"so what?" marketing

So many marketing organisations seem to have all the channel delivery but none of the planning of what they need to say, to whom and when. Relevance trumps channel and frequency. Social is just a message channel. Blogs are a channel, events, email likewise.

Take a breath, find your subject matter experts and map out your topics, then your content calendar and your delivery media to the target audiences.

Or we’re back to, « You’ve got nothing to say, and you’re saying it too loud ». And there’s no point in that.

Just as the cat is both alive and dead until the box is opened, a lead is both valuable and not valuable until it is qualified and nurtured.

Until a lead is qualified, you don’t know if they are a good fit for your product or service. They could be a high-quality lead with the potential to become a customer, or they could be a low-quality lead that will never buy from you.

Just like Schrodinger’s cat, the true value of a lead is hidden until it is observed. Only after you have qualified and nurtured a lead can you determine whether they could be a valuable prospect or not.

Here’s how Schrodinger’s cat can be applied to B2B marketing:

• A lead submits a form on your website. The lead is now in the “uncertain” state, just like Schrodinger’s cat. You don’t know yet if they are a good fit or not.
• You follow up with the lead and schedule a call. This is like opening the box and observing the cat. You are now starting to qualify the lead and learn more about their needs.
• The lead has a positive phone call with your sales representative. This is like seeing the cat’s paw twitch. It’s a good sign that the lead is interested in your product or service.
• The lead signs a contract and becomes a customer. This is like seeing the cat fully alive and out of the box. The lead has now been qualified and nurtured, and they are now a valuable customer.

Focus your efforts on creating and nurturing the leads that are most likely to be valuable, and it can help you to avoid wasting time on those that are not a good fit.

I let an AI write that – can you tell? 😉 It might have missed the bit where you open the box, the cat realises it’s about to get a premature prospecting call from an over-zealous SDR, jumps out of the box and legs it…

There’s so much noise out there, it’s overwhelming. I’m talking really about the noise of high volume content, which says nothing of note, noticed by nobody in particular, just adding to the general fray. Am I talking about AI generated posts here? Maybe, if they’re let loose and published pretty much as-is. That’s just noise, for sure. Does that make it harder for individual voices to cut through? In many ways, yes, since it’s a challenge for the single speaker to be noticed – but then it’s also easier for the bold and cutting statement to stand out from the noisy crowd. It’s forgivable for the reader to zone out of same / same posts as they scan social media, but the opportunity of being different remains for the astute voice of reason, with meaningful comment that comes from the heart and makes a connection. That’s when the scanning reader will notice, pause, raise an eyebrow and hear the voice above the crowd.

Plans and lists. Successful marketing outcomes rely on a breadth of planning activities that can’t be underestimated, even if no-one outside the marketing team really cares about or needs to see what’s involved. Any campaign or event, from the single blog post to the largest trade show needs so many simultaneous actions from initial awareness to ultimate delivery, that sometimes the list is scary.

The marketing leader’s job? To devise and oversee the ‘list’, selecting and pulling the strands together with the right deliverables from the team, working in parallel to get the job done on time.

There’s an element of judgment here; where do we test before we commit to the spend, can we pilot a message, its creative and media to the target segment before a bigger commit? Mitigating risk plays a big part but marketing’s an unpredictable game – so you have to bite the bullet, assess the likely outcomes and take the steps to get going. Then measure, tweak the strands with the team and continue towards the best outcomes.

So many comms choices, from digital to in-person, are in play that there’s no right formula, just a reliance on experience and reality-weighted common sense. Nothing beats crossing things off the list and seeing the steps go live. The tapestry may be complex, but the outcomes are there.

But the thing is, the Lead Fairy – she’s not real! I know, I’m shocked too. And so close to Christmas.

So every sales manager and product owner likes to think that marketing’s job is sooo easy, because leads grow on trees and the lead fairy just picks them and hands them out, and if that isn’t happening to us then marketing’s – well – rubbish. But what if she doesn’t exist? There are leads out there for sure, if you’re in a market for a thing which is sold by other providers, they must have leads, those guys get them, so why not us? Well maybe, just maybe she’s there but not so much a fairy as a dating agency. The leads are out there but they aren’t yours because there’s no match. Your product hasn’t put on its sharp suit or best frock, done its hair and tried its best to meet the needs of those leads, to adapt a little to their preferred nuances and win them over. Just standing there expecting someone to look over at you isn’t good enough. The product has to make an effort, speak the lead’s language, gain trust and then it might be able to get the introduction and break the ice. Then it can tell a few stories to show how much it understands, before sailing off into the sunset, happily ever after. Just having the product and shouting a bit isn’t enough, it has to show it can fit, then the lead will be yours.

Creating customers. Growing customers. We have to understand customers, their needs, motivations, their language. Get under their skin. It’s not about leads and pipeline, those are measurements. Wherever you are in the chain of comms, content or delivery, if you’re a marketer, your aim is to grow customers. I just think sometimes we forget why we do what we do.

As something of a perfectionist, I like to think it’s worth getting it right. But I’m also a pragmatist, and more often than not you just have to take the first stab at putting a programme or message out there, to see how it resonates. Then you can improve it, in search of perfection.

But then I’m a bit of a tech nerd too and that can become a distraction these days – a tool for anything and everything – we can scrape competitor x’s social followers for example, can lead us off on a tangent but possibly to a successful, more targeted campaign. So that’s the mix, and experience tells us when to give it a shot and when to keep our options open.

Processes are never perfect, and sometimes the most established can be quite personal, so it stings that improvement might be suggested – but you know what? The common goal is the thing. Getting better results and if that means occasional wayward steps to perfection, we should embrace them. We’re all in it together!

Shoot me now. What a waste of words. The next sentence starts: I am writing to you because I believe our solution… I, I, I…. It’s not about you, it’s about them. The ‘prospect’. And you’ve lost them already. They know it’s a sales pitch, they know you don’t really care (I mean obvs you don’t wish them ill, but…), just cut to what they do care about. If you know their pain then connect with that and resolve it.

Thought leadership. Marketing professionals might talk about it, either filing it vaguely under ‘strategise’, or rightly meriting it a place under ‘content planning’. But what’s the point of the wider conversation? It doesn’t have an immediate or measurable purpose in lead gen terms, so how does it contribute to the pipeline?
Well, it can take a while. The reader might not even have recognised their reality as a ‘pain’ yet to be fixed, so make sure your unveiling of the arguments are articulated, link the topic to its core purpose. What you’re doing here, is positioning your solution through the eyes of your target market. Prospects’ research cycles can be long and unintentional, the internet is a big place but the inklings of decisions can be seeded early and first impressions always count.

So, by all means, write a long white paper on a researched pain-led topic for starters, slide in a few SEO-led key words – but keep it personable, human and readable. And make sure it’s structured, because the purposing / repurposing comes next. It often starts with one structured brain dump – this might be your pillar/landing page – and spins out and links to all the following pieces, the sum of its parts. Then the different formats (media) follow – where can a sub-argument be built out into an opinion-led blog, a webinar, a video discussion with a customer?

Publish and pay-to-promote the wider piece according to your means and goals – not every piece merits outbound spend, and certainly not for everyone – if a piece has a certain vertical pain point in mind, you’ve done your ABM research, so target it to their universe, not the world in general (though others may yet collide with it when they’re of that frame of mind).

And what does ‘thought leadership’ mean for the demand gen cycle? Well, ‘early days’ is the answer to that – it’s out there in the ether. This is the point – or various points – where you start to get under the skin of your target customer. They ‘find’ an article which provokes a ‘hmm, that’s interesting’, then later another which is put in their way and eventually the voice and brand starts to be recognised as helpful, generating confidence and trust through that common understanding. When the time comes, the pipeline qualifiers kick in.

The long game, sowing the seeds – it all plays a part.