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8/31/2009 - Confessions of an Impoverished Marketer
There is nothing like a beer budget to eliminate champagne from one’s diet and a paucity of marketing resources can prompt the marketer to greater resourcefulness. This is not to say that expensive marketing programs can’t be productive or that any marketing program can be achieved on a shoestring. Rather, it is to say that creativity can sometimes be fostered by miserliness and that drastic budget cuts are no excuse to abandon a marketing mentality. A slashing of resources, such as might take place when overoptimistic sales projections come home to roost or when investors get cold feet, can force elimination of all but the most productive programs and sometimes induces a complete re-thinking of approach. At the very least, marketing penury should discourage throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks.Here then are some principles—lessons, if you will—that may help others in similar straits:
1 : It’s all about sales.
While Sergio Zyman had a consumer products business in mind when he wrote his book, The End of Marketing As We Know It (HarperBusiness, 1999), his definition of marketing applies equally to a B-to-B environment. As he put it, “The sole purpose of marketing is to get more people to buy more of your product, more often, for more money.”
The discipline of marketing requires us to be ever cognizant of the company’s target customers, their motivations, their alternatives, the best ways to reach them, and the most effective messages. Scarce resources make this even more essential. Especially in a B-to-B context, having a crystal clear picture of the sales process and how prospects move through the process to become satisfied (repeat) customers is invaluable. You may not be able to focus on ”more people,” “more product,” “more often,” and “more money” all at the same time. But you can see if there is leverage in one aspect of that equation. For example, if the company can define a set of prospects who already know of your company and your services, you may decide you can forego awareness and brand building for a period of time—sacrificing “more people” for “more often” (frequency of decision). To pursue that train of thought, this might mean pulling back on or even eliminating trade show participation (unless your salespeople actually write orders on the show floor). Sales staff or senior executives may go through withdrawal, but they do live through it, if the decision is based on a sound analysis, agreement on objectives and a thorough understanding of the sales cycle.
Analyzing the sales process and how prospects move through it can also identify parts of the process that can be more “self-service” than they have traditionally been viewed. One common assumption in many direct sales organizations is that every customer needs an overview presentation, a product/service demo, on-site attention, any number of a series of steps applied by the individual salesperson. Some stages of the sales cycle may be more efficient and even more effective if designed so that prospects help themselves. Tools like interactive web-based demos, webinars with Q&A sessions (think of them as group sales calls), Q&A’s (that ask the questions that customers actually ask rather than those you’d like them to ask), as well as a content-loaded web site, can all take burden off of individual salespeople.
If you’re in a marketing role with frugality the order of the day, there is no room for a “Marketing vs. Sales” struggle. You should both be able to get on the side of sales.
2 : The Internet Can Be Your Best Friend
A lot has been written and there seems to be plenty of data on the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of electronic communications, including email, web sites and online advertising. Without rehashing the statistics, using the Internet just makes sense because you can create something once and use it repeatedly with little or no incremental cost. Direct mail email, web sites, interactive ROI models, and the like all share this characteristic. That doesn’t of course mean that all incremental use has incremental value and these tactics need to be as carefully thought through and executed as any physical direct mail or sampling program, etc.
Another value of Internet based tools is that they are often among the most measurable of marketing tactics. They are also among the most flexible and adaptable. You may get enough response from an email with minutes or hours to evaluate the quality of your list (bounce-backs/undeliverables) and the appeal of the offer (click-throughs, response forms). It makes it easy to try different subject lines, different messages and other alterations as you learn what works best.
One of the most productive programs I’ve seen recently entailed short text ads with a logo in daily electronic (email) industry newsletters. The ads were approximately 60 words and made an offer of some kind—often for a white paper—accessed via a link to the company’s web site. The link was designed not to go to the company’s home page, but to a web form to capture some basic contact information before giving the requester access to the white paper or other document. Most people are willing to provide a few pieces of contact information in exchange for information they perceive to be of value. And, in almost all cases, those contacts did not mind and sometimes even appreciated follow-up from a salesperson starting with something along the lines of, “I saw you recently downloaded our white paper on XYZ. I just wanted to call and make sure you got what you wanted and to see if you had any questions on the material that I could answer for you.” The sales force found this approach especially helpful when a current prospect requested a white paper—giving the salesperson a ready-make excuse for an additional and usually very timely contact with their prospect.
This just begins to scratch the surface of internet-related marketing possibilities and there are many ways to leverage the electronic age, even on a modest budget.
3 : Everyone is a Marketer
Shortly after a friend joined a new company as a marketing manager, he complained to me, “Everyone in the company thinks he’s a marketer.” Of course, my friend was complaining that his marketing direction and judgments were routinely second-guessed, that everyone thought they could write marketing copy and that there was a fundamental misunderstanding in his company of marketing as creativity unencumbered by discipline. I chose to interpret his point differently and replied, “Everyone’s right; they’re all marketers.” What I meant is that virtually everything the company does is marketing. Since this company was full of born-again marketers, I saw great potential for my friend to get them focused on the customer-facing and other external facing effects of what they do personally.”
Just as one example, I spent many months trying to overcome skepticism on the part of the customer service organization in a technology company. Finally, the customer service manager forwarded me a letter they were planning to send out to customers with delinquent accounts and who hadn’t been using the service for a defined period of time. The draft letter went something like the following: “This will notify you that we have decided to terminate your service, effective immediately. As of (date), your data will be purged from our system and (name of trading partner) will be advised that they will no longer be receiving data from you through our service.” I suggested several modifications, including altering the language so as not to imply that it was a unilateral action on our part, but a natural consequence of the customer’s failure to actually use the service and pay their bills. We also added the steps they should take if they felt that they had received the notice in error. Furthermore, the re-drafted letter hoped that we would be able to serve them sometime in the future and reminded them of the specific benefits and value they would no longer be enjoying by discontinuing the service. When I sat down with the customer service manager to review the suggested changes, I saw the light dawn. Initially, for her, the letter had been a required notice that would allow us to clean up the database. When the light dawned, the letter became a way to tell customers we really wanted them as customers and to enable us to continue to market to them in the future. From then on, I got drafts of all her group’s standard communications to review and most required far less editing than that first one.
Recognizing that everyone in your company is a marketer with ability to impact the customer’s experience and satisfaction can be very empowering. It can also leverage your very meager resources by suggesting to other parts of the organization ways that they can amplify and reinforce the messages (the ones you articulate and explain to them). You may also find that people throughout an organization act differently when they understand a focus on up-selling in every interaction or the importance of handling leads and getting the content right when they speak in public. Especially in companies that have had little marketing input and direction, selling marketing internally can be one of your most cost-effective tactics.
4 : Content is King
I read an amazing amount of marketing literature that is long on claims and puffery and short on substance. That may be fine for the kind of spam I get in my emailbox for body part enlargement (usually for a body part I do not happen to possess) and for septic system repair (I don’t have one of those either). But many B-to-B buyers find “more filling” to be “less nourishing.” In my experience, business buyers and decision influencers have an almost insatiable appetite for information. They actively seek out not data, but information—the kind that relates products and services to business problems and needs, that establishes a theoretical and practical context for the service/product and that offers real-life examples (even if they are presented anonymously).
When I talk about substance and content, some people (especially people on the technical end of product development) have a tendency to think I mean specs and technical discussions of widgets and gizmos and their less tangible service counterparts. Those have their place—the technical gatekeepers in an organization will require it or they will feed your salespeople to the troll under the toll-bridge. But the business people need something that tells them why they should care and allows them to believe that you are the company that can deliver the goods. Besides, you need some content so you can repurpose it, which brings us to…
5 : Repurpose, repurpose and then repurpose some more.
Apparently the verb “repurpose” has been around long enough in our lexicon to be acceptable because Microsoft Word does not suggest that I change it to something else. While I could argue against it on grammatical grounds, on practical grounds, I am one of its greatest champions. With apologies for reverting to food analogies again, repurposing marketing content is a lot like expert use of Thanksgiving leftovers. Done well, it seems fresh and appealing. A white paper can provide the inspiration for a newsletter article (or vice versa), be turned into a presentation at a conference, a by-lined article in a trade publication, a press release, a webinar, a direct email offer … You don’t have to constantly develop new material to make your messages have impact. And, in fact, there are often real communications benefits to reworking and reusing previous work. Concepts that become familiar have the ring of truth especially when they come in different forms. And putting it in different forms can get the message to audiences with an affinity for different media.
Our language is replete with clichés for marketers despairing of insufficient funds. When life hands you a lemon, make lemonade…Make a virtue of necessity…Clichés aside, these experiences felt like a trip back in time to my early post-college years, when I managed to live for a year on a third of what I currently pay in property taxes. Those early years had some important lessons in ingenuity, and while I imagine we would all like to “count the commas, rather than the zeros” in our marketing budgets, the same lessons hold true for good marketers today.
About the Author:
Betsy Hill is an independent marketing consultant who serves as a temporary or part-time chief marketing officer for companies who need marketing input and direction but are not ready to establish a full-time marketing position or function. She can be reached at 847-644-0093 or at mktgpro tempore@ameritech.net.
Copyright 2009 Business Marketing Association. All rights reserved.
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