Dude, It's Marketing

Be a Thought Leader to Make Your Marketing Credible

I recently started a series of blog posts on strategies that you should consider to make your marketing more credible. This week I want to look at the next strategy in more detail which is about becoming a thought leader in your industry.

First off, you need to decide who is the best person to become a thought leader. In some cases, it's the CEO of your company. But in many cases it's the founder, the CTO or some technical expert with many years of experience. In addition to knowledge though, this person needs writing and presentation skills along with a lot of time (more on this later) and true dedication to making the industry better. This role is not for someone who is going to fake it or is not willing to give everything they have to help people so choose carefully.

Finding the right person is not easy but that's only the beginning. Not surprisingly, creating valuable content, the strategy I wrote about previously, is a major step in helping you become a thought leader. In fact, creating new, relevant and useful content is the key to being a thought leader so the two are very intertwined. 

In addition to creating and publishing this content, you need to get out there and share your knowledge within your industry. You can speak at conferences, write articles or columns for industry publications, become involved in industry consortium or organizations, write a book or industry-focused blog, or become a go-to person for editors and get quoted in articles. All of these tactics help spread your content more widely and raise your profile with your target audience.

The important point with all of this is that you need to communicate how to solve your market's problems in new and compelling way so you will get calls from editors, get invited to speak at conferences, or get other opportunities to share your knowledge and content. No one is going to call if you only talk about your product.

Essentially, you need to build a personal brand as a respected expert on your industry's trends, with a deep understanding of the problems your target audience faces, and simple, clear solutions to these problems. There are many great example of individuals that have built strong, personal brands and helped their companies become credible through their thought leadership. 

One last consideration which I alluded to earlier - if you think this strategy is easy to implement and that you, or the person you selected, has the desire to succeed and the knowledge to share, you must realize that becoming a thought leader and building your personal brand takes an insane amount of time and effort.

You'll need to continually develope new content to tight deadlines so you get a book published, create a successful blog or write a column in a key publication. You need to travel to many conferences, in some not so exciting locales, not to mention the time it takes to develop the presentation you deliver. You may be interviewed multiple times about a certain topic and only have a small part of that interview appear in the article. It's all of these tasks and more in addition to your day job, as rarely is the thought leadership role a job in and of itself.

So before you embark on any of the tactics listed above for becoming a thought leader, you need to ask yourself long and hard to see if you have the right person. You need to make sure they have the time, dedication and patience to become a thought leader. If the right person is you, then look in the mirror long and hard to make sure you can handle it.

In the end, being a thought leader is not as glamorous as it first seems but it will bring many rewards for you and your company including making your marketing more credible. And, to all the thought leaders out there that we all learn from, you have my utmost respect and admiration. You make your industry better as a result of your dedication so thank you and please tell us your stories in the comments below.

Create Valuable Content and Make Your Marketing More Credible

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about some of the initial strategies that you should consider to make your marketing more credible. You don't need to execute on all of these strategies to increase your credibility but you do need to pick the ones that will have the greatest impact with your audience. 

Over the next few weeks I want to look at each of these strategies in more detail so you can pick the best ones for your start-up. The first strategy I want to explore is around creating valuable content.

It's no secret that being found is crucial and search loves fresh content. A lot has been written about this topic by the various experts in search, content marketing and inbound marketing. But creating valuable content is not a new strategy.

Content that your audience finds helpful and educational will, and always has, made your marketing more credible. At the same time, content is the cornerstone of all successful marketing campaigns. Prospects will continue to engage with you if they see you as a valuable and trustworthy resource.

What is news is the number of different tactics and content types you can create and how this content can be disseminated to your audience and help you get found.

Previously, your options for creating content were limited to different types of marketing collateral like white papers and application notes plus the content that was posted on your website. Increasingly, more content moved online and webcasts became important along with video and podcasts. 

Now, with social media platforms from Twitter to blogs and YouTube to Facebook, the ability to create and share content is easier than ever. This has clearly led to an explosion of content in different media types with some content being more compelling than others.

And that's what you need to capitalize on to make your marketing more credible. You need to create valuable content. It's not about the platform or the media type.

You need to create content that is more compelling to your target audience because it is educational not promotional, easy to understand not full of jargon, and helps your customer solve their problems. That valuable content can then be easily adapted to the different media types and spread across the different platforms.

Without compelling content, your marketing will not be credible, your company won't be found and you won't have successful marketing campaigns. Creating valuable content is THE key to your marketing success and a strategy you don't want to ignore.

Make Your Marketing Credible

There's no question that it takes time to build a trustworthy brand in the marketplace. So how can a start-up trying to sell their products prove themselves to prospective customers? A big part of this is through credible marketing as I recently discussed. 

In this and other upcoming blog posts, I want to explore some strategies and ideas for how you can make your marketing credible.

Create Valuable Content
Being found is crucial and search loves fresh content. But content that your audience finds helpful and educational will also make your marketing more credible. Prospects will continue to engage with you if they see you as a valuable and trustworthy resource.

Be a Thought Leader
Creating valuable content will also help you become a thought leader in your industry. You can speak at conferences or get quoted in articles to help raise your profile with your target audience. Focus on communicating how you can help solve your market's problems in a compelling way so you will calls from editors to be quoted and invited to speak by conference organizers.

Win Awards from a Third-party
There are clearly different types of awards, but winning one that has been judged by a panel of experts, quickly raises the awareness of your company and provides strong third-party validation of your products or services. Promote these awards to increase your credibility.

Associate Yourself with Trusted Brands
There is a certain truth in the saying that you are judged by the company that you keep. Developing strong partnerships with trusted brands will not only increase your credibility but will also lead to sales opportunities with customers that may not have considered your offerings before.

Build or Participate in a Community
Prospects trust what their peers and/or friends say most of all. You need to find the relevant communities where these conversations are taking place and then listen and participate in a helpful way. In industries where there is no focused community, you could start one and invite other companies to join you as well.

The good news is that you don't need to execute on all of these strategies to increase your credibility. You need to pick the ones that will have the greatest impact with your audience. The even better news is that with the multitude of tactics and tools available to marketers you can definitely implement many with a limited budget.

This post contains some of the initial strategies that you should consider to make your marketing more credible. I will continue to add to the list and explore how to execute on them in more detail over coming weeks. In the meantime, let me know what you would do or have done to make your marketing more credible.

Frequency and Different Tactics

What tactics you use form a key part of your lead or demand generation campaign. But, is it more effective to use the same tactic multiple times or to use different tactics fewer times each to increase response rates. For example, should you send 5 emails to the same target list or should you send an email, send a direct mail piece, run a Facebook ad, run a Google PPC ad and do a webinar targeted at the same audience?

It's well understood that targeting the same list multiple times does increase response rates. However, are you still limited if you rely on only one tactic or channel to reach your audience?

I believe that you definitely need to use multiple tactics for better lead generation. At the same time though, these tactics need to be implemented as part of an integrated campaign. You need to use the same messaging, imagery and related calls to action across these tactics so that you are in effect hitting the same audience multiple times.

Basically, the best way to increase response rates would be to do a combination of tactics but use some of them multiple times, depending on your budget of course. If we look at the example used at the outset, instead of 1 email being used 5 times or 5 different tactics being used once each, we should send 2 direct mails, 2 emails and host one webinar for example. That way, we are hitting the same audience multiple times but also using different tactics and media for the widest possible effect.

While I've focused on outbound marketing tactics so far in this blog post, you should always make search part of your marketing campaign so that people can always find you. What I mean here is not just the SEO of your web site but adding terms and corresponding landing pages that are campaign specific. You should also consider including some social media tactics such as Facebook, Twitter, and others, if your audience spends time on these social networks.

The beauty of search and many of these social media tactics is that they will not take up the same budget that many traditional tactics may have cost. Granted they will take up a lot more of your time but in many companies this is easier to get than additional budget. Therefore, you can add even more of these tactics to the mix we outlined above if you budget is small but you're willing to invest more time.

Whatever the tactics, this marketing mix is a crucial part of the planning of your marketing campaign so don't sell it short. Make sure you find the right tactics that fit your audience and not just jump on the latest trend or what you did before. And, make sure you measure and look at the results of previous campaigns using these tactics so you can continue to improve your mix.

Integrated marketing campaigns are very effective and I'll talk more about this in subsequent posts. To increase response and ROI though, these campaigns need to use multiple tactics and media and run multiple times so the message and call to action hits, and gets through, to your audience.

Why Demand Generation?

While demand generation is not the marketing buzz word it was a couple of years ago, it still must be the cornerstone of your marketing efforts. But, it is also crucial to realize that demand generation has changed significantly with the advent of social media and the decline of some traditional marketing tactics, like tradeshows and direct marketing.

I use demand generation and lead generation interchangeably quite often but I want to highlight the point here that, whatever the term, this is about more than just generating as many leads as possible. Demand generation is about reaching the right prospects, at the right time, with the right message, to turn them into customers.

Demand generation involves creating awareness of your solution, qualifying the leads, sending the sales-ready leads to sales, nurturing the others by building relationships with them until they are ready to buy, while working with sales to move the qualified leads along the funnel until the deal is closed.

A successful demand generation program combines the appropriate marketing tactics (more on this in a subsequent post) with sales tools and online presences that result in increased revenue for your product of service. Demand generation must be measureable, continually optimized and entirely in sync with the sales objectives of your organization.

If this doesn't sound like the marketing you are familiar with then you need to get with the times. While the program and tactics may change, the need in every organization for demand generation never goes away. In good times and bad. As marketing tactics and technologies come and go. Demand generation needs to adapt but always remain focused on the prize of getting more sales for your product.

Defining the Stages of the Sales Funnel

If the sales funnel is the heart of lead generation, then defining the stages of the sales funnel is critical to a good healthy heart. While some (it should be all) organizations have embraced the concept of the sales funnel, the stages selected and what makes a lead be in a certain stage vary widely. In an ideal world, there would be a common definition that all marketing and sales organizations could just implement much like development organizations implement standard protocols. But we know this is not an ideal world. In fact, many of us know that these standards take forever to define so you can only imagine how long it would take to get the sales funnel defined in a standards body since in many cases marketing and sales in ONE organization can't agree.

This last point is what absolutely needs to be fixed if any lead generation program, and for that matter any organization, is to be successful. Sales and marketing must agree on the stages of the funnel, what defines each stage and use the same terminology across the entire funnel. This is definitely a tall order and if you're in the midst of defining these stages I feel for you. However, I can't stress enough how critical it is for each stage to be clearly named and defined and then have each lead be ranked with this criteria in mind. If this doesn't happen at the outset, and I've seen it many times, marketing and sales will become increasingly frustrated and always point the finger at each other about why the lead generation programs aren't successful.

I really wish I could post a clear definition for all the stages of the funnel but the reality is that it varies for each organization and type of sale. It is clear that the prospects that marketing identifies by collecting information about them are the first stage of the funnel. While some would dismiss this stage as not important since theses leads are not  sales-ready leads, it is still crucial to define this stage in terms of the criteria that needs to be collected since these prospects will be the sales-ready leads in the future.

To define the other stages, I propose that marketing listen carefully to sales and ask them to outline what they see as an ideal account. Then take as many of these attributes as possible and use that critieria as the basis for the next stage in the funnel which I normally refer to as A leads. Another set of key criteria involves BANT (budget, authority, need, timeframe), and while it's not always easy to collect, it definitely needs to be a key part of the next stage which is what I call qualified leads, or sales-ready leads. The next couple of stages really depend on the target audience, the technical nature of the product and the sales process involved in closing deals. Quite often these are called technical closure and business negotiation, but may go by many names, and may also involved some business case closure or trial stages as well.

In the end, and I've said it many times, the number and name of the stages are not what's important. What is important is that marketing and sales agree on ALL of it and also what it takes to move a lead from one stage to the next. While funnels will vary between different industries and organization, it must NOT vary within the organization.

The Heart of Lead Generation

Without a doubt the sales funnel is at the heart of lead generation. The understanding of how you move leads through the funnel is crucial to any successful marketing campaign and more importantly to the company's ability to sell more products. But before we talk about that process, the first step is for sales and marketing to work together and define the sales funnel for their organizations.

In general, the stages of the sales funnel may include: prospects, leads, qualified leads, serious opportunities, trials or evals, call-to-close phase and closed deals. And while the concept is similar across most sales processes, it's imperative that each stage be clearly defined and agreed upon by all parties so that it can be consistently applied, analyzed and adjusted as appropriate. Above all else, agreement on the stage where marketing passes leads to sales and the definition of these qualified leads is imperative. I'll have more on that in a subsequent post.

Once the stages are defined, then it's important to understand the number of leads from all prospects (10-20%) and the ratio of qualified leads to closed deals (15:1-20:1) so that marketing can generate sufficient leads to meet the revenue requirements for the year. Of equal importance, you need to understand the time it takes to move from one stage to the next (1 to 2 months per stage depending on market maturity).

While everyone would love these ratios and timelines to be smaller and shorter for their industry, I've seen time and time again that these are quite consistent in technology companies and can be even longer when selling to certain verticals. This means it's pointless to use unrealistic ratios or timelines when planning but only adjust them when you have concrete metrics and evidence built by carefully tracking this information in addition to other ROI metrics.

Since I strongly believe the sales funnel is the heart of lead generation there will be several additional posts on this topic. For now, it's important to understand that the concepts mentioned here are more scientific than most traditional marketers would like to admit so you need to accept them and work for improvement rather than ignore the process.