“There is no blue-print for Social Media”. True words from @shaunhewitt of Virgin Media. So, just make and take of it what you will. It’s the cross-over between public and private, (depends if anyone else is reading it I guess – in which case, Hi!); between personal and professional – this blog is a bit of both. My thoughts as a professional marketer, shared from my private time. Social is where the consumer, the non-professional person in us, can go public if we want and have our say and at times make our words louder by manipulating the visibility of a hashtag or a brand name @ handle. So it’s there to be used and abused. It is just another channel though, it fits in the mix as the immediate and the visible to be taken seriously or not by the target or recipient, if they happen to look and care. Something else will be along before too long…
Message or media
“We’ve got to get on Twitter!”. Really? Experience of communications that work, say that the message should lead a campaign, not the medium. Once you’ve got something useful to say to a (targeted) prospective audience, then research and decide which media – and it’s usually a combination – are appropriate to spread the word. Different media do different jobs in the lifecycle of the communications. I think of Twitter as a notice board. Maybe it’s the modern day equivalent of hiring a plane to pull a banner across the skies – that’s probably as memorable as a tweet will be. It does a certain job, but there’s no point in spending hours, or even minutes, every day tweeting, if you’ve got nothing to say or what you do have to say isn’t going to hit the people you want. So, message first then media. A bit of focus saves alot of time and more importantly, gets results.
Marketing – the challenge
Who (the hell) are you?
Why should I care?
Why should I believe you?
Those are the three key questions going through the mind of a prospect, assuming they even register your communication at all. Multiply that by a factor of all the simultaneous communications that a prospect is subjected, relevant and irrelevant to their current interest and that’s alot for any message to cut through. Our prospect probably isn’t even conscious that he or she is questioning these things: they’re just ignoring a pop-up or a banner, deleting an email, possibly rebuffing the intrusion of an unsolicited phone call, but the key to success required meaningful answers to those three questions, even if they’re asked at a subliminal level.
So, what moves a successful communication beyond that three question defence? It’s not straightforward, that’s for sure but is a result of your mix of brand (what your company means to that prospect), messages and the media you choose to use. It’s often down to, not what you say about your business, but what your customers say. And you need to address a lifecycle of messages too – the same thing won’t be appropriate to all prospects at the same point in time, but will be more relevant when they’re at the same point in their buying lifecycle. Consider whether they’re just considering buying into your market or whether they know what they want, they just have to decide who to buy it from.
Complicated stuff and not something to answer on the back of a postcard but it can help you appreciate some of the subtleties that effective B2B marketing requires.
So What? I hear you say
So What? is about the most useful thing I’ve learned to say in over 15 years of B2B marketing. That short phrase can save you time, money and from looking an idiot in front of your colleagues. It can make you a hero, help you tweak the nearly oh-so-fantastic towards greatness and help you ditch the rubbish before you open your mouth and tell someone else your great idea. It can help you think from your customer or prospect’s point of view, turning tables so the third party perspective – the recipient of your message – is at the fore when you’re developing a communications programme. It’s a useful thing to say in meetings (though you may have to find a less confrontational way of saying it as people get upset if you imply their ideas aren’t quite that great – though you’re only trying to help them achieve greatness, I know). Maybe we’ll come back to other ways to say ‘So what?”…
In this blog you will find comment and hopefully useful information to make your B2B marketing more effective and better value. Marketing is all about saying the right thing to the right people at the right time, via the right medium, after all. What could be simpler?
"so what?" marketing 