DaveStevensNow

Blogging about Profitable B2B Marketing | Branding | Digital | Team-Building

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Dave is an experienced global B2B Chief Marketing Officer / Marketing Director with an established reputation for delivering commercial results in start-up, mid-tier, and blue-chip businesses across technology, and business services and professional services sectors. Dave has worked for major brands such as Telefonica O2, EY, and Barclays and held posts from Chief Marketing Officer to Director of Online, has run his own business, and managed a P&L for a major corporate. He is chair and co-founder of the Business Marketing Club (www.businessmarketingclub.org.uk) – a network of B2B marketers. In 2019, he was named one of the top 100 B2B European marketing leaders (https://www.hottopics.ht/34199/top-100-b2b-european-marketing-leaders-2019/). He is a graduate of Cambridge University, a Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM) Chartered Marketer and holds a MBA with Imperial College, London. Dave is a keen cyclist and adventure traveller, is married, and lives in Buckinghamshire. You can read his blogs at www.DaveStevensNow.com.

  • The History of Content Marketing


    Here’s the edited text of my speech to the B2B Marketing Annual Conference held at Cavendish Square in London on 7 November 2013…

    To be clear, today I’m representing my views – not those of the firm that I work for. And it’s one of at least eight different views you’ll get on content marketing today.  In fact many more than eight because you get three formal breakout sessions for networking and then there’s drinks tonight.  So tens of different views on content marketing for you to choose from.  And that’s just today’s conference.

    And this isn’t the only conference on content marketing you might have been to or be going to to collect views.  In November 2013 alone there are five other content marketing conferences in London currently being publicised.  Let’s say that there are eight speakers at each event – so that’s forty additional viewpoints that you could expose yourself to.

    Then there’s the many views expressed on content marketing that you can find in books.  A quick glance at Amazon shows me that seventy-one books with content marketing in the title have been published in 2013 alone.

    Or you could be reading one of the 34,560 links put up on Twitter on content marketing in the last twenty-four hours.

    Or you could be reading one of the 969,000,000 articles on content marketing that Google can find for you right now.

    Given that there are 969,034,679 views on it that you can easily access right now, the history of content marketing is rather astonishingly short.  The marketing textbooks I used when I was a groovy young marketer back in the day make no mention of content marketing at all.  Not a passing reference in Kotler, Armstrong, Saunders, and Wong’s seminal Principles of Marketing You won’t find the term in Malcolm McDonald’s Marketing Plans: How to Prepare Them, How to Use Them.  Not a peep in Wilson and Gilligan’s Strategic Marketing Management. What about something more B2B and a bit more recent?  Kotler’s 2002 tome, Marketing Professional Services maybe?  Nope. Nothing there.  The CIM‘s Marketing Professional Services by Michael Roe from 2001?  Sorry no.

    The first mention of “content marketing” that I can find anywhere as a term dates back to 2007 – just six years ago – when Cleveland Ohio writer and self-styled entrepreneur Joe Pulizzi set up the Content Marketing Institute (CMI), a body that pronounces a better way for brands to market.  Joe Pulizzi has set up a CMI website, a society magazine called “Chief Content Officer”, conferences, and bespoke training.  He even awards one individual with content marketer of the year status.

    So content marketing is a term that’s been invented to proliferate the views of Joe Pulizzi.  But there’s nothing wrong with inventing a new term if it adds something to the way we do marketing.  And the hype suggests that this new term really does give us something new.  Mikal E. Belicove says that “When it comes to marketing strategies, content marketing has just been crowned king, far surpassing search engine marketing, public relations and even print, television and radio advertising as the preferred marketing tool for today’s business-to-business entrepreneur.”  Wow!  And B2B Marketing magazine has got the numbers to prove it:- 51% of B2B marketers identified content marketing as being the most important tool for generating leads, outscoring brand awareness (38%), thought leadership (34%) and sales (29%).

    So what does the term “content marketing” give us?  Because it’s a new term, I have to look to the internet for the definition.  Mikal E. Belicove defines it as “the creation and publication of original content — including blog posts, case studies, white papers, videos and photos — for the purpose of generating leads, enhancing a brand’s visibility, and putting the company’s subject matter expertise on display.”   But I’m not sure what this adds to any marketing debate. Is anyone really suggesting that there are messages that we send out that don’t contain “content” or that are in some way not designed to generate leads, build visibility, or show off a company’s expertise?  Surely you can’t have search engine marketing without content to draw your audience to?  You can’t have public relations or advertising without content?  The first definition of marketing was coined in 1935 and read: “Marketing is the performance of business activities that direct the flow of goods and services from the producer to the consumer.”  Now there are lots of things in that definition that we should quibble with, but it’s pretty clear that one of the critical business activities even in those days would have been to ensure you have content of some sort to deliver to the consumer.

    Let’s turn then to Joe Pulizzi to define the term he claims to have coined.  Joe says that “content marketing is story-telling by brands to attract and retain customers.” Story-telling is not new though.   And nor is story-telling by brands.  The best marketers and communicators have always used storytelling to connect and inspire an audience to act. They have used traditional storytelling structures with beginnings, middles and ends: with heroes and plots and settings.  Take Apple MacIntosh’s ad from the third quarter of the 1983 Super Bowl football game directed by film story-teller Ridley Scott (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zfqw8nhUwA).  Here an athlete representing Apple is the inspirational, creative, and free-thinking hero over-throwing IBM’s Big Brother in a well-established plot based on George Orwell’s novel. Another example?  Here’s one from a decade earlier (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HgzEBLa3PPk). The chimps are the heroes solving life’s trials with a cup of PG.   And back in the nineteenth century, Thomas J. Barratt told the story of how people got on by using Pears soap.  He added a bar of Pears soap into the foreground of John Everett Millais’s painting of well-groomed middle class children.  He established the Pears Annual in 1891 and the one-volume encyclopedia Pears Cyclopedia in 1897. He launched an annual “Miss Pears” competition in which parents entered their children into a high-profile hunt for a young brand ambassador to be used on packaging.  He recruited scientists and celebrities of the day like British music hall singer with a famous ivory complexion Lille Langtry to endorse the product.  We’re not hawking product features here, we’re telling a story.  We have an integrated marketing campaign that tells a story.  There’s nothing new here. It’s marketing, stupid.  And that’s reflected in the B2B Marketing bench-marking report on content marketing from June 2013 where 76% of marketers said that their organisation’s content marketing strategy was included as part of their overall marketing strategy.  Well, duh.  Of course it is.  Because all we really have in “content marketing” is a new term describing an old term (“marketing”).  How do you tell a story through your marketing?  You find a story that people will want to share.  And you share it.  How people share the story may have changed: on Twitter rather than over the water-cooler.  But the physical fact of sharing has not.

    So if this definition of content marketing does not really work as defining something new, where do we go?  Let’s look to the way that august publication B2B Marketing magazine frames all this: “Can you hear the rumble?  That’s the sound of a million pieces of content tumbling towards your business audience, threatening to overwhelm them.  It’s the Content Avalanche.”  Okay.  So here we’re postulating that there’s more content out there than ever before creating more noise for the audience and therefore we marketers need to consider how we hone our content to get cut-through.  This is interesting.  Technology has made our target audience so much more reachable than before.  We have never been more connected with our clients, we have never before had more market information at our finger-tips, we have never before been so instantaneously able to influence our audience.  We may have always had conferences and books on hot topics like content marketing, but never before the Internet and the proliferation of noise created by social media and blogging and the means through search engines to find these quickly.

    Okay – but let’s not get carried away.  Perhaps our target audience isn’t quite so overwhelmed as we think.  For now, our buyers are still fundamentally the pre-millennial audience.  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.  What that means is that much of our target audience already has an automatic means of screening out most of the content delivered by new technology.  They are not exposed to it!  Social media is hardly a keen interest for the pre-millennials who sit on the Board:- an audit from global PR firm Weber Shandwick earlier this 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!  What that means is that it’s likely you have rather more time to adapt to the content avalanche that perhaps you’ve been led to believe.  The snow is building, but it hasn’t yet got momentum.  At EY, I have found that many of our clients here today in 2013 still want to receive content in hard copy and indeed won’t read anything in any other format.  And where new technology is creeping through, it’s in the form of e-mail not social media.

    And we humans are quite adaptable to new conditions anyway.  And this content avalanche is not as new a condition as all that.  As a publisher in South Africa at the dawn of the twentieth century, Gandhi would experiment with space, design, and tone in his newspaper articles to give his readers an opportunity to absorb properly the avalanche of content that they faced.  He would give very specific advice to readers, urging them to pause, to memorise, to write out passages and keep their own cuttings.  Content overload is not new and we’ve developed coping mechanisms to deal with it.  We will select content to access on the basis of what we trust and what interests us.  We will ignore most promotional advertising, throw blanket direct mail in the recycling bin, slam the phone down on cold callers.  We will even use technology as an aid to content selection with the likes of Twitter list feeds and iTunes podcast lists.  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.  And there’s lots of evidence to suggest clients appreciate this.  So the way to market in this world is to build trust in the eyes of your target market by proving your expertise and your usefulness.  Educate and entertain them.  Show them best practice case studies, tell them your thought leadership around what to look out for and how to achieve success, present client testimonials where you’ve helped others in the same position as them.  And be succinct, so respecting the time that your audience has to consume all this.  We need to work towards operating in a world of 140 characters of text or six seconds of film.

    And perhaps we’re not being subtle enough in looking at the influence of technology on content.  Perhaps it is not so much the proliferation of content that is the new thing as the change in the nature of the content itself.  Technology enables marketers to interact with their audience like never before.  This means creating and sharing valuable, well-produced, creative content freely because if you give you will get. And it means more personalised content.  Or at least content delivered by new technology rather than old.

    Perhaps. But again if there is an avalanche on its way, it’s not yet here.  In the B2B Marketing Content Bench-Marking Report, the most frequently used content type is a press release – with case studies and white papers not far behind.  None of these types are known for their interactive capabilities and none of them are new. The first press release dates back to 1906, the first case study to 1829, and the first white paper to 1922.  And as for personalised content, the B2B Marketing Content Bench-marking Report suggests that 78% of content is tailored merely to a particular industry.  In other words, bog-standard segmentation, targeting and positioning remains the order of the day.

    Again when the avalanche comes, there are things to do here: your content will be less self-contained so that people want to engage with you about it and it will be written by a person with a personality that people want to engage with.  Great examples out there now come from the blogs of software company Balsamiq or of Intel’s Inside Scoop web-site.  So be ready.  But the avalanche has not landed.  We’re not yet ready to rumble.

    There is mounting indirect evidence that technology is having an impact on us all through heavy stimulation and rapid shifts in attention.  This has an impact on the way we do all of our marketing including the content elements.  In a 2012 study by the Pew Research Centre, 90% of 2,462 US teachers interviewed said that technology was creating an easily distracted generation of people with short attention spans.  In interviews, teachers described what might be called a “Wikipedia problem,” in which students have grown so accustomed to getting quick answers with a few keystrokes that they are more likely to give up when an easy answer eludes them.  The Pew research found that 76 percent of teachers believed students had been conditioned by the Internet to find quick answers.  Teachers also said they were using more dynamic and flexible teaching styles.  One said: “I’m tap dancing all over the place. The more I stand in front of class, the easier it is to lose them.”  What does this mean for marketing?  It means we have to make our marketing easily accessible across the different channels that your audience is likely to use.  Recreate the Pears soap experience for a new generation.  And make your marketing big, bold, and attracting.  We need to be the flashing light-bulbs of our respective businesses.

    Technology is also changing when our audiences consume our marketing.  At my previous firm, we found that tablet technology in particular was ensuring that our content was being accessed in the evenings and at weekends.  And the time of viewing was changing the type of content being viewed.  Our audiences were being less siloed in the content they looked at.  More prepared to roam across topic areas and types of content.  That means marketers need to provide broader and deeper content than before.  We are entering a world where the headline content needs to be shorter and the detail deeper.

    So where are we?  “Content marketing” is a new term with no history and there’s no standardised definition behind it.  Therefore before you have any conversation with anyone about it, you need to agree a definition as a common reference point.  I have found five possible definitions.  One. If you work for the Content Marketing Institute, the term references brand story-telling, which is not a new thing.  Marketers responding to this need to tell a story that others will want to share.  Two.  For some, the term references a response to a growing proliferation of content that overwhelms the audience because of developments in technology.  There are lots of reasons why you might say that this avalanche has been called too early.  If you buy this definition though, you can use technology and the human as intermediaries to overcome it.  Three.  For some, the term references the change in content brought on by new technology.  Again, there are many reasons why you might say that we are not yet there.  But if you buy this definition, then look to engage your audience with content that your audience wants to respond to shared by personalities your audience trusts.  Four.  For some, the term references the changing way that audiences consume content.  There is a case for this and you need to make your content very accessible and attracting in response.  Five.  The term references the changing times when audiences view marketing.  There is a case for this and it requires deeper and broader content provision than in the past.

    The hype around content marketing is undeserved.  There’s no revolution here.  But there are some interesting developments around technology that you need to ensure you cater for in your marketing over the next few years.

    Let content be king if you want.  But don’t forget that in this country we stopped living under an absolute monarch during the civil war 350 years ago.

  • Another thing to worry about: should social media be on your “to do” list?


    This article was produced for the Autumn 2013 launch issue of the magazine .so. For more detail, visit http://www.tcg.so/

    Whether your in-tray is physical, virtual, metaphorical, or even a mix of the three, the one thing you can be sure of is that nowadays you have quite a lot in it. That means, you need to take real care before adding something else. Should social media be in that tray?
    An April 2013 survey of Fortune 500 companies by Domo found that social media isn’t really on the agenda as yet: only nine Fortune 500 CEOs have active Twitter accounts, and just 38 are on Facebook. LinkedIn has attracted a better showing, with profiles of 129 Fortune 500 CEOs, but even this amounts to just 26 per cent of this high profile group. However the same survey suggests that the younger generation of executives use social media more than the over-50s. So, social may not be on the agenda now, but perhaps it may be very soon.
    I believe that, unlike many other C-suite or NED issues, what to do about social media is a personal decision. Anyone who makes a sweeping statement that all businesses should or should not be using social media is wrong. Rather, it depends on your objectives.

    (1) If your objective is around personal research and learning, then social media can be helpful as one such source of information. For example, as a CMO, I use social media as one (but not the only) means of keeping up to date with developments in B2B marketing. I am a member of a number of relevant discussion groups on LinkedIn, follow selected experts on Twitter, and contribute my own views. To use social media in this way will require you to do so directly and that’s a time commitment. There are many time-saving tools available to helps such as Hootsuite, but at the end of the day if you do not make a regular commitment in your week to use social media and to interact over it, then this method of learning is probably not for you. I find that the daily commute provides me with the opportunity to use social media and with a convenient bounded timeframe in which I can start and stop
    (2) If your objective is around keeping up to date with your network, social media can be helpful as one such connecting tool. This objective is bounded by generation. If your network is over the age of 50, the chances are that it engages by e-mail rather than social networking sites, such as Twitter or Facebook. By contrast, the 40-somethings in your network will be using text and instant messaging. It’s only for those in your network below the age of 40, that social media comes into its own
    (3) It may be that you want to build up your personal brand in your industry or specialism and that social media can help if your target audience are millennials. Sir Richard Branson, founder and chairman of Virgin Group, active on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+, maintaining a thought leadership blog on LinkedIn and a personal blog on the Virgin website, is the most obvious example of someone brand-building in this way. Another is Peter Aceto, CEO of ING Direct, who uses Twitter and Google+, and writes a blog called “Direct Talk”
    (4) It may be that social media can help the internal communications challenges of your business. If knowledge is siloed in your business or if senior management is from a different generation to front-line management, you may want to see if a tool like Yammer can assist. Such tools have had a big impact on collaboration and knowledge-sharing in professional service organisations where it has been introduced. However, first you will need to publicise some guidelines and a policy to define terms of engagement
    (5) It may be that your objective is around improving your business’s external communications. If your customers are on social media, then you will want to be too. The question here is not about whether but to what extent. Should you focus on listening or interacting? There is much to be said for the former approach. An overwhelming 93 percent of BRANDfog survey respondents in 2012 believed that CEO engagement in social media helps communicate company values, shape a company’s reputation, and grow and evolve corporate leadership in times of crisis. And you need to keep watching your customer mix to understand how social media usage changes. With the BRIC middle class expected to soar from roughly five per cent of the population to more than 40 per cent in the next two decades, change will be speedy.

    So don’t follow the herd: because you will fail. Select your objectives, make your choice, and commit. Good luck!

  • Not up where you belong…


    marketing is too hardThe B2B Marketing team have asked me to speak at the next Leaders’ Forum on 19 September on the subject of why marketing has become so disconnected from the boardroom and what we can do about it.

    Perhaps recognising that I’m not such a big name draw as my fellow speakers from Fujitsu, O2, Circle Research, and The Next Big Thing or as the legendary Joel Harrison, Samantha Pashley at B2B Marketing has asked me to do a bit more blogging and even to try out a Vine or two before my talk to big myself up a bit.

    Well I’m always up for a challenge. So here we go…

    At the Forum, the B2B Marketing team will be talking about a fascinating piece of research – the 2013 B2B Leaders Report. The statistics in the report that really drew my attention were that three quarters of marketing leaders (VPs, Heads of, Directors, CMOs) in medium sized businesses or corporates agree that marketing is central to their organisation’s success, and only half feel it is getting the resources it needs to deliver that success. In fact I’ve had to re-read these numbers a couple of times to be sure I’ve not misunderstood.

    For what that means is that 24% of CMOs think that their own marketing is not key to the success of their business. How can we explain this? Perhaps those leaders simply felt that they do not do marketing terribly well and were being honest about it. If that’s the case, then all power to them! The first step on the path to improvement is to recognise that things aren’t optimal.

    But I fear that the truth behind the 24% figure is somewhat different… My own twenty years of experience suggests that it rather points to the many B2B marketing departments that have lost their way, their confidence in their ability to matter to the businesses they support shot to pieces by years of criticism or misunderstanding from the Board. B2B marketing departments once co-located with Board members have been moved away. The areas of marketing most associated with outcome like sales have been stripped away. The CMO has been pushed out of key discussions on business strategy and targeting. The marketing team has been limited to event execution or brochure design. Broad marketing terms like “brand” have been limited to encompassing the company logo use. B2B marketing has been moved into a place in the organisation where it can’t do any harm. Because no Board can yet consider getting rid of the marketing department completely. Yet.

    And that picture seems to be confirmed by the second statistic that I quoted above. Marketing is not getting the assets it needs because it is no longer a credible force in the Boardroom. It no longer has a voice. And far from being improved by the digital age, the malaise is deepening.

    That’s my personal experience and that of those in my B2B marketing network – indeed I have spent my career pushing to get marketing back up where it belongs.

    This is the malaise that I want to discuss at the Leaders’ Forum (you can book your place at http://www.b2bmarketing.net/b2b-leaders-forum) or for the next few posts on this blog. Do you see the same malaise? What can be done?

    Drop me a line here or on Twitter (@DaveStevensNow) or on LinkedIn (http://uk.linkedin.com/in/davestevensnow) and let me know your marketing role, the size of your company and whether or not you sit on the Board, how frequently you discuss marketing with your CEO, and whether marketing plays an advisory role in your business…

    I’ll collate your views and report back.

  • Look at the state we’re in…


    There are some great marketing networks out there right now which are really looking out for the future of our profession. A few weeks ago I went along to what will hopefully be the first of many “meet a mentor” gatherings run by the Chartered Institute of Marketing where seasoned marketers offered help and advice to those just getting started. And last night Alasdair Hall-Jones from the Marketing Society kindly invited me along to the launch of the society’s new “Manifesto for Marketing” on the top floor of the swanky Aviva offices right next to the Gherkin in the City.

    The Manifesto is worth a look – you can find it at https://www.marketingsociety.co.uk/events-gallery/marketing-manifesto-sustainable-growth. It defines marketing as “creating sustainable growth by understanding, anticipating, and satisfying customer need” and challenges marketers to “pursue a purpose, champion customers, and mobilise their organisation”.

    I like the approach and particularly like the fact that it’s not rocket science. It doesn’t mention terms like ‘brand’, ‘digital’, ‘comms’, and ‘micro-environmental analysis’ – the terms that got marketing as a profession into the state it is currently in.

    Because I don’t quite agree with the Marketing Society on why a manifesto might be needed in the first place. The Society argues that marketing is currently “in rude health” (to quote Amanda Mackenzie last night), but that the world is changing and marketing needs to respond. I believe that marketing is in a pretty bad state right now. And it’s the fault of marketers that we’ve got it into that place.

    There was no need for a manifesto for marketing just ten years ago or twenty years ago. Back then, marketing was a burgeoning profession.  Businesses were recognising the needs for a marketing department for the first time and growing and funding them accordingly.  The future looked bright.

    But marketers squandered that future.  A marketing manifesto is needed now not because the business environment has changed but because the business view of marketing has changed.  Marketers have alienated our business audience. We haven’t talked in language that business understands. We haven’t talked about ‘sales’, ‘revenue’, ‘profit’, ‘growth’. Instead we’ve been talking about ‘brand’, ‘social media’, ‘sponsorships’ – terms that even marketers themselves can’t agree about. We haven’t been transparent in our terminology and we haven’t been inclusive in our discussions. And so business no longer knows what marketing actually is.  And so we’ve lost the respect that our profession had in the last generation.

    There’s a crisis in our profession. But we are waking up to this.  That’s why this manifesto has appeared now. It’s not even the first marketing manifesto that’s appeared this month – see for example: http://econsultancy.com/uk/blog/62668-our-modern-marketing-manifesto-will-you-sign.

    The driver for a manifesto that we can all get behind is important because it defines what we now do with it. The Marketing Society‘s manifesto was written by marketers.  The gathering last night was only of marketers and sought only the opinion of marketers about it. The manifesto is published on a speciality marketing site. That’s a good start.  But I think that the marketing profession needs to reach out to the rest of business to get their views on what marketing is and should be. We need to seek the views of CEOs and senior business leaders about what marketing should be. What’s the view of the CBI?  What about BABI? And so on. If we don’t consult more widely, we risk being as insular in our creation of a manifesto as we did in our conduct of marketing over the last twenty years.

    In my view, a marketing manifesto is a great idea – which ever version we run with – but we need to get the implementation right if we are really going to turn things around.  And I hope that we can.

    Because business needs good bold marketing more than ever.  And that’s a profession that I really want to be a part of.

  • Mind the gap between the boardroom and the marketing department!


    By Dave Stevens
    Google+

    I’ve been thinking rather a lot recently about the connection between businesses and their marketing departments. In all too many of the organisations that I come across, there is a regular complaint from execs that they do not know what their marketing department does or how it benefits their business. Frequently I find that the marketing teams in those organisations have lost their focus on delivering the goals of the execs or else are not communicating in KPI language that the business understands how what they do delivers those goals. Marketers frequently assume that business leaders know what marketing is. Business execs do not.

    An excellent article in the Cambridge Marketing Review led me to seek out a great paper from the Capsicum Group (www.thecapsicumgroup.com) on the subject this week which was based on in-depth interviews with C-suite and senior marketers from 40 corporates across a representative range of sectors.  Capsicum conclude that the business-marketing gap is caused by marketers not being seen as peers by the leaders of the business – something that then goes on to make the gap still wider. This means that marketers are not getting a seat at the strategy table and are focused instead on tactics. The gap isn’t helped by the increasingly back office nature of the marketing team that gets them away from clients and instead focuses them on the things that matter less. If marketing are responsible for brand in such organisations, it’s usually that they’re responsible for the visual elements, but not the way the brand is actually experienced by clients and employees each day. It all seems a bit bleak for marketers then. Could the last marketer out of the back office turn out the light?

    What turns bleakness into frustration is that 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 marketing out there. And in my experience, it is possible to rebuild 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 execs to go on the journey to provide air cover. There’ll be slip-ups and set-backs along the way that require remedy and re-work. There will be times when the gap feels less bridged than ever. But what a brilliant feeling when things begin to change! And that makes all of the effort so very much worthwhile for the business as a whole – including the marketing department.

  • The tablet is here. Deal with it…


    iPadorPC

    By Dave Stevens
    Google+

    Venture capitalist Mary Meeker recently presented a paper at Stanford comparing the first ten quarters of shipments of each of Apple‘s “I” devices – iPod, iPhone, and iPad. The paper showed that iPad shipments in the product’s first 30 months outrate the iPhone threefold. By January 2012, according to the Pew Research Center, 29% of US adults owned tablet computers or eReaders. Meeker noted that 48% of American children wanted an iPad for Christmas 2012, while 36% wanted an Ipad Mini.

    And if ever you wanted proof that the age of the tablet has truly arrived, I can tell you that it has even reached the board-room of the firm where I work. Now that is arriving! The quarterly thud of Board papers arriving on the door mat has been replaced by the ping of a file arriving on the iPad’s Directors’ Desk. Our 30 people-strong Management Committee operates in the same way as the Board. And that’s not a problem, because every one of the 30 Senior Partners that attend have a tablet. For presenters, the ordeal of presenting Powerpoint slides displayed on big television screens at the front of the Board room is no more. Slides are now available on Directors’ Desk – creating a new challenge for presenters about how to get your audience’s attention when they are looking down at a personal screen on their laps. (Best solutions I’ve found so far here by the way are:  (1) to tell your audience that you expect that they have read their slides in advance and so they should put down their iPads and discuss or (2) to take advantage of the medium to offer personalised content for each reader.)

    The change at the Board room means a change in the way B2B firms do sales.  Because CxOs are using tablets more, the tablet is increasingly being used as a sales tool. Which means marketers need to get their sales support materials into a new medium.

    More fundamentally, the arrival of tablet is changing the way marketers interact with customers. Customers are accessing marketing content at different times and in different ways. Most obviously so far, B2B online visiting times are changing out of traditional 9 to 5 and into evening. And perhaps for the first time, visitors are genuinely browsing – looking around and clicking on a wider variety of sites and content areas that interest them – perhaps reflecting the increased time and less disciplined mood offered by the new setting in which tablets enable B2B content to be accessed. According to the US Census Bureau, 144 million Americans spend 52 minutes per day travelling – and that is time that could be spent accessing content by tablet. And according to Morgan Stanley, the average American spends more than three hours per day in front of the television – time for a second screen. Genuine browsing calls for deeper content than B2B firms are used to (hence the growth in focus on “content marketing”). Because the content has to compete with other distractions such as television, marketers are now looking to new means of getting their messages across – hence the growth of video, the craze for branded tablet applications, and the bizarre infographics bubble which I write about elsewhere in these pages. In advertising, the tablet is bringing a focus on AdBank (a video format that lets users choose to watch a programme in return for credits or the ability to skip the ad after a few seconds), full page banners, pre-roll with overlay (offering content within the ad), and rich media interstitials.

    And the prediction from Meeker is that tablet and smartphone installed base will exceed that of the PC globally by the end of this quarter. We have arrived in a new world. Now marketers need to learn how to survive and thrive within it.

    PCoriPad

  • Something is rotten in the state of marketing…


    By Dave Stevens
    Google+

    I set off for the British Film Institute on London’s South Bank this morning to attend the B2B Marketing Awards Showcase event (www.b2bmarketing.net/awards-showcase). To my knowledge this event is a new concept in events in the marketing space where, rather than simply attending an awards ceremony to watch winners collect trophies presented by B-list comedian presenters while simultaneously trying to down as much of the free wine as possible, we actually listen to what the award winners did to win the accolade and the postulate how we can emulate their achievements in our own organisations. It’s a sobering and worthy idea and therefore could only really have been invented in this age of austerity.

    The agenda was a packed one – we heard from twelve award winners and reviewed upteen Powerpoint slides. The first thing that struck me was the good sense of what the speakers presented. We heard stories of marketers starting their work by conducting client research, building marketing plans, focusing on internal communications first, measuring their results – all things taught in any basic Chartered Institute of Marketing course. These are the first things we learn at marketing kindergarten. Which makes it worrying that we need to remind ourselves of these basics. So many marketers do not follow these steps and I have to ask myself why that is. Just what has gone so wrong that the elite of the marketing community feel the need to spend so much time iterating the basics to their peers or that we feel the need to note down their words and nod sagely?

    The second thing that struck me was the degree to which the speakers flagged the key to their success as ensuring marketing worked closely with sales. Again this new fact was fervently grasped by the audience as an amazing insight. But surely this should not be a revelation either? Surely marketing and sales departments are aiming to achieve the same thing? How can it not make sense for them to work together?

    I left the event feeling somewhat uneasy that my profession seems so uncomfortable with its very fundamentals…

  • The Social Media Crash is coming…


    By Dave Stevens
    Google+

    I see that B2B Marketing magazine has published its latest IT Marketing Benchmarketing Report (go to http://www.b2bmarketing.net/it-benchmarking-2013 for details). And I’m delighted to report that this survey of 200 technology marketing practitioners (and one day we should get behind exactly what a marketing practitioner is. I’m a CMO and I consider myself to spend an alarmingly small amount of time being a marketing practitioner) contains great news.

    In fact I’d go as far as to say this contains the best news for e-marketers for many years.

    Ready?

    Here goes:-
    According to the survey, the least effective marketing channel or technique is…social media. 53% of respondents regarded it as “not very important”. 69% of respondents could not say how to demonstrate ROI on social media. Just 12% currently make any use of it at all.

    Those with a big backlog of B2B Marketing magazines or an obssessive recollection of useless marketing statistics – and I leave you to decide which category you think I fall into – will recall that previous surveys have ranked social media much more positively; indeed as a potential game changer.

    So this “social media crash” is quite a turnaround. And it is good news.

    It’s fairly safe to say that as I write an occasional blog, use Twitter and LinkedIn and Facebook regularly, and spend a fair amount of my marketing career revamping company websites at Barclays and O2 and PA Consulting Group, and championing the importance of e-marketing teams within a marketing function, I am an advocate of digital techniques for marketing. Such techniques are faster, more cost effective, provide a better customer experience.

    But as with every new entry into the marketing mix of communications channels over the last few decades, social media has been placed on a pedestal as being the marketing techique that changes everything. It can do at least six impossible things before breakfast. And it is true that social media can deliver some amazing things: increased awareness of a business, increased traffic to a website, more favourable perceptions of a brand, the ability to monitor customer and prospect conversations about an organisation, the ability to develop targeted marketing activities, a better understanding of customer perceptions of their brand, improved insight about target markets, and so on. But it is just one part of the marketing channel mix – a neighbour to the rest and not a substitute.

    And this IT survey recognises that truth for the first time. If an effective marketing channel is one that delivers you the IT technology sale, you probably wouldn’t use social.

    And yes – it’s just one survey. And not a great one at that: the marketing tools that respondents could choose from in the survey is hardly a mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive list. Content marketing hardly sits alongside third party events for instance.

    This is not definitive. But it’s the first sign that social media is finally finding its place in the marketing tool-kit. Such an adjustment happened with the web ten years ago as the dot-com crash followed the dot-com bubble. It is beginning to happen now with social media. And that can only be a good sign.

  • Does your business know what it really wants?


    By Dave Stevens
    Google+

    I was lucky enough to meet with Professor Malcolm McDonald this week at a gathering of sales and marketing leads arranged by PA Consulting Group.  McDonald proved to be the draw for many of the attendees.  He is something of a legend in marketing circles alongside the likes of Kotler and Levitt.  McDonald is the author of over 40 books, including the best seller Marketing Plans: How to prepare them, how to use them.

    That book was a big influence on me as I learned the ropes about how to become a marketer.  It explains how marketers should put together a marketing plan starting with an audit, then setting marketing objectives and strategies, then defining the tactics for each aspect of the marketing mix, and finally building an implementation plan around the same.  It then goes on to outline how to operate the plan that has emerged, how to monitor and control it.  It is a remarkably effective methodology that I’ve employed with success throughout my marketing career.

    However, it depends upon businesses first knowing what they want to achieve.  And frequently they do not.

    A fair portion of businesses have no such thing as a business plan.  In a 1998 study conducted by Leslie Rue of Georgia State University, 40% of the 300 or so businesses who answered his survey admitted they had no written business plans at all.  A more recent survey of small businesses in the US found that less than a third had a plan.  A lack of a business plan can make it hard to develop a marketing plan.

    And even when there is a business plan, it may not be one that has been communicated to the business.  There is something about the concept of a strategy document that appears to demand the header private and confidential.  What is agreed is not communicated outside of the board room.  And frequently the marketing department is perceived as being outside of the need to know group.

    And even when there is a business plan, it may not address the questions that the marketing department need answers to; namely what is the desired level of profitability over what time period, which products or services are to be deployed in which markets, what production and distribution facilities, personnel, and finance are available, what is the approach to CSR and to the City…

    There has been a significant amount of discussion in the marketing press about the challenges of researching the customer when the customer does not know what they want.  But the same is frequently true of the business selling products and services to that customer.  Businesses frequently don’t know what they want.

    However that does not mean that marketers should abandon the concept of a marketing plan altogether.  We simply need to be more flexible about how we achieve it.

    1.  Be persistent about asking for the plan.  If your business leads haven’t shared the business plans with the marketers, marketers need to ask them why not.  It may be that the marketing department was simply not considered as an audience for the plan and that you need to explain the importance of your having that visibility.  Or it may be that there are sensitive parts of the plan that need to be excised first or that marketers need to sign up to the confidentiality obligations of others.  But be clear you can’t write a marketing plan without a business plan.

    2.  Be clear about the questions you need answering.  If there is no business plan, marketers need to ask the business leaders what they are looking for strategically and then commit these business objectives to writing and share them with the business.  This may mean helping the business leaders to develop their plan yourself.

    3.  Infer the answers to the answers to your questions.  If the business leaders can’t answer your questions, then you need to infer the answers.  It may be that you can do this from observing the way that the business behaves and then inferring the cause and then putting that into writing.  This may mean that you need to refresh the resulting marketing plan more frequently – but that in itself is no bad thing.

    So be persistent.  Ask the questions.  Observe behaviour.  And write the marketing plan.  I guarantee it will be worthwhile.

  • Why there’s no such thing as “Content Marketing”…


    By Dave Stevens
    Google+

    I wish I could say that I found the first grey hair on my head when looking in the shaving mirror this morning.

    But the truth is that I think I’ve identified enough grey in what little hair I still have to say I’m beyond that.  I recognise a statistically significant trend when I see one.  It’s undeniable now, I’m getting old.

    Still, at least I’ve got the ever-new, always-refreshing discipline of marketing to make me forget my age, haven’t I?  A glance at this morning’s Twitter feed suggests not.  The term “content marketing” is trending.

    One writer is suggesting that there are stages of content marketing evolution, another that there are content marketing-related tools they can’t do without, another that their content marketing strategy might be headed for trouble.

    In fairness, this is hardly a new trend.  “Content marketing” has been around for a while.  Why, I see there’s even a “Content Marketing Institute (CMI)” now.  And no wonder.  For Mikal E. Belicove (the Wikipedia “authority” on content marketing no less) says that “When it comes to marketing strategies, content marketing has just been crowned king, far surpassing search engine marketing, public relations and even print, television and radio advertising as the preferred marketing tool for today’s business-to-business entrepreneur.”  Wow!  And B2B Marketing magazine has got the numbers to prove it:-  51% of B2B marketers identified content marketing as being the most important tool for generating leads, outscoring brand awareness (38%), thought leadership (34%) and sales (29%).

    So what on earth is this amazing “content marketing” then?

    It’s interesting that the marketing textbooks I used when I was a cool young marketer back in the day make no mention of “content marketing” at all.  Not a passing reference in Kotler, Armstrong, Saunders, and Wong’s seminal Principles of Marketing.  You won’t find the term in Malcolm McDonald’s Marketing Plans:  How to Prepare Them, How to Use Them.  Not a peep in Wilson and Gilligan’s Strategic Marketing Management.

    What about something more B2B and a bit more recent?  Kotler’s 2002 tome, Marketing Professional Services maybe?  Nope.  Nothing there.  The CIM‘s Marketing Professional Services by Michael Roe from 2001?  Sorry no.

    It seems then that “content marketing” is a new thing.  And so I have to look to the internet for the definition.

    Belicove defines it as “the creation and publication of original content — including blog posts, case studies, white papers, videos and photos — for the purpose of generating leads, enhancing a brand’s visibility, and putting the company’s subject matter expertise on display.”  Joe Pulizzi, the CMI‘s content marketer of the year (who also happens to be CMI founder), describes it as “story-telling by brands to attract and retain customers.”

    And this is where I’m sounding old even in the discipline in which I work…  But in my day Belicove and Pulizzi would be using their definitions to describe “marketing”?

    Is anyone really suggesting that there are messages that we send out that don’t contain “content” or that are in some way not designed to generate leads, build visibility, or show off a company’s expertise?  Surely you can’t have search engine marketing without content to draw your audience to?  You can’t have public relations or advertising without content?

    So we have a new term (“content marketing”) that describes an old term (“marketing”). The cynical among us might suggest that the likes of Belicove and Pulizzi have made the term up to get those very despised search engines to give them some face time.

    Well, “good luck to them” you might say.  You might think that I’m clutching at semantics here.  Perhaps it’s time to stop following this old fart and move on to other blogs elsewhere?  If Pulizzi and others want to create a new term with an old definition and attract web hits to their name as a result, then that’s fine isn’t it?

    Well, no.  Because as soon as we start developing new terms for what is simply good marketing, we discredit our discipline more and more as we associate “marketing” with disreputable practice.  That’s a risk for a discipline like our’s because it does not carry the weight in business that Finance and HR functions do.

    If we do want to go down this route, perhaps we should be singling out different types of content:  “thought leadership marketing”, “client credential marketing”, and so on?  But “content marketing” is what we all do as marketers.

    Or perhaps I’m just getting old…?