Tuesday Marketing Notes (Number 22—February 21st, 2006)

A B2B Marketing Newsletter for BMA Members
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Top Ten Mistakes B2B Marketing Managers Make (and How To Stop Making Them)

Here’s a list of ten big and small, tactical and strategic, mistakes made by marketing managers, agencies, and others involved in B2B marketing.

Stay aware of these and you’ll dramatically reduce causes of failure in your marketing program, you’ll produce marketing programs that generate higher sales response, and you’ll go a long way toward creating the best possible conditions for success in your marketing program.

From least to most important, here they are . . .

10.) Google will not save your marketing program

There’s tremendous interest these days among marketers in search engine optimization (SEO) and Google AdWords-type online marketing programs. What’s not to like about the idea of having Web users become prospects by entering keywords to find your company’s product or service?

It’s a wonderful concept, if there were enough prospects in your market sittingaround all day doing Google searches to find what they needed to buy. For all but a narrow range of high-tech markets, however, there aren’t.

For B2B marketers, the volume on AdWords just isn’t there—yet. Yes, you can run AdWords programs and draw prospects to your online opt-in marketing programs, and yes, you can tweak your Web site to go higher on search engines, but the volume of response won’t be enough to justify major shifts away from direct mail, advertising and the other ways you’re currently selling your product.

So, while you’re spending time and money chasing Google AdWords, you could be losing focus from the activities that are proven draws for your marketing program: Targeted prospect mailings, print ad placements, and—most important—supporting your company’s sales team.

One day, in the next few years, keyword search programs will become a major draw in your B2B marketing program, and you do need to set up your own online marketing programs now, both to learn how this is done, and to prepare for the future, when online marketing will become more important to your marketing program. Just don’t expect too much for now.

And don’t think that you can salvage failures in presentation and tactical planning of your current conventional marketing program—print advertising and mailings, trade shows, etc.—by moving into an all-Internet marketing program. Move cautiously, and don’t fall victim to the hype.

9.) Overthinking and overfiddling

As marketing professionals, we’re all smart people who want to do right by our companies and our clients. But there comes a time in the life of every marketing project when “thinking too much” and endless fiddling with the copy and layout of your deliverable handicaps your marketing project for no good reason and threatens your ability to execute.

On the agency side we see this all the time, with greenhorn marketing managers making trivial copy changes and layout tweaks right up to the time the file is put on the printing press, and often asking for more changes even while the press is running.

If, after looking at every deliverable with “new eyes” (see #3 below), you’re satisfied that your copy and layout clearly and effectively communicates the features and benefits of your product in a way that moves the reader or viewer to take the next step closer to buying your product—stop, put down your pen, and push the button on your marketing project!

Also, don’t make the mistake of circulating copy and layouts to everyone in your company: Limit these reviews to no more than three people (including yourself), and no more than two revision cycles. Going beyond this invites overthinking and overfiddling, which becomes a senseless, endless loop that delays your marketing program, and undermines the confidence of your marketing team.

I think most experienced agency people will agree that they never saw a layout or marketing deliverable that was actually improved by a client’s overthinking, fiddling, and endless last-minute tweaking.

8.) “Branding,” not selling, your products

In B2B, the wrong-headed focus on “branding,” and not using clear, sales-oriented presentation to motivate prospects, is a sure path to making your marketing program irrelevant to your company’s goal of increasing sales.

The term “branding” has been so misused and overused it’s now come to mean almost anything the speaker wants it to mean, and is spread around over everything, like cream cheese. Most marketers use the term without really knowing what branding is, or if branding is even appropriate to B2B marketing (Hint: generally, it’s not).

As BMA’s Rick Kean points out, branding is what people used to call “reputation.” It’s the perception of a company and its product built up over a number of years, and earned by a consistent, long-term record of making, selling, and servicing high-quality products.

Like reputation, “branding” can’t be bought on the cheap in a six-month ad program: It’s the earned by-product of years of doing the right thing by your prospects and customers.

Yes, if you are a consumer goods marketer and you can throw $50 million into a saturation print and TV campaign, you can build a weak memory for your product among enough consumers to gain a few market share points for laundry detergent, and this is also called “branding.”

However, in the B2B world, most of us don’t play with $50 million ad budgets, so we’re not able to influence our markets at these deep, Pavlovian levels. Better to focus on using your limited marketing dollars to keep the presentation of your marketing program clear, compelling, and effective for the potential buyers in your market, instead of being conned into thinking that a new layout or a “clever” ad program that’s supposed to “brand” your product will do anything but make a big, smoking hole in your marketing budget.

Focus on clear presentation of your product’s best benefits and feature attributes, do right by your prospects and customers, and your company’s branding takes care of itself.

7.) Failure to track and measure sales response from your marketing program

Every marketing deliverable and program you produce should be designed for measurability. You won’t get the most bang from a powerful, compelling headline and body copy in an ad or mailing if you don’t use a clear call to action to tell prospects what they need to do next, and you won’t know how well you do if you don’t measure and track the calls, e-mails, page views, and reply cards from these marketing projects.

While many marketing activities can’t be strictly measured on an ROI basis, you can only succeed in marketing if you demonstrate that your marketing program generates the sales response it needs to at least pay for itself, and the way you do this is to do your best to track a sales lead from the marketing activity forward to the sale.

This means having both an awareness to do this, and the systems in place to trap sales inquiries and other responses wherever prospects contact your company: In your sales department, in your incoming e-mail boxes, physical mail, distributors, and other points of contact with your prospects. It’s true that you can’t accurately track and measure sales response of many marketing activities, such as print advertising, but you at least have to try.

Also, measuring the return on a single mailing isn’t enough—you have to consider the lifetime value of a new customer. What this means is that measuring one-shot ads and mailings on a strict ROI basis may often show the activity to be a loss or breakeven at best, when in reality, the customers gained from this ad or mailing will generate substantial sales revenues for the company over time, and after the paid-in cost of the ad or mailing. Direct mail companies know this stuff cold, so the sooner you can calculate your own company’s lifetime customer value, the more accurately you’ll be able to measure immediate sales response from your marketing activities.

6.) Failure to incorporate follow-up by your company’s sales reps in your marketing promotions

As a B2B marketing professional, you are accountable to your company’s sales team. Many of the marketing activities executed by B2B marketing managers are sales promotion-based, such as ad placements and mailings to support special price offers, product launch and improvement announcements, new sales rep appointments, new distributor additions, etc.

Wherever you can identify your prospects by name and contact info, such as with mailings or Web promotions, work with your sales team so they’ll follow up with prospects on the mailings you drop, the e-mail announcements you make, upcoming trade show promotional mailings, and even the print ad placements you make for special promotions, since virtually any marketing activity put in front of prospects and customers can become a good (and profitable) opportunity for contacting your prospects and customers.

Coordinating your mailings and other marketing activities so your company’s sales reps can follow up by phone or e-mail helps to improve the sales response of your marketing project, and gives your sales reps a valuable opportunity to make these contacts, since they appreciate being able to contact a prospect soon after they receive your mailing, or e-mail promotion.

In B2B, marketing never stands alone from sales. Since your marketing program is accountable to your sales team, always try to think of ways to incorporate this follow-up by your sales team with every marketing project, if possible.

5.) Failure to add a compelling promotion to your marketing project

In the rush to meet an ad deadline, or get a direct mail program launched, it’s easy to leave out that “something extra” in your ad copy, mailing, or Web promotion to give your readers and viewers the gentle push they need to take the next step you want them to take: To contact your company’s sales rep, to go to your Web site to fill out and mail a product request card, or click a link to order your product.

You may be doing everything right in your marketing project, using compelling, sales benefit-oriented copy and clear presentation, and you may be targeting the right prospects, but leaving out “the offer” often means the difference between breakeven and profit on any marketing project.

Adding a special discount for first-time buyers, or offering a free informational premium (such as a book, white paper, or video) motivates your readers to act now instead of putting your brochure, ad, mailing piece, or bookmarking your Web page for later—when they’ll probably forget to follow up with you.

Get into the habit of including a special “something extra” promotion in every ad, mailing, trade show and other marketing project, and you can add a solid 25% or higher bump to your sales response. Wouldn’t you like to have that on every marketing project?

4.) Failing to show what you know (i.e., what your company knows)

In competitive markets, what often separates a standout company from all the rest who sell the same product is that the standout shows they know more about the prospect’s problems, applications, and wants, and this knowledge is demonstrated and communicated throughout the company’s marketing program.

And once internalized by prospects, this demonstrated knowledge is transformed into a perception of industry leadership of the company, by its prospects. And that’s a very good thing.

Take the example of two companies, selling the same product, at the same price. The first company, like any business, offers to sell you its product, provides customer service, and its salesman will call you back every couple of months to see how you’re doing, and (his true purpose) to upsell you to the bigger model. That’s it.

The second company not only sells and services the product, but provides comprehensive information about the product and its applications, through white papers, detailed applications articles, e-mail newsletter updates, video presentations, and an online discussion forum on its Web site. This company takes the lead in showing you what it knows about its product, its applications, and the depth of these applications. It shares this information freely with its marketplace, creating the clear impression of enthusiasm and passion for its product, and what its product can do for its customers and prospects.

Which company would you buy from?

You can transform your company and give your marketing program a huge boost by merely putting yourself into your prospect’s shoes, and thinking of all the pieces of information that would be beneficial to your prospects in the areas where they’re using your product. For example, show how customers use your product to solve their problems, highlight the big issues and challenges in your industry, and detail how your product is contributing to the solution. Showingwhat you know is marketing’s most important contribution to making your company a thought leader in its market.

Every product in any industry can be sold better if marketing managers only did a better job of showing what the company knows about the product, and communicating this knowledge with passion, energy, life, enthusiasm, and empathy. The same goes for the ad agencies and consultants advising these companies: Stop trying to convince your clients to “brand” their products, and start helping them to better identify with their prospects, by showing what the company knows.

3.) Not seeing your marketing as your prospects see it

Many marketing managers are so wrapped up in the way they, their management, and their ad agency have been talking about their product, they’ve stopped looking at their product the way their prospect sees it.

Part of this means not taking into account the fact that prospects in your market are very busy. They don’t have much time to read your ads, mailings, Web site, etc., and when they do, they’re not very interested, and they’re also skeptical.

Because they’re busy, they won’t readily understand “clever” ads, edgy visuals, and other creative approaches that get in the way of giving your prospects the essential facts about your company’s product. And they definitely won’t respond to the same tired marketingspeak you’ve been using for the 728th time, applied to the next ad or deliverable.

All readers want are the straight facts about your product, what it does, and what’s good about that for them. Readers can absorb more information, faster, than they did ten years ago, and they can search for it and find it in a few seconds. Anything that gets in the way of their instant understanding of your product makes it less likely they’ll stick around long enough to learn more about it. Clear, utilitarian presentation of your product’s major benefits is the way to keep them on your ad, Web page, or mailing.

These benefits must also be the benefits that are important as seen by your prospects, not the benefits you, or your agency, thinks are important. Here is where your ability to see every deliverable and element of your marketing program with “new eyes,” and staying close to sales, and the best ways your product can be sold, keeps the sales content of your marketing square with your prospect’s wants and needs.

2.) Failure to respect the process of marketing execution

When a marketing manager treats the hands-on functions of marketing execution—the essential steps in the process of developing and producing advertising programs, mailings, sales promotions, and the other marketing projects in their marketing program—as a “black box” to be handled by their ad agency, consultants, subordinates, or outside vendors, they virtually guarantee failures in execution, leading to missed selling opportunities and a failed marketing program.

Lack of knowledge of marketing execution on the part of marketing managers breeds a lack of respect for the process of marketing execution. For example, If a marketing manager doesn’t know the steps involved in writing, designing, layout, production, scheduling and placement of print advertising, they’ll have no appreciation for the amount of time it takes for their agency to produce and place their company’s advertising. This means that the marketing manager waits until the very last minute to make an ad placement, and then leans on their agency or consultant to get the ad produced on time. When every marketing project becomes an 11th-hour fire drill, copy is rushed, layouts don’t have enough time to get refined, and eventually the entire marketing program suffers; that is, even if deadlines are being met.

The more you know about the process of marketing execution, the more respect you will gain for the process, and for those who help you succeed. Show respect for the process and you will be respected as a marketing professional by the other members of your marketing team.

And the number one marketing mistake is . . .

1.) Failure to execute

The biggest mistake marketing managers make in their marketing programs is not paying enough attention to the big aspects and little details that all boil down to the execution of their marketing programs. While it’s true that as a marketing manager you may not be directly responsible for producing every single aspect of your marketing program, you need to know enough about the process of execution for every one of the projects in your program to manage it effectively. Your entire marketing program is, in fact, nothing more than the sum total of the execution of its individual elements.

Poor, late, slow, incompetent, or failed marketing execution—missed deadlines in ads, mailings, or any other marketing project—is the biggest cause of failure in most marketing programs, because failed execution means losing an opportunity to sell your product, and missed opportunities can’t be recovered. An ad or mailing that’s only “pretty good,” but is placed in time to capture a fleeting sales opportunity is always better than the best ad or mailing that never got there because the marketing manager and their team couldn’t execute in time.

For marketing managers, better execution means not treating the process of marketing as a “black box” handled by others, gaining knowledge of the step-by-step process of execution for every type of marketing project in your marketing program, and respect for the process.

It also means getting on top of those small details that can lead to big problems in marketing projects: Did I make the phone call to confirm that the mailing house has our list for next week’s mailing? Am I giving my agency enough lead-time on this promotion so I can avoid the fire drill we all had to go through last time? What prototypes, comps, and marketing ideas do my business development guys need for their big joint venture meeting next month, and how much time will these take to produce?

In addition to new opportunities, you’ll also face adversity in your marketing program. When you need to turn a failed or underperforming marketing project around, your ability to execute, and to keep executing, means all the difference between success and failure. Also, diversifying your marketing program by engaging in a wide variety of marketing activities to hedge against changes in your marketplace makes your ability to execute even more critical to your success as a marketing professional.

Next week, I’ll cover public relations, and how “thinking like an editor” gets you more coverage in your industry’s trade publications . . .

Comments? Questions? Send them to me at: eric@realmarkets.net

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Eric Gagnon (eric@realmarkets.net), is president of GAA (www.realmarkets.net), a sales and business development consulting firm, and is the author of The Marketing Manager’s Handbook, the master study guide for the Business Marketing Association’s Marketing Skills Assessment, Skill Builder, and Certification (MSA/B/C) programs.

For more information on The Marketing Manager’s Handbook, available to BMA members at a special discount, link to:

http://www.businessmarketinginstitute.com/book.html

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Test, Train, and Build Your B2B Marketing Skills for Better Sales Success: BMA Announces New Assessment, Training, and Certification for B2B Marketing Managers

For more information on the new BMA Marketing Skills Assessment, Skill Building and Certification (MSA/B/C) training and professional development program, visit http://www.businessmarketinginstitute.com