Archive for case studies
May 5 th
My 3 Wishes from the Marketing Genie
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Remember watching cartoons about Aladdin and the magic lamp? I always hoped I’d find a magic lamp on a beach somewhere and I’d be granted three wishes. Didn’t you wish you could have three wishes too?
Well today I’m setting aside my marketing hat, my BI hat, and my corporate sustainability hat. I’m putting on my customer hat and asking for three wishes I know your marketing team can grant me.
Here are my three wishes:
1. I want a real relationship with you. I want to know that you are real people. I want to know that your company values align with mine. I want to know you are passionate about what you offer. I want to know you understand my needs and that you care about my success. I want to know how you give back to society. I will look for clues in your blog posts, Twitter tweets, forums, and other forms of social media.
2. I want you to help me be successful. I need to fully understand my challenge, including the business impacts. I need to learn better ways to do things, including best practices. I want to know how others have been able to overcome challenges and be successful. I need you to help educate me with credible and objective information. I need you to help me justify my business case. I will look for this in your white papers, case studies, data sheets, articles, webinars, e-books, and other educational content and tools.
3. I want to be able to find you when I need you. I want to easily find the information I need. I want my questions answered quickly. I want you to communicate in ways relevant to my needs. I want you to know who I am when I call. I will look for a well-designed, organized, and complete website, regular newsletters, targeted e-mails, trade show presence, search engine results, and most of all: contact information that leads me to a real person.
Rather than standing in the middle of the marketing department and looking out, I encourage you to walk over and stand in your customer’s office and look out. How do they see you and your company? Does your brand personality show through? Are you approachable? Do you offer a variety of content to help meet their educational needs?
If the magic genie could grant you three wishes (not necessarily marketing or business related), what would they be?
January 11 th
Content Relevance Boosts B2B Vendor Success
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I came across some research done by IDG spread across two different posts that was pretty interesting. They interviewed over 100 information technology buyers about their content preferences from vendors. IDG noted there has been a 60% increase in content assets over the past five years. The rush is on to get in the content game and offer information prospective and current customers will find valuable and that will ultimately drive sales.
Only 39% of those interviewed said they find relevance in links offered to vendor content (though their expectation is only 50%). These same buyers say that if they find relevant content, it increases that vendor’s success rate.
The trouble may come when, in their haste, vendors don’t make the shift from promotional to educational content. Buyers want content that is relevant to their needs, and supports their decision making process. This means the content must have “meat” behind it and not just be considered marketing hype.
IDG asked IT buyers a series of questions about their content preferences from various social conversation channels. Here’s a brief recap of the top preferences by channels:
- Blog – case studies, ads, tutorials, seminar material
- Forums – tutorials, free event registration, evaluation versions, white papers
- Live Chat – free event registration, evaluation versions, white papers
- Microblog – ads, technical knowledge base, free event registration, white
- Social networks – free event registration, ads, ROI calculator, white papers
- Wikis – tutorials, white papers, case studies, knowledge base
To me, these seem more like expectations than preferences, and the study is really quite small. What I did like was their takeaway message.
Winners will be vendors that build a “relevant” content bridge to draw the conversation towards their own hosted platforms and insight.
This will motivate engagement, and build a sense of interest and reliance and credibility with buyers. The wrong content will damage vendor consideration within the ongoing conversation and beyond.
May 21 st
Once upon a time in B2B marketing
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Is it just me or is most marketing content for B2B pretty dry? So much of our content says, “This is our software. It enables you to do this, so that you can do that.”
I’ve been thinking about the “dry and boring” problem for a long time. Longer than I’ve been a marcom writer and even going way back to the days when I was a marcom consumer, as an IT Director. I just keep thinking there has to be a better way.
The emergence of social media has helped changed the face of B2B marketing, an improvement in my opinion. It has a way of personalizing the relationship between vendor and customer. But something still seems to be missing. So, what if we could market using more storytelling?
Don’t you love a good story? Isn’t it more fun to listen to someone tell of an event and make the story come to life? Case studies are the closest we come to incorporating stories into our marketing content and I think even these could be improved. What I’m talking about is taking case studies and other marketing content to higher levels of storytelling. I’m talking more about creative non-fiction.
Creative non-fiction takes something that is true and writes it in a way that touches our senses. It creates a visual image and stirs up emotions using dramatic openings, realistic details, and expressive dialogue. These are just three ways to make a dry story compelling.
Dramatic openings – Capture your readers from the start. Use visual and exciting openings to compel them to read further.
Old: “Company ABC was spending 8 hours backing up their servers and when backups were running, everyone else had to be off the system.”
New: “The ringing phone interrupted the silence in the data room. On the other end was the CEO, hot that he was locked out of the system as he tried to get some last minute information for the board meeting in 30 minutes.”
Realistic details - Help the story come alive by providing details that touch the one or more of the five senses with detailed descriptions of the scene.
Old: “The vendor held a kickoff meeting to get everyone familiar with the project plan.”
New: “The blue dry marker squeaked across the white board as Joe, the project manager, highlighted the details of the project plan to the VP of Marketing, IT Director, and the project team.”
Expressive dialogue - I find customer quotes within case studies to be quite helpful. They offer a change in voice from the writer to the customer. However, most quotes end with the words “says” or states” such as “states Mr. Smith” which are really expressionless. What if we used more expressive dialogue tags?
Old: “We achieved a 50% improvement on our processing time,” says Mr. Smith, Operations Manager.
New: “We achieved a 50% improvement in our processing time,” the Operations Manager Mr. Smith boasted with a smile.
These are just a few tricks taken from the creative non-fiction world and I’m no fiction author. I’m sure every one of you could come up with even better examples.
It still may be a stretch to incorporate this style into our traditional marketing content and I’m probably treading on new ground here, but I throw it out there as a new, more personal direction for B2B marketing. What do you think?
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