My sources at the recent ICO conference on data protection tell me of the hope of the UK Government that we can work towards establishing the UK as adequate when it comes to GDPR once it has left the EU. That means the UK would be not require additional safeguards to be applied for its data to be processed in the EU – that’s hugely important for marketers! Crashing out of the EU without a deal would appear to mean that the EU can process UK personal data, but that the UK can’t handle EU personal data unless additional safeguards are in place.
DaveStevensNow
Blogging about Profitable B2B Marketing | Branding | Digital | Team-Building
-
At the time of writing, it looks as if the UK has been given another six months to find its way out of the Brexit conundrum that has been handed to our politicians. Let’s hope that an acceptable arrangement can be found in that time. Because even when a political exit strategy has been found, there’s still years of negotiation ahead to settle new trading terms with Europe and all of our other key trading partners.
And that means the uncertainty that businesses have been increasingly facing up to since 2016 is only going to continue. We’re not in anything near as bad as a recession situation as yet, but certainly there is a dip in business sentiment now and for a while yet that we’re going to have to contend with.
I think that calls for B2B marketers to go back to basics. We should be seeking insight from our customers at all times, but times of uncertainty are times to double down on that mandate. I’ve even been able to use the uncertainty to encourage businesses that have been traditionally reluctant to check in with their customers to do so to a greater extent. Every cloud has a silver lining! It’s essential that you find out how your customers are reacting to the uncertainty in the economy and look for ways of helping them to reduce their risks. Get a conversation started that can strengthen the customer relationships that you have.
Uncertain times are also times to check in on your marketing strategy and tactics. Are you capitalising on your most effective messages and pushing them through your most efficient channels? Can you focus your marketing in on the best routes to market for you? That means measure, measure, measure!
All things that B2B marketers should be doing all of the time. But uncertain economic times call for this behaviour on a far greater scale.
-
I’ve been talking in my last four posts about the first four of five steps that B2B marketers need to take to grow the link between marketing and the business leadership. There is a real need for good marketing out there. And in my experience, it is possible to grow the link between marketing departments and the businesses they serve. It takes time, care, and proof of delivery to create trust. It requires a brilliant and dedicated team of marketers committed to the cause and it requires the preparedness of a few business executives to go on the journey to provide air cover. I think there are five steps that B2B marketers need to take to grow the link between marketing and the business. Time for the final step!
We need to market marketing into the business. It is a source of fascination to me that the function that prides itself on communicating to the external market is so poor at communicating internally and selling in the concept of marketing to those in the business. We need to market marketing starting from the assumption that our internal audience does not know what we do and we need to take the time to explain. As marketers we should know how to market. But we need to take the time to market ourselves as much as our products, services, and organisations. We need to apply all of the skills that we have learnt in this profession over the last forty years – on ourselves. So, get some advocates within the business that can argue your case. Meet with your senior business leaders more frequently. Find ways to be visible regardless of the geography or hierarchy. When you have success in terms of concrete numbers and impact on revenues, make sure the rest of the business knows about it. Make sure your best marketing materials are visible in the offices where your executives work. And have a new visible thing every quarter so that your materials do not become part of the wall-paper.
There you have it: a new Marketing Manifesto. Focus on business KPI outcomes not marketing KPI inputs or outputs. Be strategic. Cut out the jargon. Train and recruit. And market marketing internally as well as externally. The first three – outcomes, strategy,and jargon-cutting – are your foundations: critical to building trust between the business and the marketing team. But you won’t make real progress until you’ve got the final two processes – training and recruiting, and marketing marketing – up and running – and people in the business are talking about the trust that has been built.
-
I’ve been talking in my last three posts about the first three of five steps that B2B marketers need to take to grow the link between marketing and the business leadership. There is a real need for good marketing out there. And in my experience, it is possible to grow the link between marketing departments and the businesses they serve. It takes time, care, and proof of delivery to create trust. It requires a brilliant and dedicated team of marketers committed to the cause and it requires the preparedness of a few business executives to go on the journey to provide air cover. I think there are five steps that B2B marketers need to take to grow the link between marketing and the business. Time for step four!
To grow the link between marketing and the business, you need a brilliant and dedicated team of marketers committed to the cause. And if you don’t have them already, you need to up-skill those you do have or recruit them in. Given the state of marketing right now, up-skilling is the better bet as our’s is not a profession that the talented want to join. A 2018 Hubspot survey found that marketing was less attractive as a profession to newbies than stock-broking and law, and just slightly more attractive than lobbying and selling used cars. Up-skilling requires the marketing team to spend time in the business it serves. At British Land, I now have the marketing team hot-desking with the parts of the business they serve. At PA Consulting Group, I looked for opportunities to give high potential and senior marketers a business role on secondment to gain an understanding of business pressures and how a P&L works. I set up a Marketing Academy to support this process and linked it to career development. Indeed so successful are these Academies, I’ve set them up in every role I’ve had for the last ten years. In recruitment, I look for opportunities to bring in people with P& L experience. I want people who understand the pressures and priorities that come with that responsibility. In fact, this understanding is more valuable than advanced marketing qualifications or broad marketing experience.
So, step one is that: marketers need to focus our work on outcomes not inputs or outputs. Step two: we need to work at the strategic bits of marketing. Step three: we need to cut out the jargon. And step four is to build up the skills and expertise of the marketing team through training and recruitment. The final step next time!
-
I’ve been talking in recent posts about the first two of five steps that B2B marketers need to take to grow the link between marketing and the business leadership.
There is a real need for good marketing out there. And in my experience, it is possible to grow the link between marketing departments and the businesses they serve. It takes time, care, and proof of delivery to create trust. It requires a brilliant and dedicated team of marketers committed to the cause and it requires the preparedness of a few business executives to go on the journey to provide air cover. I think there are five steps that B2B marketers need to take to grow the link between marketing and the business. Time for step three!Step three is that we need to cut out the jargon. All of that marketing stuff we spend our formative years learning with the CIM, IDM, B2B Marketing, and many, many, many others is all very well and good, but it means not the first thing to the executive level. Executives are interested in bookings, revenue, margin, and cash, not brand, readers, mix, and concepts. Even talk of segments, targets, and positioning can leave the C-suite cold. So we shouldn’t talk to the business about these. Consider the language your business is using – because what you mean to say is not always what people hear. When I worked at PA Consulting Group, I banned the use of the word “brand” by my team. I asked marketers for ideas about how we were going to make the business money rather than how we were going to spend the business’s money. This is all about talking about the colour of the money not the colour of the event invite. Step three in the re-build of trust.So, step one is that: marketers need to focus our work on outcomes not inputs or outputs. And step two: we need to work at the strategic bits of marketing. And step three: we need to cut out the jargon. Next time: step four.
-
In yesterday’s post, I talked about the first of five steps that B2B marketers need to take to grow the link between marketing and the business leadership.
There is a real need for good marketing out there. And in my experience, it is possible to grow the link between marketing departments and the businesses they serve. It takes time, care, and proof of delivery to create trust. It requires a brilliant and dedicated team of marketers committed to the cause and it requires the preparedness of a few business executives to go on the journey to provide air cover. I think there are five steps that B2B marketers need to take to grow the link between marketing and the business. Time for step two!
We need to work at the strategic bits of marketing. If the business is to sit up and take notice of marketing, then marketers need to offer value and challenge on topics that matter to the business: where is the growth in the market? Where is the best margin to be made? What have our competitors missed? That means that marketers need to be the experts on the market. They need to have an accurate view of the universe of their market and who is playing where within it. That means data analysis and market research. If the marketing team already manage the relevant database and research tools, then it’s a matter of getting them analysing what they have rather than just administering them. If the marketing team does not control the assets, it’s about building links with those who have. This step also means getting out and meeting clients and hearing what they have to say. At PA Consulting Group, I introduced the practice of getting the marketing team to acquire client testimonials as a means of getting them out into the market. At EY, I asked the marketing team to conduct customer satisfaction surveys and win/loss reviews. At O2, I had the marketing team run client advisory boards that delivered insights to shape strategy, offers, and campaigns. And don’t forget the one advantage of being the event and programme organisers is that marketing have an opportunity to meet clients at events and programmes too. So change your marketers’ responsibilities to include contact with clients. The business is more likely to trust a team that is offering them advice based upon knowledge and experience that the business itself values.
So this must be step two in the re-build of trust between marketing and the business: we need to work at the strategic bits of marketing.
-
Perhaps it’s because it’s the end of the week, but I’m feeling bullish about our profession!
Marketing has a lot to offer the top table. Done properly the marketing department can be a critical constituent of doing business well, growing orders, increasing revenue, deepening margins, and driving cash by building and maintaining executive networks, attending business events, identifying pipeline opportunities, growing the pipeline, planning workshops for the business around how to respond to environmental challenges, creating and pricing and testing new offers, developing programmes for key accounts, and engaging with delivery teams to ensure a total brand experience for clients and employees – as well as running a damn fine event.
There is a real need for good marketing out there. And in my experience, it is possible to grow the link between marketing departments and the businesses they serve. It takes time, care, and proof of delivery to create trust. It requires a brilliant and dedicated team of marketers committed to the cause and it requires the preparedness of a few business executives to go on the journey to provide air cover. I think there are five steps that B2B marketers need to take to grow the link between marketing and the business. I’m going to talk about just one of those steps today: focus on business KPI outcomes not marketing KPI inputs or outputs.
Marketers need to focus our work on outcomes not inputs or outputs. The Back Office nature of what we have become together with the traditional difficulties of measuring which marketing activities have delivered which sales has led B2B marketing to focus instead on the number of event invites we’ve sent out, web hits, and the number of social media likes. While this is useful information for the marketing team, it tells the CEO nothing about what the activity is delivering financially to the business. And that is critical. Executives see marketers focused on things like brand loyalty and Twitter follows – which mean nothing to them. Hell, we’re still arguing about what a brand is ourselves, so how can we expect anyone else to have a clue? Social media is hardly a keen interest for the pre-millennials who sit on the Board:- an audit from a global PR firm earlier this year found just 2 per cent of CEOs from the top 50 companies listed in Fortune Magazine’s 2018 Global 500 rankings have a visible presence on Twitter, and that proportion is actually declining – it was 8% three years ago! Instead, marketing has to build a marketing dashboard that contributes to business KPIs. When I was at PA Consulting Group, I focused marketing around the number of business development meetings held between Partners and prospects. And as for account marketing, we agreed that marketing would assist on account pursuits that exceeded £0.5 million in value. To emphasise the point, I organised the marketing team at PA around delivering on the business KPIs with the “Go-to-Market” teams driving all marketing activity agreed with the business and the different capability and message teams focused upon supporting “Go-to-Market”. The business is more likely to trust a team that is delivering business KPI outcomes. That must be the first step then in the re-build of trust between the business and the marketing team.
-
The edited transcript of a speech I gave to the PRMoment (www.prmoment.com) conference on “Storytelling: The role of public relations as a content provider” on 20 November 2014 in London…
Story-telling is as old as the oldest civilization. The Australian aboriginals painted symbols from stories on cave walls as a means of helping the storyteller remember the story. The story was then told using a combination of oral narrative, music, rock art, and dance. People have used the carved trunks of living trees, sand, and leaves record stories in pictures or with writing. With the advent of writing and the use of stable, portable media, stories were recorded, transcribed, and shared over wide regions of the world.
But story-telling in business has taken off more recently. As far as I can tell, it first began to become a business buzzword in the late 1990s. It’s Steve Denning, the management writer, conveniently writing after the story-telling in business trend took off, who makes the claim of first having used the power of storytelling in the late 1990s to convince World Bank colleagues to share information. Denning found that when he used cogent Powerpoint arguments to show the importance of knowledge management, his argument fell on deaf ears. However, when he told the story of a health worker in a small town in Zambia was unable to access knowledge about the treatment of malaria, his arguments began to get real resonance because the story helped managers envision a different kind of future for their organization.
In 2001, Daphne Jameson argued that story-telling was a key tool for managers in internal communications to persuade employees to follow a particular line. She suggested that narrative discourse could help to resolve conflict, influence corporate decisions, and unify a group of employees. By collectively constructing stories, managers made sense of the past, coped with the present, and planned for the future.
But all of this isn’t just cod business school theory. Oh no. It’s scientifically proven! In a piece of research disturbingly funded by the US Department of Defense, researchers at Claremont University have shown how engaging with stories causes the brain to make oxytocin. By taking blood draws before and after a narrative, researchers found that character-driven stories consistently cause the synthesis of oxytocin. Further, the amount of oxytocin released by the brain predicted how much people were willing to help others; for example, donating money to a charity associated with the narrative.
And so the bandwagon of story-telling in business took off. Today, even big companies such as Microsoft and SAP employ people with the title “chief storyteller”. Microsoft’s in-house storyteller did the first “interview” with new chief executive Satya Nadella.
And like any business band-wagon, the marketing and PR profession has jumped right on board using the story-telling concept as a means of building customer loyalty.
And why has this suddenly become mainstream in marketing? Simple. There’s so much noise out there. Every week, we send 1 billion tweets. Every day we read 10 MB and hear 400MB of material every day. We see 1 MB of information every second. And so audience cut-through is more important than ever. And story-telling is positioned as key to cut-through because stories, it is said, naturally imprint themselves on our brains in a way that logic and analysis do not. As the amount of data we deal with grows, the stronger the need for storytellers who make sense of it all.
And so story-telling has become a favourite topic of PR, communications, and marketing conferences. In this month alone, Google tells me there are twelve other story-telling in business conferences in London currently being publicised.
Then there’s the many views expressed on story-telling in business that you can find in books. A quick glance at Amazon shows me that 63 books with on business story-telling in the title have been published in the last 90 days.
Most of this content is around how to tell stories in different case study situations. And while this is surely valuable, I’d like for us to be a bit more balanced in our embrace of story-telling techniques. Because there are five reasons why good marketing and PR should not embrace story-telling so readily and, if you ignore these reasons, there is a risk that story-telling won’t leave your business happily every after.
“USE STORY-TELLING MORE CAUTIOUSLY” IS MY MESSAGE.
REASON ONE: STORY-TELLING DOES NOT REQUIRE CUSTOMER-FOCUS.
In nineteenth century Germany, society’s view of dwarves were as sinister monsters. If the authors of “Snow White and the Seven Dwarves”, the Brothers Grimm had listened to their customers, then Snow White would probably not have shacked up with seven dwarves. The first reason why good marketing and PR should not embrace story-telling so readily is that the disciplines of marketing and story-telling start in different places. Story-telling risks your losing sight of who really matters when you design marketing content: your customer.
I’ll explain why. There is a risk that the very concept of story-telling causes your firm to start its content development in the wrong place – that is with your firm. In its purest form, story-telling is the process whereby your firm brand deals out a self-absorbed monologue to anyone within hearing distance. After all stories come from the teller not the listener. But if I’m in the audience for your firm’s story, why should I care? Who gives a damn what your business’s story is? In contrast, good marketing starts not with the firm but with the audience. Marketing is about being crystal clear on who your customers are, what they do, and what they need. It’s about learning about your target audience and supplying valuable content – helpful and relevant quality information – that addresses your audience’s needs. If that content can be supplied in a story-format that aids clarity then great; but the story is categorically not the end itself. Note that, unlike good marketing, the process of story-telling does not focus on building an interaction with a clear, target audience. Story-telling is a one-way broadcast phenomenon. Marketing is not.
I worked for PA Consulting Group for five years. PA as a firm has a fascinating history. It was set up during the Second World War to advise the UK government on how to drive much-needed extra productivity from the munitions factories at a time when it looked like Britain would lose the war. It’s a fascinating history that the story-telling approach could have led me to focus my marketing around. That was hugely tempting. But that’s not where I started. The successful re-branding work I led at PA Consulting Group started with our customers. The marketing team went out and spoke to customers across all of the sectors, countries, and services we operated in. We asked them to describe to us who they were, how their days ran, and where they needed help in their own words. These became the stories we used to focus our business internally in the development of relevant, compelling content for our future prospects. In this way PA Consulting Group is relevant to the needs of today’s audience not to the audience of the 1940s.
So that’s the first reason why good marketing and PR should not embrace story-telling: the disciplines of marketing and story-telling start in different places. Story-telling risks your losing sight of who really matters when you design content: your customer.
REASON TWO: STORY-TELLING DOES NOT NEED BUSINESS OBJECTIVES.
The second reason why good marketing and PR should not embrace story-telling so readily is that the two disciplines can have very different objectives. Unlike good marketing, story-telling does not encourage a focus on what the business is trying to achieve. When the Brothers Grimm began collecting folk tales, they did so with no particular objective in mind. They wrote in a cursory manner when they were unable to devote their energies to their more important scientific research. Indeed many story-tellers claim that their best work is committed when they have no clear objectives in mind. True: some great stories have a clear objective. But they don’t have to have such a goal in place. In contrast, marketing only has a purpose when there is a clear business objective and strategy.
I generated the content for PA’s re-brand for a purpose because the business was seeking to re-position itself as more than just a public sector consulting firm to respond to the decline in public investment in management consulting after the global economic down-turn. There was a clear business objective for our marketing work.
REASON THREE: STORY-TELLING CAN LOSE YOU CONTROL OF YOUR BUSINESS.
The third reason why good marketing and PR should not embrace story-telling so readily is that story-telling can cause you to lose control of your business. There is a risk that corporate story-tellers start to believe their own stories. Because, to guide and motivate their customers, their staff, their boards, and their investors; chief executives must make their narrative take root in their business. And to get their narratives to take root, leaders have to repeat their stories and reinforce them time and again. But business is inherently unpredictable. And that can mean that expectations for growth may need to be adjusted. Strategic direction may need to change. In other words, you need to change the ending to your story. And that can be disappointing to your audiences. And that can tempt story-tellers away from the truth. The temptation then is that white lies, embellishment, tale-telling are more attractive as a means of telling the story more neatly than the truth.
When I read that the Financial Conduct Authority is investigating the once mighty Tesco under the Financial Services Markets Act to establish whether it was guilty of issuing incorrect, false or misleading information to investors, I can’t help wondering whether executives there were faced with a situation where the facts were getting in the way of the good story that they’d created. I have never worked for Tesco, but I wonder how tempting might it have been for that business to continue to weave a tale of strong growth, rises in market share, and corporate dominance over Aldi, Lidl, and Sainsbury’s? Clearly that behaviour – if it existed at all – has not led to a happy ending.
REASON FOUR: STORY-TELLING CAN GET LOST IN THE TELLING.
The fourth reason why good marketing and PR should not embrace story-telling is that stories can lose something in the narrative re-telling. The efficacy of a story is frequently bound up in the efficacy of the story-teller. And when the story-teller exits the stage, much of the original alchemy exists too. The Apple story was compelling in the story-telling of Steve Jobs. Somehow Tim Cook is just not the same. Marketing is more about science than alchemy and therefore more able to create a practical tool-kit that can be applied by other people to communicate the marketing content. Marketing puts as much emphasis on the channels by which it can distribute its content in a predictable and reproducible way as it does on what its content is. Whereas it is difficult for story-telling to be about anything other than the story and the teller.
REASON FIVE: STORY-TELLING DIMINISHES THE MARKETING AND PR PROFESSION.
Finally, story-telling does not help the case for B2B marketing and PR in a business because it moves the concept of marketing in many people’s eyes away from being a profession into something that can be done by anyone. Because anyone can tell a story. You don’t need a qualification.
B2B Marketing and PR is the toughest profession in business.
Marketing and PR is tough. You’ve got to put yourself in the position of your customers in the environment in which they will encounter your product or service and respond to it. It’s fiercely competitive out there yet you’ve got to be ahead of the pack. You’ve got to stand out in a sea of noise. You’ve got to plan when people just want you to act. You’ve got to be creative in a rigorously analytical world. You’ve got to apply business analytics to the creative. You’ve got to be down in the detail while staying objective. You’ve got to stay focused in the face of distractions. You’ve got to be able to marshal your content, your channels, and your distribution – against all the odds. You have to be really disciplined and work intelligently and strategically.
B2B Marketing and PR is all of that. And some. This profession is younger than FMCG. It’s still got to prove itself. So you’ve got to prove yourself in a sceptical environment. Business doesn’t get B2B Marketing. At EY, my profession was seen as the colouring-in department, housed in a separate building to the rest of the business. And so you’ve got to persuade otherwise, explain, fight for every point, and lead the way. It can take years to turn around deeply-ingrained perception. Every day is tough. Add to the multiple internal stakeholders with multiple external customer groups. There’s no longer just one buyer, there’s many – with different needs, opinions, and expectations. And there’s no one to help you: all the marketing professional bodies focus on FMCG rather than B2B. You’re on your own.
And so what you do not need — what you absolutely do not need under any circumstances – is to give business the opportunity to dismiss what you do and devalue it further. Because that can sound the death knell of the marketing and PR profession in B2B.
So there you have them… five reasons why good marketing should not embrace story-telling. That’s not to say that story-telling can’t be a handy item in a marketer’s tool-kit. It can be. I’ve already shown how stories were an important part of my re-branding approach at PA. But they did not lead the process. One item does not make a tool-kit. We need to be really careful that the trend to tell stories does not ride rough shod over all we have achieved as marketers in our profession over the last few years.
-
There’s a great initiative that’s been kicked off by the Business Marketing Collective (www.businessmarketingcollective.com) to challenge marketers in the B2B space to say why they love B2B Marketing. You can follow the story on Twitter at #iloveb2b. Here’s my contribution…
I love B2B Marketing.
Because it is the toughest profession in business. And that means when you get it right it’s the most rewarding thing in the world. In the times when you’ve cracked it, you’ve got that brilliant king of the hill feeling. You’ve made it.
Marketing is tough. You’ve got to put yourself in the position of your customers in the environment in which they will encounter your product or service and respond to it. It’s fiercely competitive out there yet you’ve got to be ahead of the pack. You’ve got to stand out in a sea of noise. You’ve got to plan when people just want you to act. You’ve got to be creative in a rigorously analytical world. You’ve got to apply business analytics to the creative. You’ve got to be down in the detail while staying objective. You’ve got to stay focused in the face of distractions. You’ve got to be able to marshal your content, your channels, and your distribution – against all the odds.
B2B Marketing is all of that. And some. This profession is younger than FMCG. It’s still got to prove itself. So you’ve got to prove yourself in a sceptical environment. Business doesn’t get B2B Marketing. And so you’ve got to persuade, explain, and lead the way. Add to the multiple internal stakeholders with multiple external customer groups. There’s no longer just one buyer, there’s many – with different needs, opinions, and expectations. And there’s no one to help you: all the marketing professional bodies focus on FMCG rather than B2B. You’re on your own.
So it’s bloody hard. And that’s brilliant. You only get one life. So do something that challenges and rewards you in equal measure. It’s the most exciting job in the world.
That’s why I love B2B Marketing.
-
The edited transcript of a speech I gave to the PRMoment (www.prmoment.com) conference on “Social Media in B2B Communications” on 11 September 2014 in London…
So here we are again.
Another day, another social media conference.
Social media has been the favourite topic of PR, communications, and marketing conferences for at least five years now. Occasionally as a topic it gets rivalled by other fads like “content marketing” and the up and coming “emotional marketing”, but it never goes away for very long.
In this month alone, Google tells me there are thirteen other social media conferences in London.
Then there’s the many views expressed on social media that you can find in books. A quick glance at Amazon shows me that 237 books with “social media marketing” in the title have been published in 2014 alone thus far.
Or you could be reading one of the links put up on Twitter on “social media marketing” at a rate of one every five seconds.
Or you could be reading one of the 47 articles on social media marketing that were put online in the last hour and that Google can find for you right now.
There continues to be this feeding frenzy in our profession then for discussion of social media.
And this must reflect a real concern in our industry. A March 2014 study from IBM noted that social media worries were a CMO’s second biggest concern – just behind mobile marketing. 66% of CMOs feel unprepared for the growth of social media, said that study.
Which is a surprise to me. As a CMO and Marketing Director of some seven years’ standing.
Don’t get me wrong, the social media landscape is changing dramatically. In May, KPCB reported that the amount of global digital information being created and shared from pictures to tweets has grown by nine times in five years to 2TN gigabytes. There has been an explosive growth in photos: 500MM are uploaded and shared each day with growth accelerating by two times in one year. Videos are ramping up fast with 100 hours of footage per minute being uploaded to YouTube (from nothing just six years ago). Sound is emerging as a sharing medium: SoundCloud has 11 hours of sound uploaded to it per minute. And data sharing is emerging too – Yelp for example now has 100MM users and 39MM user-generated reviews.
Sharing of smart, user-centric technology is especially something that people want to be associated with in Saudi Arabia, China, and Russia – with the West lagging a little behind.
And people are using digital sharing to browse and review before they engage formally with a salesperson. CEB’s research for Google tells us that the average B2B buyer is now 57% of the way through the purchase decision process before engaging a supplier sales representative.
But while the social media landscape is changing dramatically, the basic tool-kit for deploying social media in B2B has not changed at all. The methodology for managing stakeholder complexity through social is the same now as I would have prescribed last year and the year before and the year before that. The most fundamental marketing approaches for managing social media have not altered.
That’s why I’m surprised at the frenzy in our profession around social media. Because the basic building blocks of what we need to do really haven’t changed.
There are five rules of B2B social media marketing that have stayed true for years now.
RULE ONE: You don’t use a radio to communicate to the deaf.
You tailor the channels you use to suit your audience, but also to suit your message and your brand. One approach does not fit all.
Some of your stakeholders may not want any communication via social media at all. This will be particularly true of a C-suite and Board-level audience who in many occasions don’t use social media. One in six FTSE100 board members is aged 65 or over with an average age of 57, according to July 2013 findings from Ortus. In May, Robert Half UK found that the average FTSE 100 CEO is aged 53. Social media is hardly a keen interest for the pre-millennials who sit on the Board:- an audit from global PR firm Weber Shandwick last year found just 2 per cent of CEOs from the top 50 companies listed in Fortune Magazine’s 2012 Global 500 rankings have a visible presence on Twitter, and that proportion is actually declining – it was 8% three years ago! This group will look to others to précis them of social media conversations. Here, canny marketers will therefore position themselves as information processors to aid clients. In professional services, it is not uncommon for consultants to position themselves as the trusted human interface between information and the client, literally printing out interesting pieces of thought leadership and so on for their audience. And I gathered lots of evidence as UK Marketing Director at EY to suggest clients appreciated this. My experience as CMO at PA Consulting Group showed me too that many in this group treated social media overall with not just suspicion but hostility.
Some of your stakeholders may want communication via a mix of online and offline channels according to the time of day. In the social media world Facebook tends to be a first port of call in the morning, followed by LinkedIn. Pinterest and Twitter tend to be a focus more in an afternoon. This timing is particularly important for social media channels like Twitter that use recency to prioritise content.
Many stakeholders will be on multiple sites and expect your presence on the same. Pew research has shown that women are four times as likely as men to be Pinterest users, and LinkedIn is especially popular among college graduates and internet users in higher income households. Twitter and Instagram have particular appeal to younger adults, urban dwellers, and non-whites. And there is substantial overlap between Twitter and Instagram user bases.
Your choice of channel should also be defined by the type of content you are looking to share. Twitter is a perfect channel to share news, infographics and video; but LinkedIn is better for sharing research and reports.
And your brand will help suggest what type of social media interventions you make too. In Australia in January, domestic-care brand Ajax released an online tool designed to help consumers clean-up their social media feeds. After connecting to a user’s Twitter account, the Social Wipes tool scans all followers to detect spam bots, while on Facebook it aggregates all page likes so that they can be easily unfollower. That’s a great bit of brand fit between a cleaning brand and social media.
The key to navigate all of this complexity is a marketing plan with a contact strategy that integrates offline and online channels. Any social media plan should be developed only in association with this integrated plan and linked into the same objectives. That’s the key to having really measurable social media activity too by the way – link the goals of your social media to your marketing goals. Measure the number of people that social media has driven to your website not the number of likes you’ve accumulated and you’re on the right lines.
So that’s rule one: You don’t use a radio to communicate to the deaf. One approach does not fit all. Stakeholder needs are multi-layered and therefore your social media strategy and your wider contact strategy should be multi-layered too.
RULE TWO: You get to the Prime Minister through SamCam.
We listen more to the opinions of our families than our friends, more to the opinions of our friends than our work colleagues, more to the opinions of our work colleagues than our suppliers, and more to our suppliers than our prospective suppliers, and overall more to people than machines.
And so to get a message to Mr Cameron that he will listen to, we are better off having an advocate in the form of one of his work colleagues like George Osborn, or better still one of his friends like Rebekah Brooks, or best of all family like Samantha Cameron rather than trying to network with him direct.
As Marketing Director of British Land, how do I get the UK HQ of a well-known TMT business to be based out of one of British Land’s buildings?
I know that the decision maker is the FD. And I know from social media research that the FD is best buddies with the HRD. I get the HRD to tweet about how desirable the area is. And note that all of that is about people relationships. I work in real estate but my social media focus is more about people networking as people than about buildings or face-less organisations doing so. Bricks don’t tweet.
Looking to internal comms in mid-sized and corporate businesses, employees listen to other employees before they listen to the corporate centre … so have your local advocates. At PA Consulting Group, we introduced Yammer for our internal comms and ensured that we had local advocates briefed on and supportive of different comms initiatives before we yammed them more widely.
The introduction of promoted posts on social networks doesn’t appeal to me for this reason. Social media is more impactful where you can work at building targeted and meaningful relationships. Instead get scale and reach by broadening the number of people who use social media on your behalf.
In all of the marketing roles I’ve had, I’ve encouraged employees to act as online brand ambassadors. Research from VentureBeat shows that this practice is increasing: 27 per cent of employees are encouraged to use personal social media accounts for work purposes, while 17 per cent said it is a requirement.
So that’s point two: the best person to network with the Prime Minister is SamCam. Because she will be able to relate to him better than we can every time.
RULE THREE: You don’t get anything in life for free.
Including social media. Social media is not a cheap activity to engage in.
Pay for your analytics so that they are meaningful and you can act upon them. Use tools to analyse what your stakeholders are saying about you and to react. When I re-branded PA Consulting Group a couple of years ago, I started with a brilliant social media analytics tool called Sysomos which allowed me to explore how PA’s stakeholders talked about PA relative to the competition. This wasn’t the only input to our re-brand but it played a key role.
Pay to schedule some (but not all) of your posts so that you get your content out there at the times audiences are most likely to see and engage with it – as mentioned earlier. This is about as scalable as mass automation gets in this space though. So don’t spend your monies on mass automation of social media. Social media does not sit as comfortably with automation as many other marketing channels. It’s all about the personal nature of social media interactions.
So, there’s no such thing as a free lunch – even with social media. Pay for your measurement and some scheduling.
Which brings us to… RULE FOUR: You need to tweet, not bark.
Never forget that social media is not a broadcast medium. You’re having a conversation. So you need people ready to interact with your audiences. This is about a personal one-to-one relationship with your stakeholders. And this can be a big challenge for large organisations like EY which operate a centralized social media strategy so as to reduce costs.
RULE FIVE: You don’t learn to bake by watching Bake-Off.
You learn to bake by practising baking. It’s the same with social media.
There is no such thing as best practice that you can pick up from a conference or a book or online – only practice. So rather than reading the blog of some bloke – who let’s face it you’ve never heard of – sounding off about his experience, get your own experience. Because what is relevant to me may not be relevant to you. I developed my approach to social media by literally taking time out from my day to try things out. Quite a lot of time at first. Now it’s more like an hour or two per week. Block out time in your calendar if it helps. But doing this is as important as any other meeting you may have in your diary. This is the way to find out how your stakeholders use social media and how to respond.
So that’s point five: you don’t learn to bake by watching Bake-Off. You bake for yourself.
In summary then, the social media world is changing.
But the way to manage it rather than let it manage you has not changed. You need to practice it yourself. You need to treat this activity at an individual not a mass level. You need to get close to your target audience. You need to invest in the right level of automation. And you need to interact rather than broadcast.
Best get on with it then. Good luck!
DaveStevensNow 