the B2B Marcom Mind
February 2009
Hi Marketeers,
Well here we go! 2009 is off and running, and if you're like me, you have high hopes for this year. 2008 was a tough year, for a number of reasons. One of the biggest for me was a medical challenge with my husband that took up a large part of the second half of 2008. Fortunately, things are looking up here at home and I have hope things beyond home will improve for all of us in 2009.
You've heard the saying, "A purpose-driven life" haven't you? We'll look at bringing purpose into our marketing communications, especially white papers. And speaking of having a purpose, we need to fully understand a lay of the land in order to address the challenges and take advantages of the opportunities to meet our purpose. A SWOT analysis will help you do just that. Lastly, we can have a little fun under the guise of work by flexing our writing muscles with fiction writing exercises. Now Write! is a great book loaded with writing exercises to strengthen your right brain.
Writing and producing marketing content can be a lonely business. I'd love to hear from you! Drop me a quick email and let me know what your current challenges are, any successes you've had, or just chat. We can also connect over Twitter. I'm under @bimarcom.
See you next month,
Terri Rylander
LinkedIn B2B Marcom Group Manager
Freelance B2B Marcom Writer
"Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing."
~Ben Franklin
A Purpose-Driven White Paper
|
 |
In my former role as Director of Business Intelligence, a hybrid business/IT role, I read many white papers. Arguably, some were better than others. As a customer, I was reading for a number of reasons, including:
- I wanted to learn about potential solutions
- I wanted assurance the vendor understood my problem
- I needed information to support my business case
- I wanted to be fully-educated on the bigger picture
- I wanted to know if there were anything else I hadn’t considered
Having said that, I can’t tell you how many white papers missed the mark and left me hanging.
If the objective of your white paper is to move a prospect through the sales funnel, then there are some areas you should be addressing.
Problem Section - Aside from a possible short intro paragraph, this should be the first section of your paper. It should articulate the business or technical problem in detail and include the impacts of the problem, such as increased costs, lost revenue opportunity, difficulty meeting regulations, and poor quality. What will help your prospect greatly is to include quantitative measures of the impacts like dollars, number of customers affected, lost time due to rework. The problem statement is even stronger if you can back it up with fact-based statistics that cite credible sources.
History – Typically, this follows the problem section and helps educate the reader about the bigger picture. What led up to this problem? Did this problem always exist or has something changed? You may even be able to show that your competition is behind the times. You can also use this as an opportunity to show what’s been tried in the past and why it hasn’t worked or isn’t working now.
Market Trends – These kinds of trends shape the way we experience the future. Market trends include new technology or inventions, policy changes such as Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA, social changes like social networking or telecommuting, and economic changes including global markets, interest rates, and the economic climate. Your market trends should relate to your industry and not to your solution specifically. Again, use facts and statistics, and quote credible sources such as field experts and industry analysts.
Overall Solution – Now that you’ve set the stage, it’s time to educate your reader about the solution or range of solutions. Talk about the solution at a high level providing the big picture. By starting at this high level, you make the solution easy to understand and can start to guide the reader down the path towards your company’s solution. Be sure to define any common acronyms and add any helpful diagrams. Do not introduce your product here. Wait until the overall solution is thoroughly described.
So many white papers I see are more like glorified brochures. They start and end by touting the product. Nothing turns off a reader more than listening to a bunch of hype. They want real-world answers to the problems they face every day.
I know if the white papers I read had even those four sections included, that vendor’s solution would have risen to the top of my shortlist.
|
Time to SWOT Your Competitor |
 |
Have you or your company performed a SWOT analysis lately? If not, now is a great time to use a SWOT analysis to build a big-picture view of your company.
A SWOT analysis looks at an area from a few directions, specifically:
- Strengths – characteristics that are helpful in achieving your goals
- Weaknesses – characteristics that are harmful to achieving your goals
- Opportunities – external conditions that are helpful in achieving your goals
- Threats – external conditions that may reduce the chance of achieving your goals
A SWOT analysis helps you understand the “lay of the land.” It’s a chance to put everything on the table and understand the environment you are working in. It helps identify both the internal and external factors that influence the ability to reach your goals. As part of any annual planning, your SWOT analysis should be updated and goals appropriately adjusted.
Looking specifically at each area of the SWOT analysis, here are just some of the suggested characteristics to review:
Strengths – Customer satisfaction and loyalty metrics, brand recognition, intellectual property and patents, exclusive or advantageous contracts with highly desired suppliers or products, first-mover advantage, and high barrier to entry.
Weaknesses – Essentially, weaknesses will be the opposite of strengths. Low customer satisfaction, low brand recognition, low barrier to entry, little IP, high costs, lack of any advantageous supplier agreements.
Opportunities – New technologies, unfulfilled customer need or demand, loosening of external policies and laws, increased access to international markets.
Threats – Products that are out of favor or end of life, increase in copy-cat products across the market, introduction of new regulations, unfavorable economic conditions.
The goal of most companies is to sustain a competitive advantage. Michael Porter describes competitive advantage as two types: cost advantage and differentiation advantage.
Competitive advantage is achieved by using your company’s resources (capital, human, brand equity, IP, etc.) and your company’s ability to create efficiencies, quality, and innovation. These are the areas that should be included in your SWOT.
Marketing is often the owner of the SWOT task, using SWOTs to build detailed profiles of competitors in the market. Areas of analysis include your competitor’s cost structure, profit margin, resources (including capital and human), expertise, brand positioning, product differentiation, and market penetration (rates and trends).
Collecting this information is no easy task! It is time-consuming and requires a bit of sleuthing, especially if your competitor is a privately-held company. Be sure to perform your own SWOT in the same manner so you have an aligned comparison.
Putting it all together, your SWOT analysis is the key to identifying areas that currently support and currently threaten your competitive advantage. This works whether you are performing a SWOT analysis for a large corporation or your own small business. You can even create your own personal SWOT – great for those New Year’s resolutions!
Book Review
|
|
They say the best way to become a better writer is to write more! That even includes writing "out of the box." For us non-fiction writers, writing fiction can be a stretch. If you fall into that category or just want some fun writing exercises, then "Now Write!" is for you.
Now Write! is a collection of personal writing exercises from celebrated authors and writing teachers. These exercises are categorized under Get Writing!, Point of View, Character Development, Dialogue, Plot and Pacing, Setting and Description, Craft, and Revision.
|
|
One exercise helps you birth a story in under an hour by having you imagine two people having a conversation about a problem one of them is having. There are several connected writing exercises that eventually build a story. Each exercise is quick and fun. Check out Now Write! and get writing! |
| 
