When it comes to your marketing, sometimes it’s important to stop doing what you’ve been doing. And start some new things. In the book Good to Great, Jim Collins says that great leaders are disciplined – they not only have a to-do list, but they also have a stop-doing list. Here are some marketing things to stop doing and some you should start.

What Marketing Things You Should Stop Doing

(Because doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results is the definition of insanity.)

1. Stop anything that doesn’t yield results.
2. Stop pay-per-click ads – your money could be better used elsewhere.
3. Stop paying for SEO (search engine optimization). Spend it on content.
4. Stop using proprietary platforms and technology for your website.
5. Stop running those ads/attending trade shows just because you always have.

What Marketing Things to Start Doing

1. Start understanding your customers – create marketing personas and use them.
2. Start tracking engagement of prospects and customers.
3. Start tracking conversions of prospects-to-customers.
4. Start becoming a part of the social media conversation.
5. Start creating great content, including a company blog and videos.

What’s on your marketing do and don’t lists?

Lead, follow or get out of the way. When it comes to your competition, if you’re spending too much time and energy watching the competition, you’re just following them. Or, at best, you’re looking laterally at business opportunities in an attempt to keep up.

In Good to Great, Jim Collins writes that great company leaders never talked about competitive strategy. They were not focused on what competitors were doing, but on getting the right people in the business and on excelling at their core competencies.

One way to lead in your marketplace is to know what your customers need that they can’t get now. Another way to lead is to stay ahead of opportunities for your business and your industry, because sometimes your customers don’t know what they need. They don’t know what they don’t know. It’s up to you to tell them.

W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne take this a step further in their book Blue Ocean Strategy. Companies that find their blue ocean of opportunity (bypassing the bloody red ocean of competition) can do so by looking at applying their product or service to non-customers. They may be able to gain new market share that competitors don’t have.

So don’t waste a lot of energy on the competition. Know where they are at and what they offer. But look to customers and even non-customers to expand your markets.

Now more than ever, online content is the key to attracting and engaging qualified prospects online. According to a study done in August of 1092 B2B marketers, 60% plan to increase content spend in 2012 (compared to 51% in 2011) and 62% plan to outsource content creation (it was 55% in 2011).

But, the biggest challenge B2B Marketers have with content is figuring out what kind engages prospects.

There are new forms of content emerging constantly, and many B2B marketers are new to online content creation. Here are some ideas for how to identify what content you should create.

1. Use a website analytics to track downloads and visits. This give you clues as to what media visitors to your site prefer and what topics are most popular.
2. Leverage the most popular page topics on your site. If an article you wrote gets tons of visitors, build on that – create a video or a more in-depth eBook on the same or similar topic.
3. Re-purpose great content into multiple media formats and track the results. Sometimes you just have to resort to trial and error. Put a bunch of content formats on your site about the same topic and see which is most popular. Learn from the results and build on your successes.
4. Better yet, survey or interview your customers. What media do they like the most? Do they want a smart phone app from you because they’re so mobile? Video, because it’s engaging? Audio, because they’re so busy they want to listen while they drive or exercise?
5. Research your customers. Find published studies that detail the demographics and psychographics of your customers – online publications will track this information for advertisers. Combined with some interviews this information will help you develop marketing personas about them (see my previous post on marketing personas – Why B2B Marketing Personas Rule) that include their content media preference.
6. Ask your sales and customer service people to track common questions and issues. Then, answer the questions or address the issues in your online content.
7. Watch and listen on social media. What are your prospects and customers engaging in with others? How can it be applied to what you offer?

These are just some ways to answer the question, “What Kind of Content Should We Create?” How do you answer this?

Are you leveraging your B2B marketing assets to achieve better results faster? Spending your marketing time, resources and budget on tactics and strategies that can quickly accelerate marketing results is better than spending your time, resources and budget on tactics that take a long time to produce results. Before you launch that expensive, long-term, marketing campaign for a new market, ask yourself – is there anything I can leverage more quickly and less expensively?

I was reminded of the concept of leverage from a recent Monday Morning Memo by contrarian consultant Alan Weiss. Alan wrote about leveraging strengths and provided this quote:

Give me only a place to stand and I can move the world. — Archimedes of Syracuse

Archimedes of Syracuse invented the lever and discovered leverage. How can you employ leverage in your marketing to achieve the results you need?

First, you need to identify your assets. These could be an untapped niche customer segment, a product or service or knowledge that your competitors don’t have, a speech your CEO gives that is highly popular, or even content on your website that gets the most traffic. (For more information about identifying business assets to leverage for results, see my previous blog post, Be a Strategic Planning Hero with Microstrategies.)

Second, you need to create an action plan to leverage at least one asset. Choose the asset(s) that can produce the best results to meet your business objectives. For example, if you have an untapped niche customer segment, create a  dedicated marketing campaign that increases the touchpoints with customers to increase your wallet share with them.

If you have a product, service or some knowledge that is a “best-kept secret” either through neglect or because you didn’t know it was an asset, create a plan to aggressively market it and generate new sales.

If an executive or employee with your organization or business has gotten traction giving a certain speech or training materials, leverage that information into a new service or other materials that can be sold or perhaps a book that can establish your organization as a thought leader.

And, last but certainly not least, identify the most popular content on your website. Is it something that tells you what your site visitors are interested in, possibly pointing you to a previously-unknown opportunity for a new product or service? Or, is it content that you can re-purpose in different media to extend your marketing reach? (Read my previous post, Re-Purpose Content with a Purpose, for more information on this.)

What can you leverage for marketing results? Contact New Incite today for help in creating marketing leverage.

At New Incite, our tagline is “Don’t Leave Your Marketing to Chance.” We’ve seen too many B2B companies fail to look at their business, industry, and competition strategically, miss major opportunities and waste precious marketing dollars.

Planning your B2B marketing strategically means that you are driving the bus that is your business, not riding in it (or standing at the bus stop waiting for it). You either have a marketing plan and a road map, you’re just along for the ride and hopefully it will work out.

ac·ci·den·tal/ aksi-den-tl/
Adjective: Occurring unexpectedly, unintentionally, or by chance.
Synonyms: unintentional – unforeseen – casual

stra·te·gic/ struh-tee-jik/
Adjective: Pertaining to, characterized by, or of the nature of strategy (the science and art of military command exercised to meet the enemy in combat under advantageous conditions )
Synonyms: opportune – critical – key – principal – crucial

A strategic marketing plan can make you money and save you money. Are you marketing to the wrong people? Have you missed a big marketing opportunity? Are you wasting money on the wrong marketing? Are you spending big marketing bucks and not getting results?

By applying some strategic modelling to your marketing plan, you can gain invaluable insights about your customers, new markets and potential new products and services. Blue Ocean Strategy, SWOT, Voice of the Customer, Marketing Personas are all strategic marketing tools that can get you out of accidental and into strategic mode when it comes to your marketing plan.

What’s your plan for next year? Is it strategic or accidental? A little of both? Contact us today at 1-818-347-4248 for a free phone consultation. Don’t leave your marketing to chance!

Since it’s Veteran’s Day I thought this blog entry might be timely. Did you know that one of the definitions of strategy is about planning operations and movements in a war or battle?

B2B Marketers need to confront and act on today’s brutal reality, but they must never lose faith in the end result.

“You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end – which you can never afford to lose – with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.”

–Admiral Jim Stockton, about his 8-year imprisonment in the Vietnam  War

In the book Good to Great, Jim Collins wrote about how great companies confronted the brutal truth, yet never lost faith in their vision of success. Called the Stockdale Paradox after Admiral Jim Stockton’s ability to survive eight brutal years in a Vietnamese prison camp, the concept is that you have to face reality head-on.

What does this mean for marketing? Marketers need to do everything they can to understand their options and to take actions based on that knowledge.

Understand your customers. If you think you know your customers, you better really understand their needs and wants. Assuming you know or thinking you know isn’t good enough. Survey, interview, study your customers to gain more intelligence about them.

Test new tactics. If you think you know what marketing tactics work, verify it. Don’t just fall back on marketing the same way – times have changed and marketing is constantly evolving. Try something new in the coming year, such as social media or video marketing, on a limited basis. Measure each activity so you know your return on investment (ROI).

Track your results. Running marketing on intuition is not good enough. Back up your feelings with cold hard facts. Now more than ever you need to justify every dollar you spend on your marketing. Invest in systems and dashboards that help you do this.

Above all, don’t give up the faith. If you ruthlessly look for opportunity, carefully test new ideas, and measure results, you can prevail. How will you apply the Stockdale Paradox?

In today’s economy, every dollar you spend on marketing must produce results. Are you sure that the marketing you spend money on is working?

As a new year approaches, this is a perfect time for a marketing audit. A marketing audit is a cost-effective review process where an expert looks at your marketing strategy, tactics, and results to make sure you are getting the best results possible without wasting money. Here are some of the things we’ve found in marketing audits:

No marketing integration. Sometimes marketing programs grow one tactic at a time. A business creates a website, and then begins a separate effort to send out email newsletters to customers. The messaging and the graphics on the website don’t match that of the emails. Sometimes the reason for this is because the website was created by a vendor,  email campaigns are created in-house, and there is no one to coordinate the efforts. Without a plan to integrate the look, feel and messaging of all marketing tactics, you cannot reap the proven benefits of integrated marketing programs.

Bad strategy. Many companies want to market to a broad audience or the wrong audience. In a broad marketplace there is intense competition, and it’s hard to stand out. One of our clients decided to position themselves in a big marketplace, when in fact they were the leading experts in a niche market within that big marketplace. The dollars they spent trying to compete with the big guys would have been much better spent on marketing their niche expertise.

The wrong results. We’ve seen businesses that use tactics that get a lot of response, but they generate unqualified leads. For example, one of our B2B clients published blog posts about popular events, hoping to increase readership. We found that while visitors would land on their blog, they rarely stayed or looked at more information, because they were interested in the events not in our clients’ business.  In B2B marketing, quality of the leads is more important than quantity.

Are you doing the right marketing, to the right people, getting the right results? New Incite offers marketing audits – a shortened version of our Marketing Situation Analysis – as a cost-effective solution for today’s business owner.

In business there are hedgehogs and there are foxes. I believe the concept applies to marketers, too.

In the book Good to Great, Jim Collions wrote that great companies acted more like hedgehogs – simple, dowdy creatures that know one thing and stick to it. The comparison companies in the Good to Great study were more like foxes, wrote Collins, craft, cunning, fast and everchanging. The foxes knew many things but lacked consistency.

Great companies followed “The Hedgehog Concept.” They knew what they were good at and stuck to it. They saw through complexity and found unifying patterns. They simplified. So, too, do great marketers.

Great marketers plan their marketing in advance. They analyze past performance and cut under-performing tactics. They don’t jump onto the latest marketing bandwagon until they have a clear understanding of how it will or won’t support their primary business goals.

What do you think? Can you accept the image of the dowdy hedgehog marketer? Or will you go with crafty-like-a-fox?

There’s a perfect storm brewing in successful marketing campaigns these days, and there are three key components: great copywriting, optimization, and use of technology.

Just like in the book The Perfect Storm, in which author Sebastian Junger describes the confluence of three critical weather factors: warm air from a low-pressure system coming from one direction, a flow of cool and dry air generated by a high-pressure from another direction, and tropical moisture provided by Hurricane Grace, so too is there a perfect storm of marketing skillsets that accelerate results for your marketing efforts.

Marketing Copywriting

There are two things that copywriting is critical for today – social sharing and content. The more compelling content you have online that people can relate to and share with others, the more chance your business has of getting found online. And, it’s not just about writing “OK” content – it’s about writing great content – great stories with valuable information and compelling calls to action that get people to share their content.

Content Optimization

Your content needs to include and be tagged with the right  keywords and phrases. You need to know which are the most frequently-used when your target prospects search for your products or services. This is both science and art. There are certain places where you can include keywords and phrases that the search engine algorithms respond to. It’s constantly changing, including the shift from SEO (search engine optimization) to SMO (social media optimization).

Marketing Technology

Today as a CMO, marketing consultant or agency, you need to understand and use technology. Social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, websites, SEO (social media optimization),  marketing analytic dashboards, lead nurturing systems, customer relationship management (CRM) systems are all technology products that you need to use to be efficient and cost-effectively track results.

At New Incite, we think we’re in the perfect marketing storm. Our lead marketing consultant and CMO for Hire, Jen Beever, came from the software industry in 1997 to start New Incite. A great writer, Jen’s classmate and fellow English Major at Colby College was Linda Greenlaw, the captain of the Andrea Gail‘s sister ship, the Hannah Boden, who was featured in The Perfect Storm.  And, finally, Jen applies her software background as a techie – she has been getting results from websites and search engine optimization since 1998.

Are you in the Marketing Perfect Storm? Swimming strong or sinking?

Photo from Flickr. The Perfect Storm, Some rights reserved by bernavazqueze