As a B2B marketing consultant, I am often asked to figure out the one marketing tactic that is going to break open a market for a client. They are looking for a magic bullet.

I have news for them.

There is no magic bullet in B2B marketing.

Sorry to disappoint.

What does work is a strategic marketing plan that maps out integrated marketing tactics and provides a systematic approach to reaching your target audience. Strategy? Planning? Integration? Systems? Not as glamorous as the magic bullet, but they work!

One-shot marketing tactics don’t work. It has been proven again and again that multiple touches, multiple, integrated brand impressions create response compression (multiple touches lead a prospect to remember you and respond) and build brand recognition.

In my opinion, the only way to design and implement an integrated campaign is to have a written marketing plan. It becomes your road map – no, your GPS system – for integrated marketing success. Without the written plan, it is too easy to stray and end up back doing seat-of-the-pants, onesy-twosy marketing. Forget magic bullet(s). Rather,

1. get strategic
2. think “system”
3. know what tactics work for  your target audience
4. write a plan
5. make it happen!

Have you found a magic bullet for your marketing? Please comment below.

As a B2B marketing consultant, I’m often asked what day of the week is the best day to send promotional email. In earlier days of B2B email campaigns, the school of thought was that the best days were Tuesday-Wednesday-Thursday. On Mondays business people are overwhelmed and had a email inbox full of spam from the weekend. On Fridays people have their mind on the weekend and didn’t have as much time to read email.

Then, in 2008, Morgan Stewart, research director at ExactTarget, an email marketing firm, was quoted in Fortune magazine in an article titled “Sunday is the New Monday.” Stewart said “The best day to email is when no one else is doing it.” The article went on to say that Sunday was a day when business people have the time and space to read email, often from their smart phone.

Both arguments seem logical to me. Mondays and Fridays are not the greatest for email. I receive fewer emails on Sunday, and I notice Sunday emails more than the emails I receive on weekdays when email volume is higher.

However, the best answer to the question, “What is the best day to send B2B marketing emails?” is specific to your particular target market(s). When I was President of the Institute of Management Consultants Southern California, I noticed that we got more responses to emails on Friday afternoon. That’s often a time when consultants are in their offices finishing up from the current week and preparing for the next week. Clients usually don’t want to see us late Friday afternoon.

Find out the best day and time to email by trial and error or by primary research. Use a program like Constant Contact that tracks the email “read” time and day to find out what your target prefers. You can also simply observe when you get the most replies to your emails. Interview your customers, prospects and colleagues to understand when they review and read email. If the answers allow you to identify a better day of the week for email, send your email on that day. Then track the results to see if there is an improvement in responses or email reads and click-throughs.

What have you found from your B2B email marketing campaigns? Have you been able to identify a day on which your email read and/or response rate is higher? What day is it and whom do you target? Please comment below….

Photo by Stefan Baudy on Flickr, CC BY 2.0

One marketing tool to use in determining which marketing strategies and inbound marketing tactics will be most effective in B2B marketing planning is your product or service lifecycle stage. Over the lifetime of a product or service, you go through different stages of introduction, growth, maturity, and decline. Here are some examples of marketing strategies and inbound marketing tactics that are best suited to each stage.

Introduction Stage of Marketing Product Lifecycle

When a product category is introduced, it’s time to educate potential customers and build awareness. Marketing strategies at this stage include identifying a “beachhead” or niche market in which the needs for your product or service are high and the audience is made up of pioneers who are likely to adopt something new. This is especially true for technology marketing.

Choosing your first customers at this stage can be critical, especially if your development investment was large and development time was long. This is often the case in software development and other technologies that need to be proven at the first customer installation before more can be sold.

Some of the B2B inbound marketing tactics that fit this stage include quality content online in a variety of media (blogs, video, podcasts, eBooks, whitepapers), webinars, eLetters and newsletters, press coverage in trade publications and blogs, speaking at industry conferences and social network testimonials from beta and early customers. The marketing budget can be minimized by leveraging word of mouth marketing with inbound marketing.

Growth Stage of Marketing Product Lifecycle

The growth stage of the marketing product lifecycle offers great opportunity for sales, but it is a stage of increasing threat as more competitors come into the market. Marketing strategies here might be to differentiate (flank) the competition with innovation or niche markets or to find ways to reduce cost of production or control distribution (direct attack).

B2B marketing tactics during the growth stage involve increasing volume of marketing in terms of number of target markets and amount of outreach. Failure to maintain your brand and increase awareness at this stage can be fatal. The marketing spend may increase during this stage, but the sales volume should increase as well.

Your competitors will be educating your target audiences in this stage, so the key tactic here is lead generation and engagement to develop early adopters into customers. Increased amounts of quality, branded content online can attract prospective customers, and then outreach tactics such as email marketing, telemarketing and webinars will engage them and move them through the buy cycle.

Maturity Stage of Marketing Product Lifecycle

In the mature stage of a product lifecycle, sales begin to plateau and some competitors may exit the marketplace. B2B marketing strategies at this stage include leveraging customer loyalty, identifying or creating new, untapped niche markets or distribution channels and innovating product variations to fit new uses. These strategies could lead to another product lifecycle.

B2B marketing tactics in the mature stage include customer loyalty programs, promotions and incentives, finding new distribution channels, continuing marketing via social networks and email. In this stage measurement of marketing ROI is critical, because businesses must be aware of when their mature-stage “cash cow” product or service (milk it for all it’s worth) becomes a “dog” with declining ROI.

Decline Stage of Marketing Product Lifecycle

In this stage, effective marketing strategies include reducing costs, eliminating ineffective distribution channels, unbundling or simplifying the product offering, reducing price and promotion budget. With inbound marketing, content can remain online indefinitely to attract the long tail of demand even with declining demand, with little effort by B2B marketers.

At what stage is your product or service? Do you agree with the inbound marketing tactics that I identified for each stage? Did I leave out tactics or strategies? Please comment below!

Marketing consultants have to come up with great ideas and sell them to their client. Some take it a step further and create project plans. A few even stick around to execute the marketing plan. How do you know how your marketing consultant can perform through this marketing continuum?

Some of the key variables to getting marketing projects done include how individuals naturally focus their energy and prefer to work. At the Association for Strategic Planning annual conference in February, I was introduced to a unique assessment system designed to help individuals and teams maximize performance while minimizing stress. The underlying assumptions of the 5 Dynamics assessment/reporting system assessment are based on neurobiology, not personality.

I took the assessment in 2-3 minutes online, and in short order was served up a 13 page report that allowed me to review my ideal work environment, motivation, communication, interaction with others on my team,  task orientation, preferences for taking direction, leadership, sales orientation and learning style. The result told me that I love the exploration stage of a project, and I’m deliberate in the proposal, planning, and execution stages. Some of the points from my report are:

1. When you enter the 1st Dynamic, you instantly have new insights, ideas and connections.
   
2. You put time and energy into feelings, people and developing community.
3. You will stay within the boundaries necessary to get through the 3rd Dynamic. You very seldom distract the team from the agenda.
   
4. You will implement plans within deadlines and other boundaries.

I felt the assessment was accurate, and it explains why I love strategic marketing planning and easily adopt and assimilate new marketing techniques, technologies and methodologies for my clients. It also explains why my process of working from a one-page, written marketing plan and working with great teams leads to successful execution. I also loved the validation of my business name, New Incite. I chose the name because I incite my clients to positive change by offering new insights into their marketing!

Many thanks to Dr. Joyce Reynolds-Sinclair for showcasing the 5 Dynamics tool at the ASP Conference. By the way, the tool also provides analyses for teams – it quickly pinpoints any of the 5 Dynamics that a team is lacking. If you want to know more about 5 Dynamics, visit the web site at www.5dynamics.com.

I attended the Association for Strategic Planning’s annual conference in Pasadena, California on February 22-24, 2010. I got value from great networking, exhibits on strategic planning tools, methodologies and materials, author book-signings, workshops and breakout sessions. The keynote speakers were outstanding. They truly are some of the rock stars of strategic planning.

Here are some of my takeaways (note that these are not in order of importance or level of strategic-planning-rock-star-ness):

Dave Logan, co-author of Tribal Leadership, Professor at the USC Marshall School of Business

• Strategic planning has a “first mile problem.” It’s critical to execute and show some results for strategic plans, but few do this.
• Micro-strategies create a burst of implementation.
• Businesses that are demoralized should focus on the assets they have first, instead of on the assets they don’t have.
• Sometimes an asset that you don’t think is that important becomes a critical success factor (example: followers on social network can be a major factor for marketing communication).
• When businesses execute based on core values, the values act as a booster for getting results sooner.
• The micro-strategy process lends itself well to strategic thinking’s nested strategies.

Daryl Conner, Chairman of Conner Partners and Blogger, Change Thinking

• Number one reason for failure to execute strategic plan is leader’s lack of sponsorship for the plan to change.
• Strategic planners and plan implementers should spend more time talking to each other over the fence.
• Winners see themselves as both leaders and students at the same time.
• In order to change, an organization must have a “burning platform” – something too painful or expensive to continue the status quo.

Charles Kennedy, SVP of Research, ABC Television Network

• Referencing The Fourth Turning, Kennedy sited the authors’ 80-100 year cycles of American history: 1.) Awakening; 2.) Unraveling; 3.) Crisis; 4.)Heightening.
• We are currently in the crisis era, which the authors of The Fourth Turning predicted would start in 2005.
• Each stage in a cycle of history brings new meaning for society and how we tell our stories.
• In the crisis stage, there are nine new social contexts: intense parenting, rising community, simplicity, gender gap, stigma, survival, secular heroes, urgency, big & friendly.

Robert M. Malchione, SVP, Corporate Strategy and Technology, Avery Dennison

• Use ring-fence investing on key growth initiatives
• For OEMs, it’s important to focus on end-users of product as well as OEM customers
• Transparent communication is critical for innovation and agility

ASP’s annual conference on strategic planning will be in Dallas, Texas, next year – a perfect fit for one of Kennedy’s nine social contexts for our crisis era: big and friendly. The dates will be announced soon; the plan is to have the conference in early March of 2011.

Photo by Artbrom on Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0

Dave Logan, Co-Founder/Senior Partner of Culture Sync, Professor at the Marshall School of Business at USC, and C0-Author of the book Tribal Leadership, presented the opening keynote at the Association for Strategic Planning annual conference in Pasadena, California. In a little over an hour, Dave gave the audience of strategic planners a new model for jump-starting strategic plan implementation with his keynote speech. Here’s a summary of the talk:

Dave started by discussing an important disconnect in strategic planning. While the broadband industry has a “last mile problem” (the last mile of cable or wiring is the most expensive), strategic planning has a “first mile problem.” Businesses that have a strategic plan often don’t know how to move the plan into action. The inability to act on the strategic plan is compounded by the fact that most strategic plans have many initiatives, and executives have to decide which initiatives to implement first.

One solution is the micro-strategy. Micro-strategies create a burst of implementation in a 100-day term that allows strategic planners to show results quickly. The process includes five steps.

1. Identify an outcome that the business wants.
2. Identify the assets that the business has to support achieving the outcome. Dave pointed out that a critical aspect of this step is focusing on what a business has, not what they don’t have. He commented that if you are working with a group that is completely demoralized, start by making a list of the assets the business has – not what they don’t have – a great tip for these economic times.
3. Ask the test question, “Do we have the right assets?” If you don’t have the right assets, create a new outcome to achieve them, which is a nested strategy. An example is a business that doesn’t have a platform from which to communicate its marketing message for a product launch. A new outcome might be to “Get X number of followers on Twitter.”
4. List actions that can be done to achieve the outcome.
5. Ask the test question, “Will the actions achieve the outcome?”

A Micro-Strategy Example

The example Dave showed was that of a health organization that needed to improve compliance with health standards to reduce patient infections. A micro-strategy outcome they identified was to increase hand washing compliance from 42% to 85%. Some of the assets that were identified included knowledge of the financial impact of the problem, knowledge of the compliance percentage, knowledge of the role that families and culture play in hand-washing. Some of the actions they identified were to increase communications about the need for compliance and to engage families of patients to create compliance.

Dave pointed out that often one asset will emerge as a key factor in achieving the outcome. In his example, the key was engaging families and culture to increase hand-washing compliance. Once families of patients understood the importance of hand-washing by medical personnel, they would ask the doctors and nurses if they washed their hands before treating the patient, their family member. He equated the key asset to a usual object that action heroes often have and use to achieve extraordinary results  – Indiana Jones’ whip is one example. What was the actual outcome in the example? 93% compliance!

Dave had the audience break into small groups to create and discuss our individual micro-strategies, giving everyone a chance to experience the model first-hand. After we identified what we outcome wanted, Dave suggested that we triple it(!) He also pointed out that identifying core values that drive planning is a booster of the micro-strategy process, allowing businesses to increase success by as much as 300%. Because the health organization valued quality service, 42% hand-washing compliance was unacceptable and increased the organization’s motivation to achieve the outcome.

This is one of the many take-aways from ASP’s annual conference on strategic planning. I hoped to live-blog at the conference, but the facility wasn’t set up for it. I’ll be sharing more in the next week. If you find this information helpful, please comment about it below.

The Chinese New Year started on Sunday and is being celebrated around the world. It’s the Year of the Tiger in the Chinese Zodiac, which relates each year to one of twelve animals. The attributes of the tiger are tenacity and verocity, perfect qualities for marketing in today’s economic environment.

Merriam Webster defines tenacious as: 1 a : not easily pulled apart : cohesive; and 2 a : persistent in maintaining, adhering to, or seeking something valued or desire.

What does it take to be a tenacious marketer?

1. Identify business goals that you need to achieve. You’re at Point A now. Without goals (Point B) you not only can’t determine how to get where you’re going, but you don’t even know where you’re headed.
2. Have a marketing plan. You won’t be “easily pulled apart” if you have a written, strategic marketing plan. Stick to a plan instead of operating by a seat-of-the-pants approach.
3. Dare to innovate and take measured risk. Marketing has changed phenomenally in the last ten years. Are you still stuck in 1999? 1989? Learn new tactics and new technologies that will get you where you want to go faster and more cost-effectively, including social networking, search engine optimization, and inbound marketing.
4. Eliminate marketing tactics that don’t produce results. When tigers are hunting, if they don’t succeed, they starve. They don’t waste their energy chasing anything but dinner. Track your marketing results, and if certain marketing activities don’t produce what you need, eliminate or change them.

Photo by Keven Law on Flickr,   CC BY-SA 2.0

When I studied for the Inbound Marketing Certified Professional designation, one of the many comments that I made note of is that the key to social networking efficiently is “discipline and filtering” (I believe these words are attributable to Tod Defren of SHIFT Communications – strike me down if I am wrong). We need to participate consistently (with discipline!) and we need to provide consistent brand images and messaging. In addition, we need to filter the volumes of information available to us online, so that we can feed our customers, clients, and followers with relevant information.

There is a simple and free tool you can use from Google to filter online information about industries, products, people, companies and pretty much anything else you can think of. I set up Google Alerts for new clients, new product lines, competitive research, as well as my name, my company and my products.

Setting up Google Alerts is easy. If you don’t have a Google account, create one. From the menu, select Alerts, or, if that doesn’t display, select “More” from the menu and then select “Alerts”.

Your Google Alerts can help you monitor your own activity online. In addition, you can set up alerts for customers, clients, competitors, industries, trends, products and services, and even locations that you want to travel to or consumer products you want to buy.

Note that you can set your alerts to email you as they occur, daily or weekly. There may be some additional options. This is a very simple thing you can do to add to your marketing filtering system.

So, instead of manually searching for your marketing intelligence when you think of it, set up automatic alerts. You’ll have more marketing intelligence and more fodder for your customers and for blog entries,  Tweets and other social networking topics.

Please comment below on Google Alerts, or other tools you use to monitor your and your customers’ online activity.

Critical elements of the one-page marketing plan:

Vision, Mission and Goals. Before planning, you should know what your company does (mission), where you want it to be in the next three to five years (vision), and how you are going to get there (goals).

SMART Goals. Goals should be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Timely.

Customer Segments or Personas. Who does your company serve? What are their needs, behaviors, desires, interests, preferences? What are the best ways to market to them? What trends affect them? What new needs do they have?

Tactics. What worked last year? What did not work? What tactics will you implement next year? Do these tactics fit your budget? What are the alternatives?

Timeline. When will you execute each marketing tactic and who will do the work?

Results Tracking. What results do you expect from each tactic? How will you track them? How does each tactic tie back to your business goals?

I like working from a one-page marketing plan for my clients and for my own business, whether or not we have a multi-page written plan as well. I used to use Microsoft Project to create a Gantt chart of the marketing plan timeline, but few of my clients had the program nor did they want to endure the learning curve in order to be able to use it.

I now use Microsoft Excel to show the marketing objective, tasks, resources, start dates, and timeline as well as the estimated and actual costs and measurable results. My clients can more easily maintain the chart if they choose to, which is so important in light of the fact that marketing is an iterative process, ever-changing as we learn about new tactics, new markets, new ways to do things, etc. On one page we can see where we are, what each person has to do, how much we have or will spend, and what results we’ve achieved.

One Page Marketing Plan

I usually reserve a cell at the top of the Excel spreadsheet to enter in the business goals that the plan supports. Goals should be measurable and achievable, such as close 100 new customers; increase market share by 30%; double revenues… Whatever your goals are, it’s important to keep everyone’s eyes on them and tie your marketing tactics back to them.

I list the marketing tasks to be done in a left side column. These might include trade show marketing, web site updates, creating brochures and white papers, sending out press releases, holding webinars, etc. Next I add a column for who will do the work, either an employee of the company or an outsource vendor. The next columns are for duration and start date.

In the middle I graphically show each task, indicating its start date, duration and end date. The time segments in most of my timelines are by week, so I show beginning and ending dates by starting or ending the graphic in the week in which the date is. I use different colors for milestones, and sometimes I use different colors for activities that fall in different departments, such as marketing and sales.

On the right side are a number of columns for estimated and actual costs, estimated and actual results. You can add columns to track the variance from estimated to actual. For example, if you budgeted $5,000 to update your web site but spent only $3,000, you are under budget by 40%. Or, if you estimate that you will generate 20 qualified leads and you generate 30, you’ve achieved 150% of your goal.

I take the one-page marketing plan a step further and add a column on the far left, which is for category of marketing tasks. Categories include print, web site, social networking, trade shows, etc. I do this so that I can sort the spreadsheet by person responsible, by category, by date, etc. Sorting by category allows you to see at a glance how much you’re doing or spending in any particular marketing area.

Of course a lot more than formatting a one-page marketing plan on an Excel spreadsheet goes into planning your marketing. You need to have a clear vision, mission and goals; an understanding of your target markets and market personae; data on what has or has not worked in the past; analyses of your marketplace and competition; and a clear understanding of a variety of marketing tactics. But the one-page marketing plan is simple and nets out the information I, my associates, and my clients need to know as we implement marketing for the year.

Do you create a marketing plan each year? How? Do you use it? Please comment below.