Introducing: Ask The B2B Experts

Have you ever faced a difficult situation at work and wished you had a B2B marketing expert you could call up for advice?  Now you do! Beginning this month, we’re accepting your burning B2B marketing questions on Facebook and Twitter. At the end of each month, we’ll pick one of our favorite questions from the mix and bring one of our resident B2B marketing experts in front of the camera to answer it. We hope we’ll all get a bit smarter in the process!

Here’s how to submit your question:

1. Visit us on Facebook or Twitter.
2. Write on our wall (Facebook) or tweet @moveo (Twitter) with your question and the hashtag #askb2bexperts. Keep it short and simple.
3. Check back at the end of the month to see if your question was chosen. We’ll announce the question we selected on the last weekday of the month.
4. Watch for the answer. A video with our expert’s answer to your B2B marketing question will be posted to YouTube shortly after we select a question.

It’s really that easy! Want one more way to ask your question? Go ahead and leave it in the comments on this post.

Featured image via: Digital Enlightment

Are campaign ads teaching Americans to tune out advertising?

Are you excited for Election Day? If you’re anything like most Americans, you’re at least looking forward to the end of campaign advertising.

Excessive political advertising is a mainstay of every Presidential election, but this year’s candidates have spent far more on ads than presidential hopefuls in years past. In fact, The Huffington Post reports that Mitt Romney, Barack Obama and the groups that support them have aired 40 percent more ads this election season than were aired in 2008.

Since we work in marketing, many of us here at Movéo can’t help but wonder whether all these ads are causing Americans to become more resistant to advertising in general. After all, most Americans decide who they are going to vote for long before an election takes place. Since they are no longer in the decision-making process during the weeks when campaign ads are being aired most frequently, it makes sense that they would learn tune out any ads that try to sway their vote one way or another, and in turn, become better at tuning out advertising all together.

What do you think? Has this election season made it even harder than it already was to reach Americans through advertising? Or are we already so resistant to advertising that campaign ads don’t impact us at all?

Featured image via: WCBOE

Archive Post: Brand Transparency in a Social Media Age

As we wrap up our series of archive posts in honor of our 25^th anniversary, we’re excited to share with you one of our all-time favorite posts from Get There. Social media has grown explosively since this post was written back in 2010, but its message about the Internet’s impact on brand transparency is more relevant now than ever before.

Internet access provides consumers with endless amounts of information at their fingertips. To put this in perspective, let’s compare our process of collecting information today to that of 15 years ago. Imagine a grade school student in the mid-90s. If this student needed information, they would probably start out by asking their parents or another family member. If that proved insufficient, the next stop would an encyclopedia or perhaps a trip to local library.

Now compare that to today. You want to know how to tie a knot, research cancer, read a book review, etc. — it’s all a search and a click away. And since this information has become available, we have become much smarter consumers. We care more about what’s in our food, what effect our actions have on the environment and so on. If a brand is unethical in any way, we are going to hear about it and hear about it fast. It’s the new word-of-mouth and it’s much more accessible and viral.

This is why brand transparency has become increasingly important. Brands can’t hide behind walls and tell us who they are. We decide who they are by how they act and the quality of their product. Our purchasing decisions will be made with more information at hand. To succeed brands will have to be open and part of the discussion so that consumers are aware of the value their brand has on issues we care about.

October Faves

Happy Halloween! We’re taking some time away from celebrating one of our favorite holidays around the office to share some of our favorite B2B marketing posts from the last month with you. Hopefully this is just one of the many treats you’ll get to enjoy today.

Traditional Marketing Planning is Wrong for Your New Venture by Peter Whalen and Samuel S. Hollowan via Harvard Business Review

Finally, someone is acknowledging the fact that old marketing planning processes simply don’t make sense for many of today’s new companies. Rather than going through the slow, inflexible process of analyzing existing markets, predicting outcomes and designing detailed year-long tactical plans, the authors of this post suggest that today’s startups use what they call effectual marketing planning. We’re excited to learn more about this new approach that emphasizes quick adaption, learning through failure and strategic experimentation.

How to Get the Most Out of Paid Twitter Ads by Christina Pappas via Eloqua’s It’s All About Revenue

We know you liked our recent posts about advertising on Facebook, so we think you’ll find Eloqua’s latest about B2B ads on Twitter to be worth your time as well. We found their suggestions about tracking conversations outside of Twitter and keeping your eye on metrics unrelated to your follower

Featured image via: Halloween HD Wallpapers

Pinterest At Work: Four Pinboard Ideas for Your Marketing Department

Are you using Pinterest at work? If not, you should be. Now, we’re not suggesting that you spend hours browsing photos of mouthwatering food, creative weddings and expensive clothing while you should be working. Pinterest is a great (and addictive) site for someone who wishes to do any of those things, but it can also be a fantastic tool for marketing departments. When we say you should use Pinterest at work, we mean you should use it for work. Pinterest can help your marketing team become more creative, collaborative and inspired, and all it takes to get started is a few strategically planned pinboards.

Here are a four pinboards every marketing department should create and use:

A brainstorming board.  Brainstorming is a visual process. That’s why you can always find marketing folks scribbling on whiteboards and Post-It notes during brainstorming sessions. Think of Pinterest as the digital version of these old-school tools. As you brainstorm ideas for next year’s marketing plan, next month’s special promotion or next week’s blog post, pin images that spark your imagination and inspire ideas to your department’s brainstorming pinboard. Then, refer back to your pins when your creative juices have stopped flowing. One image might be all it takes to trigger your next big idea. As you get more comfortable with Pinterest, you might even consider creating a separate brainstorming board for each new project you pursue.

A success board. It never hurts to have a reminder of your past achievements close at hand. Pin images of your team’s best work to a success board and refer to it whenever you need an extra dose of motivation.

An inspiration board. Did you stumble upon beautiful logo, sleek website or clever ad you want to share with your team? Pin it to your inspiration board. After awhile, this board will become a perfect place to visit when you need to push your team or yourself to raise the bar.

A brand board. Why not create a pinboard version of your brand guidelines? Pin your logo, graphic elements, and even swatches from your color palate to your branding board. It will serve as an at-a-glance reference for your whole team.

These boards are just a few of the many opportunities that Pinterest presents for marketing departments. As you get more comfortable with the site, we’re sure you’ll find many new, productive ways to use it. Have you had success using Pinterest as a tool for your marketing department? Let us know in the comments.

Featured image via: Mashable Social Media

Archive Post – It’s a Fact: Strong Brands Drive B2B Markets

As we close out the series of archive posts we’ve been featuring this month, we would be remiss not to include something from Kevin Randall, our Director of Brand Strategy and Research. As you may already know, Kevin is a renowned expert on all things brand and frequently contributes to FastCompany, BrandChalle, Marketing Profs and many other leading publications. The archive post we’re featuring today appeared originally on BrandChannel and is one of our favorite pieces of Kevin’s work. If you’ve ever wondered how much branding really matters in B2B markets, this article is for you. See the original here.

To stay alive and flourish in highly competitive environments, business-to-business (B2B) companies spend more time and money on R&D. Suppliers focus on making their products smarter, faster, and smaller, and more cost-effective and reliable, than the competition. They also find ways to improve and add services so that they provide customers with a complete and satisfying experience. Marketplaces are constantly changing, so companies have to adapt in order to stay ahead.

But how can these B2B companies truly differentiate their offering and be relevant to customers over the long-term? This is where brands come in.

Brands matter in B2B markets. In fact, they may matter even more in B2B than in B2C.

Cut though clutter
Brands matter because the B2B marketing communications world is characterized by numbing sameness, commoditized feature wars, and laundry lists of product benefits. In other words, there is a sea of noise, parity, clutter and dullness. Branding—going all the way back to its origins with Norse livestock herders—allows a producer or owner to distinguish his/her goods or services. Branding today is a strategic tool that helps the supplier cut through the morass of the market, get noticed, and connect with the customer on many levels and in ways that matter. A strong brand becomes the customer’s “shorthand” for making good choices in a complex, risky, and confusing marketplace.

Tap into emotional drivers
Brands matter because companies act just like people when it comes to evaluating what products or services to buy. Along with a number of explicit rational criteria, a powerful irrational impulse is always present to influence the purchase decision. A strong brand with an effective positioning strategy speaks to and taps into the totality of these buyer needs.

Facilitate delivery of promise
Brands matter when supplier teams are doing business with buyer teams. Through effective internal branding efforts, the brand becomes the “glue” that binds the supplier culture and organization together, enabling the brand to make good on its external promise. Enterprise customers will reward a brand which delivers a unified, consistent and satisfying experience with repeat business.

However, common beliefs in the B2B marketing universe overlook the importance of brands. Consider the following thoughts:

Consumer brands are defined and presented largely based on emotive appeals—“warm and fuzzies.” In B2B, products and services, rather than “brands,” are pitched, sold, and transacted through cold logic.

Consumers are drawn to brands’ irrational benefits (status, prestige, affinity, self-security). Business customers specify and purchase based on rational drivers (pricing, specifications, product performance, metrics).

Such thinking by B2B marketers is not only naïve (and defies logic) but also undermines their ability to drive incremental business value and ROI.

As the following examples show, brands drive B2B. Those who recognize this fact and leverage their full brand assets will create a true, strategic competitive advantage.

1. Brands produce economic value in the B2B marketplace. According to the 2005 Interbrand/BusinessWeek “Best Global Brands By Value” ranking, IBM, GE, and Intel, largely B2B-focused brands targeting sophisticated enterprises and “technical buyers,” are among the most valuable brands. Their intangible asset of “goodwill” drives billions of dollars in value and market capitalization. IBM’s 2005 brand value is US$ 53.4 billion (GE $47.0 billion, Intel $35.6 billion). Their brands, not their products, are their differentiators that lead to competitive advantage. Brands drive value for small business-to-business companies too (see Acme Brick story in Did You Know?).

2. Ironically technology has led to brand importance in the B2B world. The growth of the Internet and e-marketplaces along with accelerating technological product obsolescence has resulted in a hyper-informed and commoditized B2B marketplace. Buyers are overwhelmed with myriad logical choices, features, benefits, information, data, metrics—parity and clutter. They want to make an easy, safe, andright choice. Thus, “brand” becomes the compass or default for navigating the purchase process.

B2B customers often evaluate potential suppliers according to numerous, rigorous criteria—a “scientific” RFP process. But does anyone really think a multi-million dollar decision will come down to a numeric score or check list? How does a supplier even make the RFP list? You guessed it: Through their recognized brand.¹

Strong B2B brands benefit from organically created, branded, Web-based communities of loyal customer-advocates who evangelize the brand while providing it with new product or service ideas. As Chuck Feltz of Deluxe Financial Services notes, “if we can create more consciousness around the experience, it has ROI.”

When it comes to marketing technology products, marketers all too often ignore the full package of customer benefits and instead focus only on rational product features. Mohanbir Sawhney, Professor of Technology at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management, argues that there are three dimensions of benefits upon which technology firms should build positioning platforms:

• 1st—Functional      (what the product does)
• 2nd—Economic      (what the brand means to the customer in time and money)
• 3rd—Emotional      (how the brand makes the customer feel)

Brands that deliver beyond the functional and economic levels with emotional benefits will command an incremental price premium and create strong competitive advantage and customer brand loyalty.

3. Emotive propositions resonate in B2B markets whether customers admit it or not. People say that they are not influenced by advertisements but data and client spending suggest otherwise. In the early-to-mid 1980s, IBM did not have the best computer systems or pricing. “Big Blue,” however, became the enterprise systems market leader because you never got fired for buying IBM (same with Ciscotoday). IT Directors “bought” a relationship, company, reputation, service, people, assurance. In other words they bought goodwill or the brand.

Recent advances in neuroscience support the notion that buying decisions in B2C and B2B spheres are largely based on irrational impulses often unknown to the buyer. For example, the IBM customer was strongly motivated by job security and peace-of-mind. Today’s B2B customers may articulate their need for ROI, higher performance, a better mousetrap. Yet, they really want: to avoid doing business with “an Enron”; a name or people they can trust; to buy from a “leader.” Strong brands play to these important drivers.

4. Successful B2B brands require one voice. B2B transactions often involve large amounts of lots of money, complexity and people. Corporate teams sell to corporate teams. OEM engineer or professional services clients interact with an array of supplier professionals (sales to marketing to senior management to support). Customers who have a brand experience that is integrated, consistent, easy and expected will more likely become customers again. Loyalty drives brand economic value according to leading marketing and brand valuation experts. With the objective of unifying the brand and improving the customer experience, Caterpillar has educated and trained over 10,000 employees through its “OneVoice” program on how to communicate and demonstrate CAT’s singular brand personality and values to the marketplace.²

5. Strong B2B brands are branded from the inside-out, top-down and bottom-up. Aligning the whole organization from customer-facing reps to factory floor employees with the corporate brand strategy is crucial to driving brand value and customer loyalty, especially in the B2B world. For example, if every employee at a $500 million electronic component manufacturer or mid-market professional services firm did not “live” the brand strategy, then the firm may face lost sales and unhappy customers. On the other hand, if every Procter & Gamble employee who worked on Ivory Soap did not understand its brand promise, there may be minimal negative impact on sales and consumer satisfaction.

Infineon, a German-based semiconductor company spun out of Siemens in 1999, recognizes the power of branding as a guiding principle for both internal and external audiences. Led by their CEO, 25,000 employees were engaged in the process of the initial brand launch. The company continues to conduct periodic studies to chart perceptions of both employees and customers in order to make sure the Infineon brand promise is fulfilled by the organization and that the brand is aligned with market values.³

There is a proven link between internal branding and the bottom line—across B2C and B2B markets. Companies like Pitney Bowes, Wachovia, Symbol Technologies, Itron, Hewlett-Packard, andWilliam Blair have implemented CEO-sponsored “brand assimilation” programs that resulted in improved performance in internal and external brand measures. Effective internal brand-building and communications efforts result not only in higher employee job satisfaction, improved morale, lower turnover and enhanced productivity, but also increased worker motivation, focus, engagement and conviction in the brand enterprise all of which leads to higher employee and organizational performance. A recent Watson Wyatt study showed the earning per share performance of companies with high employee trust levels outperformed companies with low trust levels by 186 percent.

Brands drive B2B. Because not all B2B marketers embrace or grasp this notion, there is a real opportunity for the enlightened B2B brand strategist and marketer to achieve real impact.

Did you know?

• Small brands can achieve great impact. Founded in 1891 and based in Fort Worth, Texas,Acme Brick is a manufacturer of bricks that are sold largely through the building trade. A good portion of their $1.5 million marketing communications budget goes into image building and strongly branded tactics including partnerships with professional sports celebrities and teams, PR, charity events and outdoor boards. In 1995 they introduced an unheard of 100-year product guarantee (3 to 5 years had been the industry standard) to further differentiate Acme. Their brand-building efforts have paid off. Acme is the dominant brand in the area for both homebuilders and buyers. A 1998 survey of homebuyers showed Acme had achieved 84 percent brand preference when no other supplier was above ten percent in their regional market. In fact, Acme estimates:
  • Their brand is worth an extra ten cents for every dollar’s worth of Acme brick sold and $250 in incremental revenue per home.
  • Approximately $20 million of Acme’s annual $200 million brick sales is a return on the       investment that Acme makes yearly in brand-building.
  • There is a 13-fold return on an average annual marcom budget of $1.5 million.⁴

If a brick can be successfully differentiated then almost anything can be branded to create value.

• Tech brands generate financial returns. Since 1984, technology consultant Techtel has been measuring the relationship between brand-building in the high technology arena and stock performance. Merrill Lynch and Fidelity Investments use Techtel’s research in forecasting tech stock movements. On a quarterly basis, enterprise customer respondents are queried about whether they have a positive, negative or neutral opinion of a technology brand. Over 100 brands spanning more than 40 technology categories (including Apple, EMC, Intel, IBM, Freescale Semiconductor, Cisco, Accenture, Toshiba, Hewlett-Packard, Fujitsu and Oracle) are part of the study’s database. Empirical research in the finance field shows that marketing ROI strongly correlates with stock return. Over the last decade, the Techtel study has consistently found on average a 70 percent correlation between brand equity and stock performance. Thus, there is a direct and positive relationship between brand image for technology companies and their      financial performance.⁵
• An unseen commodity produced BIG money. Before the 1990s, Intel, a second-tier electronics player lagging well behind Texas Instruments in microprocessor sales, was an undistinguished brand. Few people (PC manufacturers, buyers or users) knew or cared about specialized “386” components let alone if one brand name was different from another. In 1991, Intel launched a $100 million long-term cooperative “Intel Inside” brand campaign with PC-makers to differentiate computers built with its chip “ingredient” and build “consumer pull” for the Intel component. At the time, Intel’s market capitalization was $10.2 billion. By 1998, its market cap had grown to $208.5 billion. It is estimated the brand itself contributes about $2 billion annually to Intel’s market value. Today the Intel brand, based on a commodity product, is the fifth most valued brand in the world with intangible financial worth estimated at $35.6 billion      (Interbrand/BusinessWeek).
• Trust is worth billions. According to Richard Costello, General Electric’s former Manager of Marketing Communications, the company netted a bonus of about $10 billion in 1999, roughly equal to GE’s entire net income that year when revenues were $111.6 billion. Costello and      others including former CEO Jack Welch and current chief Jeffrey Immelt attribute much of GE’s impressive growth and success to the cultivation of intangible brand value, or the GE “trust factor.” In fact, for a number of their flagship offerings like aircraft engines and medical equipment, GE makes more money and achieves greater differentiation through its value-added intangibles, in the form of its “branded” offering (services, assurance, solutions, people, etc.) than its “parity products.”⁶ (Much like GE, IBM in the 1990s, under the skilled leadership of Lou Gerstner created transformative growth and value, reengineering itself with a customer and brand-centric offering and culture, discarding its product-focused legacy in favor of value-added services.).
• Customers buy in a blink. Malcolm Gladwell’s best-selling book Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking asserts that customers make most buying decisions (and the best choices) by relying on their two-second first impressions (or their “adaptive unconsciousness”) versus a long, drawn-out process involving lots of rational yet extraneous information. Gladwell and others have exposed a dirty little secret known in marketing research circles that customers usually cannot articulate how they really feel, what they actually think or why they buy a particular brand of product. The driver of their real feelings, thoughts and actions according to Gladwell, neuroscientists and new wave market researchers is their unconscious. Buyers make split-second decisions (“thin-slicing”) based on stored memories, images and feelings—which is what a brand is all about. A strong brand equals a strong two-second impression, whether you’re buying potato chips or specifying microchips.

Sharing Your Company Culture on Social Media Pays Off

With Halloween just one week away, we’re getting ready for our annual Halloween celebration, which always includes clever costumes and lots of sweet treats. Holidays and celebrations like these always inspire us to do something that has worked well for us in the past on social media. They inspire us to share our company culture. Last year, when we dressed up for Halloween at the office, we shared pictures of our crazy costumes, including the one you see above of our Managing Partners Bob and Brian dressed up as Mad Men. We’ve done the same thing with pictures from countless agency celebrations in the past and will continue to do so in the future. Why? Because we feel that sharing our company culture is a good business move. By showing that Movéo is a fun place to work, we attract top-notch talent that shares our work hard, play hard mentality. But the benefits of sharing our company culture don’t stop there. We’ve also noticed that both current and potential clients love learning more about the fun side of our agency. The business world can be a serious place, and it’s nice to add a bit of lighthearted content to the mix now and then.

Does your company share its culture online? If not, perhaps you should. Here are a few ways to get started.

1.  Write a manifesto. Part of sharing your company culture involves defining exactly what you stand for on paper. A manifesto can be a great tool for doing just that. Google’s manifesto, which outlines “ten things we know to be true” is a great example of clearly communicated company culture.
2. Create a video. The next best thing to experiencing company culture firsthand might be seeing it in a video. Why not create a short piece that shows what a typical day at your workplace looks like? This will help prospective employees and customers get to know you before you ever have your first meeting.
3. Share images. This one seems obvious given the introduction to this post, but we really do feel that posting photos of your company outings, events and even brainstorming sessions can be a great way to share your culture with the world. You can bet you’ll see some photos of this year’s best Movéo Halloween costumes on Facebook next week!

Three Surprising Ways Content Marketing Improves SEO

Most of us know that consistently creating and publishing new online content improves search engine ranking. Google and other search engines view websites that are updated regularly as more relevant to users than static sites. But did you know that content marketing improves SEO in several other ways as well?

Here are three of those ways:

1.     Content encourages inbound links. While traditional link building activities can help your search engine ranking, Google is getting smarter about catching those who engage in link building simply for the sake of link building. Creating high quality content is a much better way to build up a wealth of inbound links to your site. When you create a quality piece of content that resonates with your target market, you can bet they’ll share it and link back to you. Google recognizes these natural inbound links and will rank you higher in search results because of them.

2.     Content encourages social sharing. Google’s algorithm, which is constantly being revised, values social signals now more than ever before. What are social signals? Basically, they are any activity taken by a user while online (posting content, applying a label, saving a social bookmark etc.) When you create a great piece of content, people will be motivated to share it with their friends and connections. These sharing activities help you rank higher in search, so the more shareable your content, the better you’ll fare.

3.     Content naturally uses your keywords.  As most of you probably know, it’s important to have a keyword strategy and to use commonly searched, targeted keywords on your website. Doing so helps your site to show up higher in search rankings when customers search for those specific terms. Content and keywords work together in the same way. Luckily, it’s typically not very difficult to incorporate keywords into content pieces so long as the content you’re creating is aligned with your target market’s needs. By nature, content pieces like white papers and case studies tend to be keyword rich documents that do well in search.

Have you seen content marketing improve your search ranking and search traffic in other ways? Let us know in the comments.

Featured image via: clearlym

Improve your Email Metrics by Getting Rid of Dead Weight

Not happy with the results of your house list email marketing campaigns? The problem might not be with your content but instead with your list. Many of you probably spend time analyzing email metrics like opens, clicks, conversions, unsubscribes etc. but what about inactivity? What about those subscribers who do nothing? The disengaged, bored and tired.

List fatigue happens when subscribers no longer respond to your messages. Its not that they don’t click on your messages,  they don’t open them, not even to unsubscribe, they just ignore them. These do-nothing subscribers are bringing your campaigns down and you’re watering down your metrics and jeopardizing your reputation by ignoring them–not to mention missing opportunities to reengage them.

If you send mail to inactive subscribers you put your emailing reputation ability to deliver emails at risk. ISPs often turn old email addresses no longer in use into to traps called “honeypots”  to see which email marketers continue to send to invalid email addresses as a means to identify spammers. Additionally, ISPs also monitor the number of bounces email marketers generate and once you reach a certain threshold your emails won’t be delivered.

In addition to protecting your reputation, removing inactive subscribers helps improve the accuracy of the results of your email marketing campaigns, lowers the cost of each deployment and ultimately increases ROI. If you send a message to 10,000 subscribers but only 8,000 are active, you’re not only paying to send messages to 2,000 people that won’t read them, you’re skewing your metrics because every email metric is measured against the number of messages delivered. If 10,000 messages are sent and only 4500 open them your open rate is 45%.  However, if you send 8000 messages and 4500 are opened your open rate is 56% and its more accurate because you are measuring response from your engaged subscribers and not watering it down by measuring response from subscribers who will never respond.

So what do you do? Define a strategy for identifying inactive subscribers and develop a campaign to get those subscribers reengaged. Monitor and ferret out those who do not respond and remove them from your list.

Remember it is not the size of the list that counts. It is how well you work it.

Content and Social: A Perfect Pair

Last week, BtoB Magazine reported that “best of breed” content marketers (those who spend 30% or more of their marketing budgets on content) have a significantly higher preference for social media than average marketers. The reason, we believe, is that these high-level marketers already know something that the rest of the industry is just beginning to figure out: Social media marketing and content marketing feed one another.

Sure, there are plenty of ways to promote a new content piece. Paid advertising, email marketing and search engine optimization can all get your content in front of more eyes, but what could be more effective than promoting content on channels where your target market is likely to seek it out? Social channels like Twitter, LinkedIn and blogs are all widely recognized and highly trusted content channels that decision makers turn to when they want to learn. It’s essential to consistently create and release new, original content if we hope to keep these people engaged on our social channels.

But the benefits of integrating content marketing and social media don’t end there. When we create high-quality content and share it on social media, we’re making it easy for our fans, advocates and customers to share it with their own networks on our behalf.  Think of it as a personal referral, backed up by high-quality thought leadership. It doesn’t get much better than that.

If you’ve decided to make content a priority this year (and if you haven’t, you should), it’s time to start making social a priority as well. You simply can’t reap all the benefits of one without the other.