How to evaluate a B2B agency’s creative potential

August 19th, 2010

In our last installment, I provided three criteria for B2B agencies to use when evaluating potential creative hires. Today, we look at the challenge from the client perspective: how can you best evaluate the creative potential of a prospective agency partner?

The metaphor of the client/agency partnership being akin to a marriage is both grossly overused and yet, when it comes to creative output, still incredibly accurate.

Finding the right match takes time, work and communication. Anything less and you’ll find yourself on the analyst’s couch in a few short months wondering where it all went wrong.

So get ready to roll up your sleeves, do the introspective heavy lifting and start the dating process (which, as I recall from my long-ago experience, never began with an RFP).

First, make sure you understand the personality of your own brand and organization
By this point, hopefully you’ve developed a comprehensive messaging platform and have gone through the exercise of defining your brand and company using adjectives. If you haven’t, stop. Don’t read another word. Go and do that exercise as a marketing team.

For the rest of you good boys and girls, I recommend another critical step as a double check.

Ask your evaluation team to gather samples of creative (video, print, DM, banners, etc.) that you feel is both particularly strong and in line with your values. Then, compare them and look for disconnects with those adjectives. Because any disconnects will introduce huge problems in your agency search.

For example, if you have described your brand as “compassionate” and one of your senior leaders is strongly drawn to humorous creative, you need to talk that out. While humor and compassion are not creatively incompatible, it is a fine line: Humor points out absurdities; it pokes fun at people and things; it is often; well, not “nice.” See where I’m going?

So having a frank internal discussion about any discrepancies between the kind of creative you like and the kind of creative that’s in line with your brand and company will keep you from sending mixed signals to potential agency partners.

Or put another way, it is fine that you lust after the bad boys. But if that’s not who you plan to marry, you need to get that straight in your heads right now.

Then, clearly define your problem to be solved for potential agencies
Every agency has a reel and a book they want you to see. And let me tell you in no uncertain terms, as an agency professional, that you don’t need to see it.

What you need to see is creative work from an agency where they have solved a similar business problem to the one you face.

And you have a business problem to solve. If you didn’t, you would not be looking for an agency in the first place, now would you? So what is it?

  • Is the sales team struggling because prospects don’t know who you are when they call? Or do they have the wrong impression?
  • Is the sales team struggling because they don’t have near enough leads in the pipeline? Or is it that you have plenty of leads but they are not big enough or far along in the buy cycle?
  • Are you converting a large percentage of Web visitors into sales but not getting enough traffic? Or are you getting plenty of traffic but no one is buying?

The reality is that there are only a small handful of business challenges out there that marketing gets asked to solve. Any agency that has been around has been asked to address most if not all of them at some point. And like anything, some agencies are better at some challenges than others.

So define your challenge and then be ready to state it to prospective agencies in 2-3 sentences max. For example:

My company has the most durable widget in the industry. Prospects know who we are but they just think we are expensive and don’t understand our value. We need help getting prospects to understand the benefits of durability.

Give this problem to your potential agencies and then ask to see a customized portfolio of work that addresses a similar problem. This could be produced work. This could be concept boards.

As long as it relates to your challenge, this is the best way to project a successful match that I’ve seen.

Don’t ask for spec creative or “assignments” that are not actual projects
If you read the advertising trades or really know agency folks, you understand that the practice of spec creative has been a disaster for agencies. In fact, there is currently a lot of teeth-gnashing about refusing to do it.

I agree. Asking for spec creative is just wrong. But what’s more, you, as a client, don’t want it.

Here’s the thing. Great creative comes from insights about your customers and prospects without fail. Creatives can’t fake that and when they try, the work shows.

So giving a bunch of agencies no time and no budget to find these insights is a great way to end up with creative that, if you produced it, would probably fail in the marketplace.

Now, if you want to pay prospective agencies for their creative concepts as part of a review, that is fine.

But you still need to make sure that you also pay for developing those insights and give the agencies the time needed to unearth them. Think months, or at least many weeks. The results are well worth it.

Next post, I’ll move on to the next step in my Five Keys to Great B2B Creative series: structuring your team to get the best out of your agency.

Posted in B2B Creative | No Comments »

Three keys to making any creative hire

February 22nd, 2010

Continuing my series on the five keys to great B2B creative, we next need to discuss ways to find the very best creative talent.

Today, let’s explore this critical challenge from an agency perspective.

Despite all the dramatic changes in marketing over the last decade, ours is still a business of big ideas. It’s just that the formula of “Big Idea = Advertisement” is no longer remotely accurate.

Big ideas today, rooted in deep buyer insights, differentiate by finding ways to give buyers highly relevant, helpful information where, when and how THEY want it. No longer are we able to merely push out messages through mass channels and reach our goals.

So truly big marketing ideas are now more often than not the collective product of an expanded team of marketers across many disciplines, from media to marketing technology to public relations to social media and on and on.

However, despite the recent spate of grumbling about the continued use of the word “creatives” to describe the copywriters and art directors in our business,# ultimately, an art director and writer have to make it all work in the execution.

Because nothing kills a big idea faster than poor execution, finding great creatives still maters. It matters more than ever.

To today’s B2B creative directors, I share the following advice:

Look for a proven ability to handle complex sales
The talent pool of experienced B2B creatives is not infinite. So to bring in fresh talent, you will likely need to consider creatives who lack previous experience in B2B.

The problem, as any experienced B2B creative director knows, is that success in B2C far too often does not translate into our business.

In B2B, a cleaver headline or borrowed interest will not get it done by itself. Many talented creatives from the consumer side cannot apply their skills in B2B.

The very best B2B creative comes from teams with the ability to balance rationale and emotional appeals. Pure emotional plays that are part and parcel to B2C marketing, be they humorous or dramatic, rarely make the phone ring.

One of the reasons for this is that B2B creative must address complex buy cycles that take place over time. We’re not selling cereal. There are serious consequences to making the wrong decision: professional consequences and personal ones.

So if you are looking at creatives who have no B2B experience, at least look for those who have sold a complicated product: pharmaceuticals, high-end electronics, financial services, any product or service where the buyer is making a considered decision.

Look for a proven ability to meet the demands of content marketing.
As we’ve discussed, marketing today requires not only the continued generation of big ideas but finding ways to translate these ideas into content that meets prospects’ information needs where, when and how they want.

Executing on content ideas requires additional skills beyond just visuals and headlines.

For copywriters, it requires the ability to act as a reporter, to gather information via research and personal interviews, to break down complex topics into digestible chunks, to develop compelling narratives.

For art directors, it requires the ability to tell stories visually, to develop infographics that explain complex ideas in elegant ways, to create layouts that ease skimming online and in print, to translate stories into Web video and Flash presentations.

Typically, creatives do not have this kind of work in their portfolios. So in my experience, you need to work harder to identify creatives who will be able to deliver.

Look for creatives with some journalism in their backgrounds, ask for long copy/layout samples (even if it is just a college term paper or blog), create test content marketing assignments, you get the picture.

Also, endeavor to spend a LOT of time in interviews probing to see how inquisitive the prospective hire is, how he or she thinks and processes information, where he or she has run with projects in the past without a lot of hand holding.

Look for a proven ability to work with digital technologists
It is a rare copywriter or art director that does not have digital work in their book. But to my mind, that’s table stakes.

What I really want to see is how well creatives can collaborate with colleagues on the digital side of the agency.

When reviewing digital work, ask specific questions about HOW they worked with the information architects, programmers and DBAs, what was the process like, who did what and when? If the creatives seemed to have always worked in a vacuum, no matter how strong their work, I’d pass.

You want to identify creatives who not only understand the technology end but also embrace working with tech folks from the very beginning and know how to do that.

By that, I mean that the processes and culture on the digital side are very different than the traditional writer/art director “hole up in a room and toss ideas around” world.

Thinking back on my own path, I remember the first time I invited a programmer to a concepting session, in the interest of being “inclusive,” and watched her sit passively because the entire notion was so foreign.

I quickly learned that for the most part, my colleagues on the digital side need more structure (something creatives reject out of hand) and often are much more comfortable working independently and then sharing their work frequently along the way. To them, this IS collaboration and it works well in their environment. So I adapted.

The moral of the story is that not every creative has the people skills to bridge this cultural divide. And if your creatives can’t or won’t adapt, all your digital work will suffer for it. Thus, you better be sure your creative can make nice.

Now, a lot has also been written about the need to hire “digital natives.”

I think in B2B, this is overstated. I would not discriminate against a Gen-Y creative, but the reality is, in B2B, Gen-X managers are the ones grabbing the reins from Baby Boomers and so they’ll be making decisions for a while. Therefore, creatives who have comfort and active participation in social media are just fine.

In my next post, I’ll take on this question from the perspective of B2B clients evaluating agencies on their creative potential.

# Yes, I understand and acknowledge the larger point that the process of generating big ideas frequently involves strategists, programmers, public relations practitioners, media buyers, etc.
But after the big, collaborative “Ah Ha” moment, after all the back slapping, inevitably a copywriter and art director are summoned to bring that rough notion to life: what exactly do we say? How exactly does it work? What exactly does the user experience? On and on, every detail sweated over and dissected.
The execution of big ideas makes or breaks the idea. And when that execution happens, probably during a bunch of late nights, the other members of the aforementioned team are nowhere near the room.
So yeah, agencies need to collaborate on big ideas. But the idea that we’ll rename the creative function in some kind of Kumbaya gesture to make everyone else feel that their ideas are appreciated is beyond ridiculous.

To channel Jack Nicholson in “A Few Good Men,” I ask:

“Have you ever stared at a blank notepad or screen while in possession of nothing more than a half-baked creative brief, an insane deadline and a case of Diet Coke? If you have not and believe you should also be called a ‘creative,’ I say pick up a pen or grab your laptop and stay late with us. Otherwise, I’d just ask for a simple thank you as you walk out to grab the 5:15 home.”

Posted in B2B Content Strategy, B2B Creative, B2B Internet Marketing | No Comments »

“Read This Post!” Your ad agency

February 7th, 2010

Of the five keys to developing great B2B creative, striving to generate deep prospect insights and messaging tops the list.

But you also need to clearly convey that messaging and your specific business and marketing objectives to the agency creative team. And that takes a well-organized, concise creative brief.

Bottom line, a well-written brief saves you time and money when working with an ad agency and greatly increases your chances of success.

Conversely, a hastily written brief almost guarantees that you will end up sending the creative team back for revision after revision.

So what makes for a complete brief? There is no one right answer. But in my mind, I want to know the following:

Who are we talking to?
Give me a complete profile of the prospect or customer. I want to know demographics and psychographics and firmagraphics, primary research and secondary research. Details, details, details.

Ideally, I’d like all of that translated into a persona – a narrative that has a hypothetical prospect telling me about his or her needs, hopes, fears and dreams in the first person. Personas are powerful ways for everyone involved to share a definitive picture of the prospect.

What do we want to say?
Last week, I laid out the critical importance of completing positioning and messaging before any creative work is begun.

Yet, so many creative briefs I’ve seen over the years contain a key message that goes something like “Acme Company is the one-stop shop for all your blank needs. Oh, and we’re cheaper too.” You want to know why so many B2B ads lack differentiation. That’s why.

When you don’t include well-researched, well-conceived messaging in your brief , you force your creative team to come up with messaging at the same time they are coming up with creative concepts. So if you don’t agree with their take on the messaging, you’ll be throwing out both the messaging and the concepts.

Who is our competition?
Yes, tell me whom your sales team finds themselves competing against every day. But make sure your research digs into this as well. I want to know the full set of direct and indirect competitors in your prospects’ minds.

Just like Coke views its competitors as not just Pepsi but also milk, orange juice, beer, water and any possible beverage, you too need to think more broadly about what stands between you and a sale.

What specifically do we have to do right now? Next week? Next month? Next year?
In the brief, share your full marketing plans with the media buy, direct response strategy, trade show plans, collateral needs, etc.

This is nothing more frustrating for everyone involved when a creative concept is approved that has been designed primarily for online banner units and suddenly the media team pipes up that “oh, most of our buy is skyscrapers.”

Also, try and think ahead to what you might want to do down the road. Sharing this with the creative team in the brief can do wonders in them coming up with ideas that will take best advantage of all your planned channels.

Having been on both sides of the client/agency relationship, I can tell you that if your brief is not up to snuff, everything that goes wrong from that point forward is on you. Yes. It’s that important.

Posted in B2B Creative, B2B Internet Marketing, B2B direct response marketing | 1 Comment »

The smartest marcom investment of all

January 25th, 2010

First off, I apologize for the almost two-month absence. Between the holidays and moving from Chicago to Austin for a three-month assignment, time got away from me. So let’s get back to it.

In my last post, I outlined five keys to great B2B creative. This week, let’s dig into the first of those steps: generating deep prospect insights and then tying those to key messaging in support of creative development.

What’s behind every great creative campaign
In my previous life as a creative director, I had the luxury of working with a host of strong creative teams and had the honor of judging numerous B2B creative competitions. But since B2B marketing is no Lake Wobegon, I’ve also met my share of average and below average creatives working at agencies across the country.

And if you want to know the difference between teams, agencies and clients that consistently produce great creative work and those that do not, I can tell you, without a shred of doubt, that talent is a secondary factor.

If you hand an average creative team a brief filled with deep prospect insights and associated messaging, they will come up with solid-to-great ideas the vast majority of the time.

If you hand a great creative team a brief with no differentiating insights and/or without complete messaging (see below), what you will get almost every time are thin, irrelevant ideas that try to mask these deficiencies through clichés or borrowed interest.

Almost without fail, whenever a creative team walked into my office and told me they were struggling, the net of our conversation was that they simply had no idea whom they were supposed to be talking to and my advice was always the same: stop coming up with ideas and go back and do the work.

By “doing the work,” I mean digging into the mindset of the prospect. Interviewing actual customers. Checking out industry blogs. Reading all the background documents. Waking the factory. Whatever it takes to know the business and prospect.

Before the first concepting session, I want my creative team to not only completely understand the challenges, big and small, these individuals face in doing their jobs but to understand exactly what it is like to DO that job. I mean right down to describing to me what their desk looks like.

Why marketers also need to “Do the Work”
Like so much in work and life, preparation and hard work are the keys. And to prepare for any large marketing communications campaign, it is critical to dedicate the time, money and resources to generating relevant, fresh insights into the mindset of your prospect.

Some of you will read this and say:

“Of course, that makes sense in theory. But my organization knows our customers and prospects cold … we talk to them every day … just sit down with our sales team for twenty minutes and you’ll find out everything you need to know.”

I’m sorry, but this is complete and utter hubris.

Whatever your role in a B2B marketing organization, be it strategy, sales, marcom, customer service, technology or management, you bring with you biases that result from the fact that no one person or department can ever have a complete picture of the customer and, even if they did, that picture keeps changing.

I can’t tell you how many times over the years I’ve seen B2B creative briefs that asked a creative team to come up with campaign ideas to promote what were described as undifferentiated products and services targeted at non-descript prospects who cared only about price.

If you are going to spend the time and money to create a significant marketing communications campaign, spend the time and money to generate fresh insights and messaging. If you are not willing to do this, you are better off saving your money and not doing the campaign at all. It is that simple.

Tools to make it easier
The good news is developing customer insights does not have to mean expensive focus groups (not that there are not times for that).

  • Online survey tools through major email service providers are simple, fast and cost effective.
  • Social media monitoring of customer and prospect conversations on blogs, Twitter, LinkedIn and other places they congregate can be automated and, in many cases, require no additional tools.
  • Search marketing keyword research can be leveraged to find out exactly what issues customers and prospects are most concerned with or excited about.
  • You can even leverage the search tool on your own Web site for guidance.

By taking what you learn from these channels, analyzing the findings and adding that to your organizational knowledge, you can identify insightful nuggets that you can match up with your unique value proposition at this particular point and time – positioning the creative team to come up with breakthrough ideas that differentiate you.

Creating relevant messaging fast
One you have decided on some insights to leverage in your next marcom campaign, you need to support those insights with messaging.

There are probably as many approaches and templates for marketing message development as there are agencies and clients. All that matters to me is that your approach does the following:

  • Document exactly why the customer or prospect NEEDS your product or service
  • Explains both features AND benefits that support your insight
  • Provides CONCRETE reasons to believe every feature and benefit
  • Details the tone that should guide the creative ideation

With that in mind, here is a quick template I’ve used for a number of years.

Question

Answer

Support

WHO WE ARE:
(Our Promise)

WHAT WE DO:
(Our Service)

WHY IT’S NEEDED:
(User Needs)

HOW WE HELP:
(User Benefits)

HOW IT WORKS:
(Key Features)

HOW WE LIVE IT:
(Our Personality)

In this template, the most important element is the third column. Quite simply, you must buttress any claim you make with a concrete support point. If you think you offer the best service, I want to see proof: actual numbers, awards won, certifications, etc. And if you can’t prove it, you can’t say it.

And that’s really the point.
Bad B2B creative, the kind that is irrelevant or “doesn’t say anything” is what it is most likely because a creative team was handed a brief where they were given nothing to say or no way to prove broad statements, hoping the writer and art director could create magic out of thin air.

In B2B marketing, that never works. Every campaign needs to be supported with investments in fresh insights and messaging. Every time.

Posted in B2B Creative, B2B Internet Marketing | 1 Comment »

The five keys to great B2B creative

November 29th, 2009

I’ve spent five minutes trying to find a nice way to say this.

But I think our subject demands candor. So here goes.

Great creative in B2B marketing is simply not the norm.

Believe it or not, in my experience, few in our industry will even bother argue this notion.

Now, some will say that innovative B2B creative:

  • Is not needed in B2B as long as the targeting is correct and the offer is strong
  • Is actually counterproductive because B2B buyers are “turned off by it” and “just want facts”

This is simply total bunk.

The need to grab a prospect’s attention, to convey value propositions quickly, has never been more critical in a time where marketers are being held accountable for proving strong ROI.

Engaging, relevant creative concepts are critical to helping us use that fraction of a second we have to command attention so that our offer gets noticed and acted upon.

We know this in direct response and Internet marketing because we can test it. And have.

The accepted rule that creative contributes 30% of a campaign’s success is too often viewed as proof it is not very important.

In fact, improving this factor represents a huge opportunity to lift performance when the difference between break-even and success is often moving from a .7% response rate to .8%.

So if you accept the premise that strong B2B creative will drive better response rates and thus improve ROI, then the next question is why it is so rare and what you can do to get better creative from your agency or in-house team.

Over sixteen years split between client and agency jobs in both creative and strategic roles, I’ve identified five keys to producing consistently great B2B creative:

  1. Get your prospect insights and messaging down first
  2. Develop a solid brief
  3. Hire the right people
  4. Create a small, controlled oversight team
  5. Teach this team how to judge creative

Over the next five weeks, I’ll dig into each of these keys. Stay tuned.

Posted in B2B Creative, B2B Internet Marketing, B2B direct response marketing | 2 Comments »

Content and the buy cycle

November 15th, 2009

In Internet marketing, it’s often said that content is king. I don’t think that goes near far enough. What I tell clients is:

Content marketing is air.

Without it, your Internet marketing instantly dies.

Over the last few months, I’ve explained the four categories of content and offers and how they are best applied. But another way to view content is how it pulls prospects through a buy cycle.

Here’s a chart that breaks out common B2B content to meet each prospect’s needs along the purchase path:

Stage:

Early Stage

Mid Stage

Late Stage

Prospect Needs:

Education

Knows they have a problem to solve and looking for categories of solutions.

Information

Have chosen a category of solution and looking for potential suppliers.

Confirmation

Have created shortlist of suppliers and need to evaluate, compare and select.

Typical types of content:
  • White papers
  • Articles
  • Blogs
  • Social media outreach
  • Webinars (educational)
  • Web videos (educational)
  • eNewsletters
  • Print and video collateral
  • Webinars (informational)
  • Web videos (informational)
  • FAQs
  • Web tools (e.g., pricing calculators or product demos)
  • Case studies
  • Testimonials
  • Bios
  • Incentive offers

Next week, I’ll show how to conduct a content audit.

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Posted in B2B Content Strategy, B2B Internet Marketing | No Comments »

Four ideas for winning incentive offers

November 8th, 2009

Last week, we discussed the proper role of incentive offers in your online and offline campaigns.

Since this category of offer should only be used when immediate conversions are your campaign’s objective, finding a strong incentive offer will, by definition, improve your cost-per-acquisition in dramatic ways.

Because of that, however, marketers face tremendous competition to create an incentive offer that stands out in the marketplace.

I mean, offering free shipping is as “Me Too” as a marketer can get. Nor is a free trial horribly novel. And as I’ve said previously, discounting is the last refuge of the desperate marketer because someone will always be willing to go ever lower.

Here are four ideas for crafting incentive offers that stand out and drive conversions:

1. Get creative
I am amazed how many direct and Internet marketers view offer strategy as just a math problem to be solved. As in “Hey, let’s test 5% off vs. 10% off and see which does better.”

Look at strong DR creative and you’ll see that the best offers marry seamlessly with the overall creative concept. And yet, when I suggest to marketers that they get their creatives involved in offer development, the reply is quite often “What would they know about it?”

Trust me, if you turn your creatives loose to come up with incentive offers that pay off their larger concept, you can break out of the normal boxes.

For example, a concept built around ease of use could be pared with an offer bundling another company’s complementary product or service – thus providing your customers a one-stop solution.

2. Merchandise the offer
Another thing creatives bring to the party is the ability to merchandise your offer. By that, I mean taking a fresh look at both potential incentive offer ideas or even product or service features and using creativity to sell them harder.

An obvious example of merchandising an offer is how fast food chains have taken discounting to the next level with $1 menus that became the focus of their multi-channel campaigns.

But here’s another example of a creative team turning a standard feature into a winning offer.

So let’s say we have a marketer that provides a solution for Web site owners. And as part of the setup phase, they offer free phone-based technical support.

The creative team discovers that during these phone calls, the support representatives often offer advice on Web design and usability on top of information about implanting the product. This is just something they started to do and that they pride themselves on as it puts customers at ease and gives them high ratings in support surveys.

So the creative team comes up with an idea of merchandising these calls as an hour of free “Web Consulting” with a stated value of $1,000.

The offer is immediately differentiating from discounting competitors. It is not easy to duplicate as the company has superior technical support. And it costs exactly $0 to produce.

3. Align offer with your brand
Many marketers spend inordinate amounts of time and money building their brands over the years, only to craft incentive offers that fail to capitalize on that brand image or even fight against the brand.

For example, if you have a brand known for being a market leader, discount offers are going to sound discordant to consumers. They may believe you are still more expensive and dismiss the offer out of hand. Or worse, they may even begin to question the direction of your company.

Now, consider the “Web Consulting” offer we just discussed. Since this offer came from the market’s technical leader, it reinforced brand advertising and thus is much more believable for the prospect.

4. Make it easy and seem easy
We are skeptical of marketing, even us marketers. When we see a seemingly attractive new offer, the thought “what’s the catch?” comes to mind almost instantly.

So in the planning of your offer, identify every way possible to make the process of receiving the offer as easy as possible* and make those changes.

Then, as you merchandise the offer, quantify wherever you can how easy the process will be: number of steps, time to complete, time to receive offer, etc. A great example of offer merchandising is Geico’s “Fifteen minutes can save you 15% or more on car insurance.

* I say this understanding that the math behind many rebate offers is predicated on customers NOT redeeming their reward. If you are playing the rebate game, then you should not make false promises of an easy redemption process.

So at this point, you are probably thinking “wow, that’s a lot of work.” It is.

But improving your incentive offer performance may be the fastest way to show bottom line marketing ROI. That makes it worth exceptional effort.

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Posted in B2B Direct Response Offer Strategy, B2B Internet Marketing | No Comments »

How incentive offers can destroy your campaign’s ROI

November 1st, 2009

Wrapping up my series of posts on offer strategy, let’s explore the proper use of incentive offers in online and offline direct response campaigns.

To review, an incentive offer is one that “lowers price, increases value, speeds delivery or improves service.”

But another way to think of incentive offers is within the context of the Four P’s of Marketing: Product, Price, Place of Distribution and Promotion.

By this, I mean that an incentive offer is one that directly ups the ante for one of the Four P’s (e.g., offering 20% off, bundling two products together, offering free shipping, providing one year of free technical support).

The role the incentive offer
Incentive offers are actually the most widely used in direct and Internet marketing. In fact, for many marketers, incentive offers are exclusively what they think of and use to drive response rates.

But while incentive offers are critical tools, just like promotional offers, they play a very specific role in direct and Internet marketing campaigns.

Simply put, an incentive offer should only be used when reaching a prospect at the very end of his or her buy cycle when your goal is an immediate conversion.

Offering up incentive offers to prospects who are actively trying to identify categories of solutions to solve their problems or to find potential providers within a solution category will fail to produce strong ROI.

This is known as rushing the sale – pushing a prospect to make a purchase decision who is not ready and will not act now no matter how attractive the incentive.

A free trial is not free
For example, I have worked with many software providers over the years and the “free trial” is a very popular incentive offer used in that space.

However, to a prospect, a free trial of a piece of software they do not yet understand from a provider they do not yet know is by no means free.

Put yourself in the mind of the prospect.

He or she knows that setting up and learning that software will take time, likely produce some frustrations and, after all that, may not prove to be the right solution after all and thus require the act of cancelling the trial (so their credit card is not charged) and then have to face a call from a sales representative asking why the trial was terminated.

So even though the trial period is offered for free, until that prospect has sorted through your informational content and made themselves comfortable that you can meet their needs, it is not perceived as having value. Which means your conversion rate will suffer greatly.

As a marketer planning offer strategy, you need to be confident that your campaign is indeed reaching prospects who know enough about your product and about your company before you propose to serve up an incentive offer.

This is often easier to say than do, as marketers frequently face management pressure to just make the cash register ring now – regardless of whether that makes tactical marketing sense – or resistance to the idea of lead nurture as a marketing strategy.

But when we cave and allow an incentive offer to be the focus of a campaign that is reaching prospects in early- or mid-buy cycle, we guarantee low response rates. And regardless of our protestations, we will be held accountable for in the end for those poor results. So better to fight the battle early if an incentive offer does not make sense.

Now, do not take all of this to mean you should not use incentive offers in your campaigns. They are critical tools to driving sales when used properly and need to be part of your marketing strategy.

Next week, I’ll explore ways to craft winning incentive offers.

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Posted in B2B Content Strategy, B2B Direct Response Offer Strategy, B2B Internet Marketing | 1 Comment »

How to use promotional offers in B2B marketing

October 25th, 2009

Promotional offers reward a prospect for responding to a marketing message. Examples include contests, sweepstakes and tchotchke such as hats, t-shirts, iPods, etc.

These kinds of offers, while commonplace in consumer marketing, are much more rarely used in B2B marketing (with the notable exception of trade show promotions).

However, promotional offers can be used to great effect in B2B marketing, throughout every phase of the buy cycle, in specific circumstances and in response to specific challenges.

So what are those? Here are three lead generation challenges where I’ve seen promotional offers produce strong results:

1. Need to capture lead scoring data quickly

In lead generation, best practices dictate that we first define criteria for a sales-accepted lead as well as for leads that are not sales ready but worth nurturing by marketing.

Easy to say, but not so easy to execute. Often, sales will demand very detailed data points in order to accept a lead and that can be difficult to acquire via a landing page without suffering a high abandonment rate.

In a perfect world, marketing would then use progressive registration to gather this data over multiple touchpoints. Someday, I may even work on a campaign like that.

So if your marketing and lead scoring requirements demand that you gather everything you need in one shot, a breakthrough promotional offer can do the trick.

For example, I once planned a lead generation campaign for a truck manufacturer aimed at small business owners where we needed to score incoming leads based on detailed firmagraphic data not available via rental lists or appending.

So we used a truck giveaway sweepstakes to incent these SMBs to fill out a lengthy entry form that otherwise they never would have completed.

2. Need to build a lead funnel fast
Pressure to meet aggressive quarterly sales goals or to rapidly set appointments for a trade show can stress even a seasoned marketing department.

When the heat is on, promotional offers can generate very high response rates and fill the top of the pipeline fast. The offer needs to resonate with the target audience quickly and clearly: meaning it needs to be relevant and easy to understand.

However, care must be taken to be as highly targeted as possible with media and direct response lists so as to limit waste. But don’t kid yourself, many of these leads will not be qualified and just want free stuff.

3. Need to overcome lack of market awareness
One situation I’ve frequently witnessed on the agency side is marketers at startups under the gun to get their sales team chewing through leads ASAP.

Which can be a really tough challenge when you have not had the time to lay the groundwork through branding efforts.

One short-term salve is to leverage a promotional offer for pure lead generation. A carefully structured sweepstakes or contest aimed specifically at the target prospect can do the trick here.

For example, we once ran a lead generation campaign targeted at small business owners built around an essay contest.

The idea was that the SMB would write an essay projecting what their business would be able to achieve with a $50k in my client’s merchandise. Thus, we knew the work needed for the exercise would discourage a great many unqualified prospects from bothering.

For B2B marketers, I think promotional offers need to be kept behind glass in case of emergency. But you should never be afraid to break that glass should flames reach the doors.

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Posted in B2B Content Strategy, B2B Direct Response Offer Strategy, B2B Internet Marketing | 1 Comment »

Informational offer development for strong lead nurture (Part II)

October 18th, 2009

Following last week’s post, here are some guidelines for planning and developing informational offers that safely get you past the initial short list selection phase while also making strong impressions.

Research. Before you spend any time or resources on content development, it is critical to find out what specific information your prospects seek.

  • What keywords are bringing them to your Web site or which ones do they use in the search box on your Web site?
  • What questions do your sales reps or customer service reps answer over and over?
  • What questions are typically asked in RFIs and RFPs for your industry?
  • Where exactly do prospects tend to exit your Web site?
  • When you survey prospects, how aware are they of your company and how well do they understand your unique value proposition?

Map. Don’t expect that you can create a single, sliver-bullet piece of content that will answer every question a prospect could ever have.

Take the time to build personas for different types of prospects, map out their major informational gathering needs and decide which types of content naturally fit together and which need to live on their own.

Brainstorm. Actually, two types of brainstorming can be really helpful here.

First, conduct an interdisciplinary brainstorming session that includes marketing, sales, product management, customer service and outside agency professionals. This can help you both quickly generate solid initial content ideas as well as learn any initial preferences and concerns various stakeholders may have.

Second, develop a creative brief and let a creative team (including copywriters, art directors and Web developers) take a crack at coming up with their best thinking around those initial thoughts to see if they can find a breakthrough.

For example, I’ve seen one client’s complex mix of products be explained beautifully and simply through an online product selector with a game-like interface – a solution a sales team or customer service group would have been unlikely to have come up with on their own.

Create. Once you start developing content, insist that everyone on your team stop using the words “we” and “our.” As much as possible, every word and graphic should show a prospect how “they” can solve “their” problems through your product or service’s features and benefits.

Put yourselves in the shoes of the prospect and measure every draft of creative against how easy you’ve made it to answer the prospect’s likely questions identified during the research phase.

Leverage. Look across all current, planned and potential tactics that reach mid-phase prospects and find appropriate opportunities to include your new informational content.

After all, the best way to get and maintain management buy-in for continued investment in strong informational content is by finding every way to amortize your current investment.

Measure. Make sure that your measurement plan specifically quantifies engagement with informational content and how that engagement impacts prospect’s paths through the buy cycle.

This includes downloads, time spent on content pages or watching videos, changes in customer service inquiries and any number of other data points.

Finally, as you have probably inferred already from this process, leaders in content marketing treat the development of informational content as an ongoing, not episodic process.

So don’t try and bite off too much at first. Build your content continuously over time. Do this and you will see strong improvement in your conversion of prospects to leads.

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Posted in B2B Content Strategy, B2B Direct Response Offer Strategy, B2B Internet Marketing | No Comments »

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