Arts fashion style Italian

When Louis XV King of France was born on 5 September 1638, style, fashion and art were dominated by the Italians as part of their history build up over several centuries.

Marketing the French

He became the ‘Protector’ of literature (Académie Française) allowing to flourish Molière, Racine and La Fontaine. At the same time he also patronized visual arts and music.

However his most important achievement was the conversion of the hunting lodge in Versailles into the impressive extraordinary Palace of Versailles.
His goal was to promote the craftsmanship of the French by exposing it in his palace. Not only the palace was a continuous exposition of art and style, but also the famous gardens. The rest of the world followed suite on style of buildings, interiors (Rococo), fashion and gardening. Even the British Royals and nobles.

The marketing show piece

Not solely the gardens were one of kind, but the main show piece was the Hall of Mirrors were light was abundant because of the large windows and the mirrors on the other side reflecting the light or sunlight. In those days castles had dark interiors due to their thick walls and tiny windows. This was the place to be for parties in the world.

Entertainment marketing

By not only moving the entire Royal Court to palace of Versailles, but also imposing all the nobles of France to live in the condoms in the palace, he had a grip on both their presence, thinking, activities and their style.
He succeeded in achieving absolute monarchy by increasing the Crown’s influence and authority over the Church and aristocracy.

He was picky on their clothing and their appearances. His wife Marie Antoinette focused on spending on fashion, make-up and style.

As a great marketer he brought entertainment for his audience: he made a show out his own life as nobles and guests were invited to participate in his getting dressed, breakfast and lunch. Or watching him and his queen walk by through the hall of Mirrors from his private apartment to the chapel.

He used this kind of entertainment as marketing of his style and also to give his nobles something to aim for: being allowed to be near the Sun King.

The marketing legacy

Even almost 300 years later after his death style, fashion and arts are of French origin in many occasions. This he achieved solely taking the lead from the Italians and giving it to the French. Of course at a high cost as the French weren’t so keen on his activities and spending of their tax money for his pleasure, prestige and marketing of France.

He achieved this by spending large amounts of money (from taxes) and entertaining the nobles and his guests in the gracious environments of the Palace of Versailles while showing off style and fashion during a long period (over 50 years) of his life.

Marketing will cost money, tenacity and even a show piece, but also creativity and requires new ideas and concepts to be promoted. All contained in an entertaining package in order to keep the attention of the audience.

Hoarding expertise and information is history

All the information and expertise of a salesman that allowed getting an appointment is now available on the Internet. This can be provided by your competitors or by peers on social media (forums, LinkedIn, Youtube, Vimeo, Facebook, etc).

If you keep your expertise and information to yourself then your potential customers will find it on the Internet from another source. Thus bypassing you completely. This could make your company and its’ products obsolete as people won’t find you on the Internet.
Not getting found increases missing sales deals. Hence hoarding information and expertise is history.

Share your expertise, knowledge and information

Instead you should share your expertise, knowledge and information in order to keep up with competitors and make sure you are being considered for all the possible shortlists. It is not solely your products, the feature and functions of your products, the quality of products and after service and the brand name that will get you on the short list as your company and products might get overlooked or simply net found during the research phase of the purchase cycle.

Not gating for content

In most cases influencers and decision takers will not contact you before they have made up their short list. In order to get on the short list it is better to provide information and expertise without gating for this content as this is part of the sales cycle. Asking for contact details is a hurdle in your sales process and won’t help sales.

Instead of waiting and hoping getting invited to present all of your knowledge, expertise and information during a sales meeting, you need to publish this as it will:
- Bring traffic of interested parties
- Build your authority in the business
- Get you on the short list
Only when on the short list you will be contacted for information about your solution and price negotiations. This kills the concept of opportunities moving through the funnel as it has become ultra short.

Are you still hoarding your expertise ?

Leads in funnel – Sales deals

Marketing needs to prove their marketing spending’s by showing as many leads as possible.
Although Marketing will qualify the leads before entering them into the funnel they have the tendency to let more leads qualify.

On the other hand the more under-qualified leads the Salesman gets the more time he waists by qualifying each of the leads in his sales funnel. Hence the lesser time he can spend on the really well qualified leads. This creates the perception with salesmen that the marketing leads are of lesser value. In the worst case the salesmen will even ignore the leads from marketing as they prefer to work on their leads.

Rewarding

Marketing is rewarded for the number of qualified leads it generates into the funnel.
Salesmen are rewarded by the number of sales deals they have closed.

During sales meetings and revisions by the sales manager the salesmen are evaluated not only by the number and value of deals they close but also on the success rate of their funnel. Moreover their pipeline is used to get a forecast of sales which is all important business and management information.

Hence salesmen should be in control of leads entering their funnel which is not always possible with the current Marketing Automation tools. These Marketing Automation tools and CRM system often start from a marketing campaign and feed the potential leads directly into the funnel.

Commissions for Marketing and Sales

Instead of marketing being rewarded for the number of leads entering the funnel, they should be rewarded just like salesmen for deals closed. In this way they would take the time to qualify leads better as every lead requires time and effort from a salesman. The more effective the salesman can work the better for both.
Marketing and salesmen should both be rewarded on a sales commission for deals closed.

This split commission would bound the collaboration between Marketing and Sales as they both will have the same goal.

How is the distribution of leads organized in your company ?

Content marketing

As people are fed up with interruption marketing (ads, emails) it seems that content marketing is the way to go as people prefer to search online for solutions and products.
Content marketing will drive your inbound marketing for the complex sale in B2B.

Having just a few text documents, presentations or video’s might be sufficient for starting the process of generating interest, however you need to cover the entire purchase cycle and address to all of the people involved in the purchase decision. Your content needs to support the purchase process just like a salesman would do.

Purchase process and buyer persona

Hence you will need to identify:
- The different steps in the purchase process
- The different people that get involved
You need to identify the buyer persona’s. The different steps in the purchase process need to be supported by appropriate content for each of the people involved. Even if in one step different people get involved then different content needs to be created as a user-employee has different takes and views than a manager and again different than a CxO or VP:
- Functions will interest users
- Features will interest managers
- Benefits will interest CxOs

Content inventory

For each of the process step and for each of the people involved you will need to create a piece of content in your content inventory.
In order to do so make a spreadsheet having on the left the steps in the purchase process and the top the buyers persona. Then indicate who is involved in each step. Then define the content that is required for each cell in your spreadsheet that you indicated. Then start creating texts, presentations or video’s.
This will make sure you have no gaps in your content marketing.

What’s the status of your content marketing ?

Cutting marketing expenses

The current recession will require companies to scale back and decrease their operating costs.

Cutting back on:
- Sales can only be achieved by less salesmen and staff.
- Administration will require to lay-off administrative employees
- Research and development is again about firing and is a risk for the future
- Production quality will come back as a boomerang
One of the most obvious and most convenient to achieve is to decrease marketing costs as these involve third parties, hardly involves firing people. It’s the easiest but maybe not the best to do as during recessions you need as many qualified leads as possible.

Marketing costs

In a marketing budget the typical large costs are:
- Industry trade shows
- The yearly dealers, resellers and partners conference/meeting
- Agency costs
- Multimedia advertising
- Printed leaflets and product sheets (as pdf’s can be send electronically)
Or anything which involves multiple personnel and employees being off-site (travel and lodging costs).
These are the marketing expenses that are likely to be cut during a recession.

Marketing channel migration

As these marketing events and efforts represent important amounts of money, the elimination can result in having additional funds available allowing increasing the spending on other marketing channels and methods. Like email marketing, online advertising, webcasts, website lead generation, content marketing and social marketing.

Due to the recession, marketers will have lower budgets allowing them to have less off-site events and more online events or efforts. There will be a shift from:
- Physical to online marketing efforts
- Outbound to inbound marketing
in order to save costs. this will probably drive more visitors to your website requiring to increase your online conversions.

Less might even be more as the marketing channel migration will change how the company addresses to their potential and current customers. Putting the VP marketing or Marketing manager on a diet might even have a positive effect as the entire marketing mix needs to be reviewed.

Will you put your VP Marketing on a diet ?
What marketing cost will you decrease ?

Marketers as publishers instead of pushers

Marketing execs have always had the mindset of selling products or services using mainly interruption marketing with advertising, commercial messages through multiple channels. The more money spend the more likelihood of getting attention and promoting the brand or product. The more they pushed the more chance of success.

The challenge of content marketing for marketers is that they need to start thinking as publishers providing interesting and valuable content.
As content has become the currency instead of money, this is quite a change for most marketers: the shift from outbound marketing to inbound marketing.

Findable targeted content

Instead of pushing advertising, commercial messages or any other interruption marketing to potential customers, the roles are now reversed as the potential customer is now in the drivers’ seat:
- The headline and short introduction need to be enough teasing, compelling in order to attract an audience
- The content and information provided should be valuable and interesting enough to keep the interest and attention.

Making the content findable is another challenge besides creating interesting and valuable content, as you can have the best and most interesting content in the world, but if nobody can find it then all the effort and time is wasted.

Marketing the content

Just like advertisements and commercial messages were targeting specific market segments, different pieces of content need to be created in order to target each of the market groups.
Instead of pushing the marketing message to the potential customer, now the potential customer needs to find the specific content and take the time to read or view the content. The created content needs to be marketed !

Are you as marketer ready for content marketing ?

Social Media

If your social media is managed apart from the entire marketing mix, then why take the effort of investing time in social media ?
Often the social media is operated and managed separately from the rest of the marketing channels as if it is of a different kind just because it is new (was new). This can lead to a different strategy or approach of customers not fitting into the complete company or brand picture.

However in the end all marketing channels are a communication from the company towards the potential or existing customer. For them whatever channel they listen, read or view doesn’t matter as it is a communication from the vendor.

Marketing Mix

Your marketing mix should include social media as it has become an essential part of your marketing. The marketing budget should be managed over all the channels and all efforts together.

Managing and treating your social media marketing separately your efforts and investments are likely to be wasted.
All of your Tweets, Facebook messages, bog posts and blog or forum comments should be a part of the total marketing mix.

Your marketing should:
- Form one unit
- Having one message
- Consist of one strategy
and include your social marketing too.
Else you will waste time, effort and money and might end up with different strategies.

Is your social media marketing included in the marketing mix?

Mobile Outbound B2B Marketing

A previous post explained why mobile marketing in B2B doesn’t work for a number of reasons, but mainly because it is interruption marketing on our almost private device. As we all get enough marketing interruptions everyday, people are fed up with them. Moreover how can you ever know the marketing message is timely and appropriate ?

Mobile Inbound B2B Marketing

On the other hand inbound mobile marketing might work as people freely inquire about products or services giving up their anonymous behavior.
So instead of forcing people be interrupted and to read your marketing message, the Mobile Inbound Marketing stands a chance.

The challenge to engage

The challenge is getting people using Mobile Inbound Marketing by providing:
- Mobile website:
You need a mobile website which differs for navigational reasons
- Mobile Apps:
If you can imagine and build and application (on IOS and Android) that relates to your product or service it will be beneficial
- QR codes:
The QR codes can work for sign-ups, registrations, sweepstakes, give-a-ways, coupons
- SMS/texting:
The challenge is that you have to engage people sending your company a SMS/text message without you sending one. Somehow they must getting teased and take action upon with sending an SMS/text message.

Whatever mobile marketing method and channel you use the goal needs to be about building relationships with your potential customers and customers.

What’s your experience with Mobile Inbound Marketing ?

Brands have understood that their marketing message needs to be entertaining in order to succeed in this world overwhelmed by entertainment available for free or paying in any channel.
HP shows how printers can be presented in an entertaining way in their HP Invent video:

However:
Although the video is entertaining which is quite an achievement with boring printers that do nothing but print which has resulted in a few hundred thousand (>300,000) views (The Audience Is Listening), it still misses the most important passion or sentiment.

Entertaining is good to get the attention.
Emotion or passion is also required once the attention has been given.
Entertainment will evaporate quickly.
Emotion and passion will stay for a long time with humans.

Emotional Marketing

Brands that will not make emotional connections with their prospects or customers will be less successful.
The people to target need to connect to the product or brand on the level of emotions. As soon people get to love your product or brand, they will buy. In order to love your product or brand emotions are a requirement: hence the need to play to their emotions.

As Michael Masterson stipulates:
1. People like buying stuff and services, but they don’t like being sold
2. People buy things for emotional feelings, not rational reasons.
3. Afterwards, people need to satisfy their emotional decisions with logic

Passionate Marketing for advocates

If a brand can get someone passionate about the brand or product, he will become a free sales rep. for the brand as an advocate.
An advocate will not only by the brand, but also advice and recommend his relatives and friends to buy the brand or product for a zillion of reasons without being paid.

In order to get someone to become an advocate the emotion must be really deep as he will position himself in order to help your brand. Picking up advocates requires an enhanced emotional connection. The main driving reason is that these people want to help others.
Again you need to give them memorable experiences during the entertaining marketing message in order to create the passion for your brand or product.
This is not solely for B2C but also for B2B.

How emotional or passionate is your marketing message – or just entertaining or still boring ?

Aspirational marketing video

This might be one of the best B2B video’s ever made.
This video tells a powerful story of what glass could do instead what glass currently does. This sure inspires for next generation of products: aspirational marketing video.
It sure went viral as it got over 16mio clicks.

Too perfect

Although the video is well made, continuously shows interesting applications and manages to show more possible functions and features with glass which keeps the attention, it could have been more entertaining as it seems to be happening in a perfect world. In most cases a perfect world is not entertaining and lacks sentiment or passion.

Emotion, sentiment or passion is missing

For a start the video is too long and there is no build up in emotion.
Being nice and perfect is not enough to entertain the audience and to be remembered too.
In order to be remembered people need a sentiment or passion: that triggers their brains more than anything else. Something that strikes them in their feelings or emotions instead of just amazement for technical achievements.
As emotions and feelings are personal they will stay longer with the viewers.
What is required is emotion, sentiment or passion in your marketing: emotional marketing even in B2B.

Apple had the emotion, passion and sentiment in this famous 1984 commercial:

What did you think about both video’s ?

As indicated in a previous blog post all marketeers will become entertainers in order to bring entertainment in their marketing as boring B2B messages would get the audience listening.

CISCO has understood this and now presents their Collaboration video with rapping VP’s and even John Chambers (CEO) using Auto-Tune to sing in tone – just like rappers (who need it to correct their pitch and disguise off-key inaccuracies).

It sure is a pounding marketing message and entertaining.

About a year ago they had this “normal” less entertaining (boring) video.

Of course some people always want to make fun out of a new marketing concept – even at CISCO:

What do you think of entertaining B2B marketing ?

The first Auto-Tune world hit record by Cher:

Content marketing seems the last resort as all other marketing methods seem to be in decline.
The idea of content marketing is simple: providing interesting content for free that will attract potential customers who could get interested in your products. The content is used as marketing currency.
All that seems great as content doesn’t cost out of the pocket money.

However content marketing has four hurdles:

1. Creativity

It requires creativity and imagination for generating content.
This is not a widely spread skill. Some people have it – some don’t.
Moreover it is hard or almost impossible to learn it.

2. Time

Creating,editing and publishing content requires an investment in time.
As you need large quantities of content in order to handle all aspects in relation to your solutions or products, a lot of time will be invested in generating your content.
Time is costly as it consumes your capacity of doing something else beneficial for your company.

3. Entertaining content

You content needs to be entertaining as boring content won’t get read or viewed and easily forgotten. Even worse: hardly anybody will talk about it so you will miss out the word of mouth promotion.

4. Publishing for exposure

You can publish all of your interesting content on your website and just hope people will find it.
You can publish your content on article websites and hope people will find it and click on the link to your website.
So you are somewhat limited in the publishing of your content.
If other websites, like blogs, would re-publish your content, this will likely increase the exposure and the findability.

5. Marketing the content

If your content marketing wants to be successful you need market your content in order to give it enough exposure and getting found on the Internet.

Back where we stared: marketing
So we are back where we started: content marketing requires you to market your content.

Content marketing is not as easy as advertising which mainly just costs money.

In order to succeed in business with your business or sales you need to know your business and your offering by identifying:

1. The value proposition:
What value does your business or solutions bring ?
What is your value proposition ?

2. The uniqueness:
Many companies have me-too products. Still most of them have at least one unique function or feature that sets them apart.

3. The no competitors:
If you have a completely unique offering then be aware people won’t know about the offering or solution you bring. You will have an uphill battle to explain your solution as hardly anybody has ever heard of your solution.
It is better to have some competitors than none.

4. The perception:
How do you want your business or products to be perceived ?
Outstanding, high quality, low cost, cheapest on the market, exclusive, average but without any risk, market leading, innovative, conservative, …

5. The match with perception:
How does the reality matches with the perception you portray ?
If there is a discrepancy or a gap between portrayed perception and the real stuff, you will need marketing to fill the gap.

6. The business specialty:
Does business have a specialty ?
If your business is common and plain, then how will it get noticed ?
What sets you apart from the rest ?
If your business has a specialty then your marketign can focus on this making it easier and less costly.

7. The target market:
Have you identified your target market ?
The more precise you can identify your target market the better, cheaper and more effective your marketing campaigns can be runt successfully as you don’t need to address to the masses.

8. The target market demographics
Your target market consist of companies who are staffed with people. You should know the demographics of the people that advice on the type of solutions you offer (influencers) and the type of people that take the decisions like:
- Age
- Gender
- Education
- Personal interests
Don’t offer free football tickets in a golf or sailing environment. Know your demographic profiles.

9. The proposition:
According to the type of people you address and communicate a different message is needed:
- Users want functions
- Influencers van features
- Managers advantages
- CXOs want benefits
What change or improvement can your business or solution bring for the people in each of these subgroups of your target market ?
Who will get you the easiest or best to a successful deal ?
Who do you want to promote too and who do you avoid to address ?

10. The SEO:
As your website is an important part and tool in any B2B lead generation and sales process, you need to make sure you use the best SEO in order to get the people from your target market based upon the demographics and the proposition.

11. The channels:
Besides the website you need to consider other channels that are appropriate to send out your marketing messages as they need to match your the demographics of your target market and be suited to carry your proposition.
This can be email, online ads, printed ads, direct mail, cold calling, trade shows, conferences or even social media.
try to figure out which channels are likely to be used by the people in the demographics of your target market.
If they don’t read newspapers then don’t advertise in newspapers.
If they don’t visit trade shows then don’t waste money on trade shows.

12. The lead qualification:
Can you define the qualities or characteristics your lead has to have in order to qualify ?
The better and earlier in your sales process you can qualify your leads or you can dismiss your leads the lower your sales costs will be.
At the same time your feedback to marketing will be faster allowing marketing reacting or adjusting their marketing campaigns.

13. The distribution:
If there is/are a middleman(me) in your distribution (distributor and/or resellers), you need to know how profitable your business is for them. Is it worth for them to invest time (training) and money (storage space) in your business ?Can they make enough or more money on your business or products compared to competing products and solutions.
If there is noting in it for them you won’t sell.

14. The feedback:
All feedback from your channel (distributors or resellers) and end-users is utmost important as you always can improve.
Find ways to get feedback. Even if it comes at a high cost.

The better you understand your business, the better you can promote your business and sell more.

How good do you understand your business ?

Email campaign

During our last email campaign we got 6% of undelivered emails. This happened in a times span of only 3 months after the previous campaign and clean-up.
This makes clear that many people have changed companies or have been fired.
And results in even more time consuming work to keep the email data base up-to-date as not only the people that are no longer with the company need to be removed from the data base, but new contacts need to be searched and found.

Maintaining email data base

As so many people are no longer with their company where have they gone to? Of course you could investigate in each of them using LinkedIn, but most people will only update their status once they have found a new job.
The quest is in finding the person who replaces and is in charge. If there is someone who replaces.

Perpetual Mobile

In the end the more recession, the more layoffs, the more work to be done on the email data bases. Once the the recession is over the trend will change again in hiring which again will require more maintenance to the email data base.
This is the Perpetual Mobile of the email data bases.

being a small B2B company and spending a lot of money on marketing or advertising is way too expensive and not economical feasible. You could run your business into problems by spending all on marketing and advertising.

What can a small company (small business or SOHO) do instead, in order to get customers ?

1. Network business district
Network the local pubs in the business district just after business hours

2. Network on sports events
Network in the local football, golf or tennis club on Saturdays or Sundays

3. Network in clubs
Network in the fitness club in the business district during business hours

4. Charity by work
Charity will get you into networking: not by donations which is out of the pocket money but work and help

5. Charity by products
Donate products or a solution that you produce or buy at B2B prices

6. Free advice
Give free advice concerning your business specialty on local events

7. Newspaper or TV coverage
Get mentioned into the local newspaper or on the local TV for any good reason

8. Write articles or guides
Write useful articles or guides related to your business or industry to be published in local advertising magazines

9. Company car and vehicle branding
Advertise on your company car or company vehicles

10. Local billboard
Make sure you have a sign or billboard visible from the main road or highway mentioning at least your company name and the business

11. Illuminate building
Make sure the company building or a part of it is clearly visible by illuminate during the night and dark days as people will remember it and use it as a reference or landmark

12. Display time and temperature
Display time, temperature and company name or brand in front of your building

13. Road signs
Where ever possible and allowed place road indicators to your address

14. Mouth to mouth
Have a discount scheme for customers bringing new customers

There are probably more methods, solutions and opportunities to show your brand or company name or to network.