Content Is Still King in IT Marketing

Another finding of the TechTarget/Google research I mentioned in yesterday's post, was that content is still king when it comes to marketing and selling SMB and enterprise IT solutions.

White papers, email newsletters, and case studies still play important roles in helping customers understand technology and best practices, and in helping customers with choose one product over another.

Customers look for different types of content in different stages of the purchasing process.

White papers are important in the awareness and consideration phases of purchasing. They're much less important in the final decision-making stage. By then, customers are interested in product comparisons, case studies, and, above all, trial software.

The table below describes how customers use various types of content. (For an explanation of these phases, see yesterday's post.)

Content Type	Purchasing Phase
Postings in online communities	Awareness Consideration
Email newsletters	Awareness Consideration
White Papers	Awareness Consideration
Case Studies	Awareness Consideration Final Decision
Product Literature (e.g., Data Sheets)	Consideration Final Decision
Online Vendor Demos	Consideration Final Decision

One conclusion from this study: Social media, however popular, doesn't eliminate the need for traditional marketing, when it comes to selling sophisticated IT products or products in highly competitive markets.

Google/TechTarget Research Ties Keyword Search Terms to IT Purchasing Cycles

One of the more interesting insights presented by TechTarget at this week's ROI Summit in Newton, MA, was this:

IT purchasers change their search terms as they move through a multi-month purchasing process.

TechTarget reached this conclusion after undertaking an extensive study with Google of 2,200 professionals who play decision-making roles in IT purchases.

Phase I: Awareness
TechTarget and Google found that IT purchasers begin by searching for information about an issue or problem (e.g., data leak protection or VoIP quality).

Searches might include keywords such as "risk," "troubleshoot," and "optimize."

Phase II: Consideration
Once IT purchasers are familiar with the nature of the problem and the types of products available to address it, they begin searching for information about specific products and solutions.

Keywords might include the word "solution," as well as specific brand names.

Phase III: Decision
Finally, as they focus on a few key vendors in preparation for making their final purchase decision, they search for information comparing one product to another. They no longer search for general information about the problem; they understand the problem well and want detailed information about product capabilities, strengths, and weaknesses.

Searches will likely include product names and the word "comparison."


The Changing Prevalence of Search Keywords in IT Purchasing Cycles

The chart below shows how keyword searches evolve across the three phases of the purchasing cycle: Awareness (of a problem), Consideration (of various approaches to solving the problem), and Decision (as to which product to choose).



Conclusion for marketers: Make sure you have content and search keywords that address each phase of the buying cycle.

Benchmark Your Social Media Responsiveness

I wrote recently about social media metrics and quoted Forrester's Jeremiah Owyang talking about how difficult it is to measure the value of social media communications.

In some areas, such as tweeting and blogging, numbers are essential, because frequency is important. In other areas, such as video, frequency may actually dull results. (See this Technology Review story about an HP study that found an inverse correlation between the frequency of videos posted on YouTube and the videos' popularity. If you post lots of videos, the popularity of your videos tends to decline.)

In addition to measuring hits, tweets, and posts, it's important to benchmark your organization's responsiveness to social media communications. If you're at a dinner party, it would be rude to sit silently for 5 minutes before responding to a comment or question that was addressed to you. Similarly, online, it's rude—or at least a missed opportunity—if you wait too long to respond to a tweet or blog post, especially if it's from a customer.

How to Benchmark Your Social Media Responsiveness

1. Pick 3-5 important social media events from the past week. These could be tweets, blog posts, or blog comments. They could occur on your media properties or someone else's. They could even be press releases or announcements of importance to your business, but not originating in a social media tool at all.
   
2. Check the time of the event and the time of your organization's first response.
   
3. Examine how the conversation developed. Did it broaden, involving multiple departments? Did the right people respond in the right way? Were the right people notified in time? Which tools did people use? Did a tweet lead to a tweet, then to a blog post? Did the conversation end up involving legal or PR?
   
4. If you uncovered any breakdowns in communication, or learned any lessons about the importance of promptness, review them with your team, and try better this week. You might need to fine-tune email aliases, ensure that blog readers are updated with the right RSS feeds, establish corporate policies regarding the content of social media communications (e.g., respectful, nothing off-color), and so on.
   
5. Repeat this exercise in a week or two, and see how you're doing. Did any past problems reappear? Did you notice any patterns?
   

By benchmarking your responsiveness, you can ensure that your organization is ready to respond as promptly and effectively as possible to important communications from customers, partners, the press, and the online community at large.

Stopwatch photo by wwarby, some rights reserved.

Tired of Jumping from One Google Tool to Another to Manage a Campaign? Try Google AgencyToolkit

At a SEMPO meeting last night in Cambridge, I got a chance to see a new Web site that Google has put together to make it easier for marketers to find all the tools available for running a highly effective Google AdWords campaign.

Now, instead of jumping from the AdWords Editor to Hot Trends (to see whether certain key phrases are becoming more popular or less) to Google Optimizer (for checking the results of your latest A/B tests of Web site content), you can start from a simple, clean page that presents all these Google tools in one neat, orderly place.

The new destination is Google AgencyToolkit. The site groups tools into four categories:

Plan
AdPlanner, Insights for Search, Blog Search, Hot Trends, Traffic Estimator

Place
Placement Tool, Ad Preview Tool, Site and Category Exclusion Tool

Create
Search-based Keyword Tool, Campaign Optimizer, AdWords Editor, AdWords API

Measure
YouTube Insight, Analytics, Conversion Optimizer, Conversion Tracking, Website Optimizer, Webmaster Tools

(If you roll over the links above, you'll see just how widely scattered these tools are across Google's properties.)

The site looks like this:



If you're running an AdWords campaign or if you'd just like the convenience of having all these in one location, give the site a visit.

How to Measure the Results of Social Media Marketing

In some ways, marketing has changed a great deal in the past few years: there are fewer big tradeshows, there's a lot less paper collateral, no more middle-of-the-night press checks, more time spent online, more time spent tweeting and Webcasting and podcasting, and a great deal of focus on SEO and SEM.

Yet the mission of marketing hasn't changed. It's still the function that represents customer needs and wants to the rest of the business, directing the development and delivery of products and services. And it's still the function that introduces, explains, and promotes the product and services the business has created. Marketing is just doing that work with a lot more @ signs these days.

But does social media marketing, which relies of Facebook rather than direct mail and Twitter instead of phone banks, deprive marketing of the instrumentation it has come to rely on? Consider:

1. Over the past decade, marketing has become increasingly instrumented, and marketing professionals have been measured (and sometimes compensated) according to their results.
   Online advertising, which allowed click-throughs to be measured, facilitating A/B testing and brutally frank assessments of a campaign's ROI, contributed to this Taylorization of marketing. So, too, did CRM systems, campaign management systems, marketing automation systems, and a variety of other management tools. The goal of this instrumentation to eliminate the vague connection between effort and reward that seemed inherent to marketing, especially in advertising. That vagueness was neatly captured by John Wanamaker's quip: "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half." Web 1.0 and 2.0 marketing automation promised to clear up the mystery.
   
   
2. As a result of both consumers and businesses working and playing increasingly online, businesses have reduced marketing investments in print and in live events, while increasing marketing investments in e-commerce, online promotions (e.g., email marketing and Web seminars), and other Web-centric activities.
   No doubt that many of the decisions supporting this change were supported by the glaring metrics made available by sales force and marketing automation systems mentioned above.
   
   
3. In the past year, social media marketing has emerged as the hottest area in marketing.
   Companies are trimming and sometimes slashing investments in other areas of marketing and focusing on social media activities: tweeting, blogging, interacting with customers on Facebook, etc. For example, I know a mobile services company that has trimmed marketing to two people: a product manager and a social media manager. I suspect that there are many reasons for companies making this switch. Customers are increasingly familiar with these tools from their recreational time outside work. Most of the tools are free, so companies investing in them largely are only paying for their marketing staff's labor. And the use of the tools must be effective. Customers success stories about Comcast and Zappos on Twitter, for example, demonstrate the viability of social media marketing.
   
   
4. Measuring social media activity itself offers little information about the value of social media activity.
   Are 60 tweets better than 30? It depends on how the tweeter's audience responds to the tweets. Ten thoughtful, empathic, and helpful tweets will likely be received more positively than twenty hype-laden tweets. Mere numbers alone can't convey the effectiveness of social media, because social media rely on human values such as tone and empathy that resist numerical characterization. This is an important point that Forrester analyst Jeremy Owyang made during a panel discussion on April 1 at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. Here's a summary of his remarks on this topic from Susan Etlinger of the Horn Group:
   

   
   Jeremiah says that most marketers are measuring social media incorrectly; they're focusing on the measurements of yesteryear. There is no access to server logs on Facebook and other tools/networks, so you have incomplete data. And even if you had that data, it wouldn't tell you what is happening: there just aren't good enough automated methods to measure changes in tone. (As someone who does this regularly, I can attest to this: quality analysis doesn't scale that well.) A lot of companies are trying to tackle this problem.
   

   
   


5. Is it true then that marketing, which has become increasingly quantified and Taylorized, can't apply metrics to its hot new practice, social media? Well, yes and no.
   No, because, as Jeremy points out, measuring the frequency of tweets is largely meaningless, and measuring Facebook activity is difficult and in some cases impossible. (True, you can measure some Facebook activity, such as the number of fans who have signed up on a company's profile page, but most activity will be difficult to quantify.)
   
   However, outside of social applications themselves, marketing teams can certainly measure key performance indicators such as:
   
   
   
   • customer satisfaction (through surveys)
     
   • inbound leads to landing pages referenced in tweets and on Facebook
     
   • length of sales cycle
     
   • mean-time-to-resolution on trouble tickets
     
   • sales overall
     
   
   Think of social media activity as a conversation. If you have lots of good conversations with lots of customers, you would expect that your customers' overall opinion of your company would improve and that your new sales and maintenance renewals would increase—so measure those things.
   
   The companies that have cut back on data sheets and trade shows and invested in Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook are doing so not because they love being tactful and responsive 24 hours a day, but because they think it's the best way of serving their customers and growing their business. Recession notwithstanding, if a company treats its customers well, serving them through any channel of communication, then it should see positive results on the bottom line. And those traditional bottom-line results are probably the best metrics for judging the success of social media marketing.
   

I'm launching a social media project for a new client, and that's how we'll be measuring the project's success: by the numbers of inbound leads and units sold. The marketing technology might be new, but the nature of a business's bottom line hasn't changed at all.

If you have other ways of measuring social media marketing success, please share them in a comment!

Photo of a weighing scale by pareeerica, some rights reserved.

Companies That Drift Off Course Often Begin by Facing the Wrong Direction

I have a friend who's a senior network engineer. He spent many years as the top network troubleshooter for a major U.S. bank.

Yesterday he and I were discussing the NetFlow analysis features of a particular network management product. (NetFlow is a protocol for measuring network activity—top applications in use, amount of traffic flowing through a router, etc.) He was disappointed that this particular product's NetFlow capabilities were so minimal. Other NetFlow analysis products could access the same raw data and present more more useful analysis to network engineers.

The problem, he said, is that the engineering manager who built the product didn't believe that you had to know a lot about the market or technology you were working with; instead, you simply had to be smart.

My friend and I agreed: It's always a mistake to base your products and services merely on what you know, instead of what customers need. The customer should always be your primary focus. And if you need to understand customer needs in a mature market like the network management market, you'd better learn a lot about network management fast, if you're going to start building products.

So don't ask, "What can I build with what I know?"

Instead ask, "What does the customer need, and how can I build it?" If you need to learn something new along the way or hire industry experts in order to build that new thing, so be it.

Otherwise, you'll end up making a half-hearted attempt, come up with a half-baked product, and reap so-so results.

Lesson: To avoid drifting off course, pay attention to the direction you're facing when you start. Don't face inward, toward your own team. Face outward toward the customer. And stay focused there. Your steadfastness will pay off.

Token Ring Network Manifesto Attracts Little Interest from IT Industry

April Fool's Day Archive:

A recently leaked manifesto proclaiming to set forth "self-evident, immutable" principles for Token Ring Networks has elicited scant interest from IT industry press and analysts. The six-page document, watermarked with what appears to be the remnants of a frothy coffee drink, points out that networks have become essential for business, that businesses ought to be able to count on cables that are firmly attached to sockets, and network drivers really ought to be kept up to date.

Unlike the bolder, declamatory manifestos of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which called for the casting off of chains and the purification of society, this manifesto strikes a conciliatory tone, offering to "begin a conversation, not define it."

A copy of the manifesto was recently found lying on a table at the Church Street Starbucks in Cambridge, MA. Whether the document had been left there as part of a guerilla marketing campaign or simply out of a lack of interest on the part of a bored reader, was impossible to say.

Starbucks photo by dichohecho, some rights reserved.