"so what?" marketing

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.

You’d think the tech would be able to do it all by now. Some job openings seem to think so. Hubspot, Pardot, Marketo. Fantastic pieces of kit – there’s almost nothing you can’t set out to be found by the right person at the right time on their buying journey, and measure it, and tweak it and start again or send the next thing. Knowing your way around the subtleties of these martech toolkits is a given for the modern day B2B marketer.

But, someone, somewhere, somehow, still has to nail the dream, share the story and articulate the journey that the unwitting or even unwilling prospect finds themself connect with and join. That’s the hard work but the crux of the matter – what are you going to tell them via these amazing digital magimixes? What’s the ultimate destination for your customer, where do they stop along the way, and how do they travel? Coming up with the words and images that convince a prospect, whether static or mobile, spoken or mute (or with some dippy muzak), digital or physical, that takes head scratching, chatting to colleagues and customers, nosing around a fair bit and some doodling too. Lots of ‘so what?’ moments are inevitable, but it will take root and you’ll start to build the stories that will articulate your brand. Then you can feed them into the machine.

Tools require craftspeople too.

Somehow it works. It’s got rhythm. Catch the eye. Hook the ear. Don’t forget it. So what marketing.