In Marketing We Trust! Or at least a little bit...

One of the challenges that most professional marketing folks have is limited resources.  Limited time, limited budget but an UN-limited amount of work to do.  Think about it.  When it comes to driving sales and improving your business opportunities does anyone really ever say, "That's plenty, go home!"  There's always one more thing to do, one item to cross of your list and then tomorrow's another day.  That's a marketing truism that has held true no matter where I've worked. 

So why the need for trust?  Because the marketing discipline is one more step disconnected from the customer versus Sales or Product management.  Sales people are on the phone or visiting their customers directly so it's easy to measure what they do.  Product managers should also be directly engaged with their customers to identify upgrades, feature and products that will bring value to their customers so easy to measure their value there.  Product marketing folks (and marketing in general) sit one level further away from the customer in between sales and product management.  So it's more challenging to directly measure results and develop KPI's (key performance indicators) that accurately measure marketing impact.

So back to that trust story.  If your sales group or product management don't trust the marketing department or efficacy of their programs and efforts, guess what happens?  They start asking for more "concrete proof" of your marketing work.  Which means finding semi-accurate measures (or proxies) that tell your marketing efficiency story.  But as you can guess, those numbers are never that easy to pull together and unless your have a great CRM tool and a way to automate those reports, you're digging up information from multiple sources, slamming it into a spreadsheet and then creating a purty Powerpoint to present to the team.  Sigh.  And that of course, is a LOT of work.  Every single bit of time spent pulling up metrics and reporting back to the team to reassure them means you have less time to work on outbound activities and campaigns to influence and engage your customers. 

When your business is in good shape and you've got well-differentiated product or service, the above scenario is not an issue.  But if you're on a struggling product line, you can guess that fingers will get pointed back to marketing.  It can be easier to do that then fix a product or add an additional salesperson to the team.  So as a professional marketer you HAVE to maintain that trust with both teams to ensure you'll be given the latitude and time to get your work done the way it needs to be done because time is limited. 

I've been down that rat-hole where trust is lost and you can end up in a death-spiral of trying to show the efficacy of your efforts which then puts more pressure on you and your outbound activities.  The key is to keep your teams engaged and aware of your marketing activities and be transparent about their impact.  While you can not measure every single bit of your work, there needs to be enough hard metrics to show your value and impact.  Or maybe you can blow enough hot air and use words with lots of syllables to assuage their concerns.  Me, I'd rather just show the Product Management team and Sales team how effective I am.  Because even if you're a marketing professional, you're better off spending more time marketing to your customers than marketing to your internal teammates.  

Between a Rock- Product Management and a Hard Place- Brand: The Challenge for Product Marketing

Product marketing is often one of the first roles to get cut during a business downturn and I've often wondered why.  In reality the juggling act that product marketers must play is a challenging act of managing peers, executives, expectations and delivering marketing assets and programs that impact and enhance, product revenue.  At the center of the Product marketing role, from what I've seen, is a constant balance and tension between Product Management and Creative/Marketing Services.  One team designing and creating services and products for end-customers, the other a creative team designing assets, images and providing editorial services for the Product Market to go outbound with.  And why is there a natural tension between these two groups and Product Marketing?  It's pretty easy to see.

Given product marketing's role to deliver information to customers in an engaging an easily consumable fashion, we walk a tightrope between Product Management and Creative.  Product Management ideally has created features and offerings that will resonate in the market.  And they want to tell the whole world about it in a kitchen sink fashion.  But in the end, feeding features and benefits in a customer-friendly voice means bringing a prospect down a path that may take some time.  Telling your product story in a world filled with content, advertisements and social media means trying to get the attention of somebody who's nearly in ADD-mode.  So you must be succinct, you must be memorable and craft marketing content and copy that hits the mark and stays with your targeted audience.  Basically it's taking a big bag of "stuff" and ideas, and distilling it down to impactful ideas and imagery.

Once you have your content and copy, you need to get it produced in a variety of different assets within print and online.  You have to get it edited to make sure it stays within your brand voice and fits into the broader, corporate marketing umbrella.  And that line with Creative often gets blurry.  In their attempts to "clean up" or make the copy more "brand compliant", you often lose specific ideas, features and details that they think may be extraneous.  They may nix non-standard ideas and phraseology to toe the corporate line and in an attempt to keep content within brand.  And this line is often fuzzy and hard to define leading to content and ideas that have been inoculated and have lost their edge and effectiveness.  And when you've got 80 things to do today, you can't over-work and perfect any one project so you accept wants been returned to you and move on.

So that fine line between the kitchen sink approach of Product Management and perfectionist behavior of Creative often leaves Product Marketing in the precarious position of driving content and assets through the system in the most expedient and effective manner.  It's not about being perfect, it's about getting a compelling story to your audience in a multitude of ways.  And walking that tight-rope between these two key collaborators can be a huge challenge.  Just try not to fall off that tight-rope because as you can guess, doing so will lead to really unpleasant results! 

Doing More with Less, the Crux of Marketing and Limited Resources

When I was in business school, one of the questions I was always asked during interviews was: What did you do in this situation with limited resources.  And I always wondered about that question, limited resources?  Don't marketing groups have these large budgets to go do what they need to do?  Don't they have service groups and external companies to help them with what they need to do?  But after six years in corporate B2B marketing, I clearly understand what they mean.

One example of limited resources is limited time and bandwidth as an individual.  Even when you have teams that are supporting you.  Whether it's email marketing, design services, editors, videographers and advertising firms, even with an imaginary unlimited budget, the key bottleneck will be the product marketing person.  In the end, someone has to have the vision, the responsibility of executing on a specific initiative or program. And there's only so much you can outsource out. Eventually the responsibility ends with you as a professional marketing person which means meetings to report on milestones, direction and then a post-mortem to understand what was accomplished, what could have been done better and how to improve things next time.

And let's just say you are burning the midnight oil, creating assets, copy and programs that are innovative and interesting for your prospects.  In the end, one person can only do so much so you end up driving the work through your service groups.  The reality is that once you get past yourself as a bottleneck, there may be another one downstream.  Maybe your editors are backed up with all sorts of work and special projects.  Maybe people are on vacation a lot.  In the end, you are only as good as your downstream resource groups.  If they are unable to keep up with your output, there's going to be trouble.

The final part of this limited resources question is the input. As the product marketing person you quickly learn that everyone thinks they can do your job.  Engineers, Brand, Product Management, everyone.  And everyone, of course, has advice and suggestions on something cool and new to do which will absolutely work. Or they will absolutely need to have.  New ideas are really dime-a-dozen.  What matters in marketing is what you can execute on and get over the line.  When I say get over the line, it doesn't mean an automatic success.  But it means completing the task or program to the point where either you have a success, a failure or something in between to learn from in concrete ways.  There are a million ideas out there, don't get overwhelmed trying to deliver them all.

In the end, one of the key skills any product marketing person will have is balancing expectations, reporting and results to all involved to effectively meet goals for your product lines.  And that line moves over time and is often fuzzy. Without the innate instincts of where to put your efforts and what's most important to execute on from a financial, business and political standpoint, you'll sink your time and energy into endeavours that will not benefit your team, your product line or yourself.

So what would you do with limited resources?  Unfortunately that's an answer any professional marketing person must answer every day, every hour that they are working.  Yes, I totally understand that question now! 

From Spam to Scam, Text Message "Marketing"

Recently I began receiving oddball text messages from 452-44.  Odd messages such as "A dragonfly has a lifespan of 24 hours", "IQ Power: Welcome to Trivia Alerts!  3xmsgs/wk Monthly charge billed.." and " Frogs cannot swallow without blinking".  With all the text messages I typically get, I ignored the first couple but finally noticed the stream.  Some research on the net showed that scammers are now capturing your cellphone number online, auto-billing you for unknown services.  A quick check of my iPhone bill showed the $9.99 charge and I knew for sure I was being scammed since I had never signed up for any text services. 


Given the nature of this thievery, I had no interest in trying to contact this organization to stop the charge.  Apparently their website re-directs to a password protected site and any calls are fruitless, you either get hung up on or validation that you will be charged AGAIN.  No need to play by the rules when dealing with crooks.  Calling up AT&T, I had the charge reversed and put a block on my account for text purchases. And further research showed that the common denominator may be Vistaprint, a printing service that provides free business cards.  But I am just totally amazed how easy it was to scam me for $9.99, very hard to pick it up since my cellphone billing is primarily done online and electronically.  

But it also made me think about the future of text-message advertising and marketing which is in its infancy.  When one of your first experiences with text-message marketing is a scam, do you start to distrust the medium?  I mean email survived all the Nigerian prince scams but those were plainly criminal and no money was lost without interaction.  In this text-message case, I've lost $10 just due to the fact I didn't pay close enough attention to my texts and my electronic billing.  


All I know is that companies who are at the early wave of text-message marketing really need to make sure these rogue companies and communication legislation with regards to e-commerce and texting are handled properly.  Because without trust and credibility, these thieves can taint the entire industry.  And while I don't think these scammers are common, one bad experience has made my cellphone off-limits to future purchases.  I recently read an article about how your cellphone number is your most guarded piece of information after your social-security number. After this experience, I'd have to say I totally agree!  

Fiat USA's Score a Scorpion: Social Media with a Sting

I recently stumbled upon Fiat USA's "Score a Scorpion" social media campaign and let's just say I was a little impressed. For those of you who are into cars, Fiat is an Italian marque that has recently returned to the US. Known for stylish but unreliable cars, Fiat's return after 27 years out of the market presents some unusual challenges. Especially given that Fiat specializes in small, gas-sipping compacts that Americans are typically not fond of.

The first Fiat advertising campaign that I ran into featured the Fiat 500 with J-Lo driving into her old hood. As she steps out of the Fiat 500 all I could think of was that J-Lo would NEVER be seen in a $16,000 car and driving herself. Her shoes probably cost more than that car! But yes, the Fiat 500 is a "cute" car, one better fit for the urban scene and more likely for women so this advert was probably on target for its audience. Nevertheless I wasn't sure how effective this campaign would be, at least for me.

Roll forward three months later and I get an update from Fiat USA on Facebook and it's titled, "Score a Scorpion". Total exact opposite of the J-Lo campaign. You've got a bad looking, special edition Fiat 500 decked out in black and red. Pumped up to 160 horsepower and built for performance, Abarth has been a high-performance tuner whose insignia is the Scorpion. Fiat USA puts out one clue every 3 or 4 days and your job is to find the Scorpion online. The first four clues are sort of simple and are good for entries into a branded merchandise giveaway. The last four are much harder and are for the Fiat 500 Abarth sweepstakes. The clues bring you to several of Fiat's social media profiles like the Tumblr blog, Twitter feed, Google+ page and their website to learn more about the history of the vehicle. And the clues will bring you to more entertaining websites like Top Speed, 0-60 Magazine and National Geographic. As you find and click on each scorpion, your "Score a Scorpion" registers the found clue and gives you another entry in the sweepstakes.

But yes, as people are looking for clues, their was a lot of online activity within their Facebook page, Fiat enthusiasts online and what have you. What I liked about this marketing campaign was:

* Fiat USA used the excitement of a limited edition product and giveaway, magnified by social media to generate online buzz and create long-term engagement for repeated exposure (one month).

* Fiat USA targeted Facebook users who had already shown some interest and were most likely to engage in the online scavenger hunt, and amplify the giveaway activities.

* The campaign was a nice mix of education and entertainment, requiring people to search for Fiat all over the Internet. And their partners also got great online exposure with the contest activities.

* Participants were led to Fiat USA's social media streams across Tumblr, Twitter, and Google+ and I'm sure some people subscribed to these properties for cross-marketing purposes.

* Fiat USA switched gears to show another side of their vehicle. From the stylish, female-centric J-Lo 500 to the hard-nosed, performance based Fiat 500, great re-positioning.

So what's the final tally? Fiat USA's Facebook page (as of February 2012) is showing 453,000+ Likes, 19,000+ Talking About's and for the Score a Scorpion app, 100,000 monthly users. If I had to guess at the cost of this campaign, we're looking at three Fiat 500 Abarth's ($22,000 MSRP), Fiat Abarth shwag (guessing $20,000) plus design costs for the Facebook app and leaving clues (guessing $25,000). Given that there was probably existing promotional materials for the Fiat Abarth, I doubt that they had create much new media/design for this online campaign.

Estimating a high-end cost of $150K for this month-long contest, you're talking about maybe a $1.50/engaged user, i.e. Score a Scorpion contestant. Not to mention all the other people who are seeing and hearing about Fiat and the contest in general. Plus the long-term activity generated by people who have subscribed to Fiat USA's other social media streams, and exposure for partners.

All-in-all not a bad deal for the price, don't you think? And while B2B certainly can not match the sexiness of a limited-edition sports car, I certainly think there are lessons to be learned here about how to leverage social media. Signing up for a booth at a tech event and sending three or four employees to man it would typically cost $50 - $100K and maybe generate 300 random email addresses. So where would you rather spend your money?

Removing the Fear in Enterprise Software Deployments

During a recent stretch of interviews with a top 5 enterprise technology company, I was asked to put together a presentation on my approach to product marketing for one of the their ITSM management offerings. It was a short deck and focused on inbound-content marketing with the main underlying theme:

Remove the Fear.
Create Reassurance.

Now what do I mean by that? Over the course of my 10 year IT career, I covered a lot of ground. But nothing was more challenging than being asked to lead an Enterprise management software deployment from one of the big vendors. It's the type of software tool that has tendrils and connections into many aspects of your environment. AND requires coordination and cooperation from multiple IT technology silos. When you invest $75K to $150K in one of these tools, you're making a commitment and your job is somewhat on the line. And when you've got a slew of work just maintaining your network and fighting fires, you often don't have the internal expertise or resources to launch an additional project like Enterprise management.

And what support do the big Enterprise management vendors provide you online? The answer is: not much. As I perused the competitor websites, the ability to get substantive, helpful content to help me truly learn and evaluate this ITSM product was difficult to find. The ability to download a trial copy of software was buried in the online content. And it made me realized that not much has changed in this domain since my own deployment in 2004.

And given the changes in online marketing and the web 2.0, I really scratched my head as to why things had not moved forward. Why wouldn't you want your customer to have as much information at their disposal for making an educated evaluation and decision? How does an IT manager make an objective apples to apples comparison between competing products? And why wouldn't IT vendors make this whole education and evaluation process easier? I can't imagine many professionals who would invest $100K based upon a couple of sales demos and product sheets.

Then during a conversation with a pre-sales Engagement Manager, I got some insight. He mentioned that in his role, he is asked to educate and counsel IT customers through the purchase process. He described them as having the "deer in headlights" look and the need to help facilitate the purchase with enterprise architects, line of business and financial people. Reassuring the customer on both the technical feasibility AND the political feasibility of an IT enterprise software deployment.

And it really makes me wonder why technology marketers don't take some of this readily made content, that's already available, and provide it to customers earlier on in the purchase cycle. Admittedly, pre-Sales needs to hold back some value-add assets in their toolbox for their discussion but wouldn't providing some of this information earlier help the sales rep get the conversation started? Is marketing so fixated on giving away $10 Starbucks gift-cards and mugs for events that they don't have time to make this extremely valuable information available to prospects?

I don't know but if my IT job and career was on the line, I'd say please keep your mug and help me make the right IT enterprise management software decision. And the vendor that provided me with more valuable information to help me evaluate choices, would have a leg up on the rest. But that's just me...

Vee is for Vaynerchuk

If you've never seen Gary Vaynerchuk speak before, be prepared for some cussing, swearing and F-bombs. Luckily I got to catch his keynote at Raleigh's Internet Summit, what a great speaker! As the author of "Crush It!", "The Thank You Economy" and one of the leading entrepreneurs in Social Media, Gary has earned that verbal latitude. But guess what? He keeps your attention and drills his ideas into your head with ease and ferocity. As he paced and danced across the stage at the Internet Summit last month, there was no doubt in my mind that most every eyeball in the room was focused on this man. And while his domain of expertise is in B2C, it makes me wonder how much of his premonitions and expectations will be leveraged and impact the B2B world? Here are some of Gary's thoughts on how social media is changing the business and marketing landscape:

* Marketing for 150 years has been push-based, now shifting to pull

* Traditional outbound marketing no longer effective, marketing should be a conversation

* Social media and the word of mouth ecosystem carries further than ever before and has disrupted communications and marketing

* Content is king but context (relationships) will be king, we are at the dawn of 1 on 1 marketing

* Companies struggle with social media because they act like 19 year old dudes, they try to close on the first move

* The majority of corporate CEO's and entrepreneurs twenty years from today will be women: marketing will become more emotional, nurturing, intuitive

* We are in a world of transparency where nobody and no business can hide

* We are on the cusp of the humanization of business, put your money into people

Now I do believe that often enough or not, B2C marketing and trends seep into B2B marketing over time. While the B2B marketplace is more factual, less emotional and risk-intolerant, will some of these ideas from Vaynerchuk impact B2B marketing? Or is the B2B market so different that these concepts stay rooted in the B2C world?

While it still remains to be seen how, exactly, social media and inbound marketing will impact the B2B world, we are already seeing some disruption. Transparency on the internet is clearly out there already. LinkedIn allows business ideas and experiences to be shared easily and readily. Will we need to shift the sales model and have sales reps work with prospects in more early-stage relationships? No more marketing-qualified leads or sales-qualified leads. Just focus on establishing connections with people using relevant, value-add content and information?

What I do know for sure is that technology platforms online and offline are transforming marketing as we know it today. While we may not have the definitive B2B platform to bring Gary's beliefs to fruition right now, who knows what tomorrow brings? And yes, maybe Gary is a bit closer to the truth than we'd all care to believe...

Catch Gary on Twitter @garyvee