Many smaller companies struggle with justifying their investments in marketing. If they are honest, often sales and marketing are lumped into the one department or under the one budget and if asked, they would characterise their go to market investment as "a lot of sales and a little bit of marketing". Given the generally entrepreneurial nature of smaller organisations used to evangelising their products directly with customers this is inevitable, and if they are in the early "pre chasm" market, one might argue, wise.
But the world is changing and it's changing fast. SMBs need to change their approach accordingly otherwise they are in serious danger of being out-marketed and outsold by their competition who have understood the game has changed and have adapted fastest.
So what has changed? Your prospects are doing the vast majority of their investigations into how to solve their problems and who has solutions to help them, all without your assistance. 80% of buyers surveyed reckon they found their supplier not the other way around. Web.2.0 technologies mean that your buyers are researching solutions on line, participating in forums, reading blogs, downloading whitepapers, listening to webcasts and learning from their peers. Your sales people are losing the power to influence your buyers. You need to participate in the debate and that debate is online. You need a modern marketing strategy and tactics that reflect this brave new world, let's call it Marketing 2.0.
The really good news is that participating in Marketing 2.0 is very affordable for SMBs and at last smaller organisations can punch well above their weight and genuinely compete with the marketing heavyweights. How? Read on.
The key elements in building Marketing 2.0:
#1 Spend time developing robust data of your external market environment.
Reassuringly the elements of any half decent data collection process are the same as they have always been, namely:
- Customer analysis, segments, motivations, unmet needs
- Competitor analysis, identification and SWOT analysis
- Market analysis, size, projected growth, profitability, barriers to entry, channels of distribution
- Environmental analysis, government regulations, technological shifts etc.
You may already know much of this, in which case you are already ahead of the game.
#2 Analyse the information you have gathered to identify common problems and pain points, gaps between where buyers are now and where they wish to be.
If you really don't know you must go and ask; ask existing clients and prospects, or at the very least ask those closest to your buyers, your salespeople. Your key challenge here is to identify the single "best" problem. That is, the single problem that is creating the most discomfort for your buyers AND that you are best at solving.
Why is this important? Because the essence of good marketing is to disturb your buyer from their complacency , from the status quo, to trouble them and to prompt them to start considering how to solve these problems. It is VITAL that your communications with your prospects talk to them in the language of their problems NOT in the language of your company, namely evangelising how great your solution is to their problems.
#3 Develop a content marketing plan.
I wrote about this recently in an earlier blog.
Content is king in Marketing 2.0. This is a challenge for many SMBs who whilst deeply competent in their area of expertise lack the skills and/or time to write content for potential buyers. You should consider outsourcing your content development to specialists.
- Develop a content calendar. Assign a group of individuals to participate. Do not lay the responsibility for content on one person's shoulders. It is impractical and risky. What do you do if they become sick or leave? Stop Marketing? Of course not. Look to leverage once piece of content many times over. If you have written a technical white paper, consider creating a non technical article, break your paper into a series of blogs. Take your white paper and record a downloadable webcast, publish a summary in your newsletter. You get the picture
- The second component of your content marketing plan is to develop reach. You must develop your content distribution channel. You want to ensure your excellent content is being read in those places where your buyers are doing their research on solving their problems. We recommend blogging as an excellent technique for participating in and getting found online. It also does wonders for your Google ranking. Consider participating in social media channels such as LinkedIn and Twitter. Leverage your blogs by reposting links on LinkedIn groups and Twitter.
#4 Invest in robust Marketing 2.0 tools.
Develop a lead management platform. Lead management in Marketing 2.0 is more than simply tracking prospects in your CRM system or managing contacts in an email marketing tool. It is about building a systematic process that dimensions your entire funnel from initial contact through the stages of the buyers journey (a phrase coined by Hugh MacFarlane from MathMarketing) to the point your prospect becomes your customer. Enormous strides have been taken in recent years in developing marketing automation software tools. Think of these as marketing's version of CRM systems such as Salesforce.com. Software is rented and data is stored in the cloud.
These tools are very powerful and can do much of the heavy lifting for you. You may not even need to hire a marketing resource at all, or certainly not a full time resource. Many agencies such as g2m Solutions will design and manage programs for modest monthly retainers. These tools fall into two categories, those with the emphasis on outbound communications such as email and inbound marketing tools and those that focus on attracting traffic to your website, inevitably there are some that try to do a bit of both. G2m Solutions recommends and works with StrategyMix, Innoblogs and Hubspot as three excellent and affordable platforms for SMBs.
#5 Test, measure, retest.
One of the beauties of Marketing 2.0 is that you are able to use the power of the automation tools to measure the success of specific campaigns, create campaigns that are targeted to specific industry or geographical markets, understand the content and keywords that are driving the quantity and quality of leads. Finally, marketing managers can simply and affordably fine tune marketing campaigns to tactics that work and sceptical CEOs can see an ROI on their marketing dollars. In the final analysis this may well be the most obvious and immediate benefit of Marketing 2.0.
#6 Align sales and marketing around one common goal; lead quantity, quality and management.
Marketing 2.0 allows you to create a single integrated approach to the buyer and to develop processes and campaigns that nurture leads through the entire funnel, including recycling those leads who leak.
The potential of Marketing 2.0 for SMBs is very high. Many surveys are already showing that SMBs are embracing Marketing 2.0 technologies and processes rapidly and ahead of their larger counterparts, having understood its power and affordability. Yet firms must remember that Marketing 2.0 is still built on strong, robust, initial data collection and analysis of markets and prospect's problems. The most effective Marketing 2.0 campaign will founder if it is built on foundations of sand.