Marketing Perspectives: We We Text vs. What’s in it For ME!

A few years back at a “Writing for the Web” workshop sponsored as part of NNg’s “Usability Week” series of events, the facilitator introduced the term “we we” text and the “We We Calculator”. 

We We text refers to the practice of writing company-centered marketing content that’s all about the “we”. 

Think of the “We We” as a website or brochure that stresses front and center when a company was started (“we have been providing services since 1988”  “we are proud of our long heritage in the widget industry”  “Since 1994 we have lead the market in fully integrated widgetry”), a laundry list of services (“we do this and we do that, and to top if off we also do this and that”), a thorough listing of the team members and their stellar backgrounds.

But your prospects have other things on their “important” list.  They want to know how your services or product can meet their needs.

It’s the old What’s In It For Me concept. 

Also note: your prospects are busy.  Web users have short attention spans that are getting shorter.  Thus, making prospects work to find useful information that pertains to them on your website isn’t the best strategy.

Is a busy prospect vitally interested in how much your company has grown?  Do they want to know about every facet of every widget you have produced from day one? Is it critical to put front and center what year you started in business, or the number of clients you serve? Do you force folks to wade through the photos of your buildings, work areas and an officer or two? 

If you met with this message in a one to one sales meeting, you'd zone right out. Yet corporations (and corporation-speak) assume that people have been waiting all their lives to hear this type of self-focused monologue.

It’s proven that the opposite approach is more effective. 

Focus on your customers and their needs and wants.  Don’t have a clue?  Then ask your customers or prospects to help you figure out:

•                 What are their problems, pains, needs? 

•                 In what way does your product or service solve their problems?

•                 What are the real benefits your product or service delivers? 

Once you have a sense of this perspective, use your communications to show an understanding of your prospect’s needs.  Make it about them.  Connect with the "pain" your prospects suffer—then describe how you can ease that pain.

(PS:  When I first heard about the We We Calculator at a UsabilityWeek presentation, I recall it was a stand alone website – now it is part of FutureNowInc.)    

The Marketing Two-Step

Here’s another blog post about marketing and dancing.

Gaining Insight
One of the advantages of contract consulting is the opportunity to team with business-to-business companies in a variety of industries -- learning about each company’s challenges.  This provides valuable perspective and insight into common marketing challenges most organizations face in the marketplace. 

While most of my background is in manufacturing and technology, a significant number of projects and clients come from the professional services and non-profit/educational sector.  

Common Goals
Despite the type of business, many of the marketing issues these organizations face are the same. 

At the most fundamental, most organizations want to:

• expand market awareness.
• seek out prospects likely to buy.
• entice prospects to make a purchase decision.

In pursuit of that goal, decades of experience have revealed that the following two-step process is key, despite the company type.  Think if it as a “Marketing Two-Step”.

The Marketing Two-Step

Step 1: Who’s Your Prospect and What Do They Want?   

Most organizations have not taken the time to develop a solid understanding of who the company is trying to attract, and what motivates them.

It’s all very well and good to make assumptions about the marketplace but that approach can be quite ineffective.  The marketing two-step begins with a commitment to allocate resources to get inside the heads of prospects. Instead of designing and creating marketing campaigns, ads, lead generation programs or other marketing programs based on the internal team’s existing understanding of what they think their buyers want, the first step is to ascertain resonating messages, tone and features of campaigns that appeal to what ideal buyers want – not what we think they want. 

This can be accomplished by teaming with reputable marketing research groups, conducting market surveys or focus groups, or even surveying recent wins to determine the most compelling buying decisions of recent closed sales.

Step 2) Set Clear Goals and Targets.    

The two-step also includes a process to team with sales, finance, and other internal team members to calculate the number of leads needed to achieve revenue goals. Then here's the kicker, communicate that goal to the entire sales/marketing team. 

What’s the company’s revenue goal?  Tie that annual goal to leads and sales. How many inbound prospects turn into qualified leads?  How many qualified leads from marketing turn into sales?  What’s the average revenue from a closed sale?  An aggressive program depends on these figures. This target needs to be front and center.

Elegance Despite Difficulty

This marketing two-step sounds deceptively simple, but it is in fact extremely difficult to achieve.  (Fred Astaire sure made those routines look easy! He even makes dancing with a coat rack look elegant!) 

Like any dance choreography, this key step has to come first to “set up” the rest of the dance.

The trick is to make it part of the routine, do it as elegantly as you can, and go about the step with gusto. 

An Error Page Error: How Hootsuite Missed the Mark on Effective Marketing Communications

I use Hootsuite daily. 

You likely know that Hootsuite is a useful social media dashboard application.  It helps manage client’s multiple social networks from one website.

Specifically, I spend a few hours each week writing relevant Tweets of interest, and scheduling updates to my client’s Twitter account, as explained in previous blog postings.

You might also know that late last week, Hootsuite was one of the applications that was affected by a severe service outage.  Hootsuite crashed for almost a full business day.

How Did The Crash Happen?

I’m over-simplifying here, but here’s how I understand it. Hootsuite is one of several applications that use Amazon web services and databases to provide “cloud computing” capability so users can log onto the applications from the cloud. 

There was a total, unforeseen failure of Amazon's web services and database functionality (not the Amazon site itself, but their web services). Unfortunately all recovery or fail-safe strategies crashed as well.

Other popular websites and services that went dark that day were Reddit and Foursquare. They were crippled or outright disabled well into the early afternoon.

Other folks far more technically savvy then me are writing about this outage, and putting it in its proper perspective.

A Marketing Communications Challenge

My concern in this post is a little more mundane, but relates to marketing communications.  

Hour after hour, as I tried to unsuccessfully log in to Hootsuite, what was displayed was very snarky error page.  (pasted above). 

More than snarky, it was downright rude.  As the error page said in multiple languages:   “Owls need a break sometimes, too. We’ll be back in action, but in the meantime go outside and flap your wings around, you may find that flying aint’ very easy.”

Granted, after about five or so hours a more professional and “Kinder” error page was displayed, but this one really missed the mark.

Missed Opportunity for Positive Branding

The error page bugged me every time it was displayed.  

It created a certain perception about Hootsuite's service and brand.

Even though it wasn’t a critical situation by any means (nobody died), I lost a few hours worth of work since the outage resulted in losing 4 or 5 days worth of Tweets scheduled in advance.

So here’s to paying attention to content on an error page.  Seeing a directive to “go outside and flap your wings around” set quite a negative and dismissive tone, and wasn’t an effective use of positive branding or marketing communications.

If More is Better, Then Less is More

I recently attended a Marketing Roundtable event at Ann Arbor Spark.  The group is a gathering of marketing and online communications professionals that provide useful business information.  

Google Analytics

This particular “Roundtable” focused on using Google Analytics to track web visitors, time on pages, conversion rates (how many of your web visitors take an action like download a paper), and other important metrics that indicate how visitors behave on your website

As you likely know, Google Analytics is a free tool that delivers web traffic reports in the form of easy dashboards, summarizing page views, the most visited pages, trends showing time on site, referring websites, etc.

Does Your Website Work?

The event was a great reminder that in marketing, if the purpose of a website is lead generation, the most important consideration is to keep tabs on how folks behave when they visit your website. 

Google Analytics is an easy way to ask: are you getting web visitors to “do something?”

Q&A

At the conclusion of the event, one of the most interesting questions from the gathered attendees came from colleague Jen Jendo of IPD Solution, who asked the panel a great question about the significance of watching the behavior of web visitors when a business-to-business sales cycle is extremely long (12 – 18 months).

With such a lengthy sales cycle, she asked, how can a website support the sales process?

The presenters made the case that, even with lengthy cycles, a website is a useful marketing tool for prospects in the early stage of discovery.  Complex purchase decisions can be supported with white papers, online demos, case studies and other collateral. 

Make it Easy

The key is to make it easy for the prospect to scan over the resources, select what is of interest, and download.   

Don’t overwhelm visitors with highly technical information that folks won’t even read, since people only spend seconds scanning a website. (very hard to keep this focus with some projects I can yell you!)

Instead, provide summary titles of materials in a Knowledge Center. Make the content easy to scan and digest.  Let the visitor select the material of interest, to get to the next level of detail.  

Then be sure to follow up with a call or other outreach to move those folks to the next stage of the buying cycle.

In this way a business to business website supports the decision making for those early in the cycle, and moves them along in complex decision making.

Less is More

What hit a nerve with me was when one of the panelists made the case  “if more is better, then less is more” – don’t overwhelm with information on a b-to-b website.  

Marketers need to choose carefully how much content the website delivers, then be sure to follow up with those visitors who have taken the time to request additional levels of detail.

It’s tempting to slap a bunch of content on a website, especially in-depth details about complicated business software solutions for instance.  

Research and analytics prove otherwise.  

The best way to help your prospect is to present digestible bites of information that lead to more complete content. 

Twitter as a Brand Expression: 5 Tips for Effective Branding Using Twitter

This is a topic I’ve been mulling over for some time, but how to begin? 

The most useful place to start is to talk about the term “brand” so let’s begin with that.

What is a brand? 

A generally accepted definition of the term “brand” is “the emotional relationship a product, company, organization or even person has with their customers, audiences, consumers, community.” 

This is a definition modified from several sources including Marketingspot.

B-to-B Branding

In terms of business-to-business marketing, a brand elicits thoughts, perceptions, emotions, and responses from business customers. 

Responses are based on many key elements such as the product/service itself, the company reputation, the company history, the logo, the website, product packaging, the company employees, news articles, etc. 

(Quick side note – remember that logos are not the same as brands.  In fact they are design representations of a brand.  In a way, they serve as a brand “symbol” when they are created effectively.)

Twitter as a Branding Tool

So how can business-to-business marketers use Twitter as a branding tool?

A previous blog post about the basics of Twitter etiquette made the case that “a brand is a collection of perceptions in the mind of your prospect. A Tweet stream contributes to that perception.  It’s wise to operate within the constructs of common courtesy to lock in positive branding. Your Tweets are a reflection of your brand!

5 Tips for Effective Branding

To explore this concept more thoroughly, here are 5 Tips for Effective Branding via Twitter.

1)    Do the hard work first.  A Twitter or social media program can only reinforce your brand if you’ve taken the time to develop one in the first place.  Is your organization striving for a “thought leadership” brand?  If that makes sense for you, then Tweets can reflect cutting edge information, leading industry trends, and other materials supporting that brand image.  But you can’t be effective until you have a sense of the brand.   Are you hoping to brand the company as a leading edge innovator?  Then Tweets should reinforce that brand image by directing followers to innovation success stories, accolades and awards for innovation, breaking news of other innovators in the marketplace, etc. Again, this only makes sense if that branding work was done beforehand.

2)    Be Consistent.  Branding must be consistent across all media and programs.  As an example, a financial consultant might use print and online ads and its website to portray a conservative and trustworthy brand. Thus it wouldn’t make sense for the financial advisor to Tweet goofy jokes or off color comments, personal observations about the weather, Charlie Sheen or unrelated topics.  Be human, yes, but don’t go off-brand. The advisor’s tweet stream should reinforce a consistent brand image that relates to other programs.

3)    Use common sense. Courtesy goes a long way.  This was covered in another post, but it is worth repeating.  Mind your manners!   Don’t be reckless, use profanity, or insult.  That makes a terrible brand impression! Don’t Tweet or post when angry. Refrain from being intoxicated when Tweeting, as many organizations have learned.

4)     Be timely.  This is a pet peeve. What does it say about a business consultant’s “brand” when the Twitter feed hasn’t been updated in over 12 months?  It doesn’t say anything good that is for sure.   If you start a social media marketing program, by all means maintain it in a timely fashion.  It is a detriment to the brand if a blog, Twitter account, or Facebook goes through a ‘set it and forget it” process, and the last post was over a year ago.

5)    Be thoughtful.  It is a mystery to me why so many business to business companies don’t take time to draft an effective Twitter biography profile.  Many also neglect to include their website’s URL. Other relevant followers search Twitter bios using keywords when looking for folks to follow.  If a corporate trainer, for instance, leaves the bio blank, or doesn’t use keywords in the bio like “training’ “corporate training” “learning workshops”, they are missing out on a great branding opportunity.

 Parting Thoughts

A brand is the foundation of all marketing activities. 

It takes thought and effort, but social media marketing can effectively reinforce your brand, and deliver a favorable perception in the mind of your prospect.

Thinking About Words: Part II "Posh" Up Close & Personal

It’s time for another edition of “Thinking About Words.”

Notice I didn’t start the preceding sentence with “Due to popular demand.”  Nope, it’s just that time.

After reading the first post in the “Thinking About Words” series,  my colleague Patrick McLaughlin of Caldo Communications suggested the next post in the series take a look at the word “Posh” – meaning sumptuously furnished or appointed; luxurious.

Patrick suggested that much like the word “Snafu” which was featured in the first post, the word Posh is an acronym-generated word.   He pointed out that  the word is an acronym from “port out ( ward ), starboard home” which is  said to be the preferred accommodation on ships traveling between England and India.

However, a little digging shows that there is some question about this being the true word origin.

Miriam Webster considers that British humorist P.G. Wodehouse via an unintentional misspelling might have coined the word “posh”. 

Dictionary.com poo poos the acronym idea totally, and instead notes the word has an obscure origin, likely originating via American slang in 1890.

Isn’t this fun?

Thinking about words is so much fun we might have to call the cops… you know, the word “Cop” is often cited as being derived from the phrase  "constable on patrol” but I don’t have time to think about that.

Instead, I’m heading out to play some golf. (word origin: “gentlemen only, ladies forbidden")

Acting As If: The Power of the Present ..(or.. Weight Loss and Web Conversions: What Do They Have in Common?)

If you enjoy self-help and personal development, chances are you’ve heard the phrase acting as if. 

Simply put, the concept means we "act as if" we have already achieved a desired end goal. By “acting as if” a goal has been met, or some desired end has taken place, we take the actions now that we want to achieve a future end-state.

Create Conditions for Success

The emphasis is on taking action now.   The power of the present, and all that.

Instead of looking at a goal as a far-off achievement, when we start acting as if, we behave in specific ways to make a goal come to life.

A Lighter Perspective

Personally speaking, in November of last year I decided to act “as if” I were 40 pounds lighter.  Each day, I was mindful of food portions, snacking and drinking choices, and the amount of exercise taken in a given week. 

I acted as if I had already been successful.

Several months later nearly 30 pounds are gone, so it is still a process of acting “as if” those last 10 pounds have dropped.  When that goal is achieved, as long as the “as if” focus is consistent, I will own and keep the behaviors since I’ve had so much practice.

Back to B-to-B

Professionally speaking, in terms of business-to-business marketing, a marketing department can certainly act as if. 

Let’s say the goal is to increase lead generation, or to increase web conversion rates.  Another desired end-state could be to increase the number of closed sales that came from the marketing program.

Each person on the marketing team needs to "act as if" those marketing goals have already been achieved. The team can focus on the key strategies and tasks to take the actions now to achieve a future end-state.

The Power of the Present

What would it look like to act as if web conversions were higher? In other words, how would one act if an increase had taken place in the number of website visitors acting on an offer (or filling out a form) divided by total website visitors over a given period of time.

By acting as if that increase had already happened, a program would include continuous A/B testing of page designs; optimizing forms; driving more traffic to the website; adding compelling, relevant calls to action; making the “download now” button more prominent and so on.  This is the process if the goal had already been achieved.

Instead of looking at increased web conversions goal as a far-off achievement, by acting as if, the team behaves in specific ways to make the goal come to life.

Think To Make It So

This isn't that easy, but it's a great mind-set to cultivate. Whether personal or professional goals, what can you do to create the conditions to achieve a desired end-result?