B-to-B Reputation Trends for 2010
While time spent enjoying the cool days of fall is flying by all too quickly, so too is the time allotted to meet those inescapable work deadlines. For b-to-b communications professionals, this means before you blink, it will already be time to reflect on the current year’s accomplishments and submit budgets and plans for the next year. Part of this process requires evaluating strategies and tactics that have been employed during the past year, retaining some and replacing others. In this post, I will share three key trends that will impact b-to-b communications in 2010.
One: Program Interlock
Is working with your marketing counterparts to build integrated programs an uncommon occurrence? How many times have you created a press release or secured a customer or analyst quote, only to use it in just one piece of outbound collateral? Unfortunately for many organizations, communications programs are developed and run in isolation, leading to not only disjointed efforts and duplicate offers, but also to a fatigued prospect and customer base bombarded with messages through multiple channels. To derive the most impact from reputation programs, these programs must be interlocked with major marketing initiatives that align with the company’s overall goals and objectives. Best practice organizations operate from an overall campaign perspective, aligning reputation programs with those from demand creation, sales enablement and market intelligence functions.
Two: Social Media Grows Up
For too long, marketing has considered social media as a set of tactics executed outside of usual workflow. Social media tools should be considered part of the overall portfolio of tactics that marketing leverages to optimize their true reputation, demand creation and sales enablement value. We advise positioning social media in two key ways, including as an additional channel to engage your existing target market and as a way to target segments that prefer to communicate in an entirely different way. While the second approach demands a consistent application of time and resources to become accepted as a trusted member of a community, the first one can be tackled immediately. Instead of simply posting a new white paper, parse its content into a series of short (five-to-seven minute) podcasts where you interview the subject matter expert on certain key points. This not only offers users a choice in the way they can access the content but also significant incremental leverage. Add the ability to subscribe to the podcast series and you have a higher level of qualification in the form of an individual that wants to be notified of new content proactively.
Three: Measure Results, Not Activity
Many communications functions have an extremely difficult time proving their value, as they only collect activity-focused data. In a sense, this is no different than filling out a time sheet; it means you’ve had a busy day, but it won’t demonstrate the impact of what’s been done. Instead, communications should track these activities as drivers of both original demand and the facilitation of sales/buying cycles by benchmarking the performance of demand creation programs with and without reputation support. A mix of quantitative and qualitative metrics will demonstrate the true impact of reputation efforts, particularly when applied to interlocking marketing programs I discussed above. Collecting the appropriate metrics will require not only a monitoring technology or agency to track your reputation-specific efforts (both in traditional and social media channels) but also gaining a level of visibility into your organization’s demand creation reporting. In the end, demonstrating that a well-organized, well-executed reputation strategy that fits tightly into demand creation efforts drives response and qualified lead rates is the key to long-term viability of b-to-b communications.
A key theme for the communications organization in 2010 is leverage, as the ability of other marketing functions to leverage your activities and insights will do much to break the insular perceptions often directed at communications. While more organizations are integrating their reputation and demand creation efforts, these are often more opportunistic in nature and don’t reflect an integrated strategy across the marketing organization. Without this level of integration – not only from a program perspective, but also from standpoint of systems and processes – the impact of communications impact will never be fully realized.
