November 12, 2008
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Editor’s Note: Welcome to ITSMA Marketing Strategist. We’ve ditched the generic title (who doesn’t publish an e-zine in the 21st century?) and tried to focus our newsletter more on who you are and what you do. We’ve also made it as simple and clean as possible, to reduce some of the clutter in your life. Maria Lindberg, ITSMA’s manager of design and Web strategy, came up with the new format and designed the logo. Please let us know what you think.
Next month we’ll dive into the topic of Marketing in the Downturn with highlights from our recent member survey on the topic as well as some insight and ideas from our Annual Marketing Conference held in Boston last week.

Featured Articles

By Chris Koch, ckoch@itsma.com

The economic collapse has big implications for marketers who are already sick of social media (admit it, you know you’re sick of it—at least a little bit). Cost cuts are coming—if they haven’t arrived already—and marketing is going to have to reprioritize (again).

In other words, you’re going to be doing more social media marketing, whether you like it or not.

ITSMA research shows that customers consistently favor live events that let them mingle (and job hunt) with their peers. It’s human nature. We’re social animals, and sales pitches always look better through beer goggles and sound better when interspersed with good conversation with people you know and trust.

But events are expensive. And travel is always the first thing to go in a downturn.

Meanwhile, digital marketing (I make a distinction between digital marketing and social media) has made slow progress for two reasons: First, Webcasts, e-mail marketing, and microsites are not substitutes for cornering C-level executives by the buffet table. Second, digital marketing is less expensive than pressing the flesh, but it isn’t exactly cheap, either. If you want to create a program, you need to build an infrastructure and maintain it.

Free Beats Cheap

Meanwhile, social media aren’t just cheap, they’re free. Just go to WordPress.com and you’ll see what I mean.

But we hate social media. Of course, when I use the word hate, what I really mean is fear.

As marketers, we are terrified of social media.

We are terrified for some rational (though preventable) reasons, such as giving away sensitive company information or sullying our carefully crafted brand images.

But we are also terrified for one very important, irrational reason: Social media marketing seems like a Murder One sentence. You’re going away, and you’re going away for a long, long time. Indeed, the only thing scarier for marketers than being responsible for a corporate blog where people can say anything they want about you and your brand is the prospect of having to sustain it—to keep coming up with smart, thoughtful things to say. Forever.

Since you are going to have to do more social media marketing whether you like it or not, here’s some advice for keeping your sanity:

• Don’t wait for your social media programs to die—plan for them to die. Social media have a teenager complex. They feel like such a young phenomenon (even though they aren’t—anyone remember message boards?) that no one goes into it planning for it to die. Companies start open-ended blogs only to watch them suffer slow, painful, premature deaths due to lack of direction, accountability, or content. Why not declare the blog’s death prematurely? You probably already know the issues that your customers really care about. Pick one and create a blog or podcast series designed to end within a specified—but meaningful—period of time, such as after completing a research project on the topic.
• Go outside the firewall. So many marketers can’t bring themselves to start social media programs because they fear the implications for their companies (and their own careers). So put your programs outside the firewall. It’ll be cheaper, too. And don’t restrict employees from getting involved. Just have a clear and simple policy about employee conduct and require a disclaimer if they are going to act as representatives of the company.
• Integrate and cross-reference. Blogs should reference podcasts, which should reference the corporate Website, which should reference online communities inside and outside the organization. One of the reasons that social media do poorly is that there are not enough traffic drivers. Make them yourself.
• Comments don’t matter. People are lazy. Research shows that fewer than 10% of people contribute any kind of content and less than 2% are active, regular contributors to online communities. The most important thing is to create quality content. Readers will appreciate it, even if they never say so.
• Popularity is irrelevant. B2B buyers don’t consume marketing content because they want to; they do it because they have to. They are looking at your stuff because they are researching. If they only visit your blog once but they get useful information, that’s what matters.
• Social media sucks—get used to it. Many marketers complain to me about the quality of blogs, videos, and podcasts. I ask them, why should we expect new forms of media to be any different from the ones we already know?
• Reassign PR people to develop online influence. Journalism is disappearing. Assigning 10 PR people to harangue the two remaining editors at your favorite trade pubs won’t do anyone any good. I can remember when the editorial staff of my alma mater, CIO magazine, didn’t fit in a large conference room. Now they can share a cab. Believe me, they don’t have time to read your press releases. Reassign some of those aggressive PR people to aggressively build your online reputation with influential bloggers and online communities. If the targets don’t exist, have them create some.

Add your comments to this story on my blog.

Go from Campaigns to Conversations

By Jeff Sands, Vice President, ITSMA, jsands@itsma.com; and Ajit Maira, Senior Vice President, ITSMA, amaira@itsma.com

The old tried-and-true push marketing campaigns just aren't going to work anymore. Customers now expect providers to understand their business, the issues they face, and the markets that they play in. They no longer have the time to educate you on what their problems are.

In fact, they expect you to educate them. They want to know what you can do to help them attain and retain leadership in their chosen markets. In our view, understanding customers’ businesses and markets is no longer an option—a mere tactic for standing apart from the competition; it is a requirement. We have to move beyond being merely politely curious about customers’ business issues and start to immerse ourselves in those issues.

But we’re not just talking about educating customers here. Marketing also has to give salespeople the ability to have high-level business conversations with executives in their customer bases.

Consider this the second of two important steps in enabling salespeople:

1. Get salespeople to stop pitching and start conversing with customers—going from monologue to dialogue.
2. Make those dialogues more meaningful.

For example, CIOs used to think it was refreshing if a salesperson took a breath in the middle of the pitch to ask them something about their business. But today, CIOs are getting tired of those kinds of uninformed methods of engaging them. One CIO told us, “The next salesperson that asks me what my point of pain is, I am going to throw that person out the door.” The challenge for marketing is to equip the salesperson with the knowledge necessary to begin the conversation with those pain points.

Get More Personal

All of this means that marketing needs greater understanding of customers as individuals. Because merely knowing the challenges of the business as a whole isn’t enough. It's people, not organizations, who buy. The question to ask yourself is, what can I do as the solution provider to help these individuals address the problems their companies are facing while also helping them achieve their goals for their specific roles in the business?

This means that your marketing research must go beyond business issues and take a role-based approach. If you want to get really personal with customers, you need to know more than their children’s birthdays; you need to understand at an aggregate level the kinds of things that people in various roles inside your customers’ companies find useful. You also need to understand the internal buying processes that they need to follow and the internal barriers that they need to overcome as they move through the buying process.

Of course, it is also important to match the right conversation to the right stage of the buying process. The goal of marketing’s efforts is to help move the customer from awareness to interest and get them ready to hand over to sales. That’s the basic script for the series of conversations that you will have with them:

1. Acknowledge their point of pain.
2. Present a possible solution.
3. Present the value of your solution.
4. Offer proof that you can deliver the solution.

Of course, these conversations are going to take place over an extended period of time—ITSMA research shows that the current B2B buying cycle is anywhere from 12–18 months (and likely to increase as the economy continues to go south). Therefore, it’s important to remember where you leave off each conversation. You don't want to keep reinvesting effort where you’ve already been; not only is it expensive, it will be boring and perhaps even offensive to the customer.

When you do all this well, you leave the customer hanging at each stage of the conversation—they’re always hungry to learn a little more. You begin to hear things such as, “Well I didn't know that about your company—tell me a little bit more.”

This is how you know that you’ve moved beyond campaigns to conversations.

To learn more about account penetration, please contact Jeff Sands at jsands@itsma.com.

Are You a Skimmer or a Penetrator?

By Chris Koch, ckoch@itsma.com

Marketers have two basic choices for a launch strategy: try to blow the market open overnight or parse your resources and focus on building success gradually. Peter Fader calls these extremes “penetration” and “skim.” Fader, who is a professor of marketing at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, thinks all new product and service launch campaigns are grounded in one or the other.

ITSMA: Peter, explain the difference between a skim strategy and a penetration strategy.

Peter Fader: When you bring a new product or service to market, you have two basic choices. The first is to go slowly and deliberately and have all the customers line up from most desirous to least desirous and extract as much value as you can out of each one as you go down the line. That’s known as a skim strategy. As the word skim implies, it’s getting the richest, creamiest customers right off the top.

By contrast, a penetration strategy is where you try to blast the market open overnight. You get all the infrastructure in place, flip a switch, and boom, there it is.

Of course, that’s oversimplifying things a bit, but the value of looking at it this way is that you have two extremes. Because they are so diametrically opposite, you can use them as a filter for looking at what you’re doing. If you have a strategy that borrows elements from both extremes, then it's often untenable because, in general, you either want to be focusing on one customer at a time or everybody all at once.

One of the problems I see with many new product and services launches is that the tactics are a mish-mash and therefore doomed to fail.

ITSMA: But what if some factors fall in the skim range and others fall under the penetration category? What do you do then?

Fader: In many cases, you have factors that push you one way and others that push you in the other direction. In such cases, I think having a clear example of each strategy can help you determine where to place yourself.

I like to use Viagra and Botox as cases because they are classic examples of each strategy. Take Botox. It clearly requires a skim strategy. It’s risky because it’s expensive, needles are involved, and you don’t want to overdo it. It’s made by a relatively small company with relatively limited resources (at least compared to Pfizer) that couldn’t afford to build the entire infrastructure overnight. I always ask people, can you identify the company that makes Botox? No one ever can. It's interesting that the company [Allergan] just recently started national advertising, and still no one knows who they are.

Meanwhile, Viagra is the exact opposite—low-risk, high-repeat purchasing. You want to blast that market open and get there before everyone else does.

ITSMA: Let’s walk through how a campaign would look for these two different types of strategies in a B2B context.

Fader: Sure. For a skim strategy, it's very much low key. You have customers who really want this thing and they are going to find it on their own. They are going to come to you. They have this well-identified, unmet need, and they are really looking for a product or service that could help them accomplish that goal.

So you really don't have to do much. You just put the word out—let’s say at a trade show or something like that—and then they are going to line up outside your door.

Another big factor in a skim strategy is word of mouth. If you are dealing with an audience or market where there are very good social connections among people, all you have to do is whisper to one person, and the word spreads.

So back to Botox. People actually have Botox parties. It's all word of mouth. There are no Viagra parties—that I’m aware of. So in that case, you have to push the market uptake process along faster as a marketer.

Same thing applies to B2B. There are some products and services where the message will just spread through the market on its own, and others where you need to shout it from the mountaintops.

Penetration is going to tend to have lower price, much more marketing support, and much more extensive distribution channels in place, as well as some distinct product characteristics: slightly less complexity, more compatibility with existing practices, easy to identify the benefits, and so on.

ITSMA members will receive the full interview with Fader later this month.

Ask ITSMA: How Many People Will Respond to My Survey?

By Julie Schwartz, Senior Vice President, Research and Thought Leadership, ITSMA

Each month, ITSMA receives a number of queries through Ask ITSMA, a resource designed to give members a quick and easy way to get insight on important services and solutions marketing questions they face. In this column, we will publish some of our favorite questions along with excerpts from our replies.

Is there an industry average for survey response rates?

I would be highly suspect of any benchmarks out there, given the number of variables that affect survey response rates. Such variables to consider include:

• Is this a mail survey or Web-based survey?
• Is this with customers or target audience?
• Is it a blind study, or are you identifying yourself as the sponsor?
• Do you have a good in-house list with contact information, including names, or is this a purchased list with incomplete information?
• Was the survey invitation addressed by name?
• Will recipients of your survey invitation (if online) assume that it’s spam?
• Are you sending the survey out during a holiday period? The summer months?
• What is the incentive?
• How interesting is the survey? Is it long or tedious to answer?
• Will answering the survey provide any direct business benefit to the respondent?

All these variables will impact your response rates.

	Do you have a sales or marketing question? Visit Ask ITSMA to access our experience, insight, and research results.

Recent ITSMA Thought Leadership

The ROI of Community
http://www.itsma.com/research/abstracts/V0044.htm

As online communities continue to proliferate, B2B marketers are concerned that their own efforts at community could be lost in the shuffle or fail to provide business value. How should B2B marketers focus their community efforts to provide compelling content for members and business value for their companies? For some answers, we went to Bill Johnston, who blogs about online community strategy and runs the Online Community Research Network.

How to Create Marketing Content That Sales Will Actually Use
http://www.itsma.com/research/abstracts/V0043.htm

Most marketing materials are usually too broadly focused or too complex to help salespeople in the heat of the sale. Indeed, 80% of marketing content goes unused. In this Viewpoint, John Aiello, CEO of sales enablement software provider SAVO, offers tips for creating types of content that will work better for salespeople and for tapping into the “black market” of content that salespeople develop on their own.

Are Spreadsheets and CRM Sufficient? Marketing Automation in the 21 st Century
http://www.itsma.com/research/abstracts/OLB080909.htm

The incentives for marketing to automate its operations for more efficiency and effectiveness have never been greater. In this Online Briefing, we untangle the complexity of marketing automation and offer valuable advice—including results from ITSMA’s exclusive survey of best practices, challenges, and ROI from top marketing decision makers’ use of marketing automation technologies.

What Really Matters to Decision Makers? Insight into Key Buying Criteria for Services and Solutions
http://www.itsma.com/research/abstracts/OLB080812.htm

Uncertain times call for razor-sharp marketing focus. This requires a deep and thorough understanding of how customers buy—what really matters most to decision makers. In this Online Briefing, ITSMA’s Julie Schwartz and TechTarget’s Marilou Barsam present the latest results from ITSMA’s annual research program on How Customers Buy Services and Solutions. Survey data and case study examples illuminate ways to align marketing vehicles and content to customers’ acquisition processes.

Upcoming ITSMA Events

To view all events, please go to http://www.itsma.com/aspfiles/events/calendar.asp.

Marketing Accountability
ITSMA Inner Circle Meeting 11 December 2008
18:00 – 21:00 London time
Addendum Restaurant (Located at the Apex City of London Hotel), London, UK
(Invitation-only meeting for ITSMA members)
http://www.itsma.com/events/event_desc/08DM12E34.htm

Under current market conditions, marketing accountability has quickly surfaced to the top of the CMO’s list of priorities. This ITSMA Inner Circle dinner will explore the various facets of marketing accountability, aided by Prof. Malcolm McDonald of the Cranfield School of Management and his colleague Grant Oliver.

Around the dinner table, Prof. McDonald will lead a discussion about marketing due diligence, looking at how a marketing strategy can add shareholder value, and, specifically, how we assess our positions. We will look at marketing effectiveness and how our tactics can create competitive advantage; we’ll also review marketing procurement and how we can make our budgets work harder.

If you would like to discuss who might be eligible to participate from your company, please contact Katie Doughty on +44 1628 603130 or at kdoughty@itsma.com.

What You Need to Know about Marketing Analytics
Online Web Briefing
December 16, 2008
8:00 am Pacific – 11:00 am Eastern – 16:00 London (Duration: One hour)
(Free for ITSMA members)
http://www.itsma.com/Events/event_desc/08OB12G35.htm

As the economy sputters, gut instinct and intuition need to be leavened with more fact-based thinking. It’s critical that marketing improve its ability to analyze data to inform decisions, predict buyer behavior, and forecast trends. This requires a foundation of quality data, collaboration between marketing and finance, and a willingness to experiment before making big commitments to programs and campaigns.

Please join ITSMA’s Chris Koch and Marketing NPV’s Pat LaPointe as they reveal highlights from ITSMA’s survey on marketing analytics and provide insights and best practices in areas such as:

• Elements of a successful marketing analytics program
• Types of data needed to make accurate predictions
• How to collaborate effectively with finance on analytics
• Challenges that prevent organizations from developing a successful analytics program

Classic Insight

Check out these ITSMA Online Briefings that have been rated highly by ITSMA members:

Online Reputation Management: Bolstering Your Brand Through Conversation and Community
http://www.itsma.com/research/abstracts/OLB071016.htm

Just as important as what you say about your company is what others are saying about you. Today, marketers are looking for the best ways to leverage the Web to enhance their reputations and build their brands. In this Online Briefing, Brian Harvey, senior director of global marketing and strategy at Accenture; Vic Odryna, CEO, Zazzle Technology; and ITSMA’s Bob Baginski discuss how to proactively shape and amplify your reputation online.

Account-Based Marketing: Best Practices and Critical Success Factors
http://www.itsma.com/research/abstracts/OLB070213.htm

ITSMA's Jeff Sands, IBM's Naomi Wilsey, and Xerox's Liz Vega copresent this Briefing on best practices and critical success factors for Account-Based Marketing (ABM), a hot new approach that helps companies deepen relationships and increase revenue with key accounts.