Marketing Clique

This morning I was talking with a friend who sells professional services for a large outsourcing company. He was frustrated because his systems integration company sells the same thing that a dozen other SI firms sell. CIOs view certain types of services as commodities because there are so many outsourcing companies competing for the same gigs. My buddy and I were talking about ways to position sales and marketing programs to be more psychologically appealing in the face of perceived commoditization.

Battling Human Nature

It's human nature for buyers to question the price tag of intangible services, especially when those services are being delivered by armies of highly-skilled, low-paid, productive workers in India and elsewhere. It's human nature to question the price tag of almost anything. But it's also human nature to accept the price tag, even if it's overpriced, once people know exactly what they're going to get.

If services are are positioned more as product offerings buyers haggle less. There may be reluctance to buy all of the deliverables associated with the services offering, but there's more acceptance of the product as a whole. That's why services offerings should have consistent, specific, defined, branded deliverables associated with them.

In my blog post that discusses engineering versus sales-driven organizations, I opine that marketing messages should be kept focused on solving business issues, and not solving specific technology problems. That's one of the reasons my buddy at the SI firm is running into challenges - because his organization leads with a software development-oriented approach. They know that their team is really good at delivering on a particular type of software development problem when IT organizations are trying to implement a specific enterprise software module. But just because they think and know that they're good at something doesn't mean even a caveman can sell it.

What this means for marketing and sales

Don't let the engineers take over and position the company's product as a technology. Engineers and scientists become enthralled with their own creations and are emotionally resistant to talking about a customer's needs as opposed to their "baby," and the way it has been designed.

If your company is services-oriented, as opposed to product-oriented, consider offering your suite of services in a uniform, easy-to-understand fashion throughout all of your marketing and sales collateral. Deliverables can then be "brought to life" during sales calls, mapping the deliverables to the customer's specific business challenges.

McKinsey just released a study that examines the results from a new survey of 1,200 purchasing decision makers in SMBs and large companies in the United States and Europe. Among other things, the report reveals what salespeople are doing to sabotage the process of B2B sales.

The study found that customers will normally cite price as being the single most influential factor in their decision. But upon closer examination of how customers rated a vendor's overall performance, product features and the sales experience were valued as being the most important. Sales manages a critical role, but a timely and intelligent hand off from marketing is paramount.

Of the many habits that undermine the sales experience, two that are relatively easy to fix accounted for 55 percent of the behavior customers described as “most destructive”: failing to have adequate product knowledge and contacting customers too frequently (exhibit). Only 3 percent said they weren’t contacted enough, suggesting customers are open to fewer, more meaningful interactions. —McKinsey report, The Basics of business-to-business sales success

Marketing Automation Makes Sales More Successful

Given the facts that:

1. salespeople have the nasty habit of pestering customers too frequently, and
2. buyers crave more information about product and service features

it makes perfect sense that vendors spend time coming up with a way to harness the reach and frequency of marketing automation.

Marketing automation software, like Eloqua, Marketo, Genius, Silverpop, allows vendors to creatively design lead management flows that meet customers where they're at. A well designed marketing automation flow is respectful of a buyers' time, delivers appropriate, well-written, and consistently presented information, all leading to a more appropriate hand off to sales. Too often, sales is given a "lead" before the buyer is ready to begin interacting with sales. By using marketing automation, buyers are methodically delivered information until they reach a pre-determined threshold where the hand off to sales occurs.

Did the word nude get your attention? Well, it should.

SEO is all about being found naturally and letting the search engines see what you've got. Don't be shy. Be naked. Be natural.

That's the problem. Too many websites are prude, not nude. They don't let the search engines see what they've got. Their content is effectively hidden as a result of incomplete website programming, becoming overly complicated, or they've gotten lazy with their promise to remain authentic and naked.

This post was written with the small and mid-sized business in mind, but perhaps larger companies would benefit as well. None of this is really new. It's just a good, wholesome review of the basics.

Basic SEO is as easy as 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10

1. Act locally and think globally. Design your site for humans, but don't forget Google. If your site is well liked by humans, Google will catch on. Try not to over-think it.
2. Be human. Think of the ways people are most apt to search for your website. Use that language. Those are the words people type into search engines.
3. Look around you. There are other sites that you're competing against. Get inspiration. If they're more popular than you, make sure your content is just as relevant, or better!
4. Grab the Long Tail. Are there Long Tail search terms that people use to find your stuff? Can you take advantage of being a relevant search result for those terms?
5. Write as good well as you can. If you're not a good copywriter, hire one. It's worth it. Well written copy will help you sell more of your stuff. Good copy not only helps with conversion, it keeps your content focused and relevant.
6. Stay organized. Every page on your site should be as focused and organized as possible. Follow standard HTML document structure. Start the body copy of each page with content that includes the keyword phrase on which you're going to focus. Repeat that keyword phrase as a theme on the page. Directories should be hierarchical, and use real words, not dynamic URLs. For example, try to keep your website addresses intuitively structured: http://www.yoursite.com/products/shoes/tennis/product123 not http://www.yoursite.com/pdp2/asdpo.asp?#1234sessionid123
7. Links. It's about quality, not just quantity. Quality means relevancy. Relevancy means the links to your site should come from relevant sites. For example, if your site sells shoes and there's an inbound link from a site that sells tennis rackets, you better be selling tennis shoes, and not ballet slippers. Interlinking helps too. Interlinking is when you link to content within your own site. Link up everything that's relevant. Choose your anchor text wisely. The Internet is about good links!
   • Bonus: It is a more powerful inbound link if the hyperlinked ("anchor text") text that is liking to your site is also relevant, and linking to a specific page on your website, not just your home page.
8. Blog. Google likes blogs. A blog can help to keep the content on your site fresh and dynamic. What? You're afraid to blog? If you're reading this you're not afraid to blog. Now, go on!
9. Video. Google loves video. Good videos are a PITA to produce, but do it.
10. Socialize everything. All of the content on your site should have the ability to be Tweeted, shared on Facebook, Digg, YouTube, LinkedIn, and all of the other usual social media suspects. They all will have links back to your website and blog, right? Find out which social meda outlets your customers and prospects are using. Be there, and be naked!

Think Outside of the Box

Sometimes SEO requires thinking outside of the box. Here, watch this video. It will help you to think outside of the box...

Video from Joseph Pelling

The sheer volume of information available today has dramatically altered the balance of power between companies and consumers. As consumers have become overloaded, they have become increasingly skeptical about traditional company-driven advertising and marketing and increasingly prefer to make purchasing decisions largely independent of what companies tell them about products. —Excerpt from an April 2010 McKinsey Report on Word-of-Mouth Marketing

Social media continues to gain momentum. Big brand strategists are formalizing their approach to and measuring the effects of word-of-mouth marketing. Word-of-mouth is nothing new to small and medium businesses (SMBs). WOM is arguably an even stronger force for the SMB, or freelancer who's trying to make an impact within an extended circle of influence.

As sales and marketing converge, there's a strong need for SMBs to consider how they use online marketing tools and to ensure word-of-mouth marketing is working in their favor.

For example, decision makers are increasingly turning to the Web to review information on products and services. Chances are great that buyers will increasingly turn to online reviews and information as a reputable collection of authentic and trustworthy reviews from real people - the next best thing to hearing it in person.

...Its [word-of-mouth's] influence is greatest when consumers are buying a product for the first time or when products are relatively expensive, factors that tend to make people conduct more research, seek more opinions, and deliberate longer than they otherwise would. And its influence will probably grow: the digital revolution has amplified and accelerated its reach to the point where word of mouth is no longer an act of intimate, one-on-one communication. Today, it also operates on a one-to-many basis: product reviews are posted online and opinions disseminated through social networks. Some customers even create Web sites or blogs to praise or punish brands. —Excerpt from an April 2010 McKinsey Report on Word-of-Mouth Marketing

The Take-Away For SMBs

I think the take-away is clear. Word-of-mouth marketing has never gone away. In fact, it has become amplified by the one-to-many phenomenon that the Web has made possible. Make it easy for your customers and prospects to find you online. Make it easy for them to comment on and share information about your products and services.

If you're delivering quality and value, you'll come out a winner.