2009 B-to-B Reputation Management Trends
Marketing is much like music; riff on the same thing for too long and you run the risk of being tuned out. This is certainly true in the world of reputation building, whether it is customers and prospects tiring of the same messages, or the rest of the organization tired of trying to understand the impact of your activities on the business. Here are five critical reputation issues that b-to-b organizations should tackle head on in 2009 to make sure they continue to get through loud and clear.
1. Link Reputation to Demand Creation. While many reputation activities have an impact on brand perception, customer loyalty and market awareness, their value is often minimized by executives looking for a direct tie between these activities and revenue. In the highly complex, elongated sales cycles that define the b-to-b world, linking reputation to revenue is fruitless. Instead, the most effective way to demonstrate impact is to ensure that a significant portion of reputation activity is linked to the creation of demand. The communications activities that typically seed the ground for demand creation most effectively fall into the Reputation/Demand Convergence Zone. These activities – both traditional and new/social in nature – are most effective when aligned with buying cycle phases and buyer roles, efficacy that can be tracked by measuring conversion rates at the top of a demand waterfall.
2. Social Media Arrives. You can’t read any article on marketing these days without hearing that your organization needs a blog, you should be podcasting, and building a community for your customers and stakeholders is a must. Although only 25% of b-to-b organizations have a clearly outlined social media strategy according to our research, close to 60% are experimenting with it. Social media may be here to stay, but that doesn’t mean that every organization is well-prepared to reap its benefits. Many social media concepts are now being so bandied about that they’ve become cliché, whether it’s that social media can help your organization align with your customers or put you in touch with the pulse of your marketplace. Unfortunately, such pronouncements offer no concrete action items or measurable return, tending to instead focus on the “cool factor.” Social media can be an effective channel as the focus moves away from a strict outbound marketing focus (with an accompanying need to cede some control to users), but communications executives must remember four key watchwords in conjunction with any social media effort: strategy, frequency, consistency and transparency.
3. Traditional Doesn’t Mean Dead. While social media continues to dominate headlines, neglecting traditional channels will result in an incomplete reputation strategy, especially when it comes to markets slow to adapt to new technology. We must continue to use different delivery mechanisms to reach different targets, and revisit current approaches as additional targets are added to the mix. Some targets will only read trade publications and online industry or analyst sites, while others get most of their information from a social network or online community of their peers. By understanding the buying processes of prospects and customers – including the audiences that make up these processes and how they prefer to shop – is the best method to understand what the communications mix should look like.
4. New Reputation Measures. Many organizations attempt to track a wide portfolio of reputation metrics, from Web analytics to clip counts and analyst touches. I believe it’s critical to shift the focus to key performance indicators (KPIs), major measurement families that truly give organizations an idea of how reputation activities are impacting the business. Core reputation KPIs include market awareness, share of voice, market tone, brand image/awareness and influencer impact, all of which can be indicators of how well the ground is being seeded for demand creation activities to take place. While some may consider it “old school,” surveying remains an effective means for gathering external and internal feedback to establish your reputation strengths and weaknesses. Measuring media placement will also not disappear but needs to be recast in a KPI light. KPIs are also important for measuring the impact of social media. While quantitative metrics regarding social application visitors, comments and feedback may be important, they’re really nothing more than glorified Web metrics and by themselves may be conflicting. Pick performance indicators that are relevant to the application of a particular category, and that can also determine its true impact. Take communities as an example: While we can easily measure who and how many times a user visits and posts, more meaningful measurement tracks the actual awareness it generates, its impact on customer support costs and renewals (for an external community), or the level of peer interaction and knowledge sharing (for an internal community).
5. A New Vendor Model. Many b-to-b organizations rely on outside agencies for some or all of their creative, advertising, public relations and analyst relations activities; the importance of linking these activities to demand creation means the profile for agency selection and success must change. In addition, while many communications providers have added capabilities to support the expanding field of social media, new providers have emerged that focus solely on such applications. Should an organization stick with their established provider and add a social media one, or should they look to contract with a hybrid agency that has expertise both with new and more traditional communications channels? In the end, decisions come down to your ability to manage multiple vendors versus the perceived benefit of standardizing on one hybrid provider, but you must have a vendor in your mix that understands the importance of the reputation/demand creation link. In 2009, expect to see the emergence of more hybrid agencies that have strong experience across both social and traditional media, rather than just tacking on new communications channels to their traditional business offerings.
In a down economy, budget dollars are continually under scrutiny. While the marketing organization overall is often in the crosshairs, the communications function is especially vulnerable given its cost center perception and often shaky ability to determine return on investment. The most effective way to combat this view is to demonstrate the impact of reputation efforts on demand creation, but this constitutes a shift in the way that many communications staffers are traditionally used to executing and measuring. This convergence of reputation and demand creation, and tracking the results to prove it, should be a top priority for 2009, or you can be sure that these resources will be at the top of the list whenever cost-cutting measures are implemented.
