***This week's post is not based on any knowledge gained during my previous employment at Marketo.  Instead, I used an awesome data collection tool called import.io to harvest the information publically available on the Marketo blog for posts published from 2011-2014.  I then sliced and diced in Excel and drew my own conclusions***

Wouldn't it be great to create a vibrant corporate blog capable of driving meaningful social engagement with your prospects?  Marketo has done a fantastic job of this, so I decided to jump in and see what lessons can be learned from their success.  

1.  Marketo Hired Pros - Their Posts Did Best

Turns out professional content marketers are pretty good at content marketing.  At Marketo, team members whose job it was to think about content marketing all day had the highest average number of shares per post of any Marketo employees, over 42% higher than the next internal group of authors.

2. Posts by Junior Team Members Achieved 51% More Avg. Shares than Those Authored by Marketo Executives

Finding the time to publish a new blog post every week can be a difficult, which is why many corporate blog managers begrudgingly allow the occasional post by a junior or off-message team member to slip through.  Marketo takes a different policy though.  Only ~50% of posts were published by FTE content marketers or executives.  The other 50% came from team members across the company or from external thought leaders and partners.

Perhaps the biggest gem in this analysis is that, at least at Marketo, the posts authored by junior team members had the highest number of average shares of any internal group!  They were able to capture 51% more shares than posts by Marketo executives!  Why? Well, it may be reasonable to assume that it is harder for a junior team member to get a post approved (they published less posts overall) so their posts might have to meet a higher standard to get published. But I also believe that under the right circumstances, the energy and creativity a junior team member can bring can often overcome a lack of depth of experience.  

3. Of the Top 4 Author Types By Avg. Shares, 3 Were Partners or External Thought Leaders

At Marketo, only 1% of posts came from external thought leaders, but posts by this group were the most shared on average.  The success of posts by this groups probably isn't much of a surprise.  Every company would like the best minds in the business to post on their blog, but this can be difficult to achieve due to cost and a lack of existing relationships.  It should be reassuring then to see that Marketo seems to struggle with this as well, as is evidenced by the low number of overall posts by external thought leaders.

4. Posts by Partners Who Sell Products Achieved 36% More Reach than Those Authored by Partners who Sell Services

Regardless of if a partner sells products or services, both groups drove higher than average shares: both made the top 4 list of average shares by author types. Partners and external thought leaders can be great blog contributors because their posts bring together two networks, yours and theirs. This can pull in more readers to your blog than you would be able to engage alone.  It was interesting however to see that Marketo partners that sell products outperformed partners that sell services by 36%. Do product companies have more interesting things to say than services companies?  


5. Infographic Blog Posts Captured 317% More Shares than Other Types of Posts

My personal feelings about infographics aside, people love them.  When it comes to sharing success, there were really only two types of posts by Marketo, blog posts that shared infographics and those that didn't get many shares.  And when you look at the Marketo posts that went Viral, almost all were infographics.  The only possible conclusion here is that if your company doesn't publish regular, rich, compelling infographics, you're doing social media marketing wrong.

6. Marketo Kept It Early Stage

Below is a Wordle image which shows the categories in which Marketo published the most posts (the words which are the largest had the most posts categorized under them).  This visualization makes it clear: Marketo executed a broad and bold blog strategy focused on early stage best practices and thought leadership. They published very few posts which they classified as "Product and Industry" focused, "Marketing Automation" focused, or even feature focused, such as "Lead Nurturing" or "Lead Scoring".  In fact it will probably be difficult for you to find some of these categories below--thats how infrequently Marketo focused on mid to late stage content on their blog.  

7.  A Rising Tide Lifts All Ships and Blog Posts

While Marketo's blog shares per post were gaining impressive momentum throughout the entire time studied, things really got crazy when Marketo announced they would IPO.  Suddenly, Marketo's brand was all over the press and blogger-sphere.  While I don't have access to Marketo's web traffic stats, I am willing to bet their blog shares and visitor numbers are congruent.  Which is an important point: having a blog doesn't drive engagement with prospects.  Your blog is exactly like any other type of content: it needs to be promoted and be easy to find organically.  Marketo does a nice job of both, and reaped the benefits when they stepped into a bigger spotlight.  

Pretty interesting, huh?  I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.

Author: Chris Russell

It can be difficult for B2B companies to know whether a traditional outbound marketing model (tradeshows, field marketing, sales prospecting, list purchases, cold mass emailing, etc...) or the more trendy inbound marketing model (SEO, SEM, social media, content marketing, etc…) will be more productive.  

Here is a quick quiz to help you ask the right questions about your business as well as suggested marketing plans based on your answers:


Demand Generation Quiz: Which Model is right for your B2B Company

  1.  How big is your potential market?
    A) Every company in the world could buy from us
    B) More than ten thousand, but not unlimited
    C) We can name every potential customer

  2.  How expensive is your product?
    A) less than a couple of thousands
    B) Tens of thousands
    C) 7 figures plus

  3.  Do your potential customers know of you and know generally what you do? 
    A) Mostly, yes
    B) ~10%-50% probably do
    C) Nope, we need to work on that

  4.  Are your potential customers actively looking for solutions like yours?
    A) Yes, the market is generally aware that companies provide solutions like ours
    B) Mixed
    C) No, we are creating a new market space

  5. How many non-independently branded product families do you sell? (for example: Proctor & Gamble sells hundreds (thousands?) of products, but nearly all under a independently branded name brand.  While Oracle also sells hundreds of products, but most are sold under the Oracle brand).
    A) <5
    B) 5-10
    C) >10

  6. Is your primary offering consulting services?
    A) No
    B) We sell services, but as an add on
    C) Yes

  7. How open minded are your potential customers to new ideas and technology?
    A) Very open minded and are actively seeking emerging ideas and technology
    B) Mixed
    C) Our potential customers are risk adverse and/or traditionalist

  8.  How long is your total marketing to sales cycle?
    A) Days
    B) Months
    C) Years


_______________________________________________________________


Results: How Did You Answer?

***Mostly A’s - A marketing led, sales assisted/closed approach is best

You have described a market in which a marketing driven, low touch, high velocity model will likely work best.  Companies with attributes such as offering low cost, well known products to educated prospects who are actively seeking solutions, are well advised to focus resources on receiving and converting inbound interest, rather than less productive cold calling and outbound prospecting.  

Creating an impactful and engaging prospect web experience is also considerably easier when companies have shorter sales cycles and can focus inbound marketing messaging around less than five products or services, rather than dozens or hundreds.

Recommended Channel Strategies For Your Market

• Organic Inbound Marketing
  
• Website - companies with few products, inexpensive products, and/or short sales cycles should create a conversion focused (obsessed!) website whose main goal is to drive visitors to clear call to actions (CTAs) with unconfusing messaging firmly rooted in the current nomenclature of the market.  Brand positioning and artistic design is still important, but both should be seen as subservient to demand generation.
  
• SEO - while the core site should be optimized for the most important keywords, creating unique pages for the long tail is also important because as  industries mature and grow, solutions for more specific use cases become key differentiators.  The publishing of unique pages discussing specific use cases including verticals, features,and region-centric topics will be indexed by search engines and allow prospects to find your products via a broad range of relevant search terms.
  
• Social Media Discussions - Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn are all omnipresent in today’s digital world.   Companies are well advised to participate both as a brand and, for key thought leaders, as brand spokesmen, in conversations about their products and industry.  Like any other organic channel however,  prolonged and consistent investment and attention is necessary to produce demand generation results.
  
• Paid Inbound Marketing
  
• SEM - for companies in markets where prospects are actively seeking solutions like ones your company sells, a comprehensive SEM campaign portfolio covering topics from the early, mid and late stages of the buyer cycle often proves an effect method of capturing demand.  It should be noted however, that SEM campaigns need to be actively managed to achieve ROI and continued success.  If you do not have in house expertise in this area, consider contracting one of the many SEM consulting companies to manage your campaigns.
  
• Re-Targeting - when prospects don’t convert after the first visit, re-targeting can offer the opportunity to keep your brand front of mind, even if you don’t have an extensive sales team to do follow up calls.
  
• Social Media Campaigning - companies targeting an expansive market made up of technically savvy prospects should work to develop effective social media campaigns and offers which drive awareness and engagement with prospects.  When it comes to achieving ROI in this channel, targeting is especially important and platforms like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn have new features that allow companies to target via demographic, firmographic, by account, or by individual.  
  
• Outbound Marketing Strategy
  
• Tradeshows - the traditional approach to tradeshows, i.e. booth sponsorships, are typically not effective from a demand generation prospective.  To get around this, be creative with event sponsorships and related programs.  Consider pre-event promotions (i.e.: VIP your trip) to learn who is planning on attending, obtaining speaking sessions so you can present your story uninterrupted, hosting parties nearby the show,  subletting other company’s sponsorships, and co-sponsoring with other companies.
  
• Email Marketing - outbound emailing purchased lists is relatively unproductive at scale due to the diminishing returns caused by spam filters, so instead companies with huge potential markets should focus on creating compelling cross channel marketing experiences for prospects that use email marketing as a personalized follow on tactic for programs driven by web, event and other marketing channels.  Also, companies with less than 5 products will find it much easier to create engaging, targeted nurturing tracks, with a relatively limited time investment.
  
• Pipeline Acceleration Marketing
  
• Content Marketing - if you are in an established market where people are actively searching an answer to a problem they are having and your solutions solves that problem, creating content that supplies the information those prospects are looking for is critical for SEO, social, and SEM success.  As such, create a content portfolio that is directly aligned with your prospects interests and search terms.
  
• Webinars - unlike in person events or 1:1 sales calls, webinars have the ability to scale to a nearly unlimited number of prospects. Because of this, companies with low cost products, a geographically distributed prospect base, and/or active and educated buyers should hold a series of regular webinars that focus on both early stage topics (to capture interest) and product demos (to accelerate buying cycles).
  
  

***Mostly B’s or an Even Mix of A’s, B’s, and C’s - Your firm is likely to find success by incorporating a mixed strategy.

Because your market is more multifaceted than some, your marketing approach will need to reflect that.  A pure inbound model is no more likely to work than a pure outbound model.  Due to your mixed portfolio of programs and channels, it will be especially important to find a common yardstick to measure program success to prevent spending valuable resources on an unproductive channel when others are performing well and could be ramped.  

Recommended Channel Strategies For Your Market

• Peruse the plans outlined for both other models and choose channel strategies which most closely align with your market.
  
  

***Mostly C’s - A sales led, marketing assisted approach is needed

You have described a market in which your prospective customers will need a lot of hand holding by sales, so while marketing programs can still play a big part, they will likely perform better if done in support of outbound sales prospecting or sales pipeline acceleration activities.  This is due to the fact that potential customers who have characteristics such as being risk averse, are totally unaware of the value or existence of your solution, or are being asked to spend millions of dollars on your product or services require a guided, custom experience that pre-packaged marketing programs will struggle to provide without sales support.  

Also, companies who have extremely complex product SKU’s and numerous product families will struggle to provide one size fits all marketing messaging in many inbound channels, even with large marketing teams.  Plus companies who can name all or nearly all of their prospective customers are usually able to target prospects in a more cost effective manner if they focus on targeted outbound marketing and sales prospecting campaigns.

Recommended Channel Strategies For Your Market

• Organic Inbound Marketing
  
• Website - Create an informational website that is brand centric and allows engaged prospects to educate themselves and reinforce messaging they have received from sales.  Messaging can be high level, strategic, unspecific, and even ahead of the market, since positioning and education is the main goal of the site and salespeople will be on hand to guide prospects through the buying cycle.
  
• SEO - if your company offers prospects dozens of diverse products and services, a key challenge is educating customers about lesser known services.  Outside of discussion with sales, investing in the development of a long tail of web pages, each featuring messaging, offers, and CTA’s specific to one product family, industry, use case and combinations (i.e., product X for industry A) can help potential customers discover your less known services via SEO.
  
• Paid Inbound Marketing
  
• SEM - Create hyper targeted SEM campaigns targeting searches for your company, your competitors, and late stage queries such as solution categories and product comparisons.
  
• Re-Targeting - Consider using re-targeting to deliver brand impressions post engagement
  
• Outbound Marketing
  
• List Purchases - use vendors to create custom, highly demographically qualified and/or BANT accessed lists from sources such as LinkedIn, trade organizations, and online company profiles.
  
• Email Marketing - cold emailing purchased lists is dangerous, at best it will annoy some of your potential future buyers and at worst you will find yourself out of compliance with your email marketing or marketing automation contract and your IP address blacklisted by spam filters.  Still, by working closely with list vendors and sales, marketers have the ability to build highly targeted and segmented lists of well qualified and untouched prospects and email marketing can be a very effective method of reaching these potential buyers.
  
• Direct Mail - develop a series of high dollar value gift packages designed to be engaging and difficult to ignore.  Packages should be sent to sales identified, pre-qualified high value targets.
  
• Tradeshows - “niche-y” industries with tight knit vendor/customer relationships will commonly have highly attended annual events.  However traditional booth sponsorships are typically not effective from a demand generation prospective.  To get around this, be creative with event sponsorships and related programs.  Consider pre-event promotions (i.e.: VIP your trip) to learn who is planning on attending, hosting parties, or subletting other company’s sponsorships or co-sponsoring to reduce costs.  
  
• Pipeline Acceleration Marketing
  
• Field Marketing - companies with many products, low tech buyers, or services businesses should focus on the creation of repeatable micro-event programs which can be locally run by salespeople in their region/territory and provide significant prospect facetime for sales and/or deliver a product/solution centric presentation which can be shaped for the audience in attendance.
  
• Content Marketing - Companies with long sales cycles will find the most success with content marketing if the content topics and formats are in support of sales efforts.  A diverse and comprehensive portfolio of product marketing content and other late stage offers such as ROI calculators, analyst reports, and customer success stories, will allow sales to be armed with tools which will help them handle most objections.  
  
  

While every B2B business is different, knowing the right questions to ask is important.  Hopefully this quiz and potential marketing plans help you find success in your market!


Best Wishes,

Chris

Author: Chris Russell
Photo Credit: Michelle Johson - http://www.flickr.com/photos/26176646@N04

Many companies focus their marketing time and money on specific verticals or job titles, but there is one commonality that the prospects of all but the most ubiquitous brands share, and it’s that the vast majority of your prospects will NOT consider purchasing your solution in the next year.  

Sounds depressing, right?  But if you compare your potential market opportunity to the number of active buying cycles your sales team will engage in this year, it becomes pretty clear that of the majority of people in the world that you could sell to, most won’t be sold to in the next year.  This isn’t a knock on your marketing or sales prospecting effectiveness, even if you improved these by 100%, chances are it would only increase your annual market penetration a couple of percent.  

So what is it that’s stopping all of these prospects from purchasing right now?  Usually it’s factors largely out of your control such as your prospect’s budget, leadership, timing, and their other priorities.  But what’s equally important to know is that all of these obstacles are usually temporary.

Which is why it’s so important to segment your content and offers by buying stage.  If the majority of your prospects are “no stage” buyers, blasting out late stage offers like the opportunity to speak with a salesperson or watch a 30 minute product demo will drum up as many unsubscribes as clicks.  And once someone unsubscribes, literally or mentally, your ability to market to them down the road is severely restricted.

So what’s a marketer to do in a world of “no-stage” buyers?

• Incorporate buying stage into your campaign & content planning - when planning marketing investments, identify the targeted buying stage and ensure your program and content portfolio covers the full funnel, from no stage buyers all the way through to closing.
  
  
• Listen for your prospects online activity - What pages prospects visit and what offers they respond to can help you identify when they have entered an active buying cycle, A.K.A. when it’s time to shift messaging to later stage topics.
  
  
• Use dynamic and reactive marketing tactics - seize the power of marketing automation and use dynamic content, multistage nurturing and other reactive marketing tactics that considers buying stage before serving up offers and content.
  
  
• Focus on aspirations, rather than features - people tend to evaluate features when they are in a buying cycle, but everyone wants to be more successful in their jobs, have happier customers, etc...  Even in B2B, no stage and early stage marketing that focuses on emotion or personal topics will produce better results than a feature focus.
  
  
• Consider buying stage when setting the period between touches - an actively engaged prospect late in a sales cycle probably won’t mind receiving great content from you every couple of days.  However early or no-stage buyers are much more likely to consider weekly emails spam.
  
  
• Measure your clicked to unsubscribed ratio - never forget that an unsubscribe is FOREVER!  So it is important to factor in the lost opportunity associated with every unsubscribe.  A simple ratio of: (number of clicks) / (number of unsubscribes), can quickly show you if you are turning as many people off as you are engaging with your email marketing.  
  
  
• Add a punt to your lead qualification process  - most lead qualification teams tend to think of the life in 7-30 day bursts.  A lead comes in, they work it for a fixed period of time or until it is either an opp or disqualified, then they move on, possibly never to return.  But because many reasons for disqualification can be temporary (too busy, no budget this quarter, current prioritization of projects), it’s important to set up systematic workflow that allows salespeople to recycle leads for a month, a quarter, or even a year.  This way they can automatically be reminded (even in the event of territory changes) to reach back out when the timing is likely to be better.
  
  
• Set appropriate goals for no stage campaigns - because the majority of your no stage buyers are 12+ months away from purchase, tying them to opps and ROI is not possible if you are looking for real time success metrics.  Instead, focus on tight demographic segmentation (are we engaging people and companies who could buy one day?) and activity metrics like unique web visitors, content downloads, etc…
  
  

So take a long term, more strategic view the next time you are planning or executing your campaigns and consider the “no stage” buyer.  ‘


Happy marketing!

-Chris

Author: Chris Russell

Given all the priorities on our plates, it can be difficult for the above average marketer to build a good company blog. And blogs can be a tough sell to crusty, old CMO’s who didn’t grow up with the internet and social media.  After all, why should scarce resources go to blogging when they could go to tried and true tactics like customer success stories or tradeshows?  

Here are seven answers to that question...

1. Blogs increases early stage funnel flow and conversion - Unless you are an omnipresent consumer brand or a big fish in a small industry pond, chances are the vast majority of your potential buyers have never heard of your brand.  Furthermore, even though 91% of adults use search engines, most of your potential buyers won’t turn to Google looking for a solution like yours anytime this month, quarter, or year.  However they will be using search engines looking for other information related to their job and responsibilities.  
   

This means that because your current website is focused on your company and your services, it’s content doesn’t match what your largest group of potential buyers are looking for.  To be found by this group via organic search, you need solid, early stage content, and blogs are the perfect vehicle for this.  

So what is good early stage content?  Blogs which effectively engage early stage prospects focus on topics such as these:

• General best practices - sharing lessons learned the hard way is an excellent way to get broad reach, endear prospects to you, and segment potential buyers via targeted content topics.  It’s important to emphasize that the best practices should not be best practices for using your product, but instead be product agnostic.  You will see from the made up topics below, using Ford Motor Company as an example, that all potential car owners can gain value from reading these posts regardless if they are currently looking for a car.  Also,  they are phrased in a way to match what people are likely to search for:

      - 3 questions to ask before dropping your car off to get serviced
      - How much should you slow down when it’s raining?
      - 10 tips for road tripping with kids

• Benchmarks - real data showing what peers and peer companies are doing is as equally as hard to find as it is invaluable.  Some made up examples, this time using TurboTax as an example:

      - Top tax deductions for San Francisco, California
      - Study finds 26-33 year olds spent 2 hours on average doing their taxes in 2012
      - 34% of filers used charitable donations to reduce their tax burden

• Newsjacking - big news like industry mergers, breakthrough new products, and even Super Bowls can make great blog posts that are relevant and give your company an opportunity to insert your brand into a cultural or industry milestone.  Again, made up examples using Hershey’s chocolate:

       - 10 great desserts for Christmas dinner
       - How to choose foods that reduce rainforest deforestation
       - Super Bowl of chocolate: where will you be eating your half time snacks?

• Trends - everyone loves to pontificate on the future and where things are headed, but good blog content on trends focus more on data and real world examples.  Shy away from philosophical rambling and lengthy manifestos, because they will usually just make you sound self involved.  Made up topics using Cisco Networking as an example:

      - 3 networking trends for 2014
      - Macs vs. PC’s, guess which is logging into more company networks?
      - Virtual v. physical networking: predictions for 2014
You’ll notice that at no point in any of the examples did I reference the companies’ products or services, but instead focused on content that a prospect who doesn’t know of the brand or company could find via search and find value in.   
2.              Blogs builds a portfolio of thought leadership for your company’s public figures - chances are you already have a stable of team members who regularly go on stage at trade shows, give webinars, and speak with analysts.  But there is also a good chance that you are frequently denied highly visible speaking engagements because your brand spokesmen and spokeswomen don’t have the resume of thought leadership and wake of followers event promoters are looking for.  By promoting authorship on your blog and pushing the faces of your company to contribute regular, good early stage content, you allow contributors to create portfolios of thought leadership that can be submitted to event promoters and help you get more visible speaking engagements (and drive more prospects into your funnel!).

3.              Blogs create a consistent stream of content for social channels - matching content to social channels can be difficult, because most social media users aren’t looking for white papers and product demos when they log on to Facebook.  However, bit sized thought leadership, best practices and trends tend to work really well.  By publishing weekly, or more frequent, blog posts, you are also creating the perfect content to promote socially!

4.              Blogs strengthens SEO rankings via intra-site linking - While SEO is a dark art, most marketers understand the SEO value of intersite linking (other sites linking to pages on your site), however most also overlook the value of intra-site linking (pages within your site linking to other pages within your site).

For example, if you have a blog post with the phrase: “...driving a truck is different than driving a car...”, and you hyperlink “truck” to a page on your site about trucks, you are telling search engines that that page about trucks is the best page on your site about trucks.  Doing this consistently throughout your blog and core site is a great way to convert general SEO strength into focused strength on key terms and pages, and hence make it easy for search engines to promote more of your content.

5.              Blogs forces you to better understand your market - producing 52 or more fresh, early stage posts a year is really going to push your box of understand for your industry.  By constantly coming back to the question “what are my prospects doing today and what might they find interesting?” you will find that you gain a greater understanding of who they are and what challenges they face.  This will absolutely improve your ability to market and sell to them throughout your funnel, and also help your product development organization build better product.

6.              Blogs are R&D grounds for new messaging and ideas - Online marketing is all about content, and blogs can serve as a testing ground for new content ideas and messaging before significant investment is put into developing webinars, white papers, etc...  Also, because blog posts are essentially free to produce and engagement can be easily measured, greater autonomy can be given to contributors.  This avoids the stifling HIPPO syndrome (HIggest Paid Person’s Opinion), and promotes an internal atmosphere of marketing innovation from the ground up.

7.              Blogs create the opportunity for guest post horse trading - if you take these steps and are able to build a good blog with a mass of readers, you will quickly find that you will become a popular person in your industry!  Partners and analysts will all wish to contribute and you should let them--provided they also follow the best practices above.  This opens the door for new partnership, cross promotions, and is simply another asset you have to leverage when closing deals with vendors and customers.  

The fact that a blog can help you engage and convert early stage prospects is probably what will resonate most with people, but don’t discount the impact a blog can have on company culture as outlined in it’s ability to help you understand your market and provide a testing ground for new ideas.  Afterall, the only thing that stays the same in business is the need to adapt!  

-Chris
Author: Chris Russell

P.S. - Here are some examples of quality b2c and b2b blogs:

• Marketo - excellent b2b content, with targeted channels for specific audiences: http://blog.marketo.com/
• Hubspot - as an inbound marketing company, blogging is there bread and butter.  Take note of their tactics--it’s built a company that will be most likely IPO’ing in the next 12 months.  http://blog.hubspot.com/
• Lonely Planet - most people are familiar with the brand, but they do a great job of leveraging the traveling community to create participatory content that they then use to drive further engagement.  http://www.lonelyplanet.com/blog/
• The Clymb - outdoor apparel deal of the day company, uses outdoor orientated “stories” to engage prospects: http://www.theclymb.com/stories/
• Intercom - another good b2b example.  Solid early stage content and a very cool design: http://insideintercom.io/