With Marketing budgets being tight and ROI more important then ever, there’s a major focus to get the most bang for the buck.  Decisions to drop high expense/low return tactics such as paying for exhibitor booths or sponsorships are becoming more common in exchange for speaking at events and creating more content to be distributed online.  As companies in the B2B space look at social media and content marketing, there are many reasons to build a strong content marketing strategy.

Anywhere by anyone at any time

One of the top reasons content marketing is so effective is that it can be distributed anywhere by anyone at any time.  Great content has the potential to be shared by thousands of people over various networks when THEY need it.  It’s not a point-in-time experience shared by only a few.  Helpful content gets your customers’ attention.  Just a few well-connected customers can then share that information with their networks and word-of-mouth spreads overnight.  In addition, people trust information shared by someone they know much more then an unsolicited ad or brochure.

Thought Leadership

The more a company can educate and help customers and prospects, the better.  When speaking at events, take the time to upload your presentations online where people can go back to them and share them.  Address key pain points your customers face on your blog and provide useful advice that doesn’t include your product or service as the answer for everything.  Everyone knows the business decision process for B2B is much longer so building trust as a thought leader and advisor pays huge dividends when one of your followers is ready to make a buy decision.

Stronger Relationships

One of the biggest differences between B2B and B2C is that a B2C transaction tends to be a one-and-done experience.  In B2B, the relationships last longer and the parties turn into strong business partners when it’s done right.  Your customers don’t want to hear from your Sales people all of the time but they do want to learn from your expertise.  Providing great educational content via ebooks, webinars, blog posts and newsletters allows you to continue to build strong relationships with your customers without them feeling bothered or pressured.

Having a great content marketing strategy in place is key to creating new customers and building stronger relationships with current customers.  Taking the time to create helpful and timely content on a consistent basis on a variety of platforms can be an extremely effective and rewarding use of resources.  How is your company using and benefiting from content marketing?

Let me start off by saying that I’m not a fan of the term “social CRM” as I believe that adding social media as a channel to CRM platforms is no different then when we added online forms and chat.  It’s simply another channel of communication between you and your customers to handle any issues and it’s still CRM.

With that said, social CRM is a major game changer in two ways:

1. It makes your entire team publicly accountable
2. How your company handles issues and tickets via social media will be either the best or worst thing your marketing team could ever hope for

Public Accountability

Until now, all issues between a customer and your company have been one on one.  Whether it’s via call, email, fax, online form, or chat, only one person outside of your company was privy to that experience and when or how your company resolved it.  With social media and CRM, any complaint, experience, or promise is shared and accessible with everyone.  If your software has a major bug, you can’t downplay it with each customer separately because they now know how big the issue is by sharing information with each other without you being the gatekeeper.  If you promise that the bug will be fixed by the end of the week and you’re still working on it a month later, you’re not just losing credibility with one customer but with all customers and as well as prospects.

In addition, tickets and issues with customers are no longer just point-in-time.  Any issues brought up (and hopefully resolved) via social media are out there forever, searchable by anyone at any time.  Go to http://search.twitter.com and type in “Comcast Customer Service” and see what I mean.

This new reality makes product and service quality more important then ever before.  The better the experience, the better the word-of-mouth.  It also makes your company’s process for managing and resolving tickets/issues more critical then ever before.  In addition, how your company communicates and sets expectations on those issues and resolutions will be just as important.

Marketing Impact: Sweetest Dream or Worst Nightmare

Based on what I discussed above, it’s easy to see the impact your company’s quality, service and support will have on your brand.  For companies with a great product or service and a well organized support team, social media is a marketing dream come true as your own customers will promote your brand better then any advertising campaign could ever do.  However, for those companies that historically have gone with heavy marketing budgets to drown out their subpar products and services and disjointed support, this new channel could very well be their worst nightmare.

Don’t wait for your company to start using a CRM solution with social media capabilities to take action.  Start cleaning house now.  Is your product quality where it needs to be when you release it?  Is your support team educated and experienced with new products before they’re released?  Is your support team working with your Marketing team to share a consistent message before and after the sale?  Do you have the staff in place technically and otherwise to successfully resolve issues? Having these areas and others in order will be important factors in making sure you can rest at night without the nightmares.

As social media continues to make it easier for consumers to communicate with one another and share experiences and information, companies are changing their marketing priorities to line up with the trends and greatest impact.  We now see companies focusing on Owned Media, Earned Media, and Paid Media in that order.

Forrester defined these three types of media in this blog post last month and you’ll start to hear this more and more as you attend various marketing conferences and strategy sessions.

The first priority for companies with a strong strategy in place will be to build a consistent base with their owned media such as their web site, blog, Twitter account, Facebook account, and newsletter.  Consumers will choose how they want to interact with a company, if at all, and having a presence in these areas builds a solar system that allows your company to be engaged regardless of the channel.

As your company builds its presence and successfully interacts with customers and prospects, the goal is to build that positive word-of-mouth into earned media.  It’s important to note that while earned media is something that will likely be tracked by your Marketing team, it has less to do with marketing and much more to do with the quality of your service or product and the sales and support experience your customers and prospects have with your company and your web site.  Make sure that the task force responsible for earned media is made up of the right people from the groups that have the ability to impact it such as Product Management, Support, Sales, and your web site team.

Last but not least is advertising, i.e. paid media.  While advertising is on a drastic downturn as consumers and prospects train themselves and use technology to ignore it, it is not going away.  Paid media is still a powerful way to ignite a marketing campaign actually being carried out via your owned media.  Many companies have used paid media as a catalyst for a larger online or social media campaign to do things such as naming a new product or submitting a short video to be the next commercial or idea for the company with wild success.  That said, advertising is becoming more valuable as a catalyst and not a foundation as it once was.

As social media and technology continue to impact how we all interact, advertising and other interruptive forms of marketing will continue to move to the bottom of the marketing to-do list and play a more supportive role in a company’s marketing strategy.

We’re all used to going online and finding outside information in the form of ratings and reviews in the B2C world, however when it comes to B2B, service providers still tend to be the gatekeepers for prospects in terms of finding customer feedback before they decide to purchase.  It’s not that they intended to be the gatekeepers, it’s just that nobody else shared or organized the information with the exception of high-end analysts firms that sell their reports and evaluations for a fee that most small to mid-size businesses can’t justify.

However, with more people participating in social media for their professional lives, that’s changing fast.  People are creating and joining professional groups and networks to share information with one another relating to their jobs and responsibilities.  As this trend progresses, more professionals are starting to share their experience with business products and services and the companies that provide them just as they do in their consumer lives.

While your business will never be able to control or manage what’s discussed about your company and solutions, there are steps you can take to curate positive reviews and referrals in a way that helps them rise to the top of your prospects radar.

Create a referrals or customer comments page on your own site.

Something that is well within your control is to create your own customer comments and referrals page on your site.  Ask key customers to provide you with a recommendation that you can publish.  In addition to displaying those comments on your respective product pages, create a specific landing page for each one with a title like “[Product Name] Reviews” or “Customer Comments on [Product Name/Company Name]”.  Make sure you also include those terms in your page meta-data.  This will increase your chances of the positive reviews you’ve put together coming up at the top results when someone does a search.

Listen and participate in social discussions on your company and solutions

Use a listening service of your choice to closely monitor any mentions of your product/service or company.  Thank those that are positive and address the negative ones.  If someone’s had a bad experience and is making it public, do your best to resolve that mistake and/or apologize to the customer in the same medium.  Not only will this ensure that prospects that see the comment also see your resolution but there’s a good chance that you’ll turn that upset customer into a company advocate.

Ask key customers to provide a recommendation of your company on other sites

In addition to getting customers to provide you with a recommendation on your own site, it’s also worth it to get them to provide a recommendation on your company on other sites that prospects may go to in order to learn more about your company.  One key point here is to make sure that the review/recommendation is for your company and/or solution and NOT for a person on your team.  Why? People and companies take different paths and if that person leaves, it does you no good.

Taking these steps will allow smart businesses to curate comments about them or their solutions.  It won’t totally control the conversations and it isn’t a magic bullet for marketing but as the use of social media continues to grow for B2B companies, it’s a best effort to make sure the positive Word Of Mouth from your customers gets heard by as many people as possible.

When you think of a white paper, what comes to mind?  Is it a boring, descriptive, overly-professional document that you’ll struggle to get through in the hopes of learning something?  Would you ever voluntarily read a white paper with a boring title from a company you don’t know?  You’re not alone.

Hence, the ebook.  I’m not talking about books you can download on a Kindle.  I’m talking about short (5-20 pages) documents that have the goal of educating and enticing without all of the stuffiness.  Just as the use of social media is the cool and “in” marketing tactic to create content people are attracted to instead of interrupted by, the ebook is the new, hip document that people create with the goal of educating others via a document that they actually want to read.  The reasoning behind it is that people can learn something for their job and enjoy what they’re reading at the same time.  There is no longer the major dichotomy between Personal=fun/enjoyable to Work=buttoned up/boring.

A great example of an ebook that stepped away from the standard educational information of the industry and increased market awareness for the business is “Healthy Smile, Healthy Sex!:  How Your Oral Health Affects Your Sex Life” by Dr. Helaine Smith. 

Let’s start with the title.  Even when you’ve been sitting in your dentist’s waiting room for an hour with nothing to read, did you ever want to pick up an educational brochure?  Me neither.  And that’s when you’re a captive audience.  Yet, this ebook has been downloaded thousands of times by people nowhere near a dentist office and educated them on things they need to be concerned about regarding dental hygiene and how it can impact other parts of their lives…some may say the most important part of their lives.

Then there’s the content.  I have never read any dental white papers but I’m fairly confident none of them are aimed at me, the patient, and discuss sex, pot smoking, pregnancy, and aging all in a quick, entertaining, and informative manner on topics that matter to me.   I don’t need to know the deep, technical stuff.  That’s for the dentist.  I just need to know enough to educate me and help me understand what I can do on my own and why going to a dentist regularly is important.

Finally, a good ebook will have calls to action. In the ebook, Dr. Smith let’s people know her background and how to contact her for speaking engagements as well as sign up for her newsletter and blog.

The white paper is not dead and there are some out there that do it right, however those creating content for their marketing endeavors should probably go with writing an ebook.  They’re more enjoyable for everyone involved and have the ability to attract many more prospects.

Have you written an ebook for your business?  Please feel free to share how it went.