear to have a mental blind spot.

Despite advances in technology, data and analytics – personalisation stubbornly remains ‘too hard’ or ‘too expensive’. A nice thing to do, but not an essential many would argue. Contrast this viewpoint with the bounty on offer at the other end of the rainbow and the logic seems deeply flawed.

For those ‘doing personalisation’ the rewards are a 5-15% increase in marketing efficiency and revenue. Yet, these market leaders remain in the minority with fewer than 10% of businesses deploying personalisation in a systematic way.  

Start with the holy trinity

Outside of this small number of vanguards in the B2B marketing space, personalisation hasn’t really progressed much beyond the realm of email marketing. Much of this is down to poor data quality, lack of technology know-how and inadequate planning processes.

These are the ‘Big 3’ foundational elements of marketing and if you don’t have them, there’s very little chance of making personalisation a success. In fact, you even argue you have very little chance of making marketing a success without some basic competency in these areas. So, why is this holy trinity so important?

Data pools, lakes and oceans

When it comes to decision-making and accountability, the conversation tends to start and finish with data – and quite rightly so. The best creative, content and go-to-market plans in the world are rendered impotent if the data to target on a personal level is absent. If you’re looking to be hyper-targeted – now or in the future – you’re going to need a data strategy that covers first, second and third party sources.  

First party data is simple enough – it’s the stuff held in your CRM, or on spreadsheets, and is hopefully GDPR-compliant. This is gold dust and it should be your aspiration to build a high-quality customer database for as long as humans communicate by conventional methods. Yes, email as a B2B channel ain’t going to die anytime soon – no matter what the doom-merchants predict.  

Second party data is leveraged less frequently in B2B than consumer, but is still worth understanding. This is effectively shared data between two parties. For example two complementary brands sharing a digital cookie so they can both market to the same prospect across both of their websites. One rents its data to the other, which is relatively common in the transport and retail industries. Think AirMiles and British Airways or Sainsbury’s and Argos as part of the Nectar points scheme.

Arguably, the most interesting area of innovation for B2B marketers is in the field of third party data. This is both simple and complex at the same time. The easy bit to grasp is the email and postal address lists you rent from a professional data provider like Experian or Blue Sheep. You blast a few email campaigns out and what you capture is yours. The rest goes in Room 101.

The complex bit is that third party data also now incorporates data warehouses who aggregate it in enormous volumes from multiple sources and make it anonymous to advertisers. These third parties are called DMPs or data management platforms and they sell their data to advertisers who are looking to expand their reach. By using ‘look-alike’ modelling they can help you reach identikit prospects to the ones that have become your customers in the past.

Select your audience segments, just like you would with a paid social campaign, and off you go. If your target audience, and budget, is big enough then this form of ‘programmatic’ advertising could very well be up your street.

Take a look at what Oracle is doing, for example. It has a suite of apps that can help you deploy personalised campaigns across all inbound and outbound channels, while enabling you to track and score prospects in real-time. It can be used to automate campaigns, nurture prospects at scale and hand-off leads instantly to sales. It’s about as sophisticated and expensive as it gets.

The point is not to say “buy it”, but to suggest that you imitate it. But at a level of monetary and resource investment that you can tolerate. It’s not easy, but it is worthwhile. The first step is understanding it (technology). The second is doing it (personalisation) and the third is repeating it ad infinitum (scalability).  

To attempt personalisation without some form of technology infrastructure and automation in mind is a foolhardy endeavour. Some have tried. Almost all have failed or given up. Given that a CMO’s shelf life is about three-years, the need to upskill knowledge and skill sets quickly is a race against time. ‘Digital transformation’ is all the rage right now, but this is what it means when it comes to marketing. Data and technology know-how is mission critical.  

Don’t just plan to personalise. Plan to measure it.

It’s a disconcerting thing to admit that most planning processes have failed before they have started. In marketing, the planning phase tends to be rushed and therefore poorly conceived. Others argue it’s the other way around, but when it comes to personalisation this is very rarely the case.

Deciding at what level to personalise is all-critical. And it’s actually not difficult decide. Start with the budget – yes, I know every agency bod says this but we truly, madly, deeply believe it. What is the point of planning to personalise to a certain level of granularity if you don’t have the money to do it?

Take this scenario. You want to deploy a three-step buyer journey campaign to sell concrete into the bridge and tunneling sector. That’s a minimum of three items of content and possibly an equal number of emails, landing pages, web pages, ads and anything else you use to go-to-market.

Now add in one category of personalisation – let’s say job function. We now have contractors, consultants and end-clients as a bare minimum. You’ve potentially just multiplied the number of deliverables by a factor of three. Is that extra workload built into the budget and the production lead times? It’s simple mathematics that can be determined at the start of the conversation. It sounds obvious, but my advice is not to start any audience messaging work until this is defined. Planners are intelligent folk, but as far as I’m aware they are not Claire Voyant.  

Okay, so now we decide that job function level segmentation is good but we also want to target by business size as well. We think that there’s no real need to further segment the content or promotional assets, but our prospect database doesn’t split by turnover and we’ve discovered that third party data is only available for multinational parent companies. This means we can’t rely on the data quality and could incur the cost of acquiring leads that are not relevant to the regionally-focused UK sales team. In this instance, it’s not a just a budget issue but a practical one in terms of targeting and effective lead generation.

We could apply many more instances of personalisation (vertical sector, interest area, key account etc), but the same rules apply. Do we have the data split by these criteria? Is data available to buy or rent? How many content and promotional assets do we need? Can we afford to create them? Do we have sufficient lead time and skills to produce them? Can we track, score and follow up on leads in this way?

Only when these questions have been asked, answered and budgeted for is it appropriate to start writing a campaign brief, let alone putting subject matter experts through planning workshops and much more besides.

Targeting a person of interest demands much more than a ‘spray and pray’ approach. Get your data, technology and planning processes in shape and you’ll be armed with the ability to turn unknown suspects into known leads in no time at all.

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The Parroting of Things (Part 2)

Too Big to Fail?

Isn’t it strange how technology leaders and visionary entrepreneurs light up the road ahead and brands just ignore the signposts?  

Take for example, the Internet of Things (IoT). To anyone with a basic understanding of its usefulness, it’s obvious that mass adoption is merely a question of time – not money, luck or judgement. History has shown that you can’t hold back the tide of technology advancement.

We’ve seen it with email, the Internet and social media. In the early days, every one of these developments was marked down as a trivial innovation, a passing fad, or even something to fear. Most of us would consider those doubts incredibly naive, but hindsight is easy and there’s no guarantee we learn from it.

IoT will soon add itself to that esteemed list and some big brands will pay the price for applying the same blinkered, immortal thinking. They will sit back and protect their market share advantage, at the expense of future growth. They will ignore the investment needed now to realize it.

In any industry, upstarts will jump in and use their agility and foresight to systematically dismantle the old oligopolies. In yesteryear, it happened to Alta Vista, Kodak and Borders. Today, you can see something similar reoccurring with the likes of Nokia, Hewlett Packard and even Twitter.

*For further info on this ‘Wile E Coyote’ phenomenon, see here: https://medium.com/building-the-agile-business/digital-disruption-and-the-wile-e-coyote-effect-6902c6ecb560

Germination of Ideas

Most big brands launch a handful of new products or services in a good year. In 2014, Amazon Web Services launched 280! God knows what number they’re posting today. Now prolificacy doesn’t necessarily equate to success, but if you don’t back a few horses how can you expect to keep winning?

Google (now Alphabet) has become so large and cumbersome that they’ve broken up the corporate entity into a series of subsidiaries – purely to cut red tape and support greater business agility. I’m sure there’s a tax avoidance measure or two in that decision, but it’s still a proactive step to nurture innovation and tackle the threat of plateaued revenue growth.  

Both of these fast growth firms aspire to be both big and fast – not one at the expense of the other. They don’t seek comfort in old, established business models. They don’t use risk as the sole barometer of investment opportunity.

They parrot nobody. They have a clear voice. And, because of that, they also have a clear route to victory.

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The Parroting of Things (Part 1)

It strikes me how voiceless we’ve become in the age of information and technology. Not so much you and I. We have social media for venting our spleen in a nanosecond. Or the ballot box for making a protest vote during an election cycle.

No, I’m talking about the corporate world, of course, where this strange paradox manifests itself most acutely. You know, the one where big brands have begun to mistake the power of promotion with originality of thought?

We’ve never had such a broad range of inbound and outbound channels to communicate with buyers, sellers and influencers. Yet, the tone of conversation is unmistakably bland. You could call it clichéd thinking, but I call it what it is. Fear.

What’s more, a brand’s most important audience – its customers and prospects – are becoming numb to brands with very little sense of their own voice. And that, in turn, leads to torrent of branded content that promises a lot, but delivers very little.  

In corporations across the globe, so called business leaders are vocal about what can’t be said, but then strangely silent about what can. It suggests an air of responsibility, but really it’s the very antithesis. It smacks of passing the buck.  

Some brands have a gag reflex against anything that whiffs of risk. Even the word itself is loaded with unintended meaning. Risk, after all, has both an upside and a downside. So why so much emphasis on the latter? Fear, that’s why. Everybody is talking about disruption – the buzzword of the day – but very few are prepared to disrupt themselves to achieve it.

Throwing money at the safe alternative – clichéd thinking – will never do. In the long run, media buying power will never replace originality of thought. Many firms, particularly the technology players, put their stock by product and service innovation. That’s fine. Why wouldn’t you?

But what about the baron periods during which R&D actually takes place? What about the times when both old and new competitors make breakthroughs you can’t match? What about the years when global demand drops and investment with it? What do you have to fall back on?

Masters of Reinvention

Popular culture shows us that you need to find your own voice to stand out. A voice that delivers new ideas or opinions with resonance and disarming authenticity. It’s the very thing that makes an audience sit up and listen. To keep the brand relevant. To keep the communications lines open. Or, as I like to call it, the retention of attention.

Mega stars like David Bowie, Madonna, Prince and The Beatles were the masters of reinvention. Always giving their audience a different look. A new concept. A new sound. Something to literally and figuratively sing along with.

As a brand marketer, you can’t replicate that level of audience connection by asking them to binge on stale content storylines and outmoded delivery formats. You need more creativity and substance – coupled with a sense of urgency about finding it. Otherwise your audience moves on without you.

You need to work hard at devising fresh narratives. You need to avoid analysis paralysis. You need to fight off the fear. You need to set out your stall – and own it.

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Has your brand grown to love or reject customer intimacy?

What did you want to be when you grew up? Firefighter? Astronaut? Nurse? Teacher?

For what it’s worth I dreamt of one day of owning a vintage Porsche (still do). A silver Speedster with red leather interior to be precise. Like the ones driven by Hollywood stars of the James Dean era. Only I didn’t concern myself with the small matter of forging a career to pay for it. That’s childhood naiveté for you, I suppose.

Our grown up selves are more sensible, of course. The simple practicalities of life have a way of holding such lofty aspirations at bay. Maturity is the order of the day and we place greater value on attributes like realism, judgement, experience and pragmatism. After all, these are the things that make businesses and business people tick.

Insular or worldly wise?

So, why am I banging on about maturity you may be asking? Well, it appears that it’s not just me with a Peter Pan Complex to shed. According to a new study, the vast majority of brands in every corner of the globe do too.

Inside the report, a revealing picture emerges of a modern enterprise that remains digitally awkward. One that is struggling to come to grips with true customer intimacy. More of a temperamental teenager, than an attentive adult you may say.

How else do we explain that only six per cent of firms can be classified as digitally mature? How else do we account for just one in ten being able to conduct timeline-based marketing? How is it that more than two thirds of brands make no attempt to perform lead scoring? This is digital immaturity on a global scale. But, fear not, help is on its way.

Funnelling your experience

Data gathered from the same survey of 300 CMOs in Europe, Asia-Pacific, Middle East and the Americas has now been plugged into a new web tool called, The Digital Marketing Maturity Index. It tracks the sophistication of every brand’s approach to customer experience. And the neat trick is that you can now compare your organisation against the global benchmark. After all, how else would you know if your brand has a little more growing up to do?

For senior marketers and brand leaders it’s the ideal springboard from which to perfect the art and science of full-funnel lead nurturing and conversion. It’s a great platform from which to build out a more coherent customer acquisition strategy. It’s a sure-fire way to identify the right combination of skills, processes and cloud-based tools at your disposal. Most importantly, it’s a great way to evolve into a modern marketing technologist.

You aspired to be one of those when you grew up, right?  

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Taking the crisis out of a social situation

Social media is just a channel. There, I said it. Nothing more, nothing less – just a channel. Despite what some digital gurus and evangelists will tell you, social is fairly easy to master if you keep a close eye on the fundamentals.

Take crisis or issues management situation, as an example. The overall approach you need and the skills required in social media are identical to those you would take with traditional media or stakeholder communication. You may add a few tools here and a few techniques there, but the fundamentals are called fundamentals for a reason – they don’t fundamentally change.

Here are 10 top tips to keeping a social crisis under wraps:

1. Communicate all the time – build up your online brand equity, so that when a crisis occurs, people will be more likely to think the best of you, rather than the worst. Build a positive brand halo around your brand across all your activated social networks. Your community will help you when you most need them. 2. Research your audience – identify anybody and everybody that influences your brand: customers, prospects, media, trade associations, legislators etc. Understand what conversations are taking place – who and what are they talking about? Which of these players carries the most influence? Which channels are most actively used? 3. Keep your friends close and your enemies closer – follow, friend and join them in their social networks. Monitor what they say, how they interact and whether they’re likely to respond positively, negatively or indifferently. This will dictate how much resource you throw at involving or pacifying them in a crisis. 4. Team up – get all the major internal stakeholders involved in your crisis planning, rehearsal situations and responses. We’re talking about your board members, legal people, press office and customer service operators. Train them all in social media practice and etiquette – they will each bring something valuable to the party and it’s almost always best to communicate via a named expert rather than a faceless corporate social account. 5. Chill out – give your crisis team, including those manning your social networks, a rest when they most need it. Divide into two teams with equal skill, responsibility and authority. When a crisis occurs they can work shift patterns around the clock. Remember, sleep deprivation and stress are two of the major causes of miscommunication. 6. Cool tools – use the latest tracking, monitoring and publishing tools to ensure you can respond with speed to the right things at the right time. Consider how often do you are likely to encounter a crisis and how many staff need access to your tools. This will dictate whether you need subscription-only apps, or can make-do with freely available platforms. Browser-based tools are preferable for crisis work as they can be accessed 24/7 from any device. 7. Less is more – communicate only the basic facts as and when they need to be made public. Check and double check your statements for accuracy and misinterpretation. Offset negative responses with positives, explain the counter arguments and correct inaccuracies immediately. Twitter can be a great discipline in brevity, but don’t allow the 140 character limit to corrupt your message. Instead, refer traffic to official channels, such as websites, where the content can reside in full until it’s ready to be taken down. 8. Take complaints offline – don’t expose your entire social community to a crisis or complaints resolution process. Deal with people one to one, until the issue has been resolved. Then make the resolution public, so that everyone knows the situation has been satisfactorily dealt with. 9. Don’t allow a situation to fester – a slow or non-response is tantamount to accepting guilt. Quickly make clear you are dealing with the situation, investigating and will report back once the facts have been established. Social media is a fast-moving medium, so take every opportunity to buy yourself time to think and act appropriately. 10. Be personable – don’t be overly familiar, particularly in the early stages of communication, but don’t be afraid of referring to individuals by their first name in a social post. The informality of channel can be a useful ally in a crisis – helping to break down barriers, alleviate some of the negativity and ultimately in converting the ‘haters’.

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The friendly face of real-time marketing

There’s a lot of noise doing the rounds about real time marketing (RTM), even in B2B circles which are renowned for obsessing about complex and lengthy purchasing timelines. So, what relevance does RTM have in a segment that is invariably playing the long game?

Well, quite a lot if you look at it like I do. Which is to say that RTM is basically: “crisis management with a friendly face”. Think about it, RTM relies on four things: 1) Planning 2) Infrastructure 3) Deployment and, perhaps, most importantly: 4) Proposition. 

In an issues management situation (industrial accident, litigation, redundancies etc) all of these four elements are factored in – usually well in advance. But while in crisis mode you’re preparing in the hope that your hard work will never see the light of day, in an RTM situation the very antithesis is your objective (i.e. going viral).

Planning for a negative or positive scenario essentially involves the very same steps – but usually with a different set of resources (people, channels, messaging etc). What both situations have in common is usually the time span, which is usually quite short – irrespective of whether that was the intention or not.

That’s not to say RTM has no place in B2B – far from it. The advent of our multi-media, multi-device, always-on lifestyle (work and play) means that your audience consumes information in shorter, quicker bursts. In B2B, white papers have been overtaken by eBooks and management briefings. Slide decks have been sidelined by infographics. And even mass-scale, industry conferences are feeling the pinch from smaller, shorter, boutique events.

So, it’s worth bearing in mind your RTM campaign will have a limited shelf-life – you need to know when to turn off the tap as well as when to turn it on. The danger, of course, being that your innovative, creative and gorilla RTM campaign later turns out to be a tired parody of itself. Nobody likes to hear the same joke twice in quick succession (or at all), so ensure you have enough material (content) in different forms (channels) as appropriate your audience and their wants and needs. 

Select your channels very carefully indeed. In PR, it’s common to release a holding statement to a ‘friendly’ media outlet in the hope that the message can be better controlled as it reaches the public domain, rather than edited out or mis-represented in a heart-stopping, audience-grabbing headline.

In RTM, you want to reach as many people as quickly as possible. Brands therefore lean towards quick deployment channels such as social to achieve this, but don’t always have the critical mass of follower/friends/connections to get it viral before the campaign runs out of steam. That’s poor strategy and is usually an outcome brought about by under-investment. More importantly, it’s a sign of desperation and your audience (internally and externally) will see right through it – in real time.

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Do the right thing

I read an interview the other day by a highly successful and prolific artist in the music industry, which had me thinking about the parallels between song writing and storytelling. The interviewee in question was quizzed on why he'd changed his sound on a recent record - to which he replied: "The song comes first. The song is the king and you try to do the right thing by the song." In our own industry, there's a lot to be said for doing the right thing by the equivalent of our songs - creative ideas. From time to time, we've all been guilty of corrupting the creative concept, twisting it's meaning and forcing it into spaces where it doesn't belong. Or, worse still, conveniently sidelining the 'Big Idea' altogether. At Stein IAS, we may have Big Ideas that stand the test of time - we call them Big Long Ideas - but that doesn't mean they don't break without careful handling and nurturing during the transition from proposition to print (or any other medium). A great idea will spark the process of devising creative, engaging tactics - the vehicles that carry the idea to its natural destination through whichever means necessary. A good campaign can become a great one, but only if it forges a close, strong bond with the Big Long Idea. The process of devising tactics can be taxing - even for the most gifted practitioners. So, when our creative juices run dry, we often "get out of the river". But we always return - freshly inspired - by the Big Long Idea. During these creative droughts, it very tempting to let our 'default' channels and tactics lead the way because "this worked before, so it'll work again", or because "it's more cost effective to do it this way". The danger of this is that we risk losing the creative essence somewhere in the process and deviate from the purity or inherent truth of the Big Long Idea. So, whether you operate on the agency or client side - we're all involved to some degree in the creative process - just be mindful of "doing the right thing" by the idea. We may choose to play a tune with different instruments, but the song remains the same. 6 tips to help you "do the right thing": 1. Research: do your homework (collate and immerse yourself in the insights) 2. Brainstorm: start and finish with the Big Idea (be inspired by and test your ideas with it) 3. Map: align your ideas to buyer timeline (awareness, interest, consideration and decision) 4. Extend: broaden your ideas to multiple channels and platforms (online, offline, direct) 5. Acquire: ensure data is front of mind (create assets that people will register for) 6. Entertain: pander to human nature (appeal to both the rational and emotive buyer)

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Is everybody’s job social media?

Back in the 90s, and probably well before then for all I know, the phrase "sales is everyone's job" was thrown around with all the loose abandon of Mario Balotelli's potty mouth. Clearly, not much has changed. Substitute "sales" for "social media" and you have the modern day equivalent. It's become fashionable to say it, but impractical to do it.

Let's run with this theme for a moment. The vast majority of the population will either have sold something on eBay themselves or know somebody else who has. That doesn't make them a salesman. Similarly, everyone has used social media at one time or another, or at least knows someone on Facebook. That doesn't make them a social media expert - no matter how many virtual friends or 'likes' they have.

While this is clearly over-simplification of the issue, there is a slim likelihood of any firm - large or small - defining social media as a pre-requisite skill of every employee. Try pitching that idea to a financial director, or even a HR for that matter, and you'll probably be laughed out of the door.

More likely is the scenario whereby all, or most, staff are engaged with internal social media platforms, such as Yammer, which enable people to get connected with the brand and each other. This is because the internal view is very much different than the external one, which is why disciplines like PR are often outsourced rather than insourced. Is it right to say that PR is everyone's job? A little, perhaps, but not a lot.

Marketing, sales and IT-led business operations will naturally drive social media externally, because it is their job to do so. Just like Henry Ford's 'division of labour' assembly line, it is time and cost efficient to do it this way. And that's also why - using the agency analogy - PR departments tend to generate content and manage social platforms for clients (in lieu of specialists, of course). Creative, digital and design departments collaborate on such initiatives, usually at the early stages, but the ongoing donkey work usually resides with those who have the core skills to sustain the community spaces - namely copywriters or, more broadly, good storytellers.

From experience of training in-house teams in social media, the results can be gratifying and depressing in equal measure (depending on the company's culture). But in all positive cases, success has been achieved with a small, carefully selected and motivated team. Volunteering is important too, because employees need to want to be involved, rather than being cajoled, forced or threatened by their 'superiors'.

Whose job is social media? Seek and ye shall find.

If you ask everyone if they want nine to five access to Facebook, almost all will jump up and down excitedly like demented teenagers. But if you ask them "who fancies writing a blog and 10 tweets a day for the rest of their working lives?", watch as people start hiding from, or pointing at, the lunatic with the big idea.

Social media can be a major undertaking, which is best directed by those that know it well (marketers) and should be informed by those who know the audience well (customer facing staff). But, remember, being involved and managing social media are two very different things.

Communicate to many, but do it with a few.

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Button down the hatches

"Facebook gets 1.17 trillion likes a year, or 3.5 likes per user per day and there are 42 million Facebook pages with over ten likes." Bloomberg BusinessWeek

Since April 2010, Google and Facebook have contested pole position in the race for social search dominance. First there was the 'Like' button, then there was the +1. Now, Facebook has struck back with Graph Search and it's clear to see that the future battle ground for brands is in the field of social advocacy.

The existence of search engines, whether they cover the entire Internet (like Google) or just a social community (like Facebook) is vital to ensure that choices can be filtered or indexed for user relevance.

Whether you think a +1 on Google+ should influence Google's organic search results or not, that's the way of the modern world. Facebook has followed the very same path with Graph Search because it makes commercial sense and aids users.

Marketers now need to think this way too, so if you're expanding the breadth or sophistication of your digital marketing effort, consider whether you're providing ample opportunities for visitors to like, share, +1, recommend and re-pin your content - wherever it resides. Such as this.

It's no longer enough to have an attractive shop window - a website, microsite, blog or social network - you need to make it socially sharable too. Which in turn makes it search-friendly.

So, rather than obsessing about whether to put a share price plug-in on your home page, think about whether you have social sharing buttons in prime positions across all of your digital media spaces. Home pages and sub-pages.

This is arguably even more important than choosing which social media channels to activate or service with content in the first place - because you don't need to be in it to win it, so to speak.

Take Google+, you don't need to have a Google+ business page to include a +1 button on your website and benefit from the visibility it provides within Google+ and across the entire web. The same is true for Facebook's Like button which already impacts on users' News Feed results. This will soon extend to Graph Search and ordinary web search (via their partnership with Bing).

It may not be considered best practice to leverage social sharing buttons without having a presence on those networks, but maybe your strategy isn't about covering all the social bases. Maybe your resource and content is only appropriate for certain channels and audiences. If that's the case, don't deviate from your roadmap - just be mindful of what social sharing and advocacy can bring to the party.

Finally, remember the golden cliché that it's all about content. You need to earn a visit, win a follow, deserve a like and merit a +1. You can only do that with truly engaging, relevant and timely content. You also need to market the availability of that content within digital and offline channels - using the combined power of paid, owned and earned media.