The Invisible Marketing Blog » create value not art

Can humanizing your brand increase sales?

Christie Turner — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 21:04:37 +0000

It’s easy to simply dismiss all branding as a constructed image, no relationship with reality. Most people with power to spend money do know that brands are constructed with an agenda: influence people to spend money. At least intellectually, we know that brands intend to produce a rather specific outcome, and it isn’t the greater good.

Now, the most powerful brands tap into a reality we want to believe. The human brain has a tough time resisting an offer which appeals to beliefs we already hold about the world, how the world should be, or ourselves.

We want the NYPD and the US Army to be like Iron Man: efficiently killing off the bad guys, inerrantly knowing who they are, and sparing everyone else — all with beautiful technological accuracy that’s much more surgical and correct than mere human judgment. Such desires are common among post-9-11 Americans, and this zeitgeist is a secret of the power of all three of these brands.

All 3 brands have also been humanized for us to some degree. NYPD by stark and heroic images related to 9-11 and the defense of the city since. The US Army by our proximity to many of its faces through our family, friends, school or work colleagues, fellow travelers in our airports, and extensive news coverage. Iron Man by Robert Downey, Jr., and the famous movies.

Even brands that should take what they do seriously and exert a vibe of trustworthiness and confidence (the NYPD, my accountant, the NSA) don’t seem credible without a human side.

Yet many executives believe that humanizing their brands will actually cost them credibility.

We won’t seem as big. (You also won’t seem as distant.)
We won’t seem competent. (A fake, constructed image of competence will seem more competent than you guys actually are?)
They’ll notice that we’re not invincible. (Most brands are expected to recover well. Perfection is a nice but optional extra.)

What really matters, of course, is whether humanizing the brand can increase sales.

Many fashion/consumer brands know that the answer is yes. Celebrity endorsements, done correctly, are one of the clearest proofs of this.

Is it also true B2B? Yes. How do I know? Because business to business buyers value word of mouth referrals, video testimonials, live customer references. They also know that such things aren’t foolproof (past results don’t guarantee future performance) and can even be faked. But how many of you hired your corporate lawyers or accountants from the Yellow Pages? Heck, no, you got referrals from people you trust. Even a Google or LinkedIn search result comes with more credibility than an ad.

Why? It’s a lot harder to get real human beings to stake their reputations on my company’s performance (by lending face and name to a reference) than to design a pretty image and make it say all the right things.

Content marketing is another part of humanizing the B2B brand. Let’s say I give you a preview of a company’s problem solving insights and approach as it tackles a problem similar to the one you face. Maybe it’s a Slideshare presentation or a conference breakout session or a blog post – doesn’t matter. What matters is that you can much better envision what it’s like to work with me based on that preview. No ad can accomplish this. Ads tell, which means they are self conscious messages. Content marketing shows what I understand about a problem, and how I approach solving it. It puts a real face on a real solution. This increases trust. It’s humanizing.

Invisibility is holy grail or anathema in marketing?

Christie Turner — Mon, 24 May 2010 17:55:55 +0000

As I watch the Google Alerts pop up for my brand name, I am struck by two things.

1. Some affiliate marketing writers (who frankly sound half a step short of MLM’ers) have glommed onto the idea of invisible marketing being a terrible thing. Who wouldn’t want their name in lights?

2. Other marketing writers (who sound like SEO specialists) emphasize that invisibility is kind of a goal when marketing online.

I would argue that invisibility isn’t itself a goal for B2B marketing. Nor is visibility per se.

It’s good to be visible — to your prospects, to people who should have some interest in knowing you. In fact, it’s necessary to be visible to this group.

It’s good to be invisible, too. The idea is for your value to be visible. That means building content, building relationships, building trust, building something other than a big pile of robotic spin.

It’s for your target market to judge the value of what you do. Your job is to listen to the market as it responds to what you’re putting out there. Either it validates your position or it doesn’t. Whatever the response, you can only get better when you understand what your buyer values and figure out how to do more of what they value with your products and services.

Market-validated positioning, products, services, communication. Consistent and growing revenue. Those are valid goals for marketing.

Not who sees our marketing or knows that we’re marketing something. That’s called vanity marketing. In the B2B world, it doesn’t make money.

Marketers: under pressure for ROI? How to find accountability mentors.

Christie Turner — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 17:43:55 +0000

Process improvement is a sophisticated science (and art) in the real world where stuff gets moved (logistics), stored (materials management), built (JIT, Six Sigma, Lean, Agile), and so on.

Most marketing people don’t think about what they do in terms of process improvement.

These two disciplines should talk to each other.

If you’re a B2B marketer, especially in technology or other companies that make stuff, find some buddies on the ops side of your shop. (Or at other companies, if you like.) Take ‘em to lunch. They probably think what you do is glamorous and useless. And it may be. But don’t talk about that. Get them to talk about what they do. How they do it. Why they do things the way they do.

What’s useful about this isn’t so much product knowledge (though this couldn’t hurt you). It’s exposure to the operational mindset. To a part of your business that’s probably been accountable for its results a lot longer than yours has.

Why? If the marketing accountability craze hasn’t caught up with you yet, it will. Get a crash course in how to survive in that world from someone who’s already accustomed to the constant demand for visible results.

Here are some questions to get the conversation going:

How much of your week do you (or your team) spend measuring the results of what you do?
What measurement and analysis tools do you use?
What metrics do you follow? What do they tell you? How do you use them?
When a metric is off, what do you do? Do you ever let it ride and see if it gets better on its own? Why or why not?
What are you doing to try & improve your numbers? How well is it working?

The new world of marketing doesn’t spend money on vanity campaigns. It demands NPV and ROI calculations and a general trend of improved results.

If you’re lucky, the new world of marketing also doesn’t get asked as often why the logo is green or how to get extra tickets for the golf benefit.

Top 3 gaps between marketing leaders

Christie Turner — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 18:12:34 +0000

In a discussion of brand and marketing on David Friedman’s blog, Kevin Liebl observed the appearance of a generation gap in marketing executives.

Amid seismic shifts in technology and the macro economy, it’s my view that at least 3 other gaps are emerging between marketing leaders.

Accountability gap. Possibly the most important gap among marketers. Marketers increasingly get to test, tinker, and directly associate their work with customer acquisition, revenue, and profitability. Now, I’ve had more than one ad agency veteran tell me it’s not OK for an ad, event, or website to be judged on direct revenue it generates. This thinking is common among marketers. But those who are proficient with metrics, analysis, and accountability for ROI are increasingly prized.

Technology gap. New technologies enable a right-now measurement discipline which was formerly the domain of direct response advertising. Not just social media, but mobile marketing, search engine marketing, internet analytics, marketing automation. Tactical savvy in these technologies can be game changing. A haves and have-nots gap is increasing between those who learn the new tools of the trade and those who don’t.

Mindset gap. Old mindset: do I think I can control the message in a one-way brainwashing effort toward my audience? New mindset: can I engage markets and individuals in 2-way conversations that I influence but cannot control? This also includes the relationship between marketing and sales, not just marketing and the customer. The new mindset doesn’t win in every market, but it’s becoming more important to be flexible in thinking about the role of the marketing messenger.

Marketing has always been about revenue generation. More & more, marketers get to drive activities that actually can be proven to generate revenue. It’s a good place to be.

For the swipe file: impressive B2B tech ad in social media

Christie Turner — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 14:59:49 +0000

SAP may be an old-line vendor in the technology space, but along the way to the top of the stack they figured out how to talk to their customers.

This SAP ad on Youtube does NOT talk about bits and bytes. It talks about what the tech can do for the biz AND for the buyer personally. And it diagrams juuust enough tech that a biz buyer can feel smart about it.

If you’ve ever been part of an enterprise SAP implementation, of course, you have a potentially rather jaded perspective on the ad and its promises. But that’s a different conversation. This is a very classy example of how to open the conversation for complex, multimillion dollar enterprise sales of complicated, high risk technology packages.

And look. Over 10,000 hits. The hits keep coming after 3-4 months online. I’d love to know what this ad is doing for the top of their sales funnel. Maybe it’s just cool and nifty brand fluff because every big company CIO already knows SAP and has an opinion about it. But my hunch is that this video is opening conversations somewhere for SAP.

4 things that marketing can change in a down economy

Christie Turner — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 15:11:49 +0000

CMOs, how do we make a difference when the available pool of paying customers has shrunk?

In a B2B company of not-unlimited means, it is easy to spend a lot of money on marketing without seeing value for the spend. Here are 4 spends that are limited, scalable, and accountable. Each can drive overall company growth, short term revenue, or both.

Target Customer analysis > G2. What characteristics, beliefs, business problems, firmographics do our best customers have in common? How predictive are these traits that another company could be a good customer?

Demand generation. Who else might be similar to our target customer(s)? Where might we find & meet them? What offers and approaches will draw their interest?

Relationship nurturing. How do we better get to know the people in our target customer universe — including our existing customers:?

Strategic communication. Who are our stakeholders (including current and potential customers, investors, and employees)? What do our stakeholders want and need to know? How can we become the source of that information?

They won’t remember our ads. They don’t want to learn what we want them to believe about our products, services, company, quality… they want us to tell them how our stuff solves their problem.

Add these distractions to Marketing’s not-to-do list

Christie Turner — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 14:47:17 +0000

In a world of limited time, finite means, and pressure for results, what not to do?

When marketing is under-resourced, it tends to stop listening to the customer (if it ever did), because listening requires a cessation of action. What happens next? Recycling whatever you said and did in the last campaign. Talking to all customers as if they’re all the same.

Four marketing temptations that are common in a down economy (and ways to avoid them):

Not to do: Try anything once.
Try instead: When results are off (or direct marketing is new to the organization) it can be tempting to churn through new tactics, media, messaging, target industries. Revisit your plan, fine, but spend the energy to first analyze what’s there today. It’s easier, faster, and potentially less risky to incrementally improve an existing program than to chuck everything and start over.

Not to do: Get something out there NOW.
Try instead: Urgency and timeliness are important in marketing. Make the most of them by talking to each of your customers (and prospects) as if their current goals and worries are important to you. Start with the customers you know best and who are most valuable to you. Think about whom you’re trying to reach and what’s important in their world. Just making noise isn’t enough.

Not to do: The Unfunded Mandate.
Try instead: Ruthlessly cut what doesn’t have a budgeted spend, allocated time/project plan, and a revenue stream it’s directly intended to influence. Say no to everything else, regardless of who’s asking. Create a backburner list for nice ideas that need some more time to bake.

Not to do: Abandon everything.
Try instead: Don’t simply stop doing marketing. Establish an ROI objective linked to how your program or tactic will help a salesperson and/or a prospect. Test with a fraction of your sales force and prospects before investing big.

For the concept of the not-to-do list, thanks to @gerhard20 for the post 15 Things Salespeople And Sales Managers Should Put On Their Not-To-Do List.

I bet you don’t know your customer this well.

Christie Turner — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 16:01:40 +0000

The real beauty of Kevin’s article When will CMO heads roll? isn’t the observation that corporate marketing budgets are broken and that change is amazingly slow in coming.

That’s an easy target.

What I like is his description of who is changing.

He describes an actual target market that a marketer can begin to get to know and flush out through sales-related communications as well as corporate positioning.

Why?

It isn’t “people in [Department] with [Job title] at companies with revenue between $[X] and $[Y] million, whose [CMO] is [40] or younger, headquartered in [US].” That is how 90% of business people think of their target markets. In B2B especially, it’s really not true.

Your customer is someone who has a reason to buy from you. That’s not intrinsic to size, location or any other easy demographic or firmographic marker.

Check out Kevin’s article and see what I mean.

5 Reasons your customers and prospects don’t listen to you

Christie Turner — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 14:28:24 +0000

Which of these is true for your company? How are you going to fix it?

Your customers are focused on their own issues — and don’t see you as relevant to those concerns. Are you talking to the wrong people or companies? Are you trying to sell too broadly? Do you simply need to better explain the relevance of your work to customers’ problems?
Your company talks about itself, forcing customers to navigate your bureaucracy, jargon, products. How can you put aside your internal bureaucracy and help customers solve their own problems? Can you organize around customers and their problems?
Your company talks about solutions without correctly defining your customers’ problems. Ask existing customers, target customers, and your sales and marketing people what the customers’ problems are. Where are the common threads? Where are the disconnects?
When your company talks, it sounds like a bunch of other companies. What’s the difference?
Your company talks in language they don’t trust. Too tidy. Too pat. Too good to be true. Find out how your customers talk about their problems. And don’t overpromise what you can do about the problem. Respect your audience’s intelligence.
Your company doesn’t admit what it doesn’t do. Draw a line: Here’s what we do well — that is, where a customer gets the most economic value from us. Here’s everything we don’t do so well — can we send customers elsewhere for those things?

Getting customer attention is already hard. Why make it harder?

People won’t buy what they don’t know about. Or will they?

Christie Turner — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 17:08:11 +0000

As regular readers of my blog know, I have an uneasy relationship with traditional brand advertising. Especially in the B2B space.

I do feel moved to clarify this point regarding corporate brand marketing: “People can’t buy your stuff if they don’t know you exist.”

Now, especially in the B2B world, people CAN buy a product or service from you – and not know you exist. Especially (but not only) if you’re selling commodities.

– They’re buying through a broker or aggregator or auction or distributor.

– They’re buying through a blind or competitive procurement process.

In both of those cases, an influencer had to know who you are and decide to bring you in. Purchases did not materialize through spontaneous generation. Someone still made them happen

Now, here’s where sales and marketing disciplines are inextricably linked, often uncomfortably so in many companies.

In any B2B sale I can think of, and also many consumer purchases, awareness is not enough.

A significant goal of marketing in the B2B world is credibility. That comes through many proofs — word of mouth referrals, customer testimonials and references, personal introductions, coverage in some kind of third party analysis (from research houses to blogs), awards, media coverage, peer reviewed journals, technology reviews…

Whether buyers, influencers, or both need to trust your credibility, this must be established before money will change hands. And typically before serious discussions will be entertained.

Credibility implies some openness, respect, trust. It is a source of motivation to proceed with a deal.

What credibility is not? Awareness. (It’s so much more than that!) Awareness is not a meaningful yardstick for measuring any kind of B2B marketing ROI.

How do you know your marketing is building credibility? By measuring the degree to which your marketing gives you influence over the actions your counterparties are taking. Is it easy to measure? No. But it’s what matters.

Enter tension between marketing and sales. In the B2B complex sale, marketing + sales must work hand in glove to deliver the kind of influence that leads to customer action. It’s a highly integrated partnership. It’s hard to peel out what marketing did and what sales did and give them credit as separate functional entities for their specific influential little successes during the course of a sales cycle.

We can steal many good ideas from six sigma, agile, and other manufacturing processes. Sales and marketing people should do more of this. But human influence is much, much more complex and unpredictable than a manufacturing process. What we do can’t be fine-tuned in the same way as a mechanical build operation. Which is already pretty complex and tough to tune.

What’s predictable, though, is this. If the marketing team is focused on writing pretty brochures and running pretty ads in traditional media, it’s going to be a strained partnership. If the sales team is waiting for fully qualified leads to fall from the sky, ready for contract negotiations, it’s going to be a strained partnership. (Hopefully that’s not your company…)

6 Reasons People Can’t Tell What You Do Even After Reading Your Website

Christie Turner — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 16:52:37 +0000

Widget makers have it easy. Plaster photos on the website. We.Are.Selling.This.Thing. It.Looks.Like.This. (Do you want it painted in Autumn Glory, Technicolor Stainless, or Urban Soot?)

For those of us who sell things whose souls cannot be captured in a photograph, it’s not quite so literal.

Here are six reasons why your erstwhile customer can’t figure out what on earth you DO, actually. Even after visiting your website.

6. Representative Imagery. Someone let the agency get hip and artsy at the expense of the brand again. So much so that nobody can tell what any of that hip artsy stuff on the website actually means. Creating a whole visual and literary language in which the customer must be educated before they can actually learn something about how your company solves their problem… not cool.

5. Industry Buzzwords. True meaning is completely obscured in a thicket of industry benchmarks, certifications, technical jargon, association relationships, awards, TLAs… The site may be connected to many third party ideas and standards. But what does the company actually do or think to help its customers?

4. Vague Benefits. We do everything. For anyone. Just call us to find out what that actually is.

3. Steaming Piles of Features and Promotions. Do you need a _? How ’bout a _? Do you need a service contract with that? Would you rather buy _ and _ together, at a 1.208598% discount on second Tuesdays? A five year contract will get you an additional 0.00029% discount for the first 34 months!

2. Product Bureaucracy. The website has to explain our entire internal bureaucracy to you before anything else happens. Obviously our bureaucracy is the most salient benefit of working with us. Why else would we lovingly provide you with 16 different numbers to call in each of the 28 countries in which we do business? Heaven forfend that our service teams in any country should ever look like they could talk with you as a global team. I mean, how weird is that?

1. The Very Nature of Intangible Products. If I’m buying a widget, I may actually have an affinity with the look or functionality of the thing itself. If I am a business person, and if I’m buying software or services, what I am really buying is an outcome. I don’t want accounting software. I want my accounting done well enough that the government doesn’t investigate or fine me over SOX compliance. I don’t want consulting, I want more productivity or more revenue or both. I want to keep my job and not be embarrassed by your performance. (Etc.) All the other hoopla is you trying to convince me that your intangibles will provide that outcome.

Why should marketing be invisible?

Christie Turner — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 15:48:01 +0000

People ask this all the time. (Which is fantastic, by the way!)

“Why Invisible Marketing? Isn’t marketing about getting visibility?”

Well, here’s how I think about it.

I have enjoyed, talked about, and experienced deep emotional connections with super-cool Superbowl ads for products I’ve never bought and companies with whom I won’t do business.

But I earn a living because I’m known and trusted by a really small group of professionals and executives, for whom I treat the cancer they’re struggling to manage.

Do I want someone to say to my client, “My, what a memorable campaign your company ran”?

My goal is to expose something valuable to people who will value it. To facilitate the development particular kinds of relationships, which eventually result in durable revenue generation.

It’s comparatively easy to design marketing that the marketer thinks is effective. But it’s terribly expensive to do that. Such marketing typically takes place in an echo chamber, absent the customer, the sales people trying to reach the customer, and the people who are serving the customer after the sale.

It’s hard to design marketing that does its job, which is to contribute to positive Prospect Lifetime Value.

Here’s a non-advertising example. When developing a website, most people are tempted to start with the graphics and colors. The disciplined and productive place to start, however, is with the business case: what problem am I trying to solve? For whom? What do they want from me? What do I want from them? What should we accomplish together through our conversations?

I promise, the color scheme is much easier to define and matters far less than a clear, shared definition of the business problem the site is solving. From the business case flow the message, the functionality, the design standards, and the common ground for making decisions throughout the process.

In everything I do, I try very hard not to begin with branding or design or pretty words or Fun Marketing Stuff or putting together a webinar by Tuesday. (Though all those things have to get done, too.)

When I work with companies, we begin by asking and answering hard questions. And then we test those answers to find out if they are true. Over and over. Iteratively, over time.

I’m not a designer. But I think there’s a beauty to this process. As the great Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky said in his landmark book Sculpting in Time, “The beautiful is hidden from the eyes of those who are not searching for the truth.”

Why Business People Speak Like Idiots: A Bullfighter’s Guide

Christie Turner — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 16:07:17 +0000

Book report time. This one is good summertime reading – lightweight, and short.

The Elevator Summary: A witty lampoon highlighting the jargon, obfuscation, and paint-by-numbers habits which cloud business communication and impede selling.

Standout Moments: The chapter “You’ve Been Templatized.” A favorite nugget: “Business idiots are the sheep that use any shortcut available to automate their voice, and PowerPoint is a prime example.”

And another: “It’s good to have the company name somewhere, but the customary fluffy opening about how great the company is and how the execs owe it all to the worker bees sounds contrived. How about starting with a controversial statement? Or just something unexpected? We would all read a memo that begins, ‘Are you about to trash this memo? If so, good!’”

The chapter on selling is simple, practical. A sample: “Most people, when they want to persuade, immediately begin talking about ‘me’. This works if you have a great anecdote that puts you on familiar terms with your audience. But if you really want to convince people of something they wouldn’t otherwise know, think, or believe, you need to take yourself out of the equation. Take a hard look at the words ‘I’ and ‘we’ in your last brochure or speech.”

Not so much: The book will appeal to grammar curmudgeons more than most mortals. Not a recipe for mass appeal.

Who should read it: Business people who find themselves using the English language to communicate with other business people. English majors who somehow snuck into the corporate community and need a laugh.

Bottom Line: Witty, valuable, easily digestible insights into business communication. Worthwhile airport or beach reading.

More about the book: Why Business People Speak Like Idiots: A Bullfighter’s Guide

Who are we talking with, anyway?

Christie Turner — Thu, 28 May 2009 16:42:05 +0000

I like to base my calculation of conversions on % of my total list [target universe] who converted. Now, % of clickthrough is the usual denominator. But I think that sets the bar too low. I want to keep the focus on relevance to the total known target universe.

Why?

In my world, there are no points for visibility without relevance.

I prefer microtargeting: saying very very relevant things only to the people who care about them.

If the total universe is unresponsive, I’m blathering at too many people without enough relevance. (Setting aside email spam filters, “not working at this company any more”, and similar mechanics.)

This isn’t how consumer marketers think, and I’m not really sure how they could.

If I’m building executive relationships in a finite market space with comparatively few buyers and influencers (vs mass consumer marketing), then every contact is important.

And if relationships are the goal, and if every prospect is important, then my conversations and messages should have really high relevance to the people they engage.

That’s the holy grail, anyway.

Marketing = selling + better + faster

Christie Turner — Tue, 26 May 2009 15:15:24 +0000

Why do sales people hate prospecting?

Many sales people believe they must do things that seem unrelational, with the very people with whom they need trusted relationships, in order to sell.

B2B sales people are also trying to help people follow through with big changes. Most people love change about as much as they love a root canal.

In short: prospecting = rejection. It’s tough to be alone out there.

How can the marketing partner help?

Partners in strategy. Once we both understand where you’re trying to go, then we can start getting somewhere.
Partners in activity. Activity that finds and helps us meet people who (in theory) should want to know us, because we sell stuff that helps people like them.
Partners in encouragement. Selling is hard. Marketing should be a cheerleader.
Partners in psychoanalysis. What’s the customer thinking? How do we communicate best with them? What is the endgame they want? Where are our interests aligned? Are we negotiating against ourselves here?
Partners in technology. Marketing people help automate the stuff you shouldn’t be doing anyway, but that helps us all if it gets done.
Partners in ruthless pursuit of the truth. Is that customer really serious? Is this message more about us than it is about them? We say we’re adding value here, but are we really? How do we need to change in order to win this one? How would we do that? Is it worth it? Yes, I can say all this and still be a cheerleader.

In short: Marketing = selling + better + faster