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Recently I got into an online discussion on LinkedIn about content marketing and it revolved around, what IS content marketing?  It’s a pretty simple concept and haven’t we been doing it forever?  And it’s a legitimate question so for clarity’s sake I wanted to give you my definition of content marketing:  

Content marketing is offering customer-focused, value-add content (whitepapers, articles, webinars, videos, services) that introduces a potential customer to your organization, your expertise and indirectly, your product line.  

Content marketing is not about a direct product pitch and serves to engage and warm up a prospect before they even start down the buy cycle. It’s also a indirect form of brand marketing because the prospect establishes a relationship and understanding of your organization without necessarily, a specific product or even brand pitch. 

Where I think content marketing can be most effective is for purchase cycles that are long and infrequent.  You know a marketing professional may be evaluating marketing automation technology but it’s not that frequent.  So you keep them engaged with value-add content that indirectly tells your story and establishes your expertise.  Here’s an example of a content marketing email I received from marketing automation specialist, Teradata!   With a 2015 marketer survey as their content bait, they are establishing digital marketing expertise without pitching the marketing automation solution.  

When I marketed Microsoft and Red Hat training it’s often not enough to tell prospects that you offer great training and expertise.  It’s even better to SHOW them you offer great training and expertise.  I offered up whitepapers, blog posts and webinars from industry experts to help them learn technology.  So of course when you’re ready to take a more formal training class, I would expect to be top of mind.  Content marketing is a strategy and tactic that takes some patience but it does pay off.  The periodic chart of content marketing (from eConsultancy below) is a great way to visualize the breadth and spectrum of potential content marketing and how it can drive your business!  And noticed how I shared out their valuable content creating a viral, marketing pitch?!  

The Periodic Table of Content Marketing, by Chris Lake.

It all goes back to my adage: do what’s right for the customer in all phases of your business: operations, marketing and sales.  All your usual product marketing (product sheets, FAQ’s, customer success stories) assets are still crucial but your overall story gets enhanced and extended with content marketing.  Content marketing fits neatly into that expectation by giving customers what they want to hear and know, not just what you want to tell them.  Establish a trusted relationship first, then the sale will follow…  

Ron Wen

www.linkedin.com/in/ronwen

(Re-posted from my LinkedIn page)  Buyer Personas continue to be a hot topic for marketing professionals and Adele Revella’s new book on Buyer Personas sheds a light for those of us looking for clarity.  While discussions with your sales reps and internet searches are a good start, a truly effective buyer persona hinges on one key action: getting in front of your customer and interviewing them.  

Having just finished reading Adele’s Buyer Personas book, it breaks down this crucial and insightful marketing research into four very digestible sections for the busy professional.  

1. Buyer Persona project launch- Getting organizational buy-in and recruiting individuals who have considered and/or purchased products and services in your area of interest for interviews. Who to recruit and why to recruit them is also covered.  
2. Buyer Person interviews- The hands-on qualitative interviews that are key to developing buying insights. The goal is to have an unscripted conversation that allows customers to tell their buying journey with no judgement or bias.
3. Buyer Persona interview mining- This key phase is all about recording the words and buyer focal points into categories and developing the key insights that your organization will act on. You will also identify how many buyer personas you will support.  
4. Execution on Buyer Persona Insights- This final phase is all about prioritizing key buying insights, getting buy-in and acceptance through your organization on these insights and injecting them into your sales and marketing operations.  

End goal?  Develop 5 Rings of Buying Insight for your potential customers.  These insights revolve around: Priority Initiatives, Success Factors, Perceived Barriers, the Buyers Journey and Decision Criteria.  To summarize these 5 rings, we are talking about what motivates an organization to start looking for a solution, the personal or organizational benefits of the solution, why they may not consider your solution, how and who was involved in the purchase of a solution and finally, what specific attributes moved them to that decision. 

Adele also covers developing Buyer Personas for global organizations, new product launches and supporting product development.  All of the guidance in this Buyer Persona book has enough flexibility to accommodate the reality of your marketing organization.  

Over the course of reading Adele’s book and re-reading it, several key themes come through clearly. The need for product marketers to listen carefully, providing valuable information and assets to customers on their buying journeys and  developing trusted relationships. In the end, it’s all about a shift for marketers to truly represent their customers at your organization’s table and in the conference room.It all just reminds me of a quote from Amazon’s Jeff Bezos: ‘If we can keep our competitors focused on us while we stay focused on the customer, ultimately we’ll turn out all right.’ And that customer focus is key throughout all phases of your customer interactions, from product to marketing to sales.

If you’re interested in taking a serious dive into Buyer Personas, you’d be remiss not to check out the book written by the woman who developed buyer persona curriculum for Pragmatic Marketing. Read, learn and enjoy this new take on modern marketing for the 21st century…  

Buyer Personas by Adele Revella on Amazon.com

www.linkedin.com/in/ronwen

You know the old marketing discussions you hear at the watercooler and online: SEO is dead, social media is absolutely critical, you have to build an app for your company, and so on.  Oftentimes when we look at tactical marketing decisions, we approach them in a binary fashion.  Yes or no, good or bad, right or wrong.  But the reality of marketing today is that you’re one person, communicating and influencing thousands of prospects and potential customers.  And that means there are thousands of “right answers” to marketing.  

What’s just as important is that your marketing strategy and tactics are right for you and your organization!  I know that I’ve blogged about being customer-centric and that is absolutely crucial in terms of your strategy and marketing voice.  But the reality is that any marketing strategy or philosophy is only as good as the execution behind it.  Trying to follow a marketing framework or plan without the necessary people, expertise and resources behind it becomes an ineffective, academic exercise.  

And as marketers shift from one philosophy to another, what was old becomes new again.  Advertising and direct mail which is very difficult to measure and expensive, can be a useful tool when used in the right context.  Email, while still effective, typically only has a 20+% open rate which means you’re missing out on influencing 3 out of 4 of your prospects in that cycle.  Which is why I truly believe in quality AND quantity for your outbound marketing.  And choosing a good mix of marketing channels is a way to repeat your message without being overly redundant.  

So as you move your higher-level marketing strategy into a more tactical marketing plan you need to bring some organizational intuition to the planning.  Product marketing is steeped in communications and influence, and your prospect will require multiple touches to absorb your message. It’s not a binary decision, think shades of gray and guide your marketing mix based upon the time, expertise, money and resources you have at hand.  

The bottom line is that until a prospect opens up your email, views your video online, visits your website or chats with your sales rep, you’ve still got work to do Mr./Ms. Professional Marketer!  There’s no easy answers to the marketing discipline and only you can help define what the proper marketing mix for your campaigns and organization will be.  But if you keep your marketing customer-focused and valuable, you may start to find your customers beating a path to YOUR door.  And that’s where buyer personas and effective content marketing come into play.  More to come…   

Ron Wen

www.linkedin.com/in/ronwen

Content marketing can be a key component of your outbound and inbound campaigns but what if you’re new to the product segment and don’t have internal expertise?  One possible solution is an interview with a recognized subject matter expert (SME)!  During my time marketing Hadoop and Big Data training, I was put in the difficult position of not having an internal subject matter expert when we launched.  But it was crucial that my company establish thought leadership and credibility in this new training market so I knew I would have to rely on my technology partner, Cloudera.  A leader in Hadoop software, Cloudera had on its staff the founder and creator of Hadoop- Doug Cutting.  But as you can guess, Doug is a Big Data rock star and in high demand but after repeated requests, Cloudera graciously set up an interview for me with Doug. 

The reason why interviews work so well is that there really is a minimal time commitment for your SME, typically you can do it in under 30 minutes.  And as long as you’re comfortable doing the interview, you’ll have all the resources you’ll need outside of a phone line and recording system.  Some of my guidelines are below:

• Draft up 10 or 15 questions in increasing detail for review by your SME or partner.  Use a good mix of forward and backward-looking questions.  
• Mix up the questions from practical and detailed to more offbeat and personal, you want to have some fun with the interview.  
• Set up a conference line to record the interview for transcription purposes, make sure your SME understands that he/she is being recorded.
• As you start the interview, warm up your SME with the broader questions to prepare them for the more detailed questions.  
• Keep the conversation lively and informal, you’re more likely to get interesting tid-bits that way. Provide encouragement for your SME because there’s always some stress involved. 
• Take 2 or 3 hours to transcribe the audio content to a document or use a transcription service to assist (it can be a painful process).  
• Smooth out the language and verbal clutter within the transcript and go through final review with SME. 
• Post your great new content online for your audience and leverage that interview article in your outbound marketing efforts.  

It’s really a pretty quick and painless process outside of the transcription part of things.  I really enjoy interviews because you can bring both humanity and expertise out to your audience in 30 minutes or so.  And the mantra of social media is always about authenticity and real-time information which makes an interview a perfect content candidate.  

In the end when it comes to your technology marketing, it’s important to have technology rock-stars on your side like Doug Cutting. Establishing technical credibility creates a halo-effect on your offerings.  If you don’t have a rock-star, well it’s on you to find one or create one. And then generate great marketing stories to influence your prospects and audience!   Techies tend to trust other techies because they speak the same language and an interview is one of the best and easiest ways to create engaging marketing content…

Ron Wen

www.linkedin.com/in/ronwen

One request that you’ll often hear from your customer as a Product Marketer is why can’t you help me compare your product to the competition?  You have product sheets with screenshots, cool images, value propositions, positioning statements and bullet-pointed details but I need to do a direct comparison, Mr. (or Ms.) Marketer!  

And as a customer-centric professional marketer, I’ve often scratched my head on this challenge, why don’t we do more comparative marketing?  It would help the customer, wouldn’t it?  But there are reasons why marketing professionals don’t often go down this path.

Reason 1: If you’re the leader or front-runner in your segment, why even put your competitors into the customer’s consideration set?  We are THAT good so we have no competition.  (Ok, that’s a bit of optimistic thinking).

Reason 2: I’m managing 8 (insert really large number) products in 3 categories and as an over-worked marketer, it’s hard enough to keep up and communicate the features, values and messaging of my own offering, forget keeping up with every minute detail of all of my competitors.  

Reason 3: The process of getting my comparative marketing assets and copy out into the field (editing/approvals, design, onto website, printed product sheets, sales team, partner/distributor channel) is so lengthy, that by the time it gets to the customer-facing side of my market, the information is out-dated.

Reason 4: The details within my comparative marketing go out with an error or the competitor features change making it look as if my organization, my sales team and my partners don’t know what they are talking about.  And that’s when the legal team comes in.  Also see Reason 3 for the origins of this issue.  

One example I’ll give you is a company’s aggressive comparative marketing in the IT training business.  Six months ago there was a checkbox table of features, functions and specifics of what they had and what the competitors had.  And some very unflattering statements. Fast forward to today and notice how now the comparative marketing has evolved into one or two screen shots and some subjective statements:  

But at the core, the customer request is real and they need help on their customer journey .  And they’re asking how can you help them make a more honest and productive decision.  As a customer-centric marketer, my thought is perhaps provide a framework and methodology for your customers to evaluate and prioritize their needs in your product/service segment.  

In essence, teaching your customers how to fish (or evaluate) vs. giving them a fish (check list of features/capabilities in market).  In the end, the customer journey tends to be pretty unique and subjective for each organization so tools and a decision framework to reach an effective solution is really important.  And TRY not to have that decision path land directly at your door-step, Mr. (or Ms.) Professional Marketer!  You do know that your customers understand what you may try to be doing!  😉  

Ron Wen

www.linkedin.com/in/ronwen

You know the old saying, “it’s about quality, not quantity”!  But that adage isn’t entirely true with regards to content marketing in B2B or B2C spaces.  It’s about quality AND quantity!  Because your audience and people in general, are always looking for good stories and snippets that educate, entertain and inform.  And over time, as your content stream is recognized as being valuable and interesting, your prospects and customers will return and stay engaged when you have a more compelling call to action. 

Case in point, during my last product marketing role I had two email streams, one for Microsoft and one for Red Hat.  Given my company’s long history in the Microsoft training space, our email campaigns typically had much better engagement and open rates than similar Red Hat emails.  Approximately 30% to 35% better open rates which is pretty significant. Our Red Hat training portfolio was resell meaning we didn’t have any Red Hat expertise on staff.  

Thankfully I had and built up a relationship with an external Red Hat consultant and analyst, Kerry.  As Red Hat prepared to launch Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 (RHEL 7), a key release of their flagship offering, I really wanted to take advantage of this big news.  My expectation was that there would be a lot of excitement and pent up demand for education and training on RHEL 7.  

Working with Kerry, we created a very thorough content stream of blog posts and whitepapers leveraging the beta version of RHEL 7 about 3 – 4 months before the product would release.  Lighter weight RHEL 7 blog posts were easier to develop and would drive social media efforts on twitter and Facebook.  As we got closer to GA, we went with more technology rich content like whitepapers for stronger, value-add assets.  

While blog posts and whitepapers are great for passive, inbound marketing, these same great stories are also perfect for outbound emails.  Leveraging the same content and topics, I created an email campaign that would first announce to our customer base about the release of RHEL 7 with great fanfare.  And of course, point to all the associated content we had available for people.  The core training Red Hat training portfolio was a secondary Call to Action.  My next email focused on those key training classes.  Email number three moved to the certification story and then finally the fourth email spoke to higher-level Red Hat training and associated exam prep products available to support the foundational RHEL 7 classes.  

As this cadence of content and emails continued for a span of six months or so, I noticed open rates and click-through rates on our Red Hat emails increase steadily.  By the end of the six months, there was about a 45% increase in Red Hat email engagement.  Those numbers had been pretty steady-state for the previous 2 years so I can comfortably say that the Red Hat content stream really helped drive that customer engagement.  Our customers had started to expect valuable news and information in our marketing content stream.  

One of the key marketing mantras I rely on is repeating your message over and over so it’s digested properly.  You need to go out not just once or twice but many times over the course of a campaign to drive your message in.  By the end of this campaign for the launch of RHEL 7 training, our email open rates had surpassed our Microsoft list and had our Red Hat training business out of the gates, fast!  So when you think of content marketing, focus on quality AND quantity!  And then leverage that great content in a consistent and repetitive fashion for your outbound and customer communications.  You’ll start to see the results if your content is being received by your audience resulting in a stronger pipeline of leads and engagement!  

Ron Wen

www.linkedin.com/in/ronwen

Virality is a term often bandied about in marketing.  It means that you come up with a phrase, an asset, a meme that becomes so popular, people spread it amongst their peers which organically increases your marketing reach.  And the reality is that it’s like trying to catch lightning in a bottle.  Whether your talking about a Gangnam style video or the ALS Ice Bucket challenge, coming up with a viral idea is tough sledding for most marketers.  

But every now and then you do catch a little bit of lightning in your every day dealings.  I remember a meeting last year with my Product Director, Ben.  We had just added six months of practice labs, mentoring and class recordings to our Microsoft training as a key differentiator.  In our preparation to announce this big news to the outbound sales team, we were brain-storming ideas and a tagline to go out with.   We had to go with verbiage that would capture this key point quickly but Microsoft Training with the three sixes or 666 was definitely NOT going to work.  After bouncing around ideas for 30 minutes, I left Ben’s office scratching my head and started drafting the sales announcement.  

Luckily, necessity is the mother of invention and sometimes a bit of creativity.  Reaching back to some Microsoft webinars I had run recently, they were titled Unleash the Power of Microsoft SQL Server and Unlock the Power of Microsoft SQL Server.  Hey…  what if we just used the Power of Six?  The power representing these value-add customer features and those features powering the sales calls for our reps.  So out goes the sales announcement featuring “Microsoft’s Power of Six”  And definitely not the Power of 666!  

Sales training was done later that week by the Product Management team which loved the tagline and used it in their presentations.  Before long, our Microsoft training sales reps started asking me for more details about the Power of Six so I generated an internal sales cheat sheet.  And then to complete the story, we used the phrase “Power of Six” in future Microsoft training newsletters and emails reinforcing the tagline externally as well as internally. 

As with any marketing message, repetition is key.  I made sure to repeat it in a variety of outbound emails, landing page copy and social media to sink the message in.  And as effective as the “Power of Six” theme was, the main goal was to use it as a memory tool so customers would clearly understand the value-add and differentiators of our training exclusives.  After 3 – 6 months of use, I would have been happy to move to a new catch-phrase as our product evolved.  

The reality is that virality is unpredictable and very difficult to create and generate.  But you have to be cognizant about how your audience is responding to your message.  Based upon the internal response from our sales reps, I used their interest and take-up as a proxy for our external customer base.  But like anything, writing interesting, tight marketing copy is a skill.  And no different than getting to Carnegie Hall, it’s all about practice, practice, practice.  And keeping your ears open to your audience…  

Ron Wen

www.linkedin.com/in/ronwen

When you talk about digital disruption on businesses, the music industry, television and movies usually come to mind.  You can subscribe to music services and subscribe to media channels to get your content on-demand and in a pay as you go model.  Which is all very friendly for the customer and end-user.   Think Spotify, Netflix and Hulu.  As enterprise software moves to the cloud, that same subscription model comes into play.  Enterprise customers pay as they go and can leave at any time.  Trying out cloud software is often a very easy proposition making the evaluation of an online application a five minute commitment and some convenient clicks away.  

Think about the benefits being ascribed to cloud software: easy to use, low/no software maintenance costs, no infrastructure commitment needed.  Red Hat and its Enterprise Linux support contract follows a subscription model but the cloud takes it one step further.  And in this customer-friendly software model, the business and marketing implications are huge. 

The days of slick marketing with product sheets and lavish screen shots along with over-promising features and benefits have passed.  I remember back in the days of the first dot.com boom.  Vaporware and bug-ridden software in pretty boxes being marketed aggressively and with little regard for facts.  At the core of the cloud and subscription model is the shift of power to the customer and end-user.  Any gaps or weaknesses in your offerings and the marketing behind it will be uncovered quickly once the prospect tries your cloud software out.  And if not discovered through the customer trial, it will happen after purchase resulting in negative customer feedback available on social media and other online forums.  How long do you think that customer will stay with you if you inaccurately market your offering?  

The cloud software business is really about a new customer-centric software delivery model.   And in the end, it really makes a lot of sense.  Better products designed to work more effectively for customers and delivering promised results.  And there’s no hiding as your customer moves through the consideration and purchase cycle.  You have to earn their business every day, before, during and after purchase.  That includes all stages of your marketing and a refreshed emphasis on software consumption and customer retention plans. 

Earning your customer’s trust isn’t always easy but in today’s world of cloud-based software, it’s never been more important for B2B technology marketing….  

Ron Wen

www.linkedin.com/in/ronwen