Integrated Marketing - What and Why

Marketing professionals, particularly those in the B2B space, talk about integrated marketing but it is surprising how many marketing activities are still not ‘integrated’ with the whole of marketing.

I recently had a discussion with a non-marketing professional who reminded me that many of his colleagues do not understand what integrated marketing is.

For these 2 reasons, I thought this topic worthy of a blog posting. To succeed in a Demand Generation 2.0 world, integrated marketing is an absolute must.

Without looking up (or linking to) any other definition of integrated marketing, let me define integrated marketing based on my own experience.

What is it?

Integrated marketing (also referred to as Integrated Marketing Communications or IMC) occurs when every activity and communication within a marketing organization is a part of, and blended with, a larger plan or superset plan over a specific product, solution, topic, audience, target, message, etc. To understand this, let’s first describe the major segments of a marketing organization. I’ve also included a high level list of their charters (which is not meant to be a complete list):

a) Corporate marketing – branding, messaging, corporate events, analyst relations, public/media relations, website, SEM, collateral, success stories, etc.

b) Product marketing – product requirements, product positioning, product launch, messaging, targeting, product collateral, etc.

c) Demand marketing – lead generation, events, seminars/webinars, trade shows, targeting/segmentation, SEO, social media, analytics, etc.

d) Channel marketing – co-marketing with partners, partner promotion, partner events, partner collateral, lead generation, etc.

e) Field marketing – field support, lead generation, targeting/segmentation, local trade shows/conferences, local events, etc.

As we can see, many marketing activities can overlap. For example, demand generation, channel marketing and field marketing can all execute lead generation. Likewise, adjacent activities can be performed by different parts of marketing. For example, SEM can be handled by Corporate Marketing while it’s ‘brother’ activity, SEO, can be handled by Demand Marketing.

This is why integrated marketing is important. If an organization does not integrate their activities across the whole of marketing, we see multiple messages, gaps in messaging and targeting, duplication of efforts and most importantly – a substantial increase in marketing’s failure rate.

Why Integrated Marketing

As a first step, let me provide an example of what integrated marketing is not. I once worked with a client who focused their demand generation budget on 3 product lines, which we will call Product A, Product B and Product C. All marketing activities for Product A and Product B were integrated – perhaps more by accident than by design – so that the message to media, customers, marketplace and analysts was consistent (e.g., ONE message) and the branding, website content, positioning, targeting, lead generation, partner management and field marketing were all aligned.

Product C was a different story. Product C was developed by Engineering who thought it was a good product but unfortunately, it did not fit in with the company’s message or target audience. It solved a completely different business problem for a completely different audience. In spite of this, Sales viewed Product C as a tactical revenue opportunity, dedicated 3 full time sales representatives and required Demand Marketing to run lead generation activities. Corporate Marketing was not supporting any activity over this product line other than requiring the Product Marketing Manager to independently develop web page content, presentations and collateral without any oversight to ensure brand or messaging consistency.

The results? The team barely generated leads and the cost per lead was way out of line in and of itself and compared with the other product lines – over $9,000 per sales lead – 300-400% higher than the cost of a sales lead for Product A or B.

There are books written about how to integrate marketing but let me just add a few sentences as to what integration looks like.

An integrated marketing approach includes a Go-to-Market (GTM) plan that incorporates and aligns all marketing activities and assigns tasks and timelines across the ‘whole of marketing’ in an organized, self-supporting way. It identifies the 3-5 key marketing themes for Product C and articulates the key message(s). It includes a plan to approach the analyst’s and media as an initial step. It also includes a plan to (a) align the website and collateral with the themes, (b) publish press releases and articles and (c) create a “buzz’ in the marketplace. It identifies one or more ‘compelling events’ (e.g., product launch, major conference/show, webinar series, industry event, etc.) which demand marketing can use as a centerpiece activity for lead generation campaigns (not isolated lead generation activities).

Marketing integration is fun because a relentless focus on it will generate results. If you agree (or if you don’t agree), I welcome your comments.

Other relevant links:

What is Integrated Marketing?

The Adoption of Integrated Marketing is Essential….

Behold! A New Marketing Concept

Tags: integrated marketing, IMC, communications, marketing communications, demand marketing, go-to-market plan, GTM

Develop User Generated Content Via Surveys

Here are some quick tips on how to develop more content to support campaign automation and segmentation:

(1) Review your current content for applicability, identifying when and how to use and who to target. Exploit what you have. Identify content ‘gaps’ by audience, marketing/sales lead level, etc. and what you need to fill these gaps.

(2) Develop an Annual Thought Leadership Plan to include Public Relations, Media Relations, Social Marketing, etc. Ramp up thought leadership content to publish white papers, article, blogs and press releases. Look internally to your product management and product marketing teams to develop. Look externally to engage analysts, authors, consultants and other thought leaders to develop or co-develop. Choose topics that are ‘top of mind’ to these audiences but are also relevant to your product or service. Turn yourself into a ‘thought leader’: the ‘go-to-organization’ to obtain information, knowledge and ‘solutions’.

(3) Survey….survey….survey….Take every opportunity to survey your constituents. Again, choose survey topics about industry issues/challenges that are of strategic (preferred) or tactical interest to your audience (and again apply in some way to what you market.) Use survey results as content for research or point of view white papers, articles, press releases and even another campaign to share analysis of the survey results. Encourage survey participation by ensuring every participant is emailed an early copy of the research results. This provides opportunities to get email addresses, demonstrate your understanding of your prospect/customer’s business problems and become a ‘consultant’.

a. Develop an Annual Survey Campaign Plan based on audience, topic, business issue, etc. Be sure to integrate this with the rest of marketing (remember…integrated marketing is what we want to achieve!).

b. Post on-going surveys on your website (home page) or blog and drive participation.

c. Use every customer/prospect touch point as a survey opportunity. During a webinar, break up the PowerPoint presentation and pause to poll the audience on relevant issues. At the end of a Webinar, include relevant ‘industry questions’ with any survey you may provide that evaluates the event itself.

d. At trade shows, conferences and seminars, advertise and provide opportunity in the booth or at the event for individuals to participate in surveys. You can use this as an additional draw to encourage dialogue with the ‘walk-abouts’ on the conference floor.

e. Build out your contact database by using telemarketers to phone survey. Consider hiring industry analysts to perform these surveys if targeting senior level management. Segment your current database and develop survey questionnaires and execute methodically targeting x number of segments per quarter, etc.

f. Provide quick surveys to your internal telemarketing and telesales organizations and encourage them to use these as a way to initiate dialogue when cold calling. Prospects are more willing to talk to someone who can provide knowledge than someone who wants to strictly sell.

g. Build out your database so you know the survey history of every contact.

h. Over time, develop a ‘trending analysis’ where it makes sense on survey topics and publish.

These are some examples of what I have done in the past and I welcome other ideas on this topic. Here is a link to a recent blog that goes into more depth on how to gather feedback from social media.

Capitalizing on Campaign Management = Yikes, We Need More Content!!

One of the greatest demand generation challenges that I have seen with every software company is the company’s ability (or lack thereof) to continuously develop compelling content to support campaigns. In many cases, lack of content is ‘thee’ showstopper.

And now, as more companies invest in campaign management systems such as Oracle, Eloqua, Aprimo, Unica, Market2Lead, etc., (refer to Gartner Magic Quadrant for Multitchannel Campaign Management 2009 for an entire list), many of these companies have the ability to (1) automate campaign generation, (2) better (or in some cases, start to) segment their market(s) and target audience(s) and (3) nurture leads (for the first time!), which will further exasperate the ‘content’ problem.

Consider these “as is” scenarios - before campaign automation.

(1) Before automation, we manually launch all campaigns, however simple or complex.
(2) Before (improved) segmentation/targeting, we don’t segment or we segment at the highest (limited number of) levels (e.g., target IT professionals versus LOB managers).
(3) Before nurturing, we don’t know where a prospect is in the ‘marketing pipeline’ so we treat all prospects equally and throw the same campaigns (and content) to everyone without regard to their interest level.

Consider these “to be” scenarios - after campaign automation.

(1) After automation, we can schedule campaigns to execute automatically, freeing up headcount to work on developing and executing more complex campaigns. By default, we can run more campaigns with the same resources, maybe even less.
(2) After improved segmentation/targeting, we can better profile a prospect by title, industry, interests, behavior, preferences, etc. and execute campaigns that are more specifically tailored to an individual (by grouping or segmenting like-kind prospects). This increases the number of campaigns.
(3) After nurturing, we know where a prospect is in the ‘marketing pipeline’ because we can ‘score leads’ and identify what campaigns/content to provide along the way from prospect first contact thru close (and beyond if we are up selling/cross selling into our existing customer base). Now, we can execute campaigns specific to the target, segment AND lead score, increasing the number of campaigns by another x factor.

Let’s look at an example. Let’s assume we are targeting IT professionals. In the “as is” scenario, we develop a number of campaigns with messaging and content that is the same for every IT professional regardless of industry, title, interest level, etc. In the “to be” scenario, we segment IT professionals in Financial Services/Insurance from IT professionals in the Manufacturing segment or the Health care segment and so on. Instead of a one-size-fits-all message to all IT professionals, we can now tailor each campaign to talk to the strategic issues each IT segment experiences (and hopefully play into how our software product/solutions address those issues). With Financial Services – it may be compliance. With Manufacturing, it may be ERP. With Health, it may be integration and so on.

We can further segment based on 'title' executing campaigns that talk to more operational benefits targeting managers and campaigns that talk to more strategic benefits targeting the VP level. Once we execute lead scoring, we can further segment and develop separate campaigns to first time visitors, xx time visitors, etc. and nurture that lead along.

Yikes! We need more content says the head of the demand generation team and begins dialoguing with Product Management, Product Marketing and outside consultants to line up campaigns and the unique content that is required.

Next post provides some ideas on how we can generate the content we need to support an increasing number of demand generation campaigns….

Some interesting links:

Top Ten Marketing Automation Software Vendors
Set Expectations by Scoring Your Lead

Integrating Social Media Marketing

I had a series of interesting conversations these past few days with several individuals about the importance of integrating traditional marketing techniques with social media marketing. As I work with a series of different B-to-B clients, I notice that one company typically excels at traditional marketing techniques while another excels at social media. Many organizations are looking for the right marketing talent to integrate the best practices of each.

Marketing Sherpa published a good article this past week about Social Medias Place in the Elite Marketing Trio, which you should read to make sense of the remainder of my post. Here is the chart with the results of a survey asking marketers to rank the importance of social media. I voted (unofficially to myself) and chose that in a pure integrated marketing model, social media marketing can (1) complement existing tactics, (2) be a standard marketing tactic and (3) have its own budget line item. The answer for your organization will have something to do with the target audiences and products/services that your team is marketing.

For example, with a company that has multiple products or lines-of-business (LOBs) targeting different segments and/or audiences - you might choose a social media marketing tactic exclusively for one segment and perhaps integrate with existing tactics when targeting another segment/audience. Your choices may be driven by (1) your desired outcomes, (2) where a segmented audience is in the lead nurturing cycle (or the impact on brand as an influencer or thought leader), (3) how 'social' your audience is and (4) your budget and the need to balance and execute more comprehensive marketing tactics (including social media) to your top priority segments/audiences, while spending less dollars via social media exclusively for segments that are a secondary focus.

I think it is also important to note that the "trio" analogy the author discusses talks to interactive marketing tactics and if a non-marketer reads this article, it can leave an impression that oversimplifies the power (and complexity) of marketing. While interactive marketing tactics are important, there is more to marketing/lead generation than dropping emails, SEO and social media particularity for enterprise software companies. Most enterprise software companies have multiple "messages" and target audiences as discussed above. For those organizations targeting C-suite executives and Vice Presidents, in particular, marketers need to integrate an array of different marketing mediums including direct (dimensional) mailings, executive events (such as a breakfast event, cocktail hour, dinner, etc.), email, webinars, SEO/SEM, social media, tradeshows/conferences/thought leadership events, telemarketing, etc. - those that entice more "face-to-face" interaction and relationships.

The good news with this survey is that marketers realize that social media is here to stay. I think it would be interesting to survey non-marketing executives to get their point of view. I sometimes think that all the hype about social media marketing is confusing non-marketers who already grapple with what marketing really is....

Here are some relevant links/sites on this topic:

http://elektrik.com/blog/2009/07/integrated-marketing-strategies-are-even-more-important/

http://masterful-marketing.com/social-media-marketing-one-component-of-marketing-plan/

Social Media Marketing: Improve customer experience by experiencing customers…..….

In the traditional enterprise software world of the late 90s and early 2000s, ‘collaborating’ with our customers or prospects wasn’t a common occurrence. In fact, the ‘window” to the customer was typically via the sales channel during the sales engagement process, where informal collaboration might occur but the engagement objective was about closing the deal. Some vendors met with customers individually or as a group as part of the product requirements process. User groups were established which met on a regular basis but in many cases, these venues were more about “pushing” information to customers. Developer sites were also established to both push information and respond to customer inquiries – always product-related – about features, functions, fixes, etc. The world ‘collaboration’ was never used in the same sentence as the word ‘customer’.

It’s interesting how the term ‘customer relationship’ turned into ’customer relationship management’ (CRM). When first hearing the term – 15 years ago or so – my interpretation of the term ‘customer relationship’ was: establishing great relations with our customers. While that is the objective of CRM systems, somehow the personal aspect of relationship building faded from view as we got caught up in the technology side of the relationship equation.

Then the term ‘customer experience’ surfaced. Where CRM is about customer-facing parts of the organization and is typically a one-way street – that is, the vendor gathering data about the customer; customer experience is a two-way street - multiple channels within an organization interacting with customers. And, the more personal the interaction is, the better because that makes a customer feel important…special. We send the message that we know the customer and understand his/her (relevant) issues or want to.

My view is that the objective of customer interaction is to create a collaborative forum to gather and record historical data to (1) understand our customers (profiling), (2) improve personalization and most importantly, (3) know, understand and gather information about our customer’s behavior, preferences, thoughts, intellectual property and points of view.

One way to do this is for us as software providers to “experience the customer”: provide multiple forums to share our information, ideas, questions, thoughts, intellectual property and experiences with our customers/prospects AND create a dialogue to encourage interaction so that a customer responds with information, ideas, questions, thoughts, intellectual property and experiences back to us. The dialogue or conversation is continuous. This is one of the key objectives of social media marketing.

I was recently reading a blog by Larry Brauner, a well-followed social media marketing professional – the link here speaks for itself http://online-social-networking.com/top-10-reasons-for-social-marketing. One of Larry’s ten points is that social media marketing allows us to dialogue with our customers. I concur with this and his other 9 excellent points and believe that, even more importantly, social media marketing creates a forum for developing and maintaining positive (and hopefully continuously improving) experiences for us, as software providers AND for our customers. Creating these mutual experiences delivers mutual value.

Here is a list of 7 value items that we, as software providers, realize:

(1) Improved insight into the customer by improving customer profiling and personalization.

(2) Foresight into the customer, his/her preferences, top of mind issues, points of view, signals on anticipated behaviors, etc. for continuously improved profiling, messaging, targeting and personalization.

(3) A continuous and formal medium to collect, collaborate and share information on product and marketing requirements.

(4) User-generated content that we can analyze, publish and share back to our customers and initiate continuous dialogue.

(5) User-generated content for use in off/online demand generation campaigns.

(6) Be recognized as the “go-to thought leader” as we build a thought leadership ‘library’ about various topics over product issues, product requirements, industry issues, economic issues, top of mind issues, compliance issues, any relevant issue around our ‘space’ as a software provider.

(7) Most importantly, the quality of our customers' experience, our experience with customers and demand generation campaigns continuously improves since we no longer have to exclusively rely on internal resources for dialogue or campaign content.

One important last comment: Social media marketing is not the be-all, end-all. My view is that social media marketing is blended with traditional marketing strategies to develop an integrated campaign that targets a specific audience. More on this later…..

I welcome and look forward to any thoughts on this positing. After all, blogging, like all other social media marketing mediums, is about creating a dialogue…..….

The Potential (But Not Necessary) Evolution of Solution-Selling

So by now you probably have figured out that there can be a very fine line between solution-selling and selling solutions and that many people confuse and interchange the two phrases. While sales and marketing people can understand solution-selling (but I’ve always approximated that 1/3 of technology-drive sales people can intuitively understand solution-selling with minimal training, 1/3 with LOTS of training and 1/3 will never get it), there is still confusion over what a solution is.

Defining ‘solution-selling vis-à-vis a ‘solution’ can be a chicken and egg thing so let me start by including this picture that I believe is one viewpoint on how a solution-sell can evolve – but that doesn’t mean it has to in every solution case and/or for every software provider.

For example, many enterprise software companies and system integrators only ‘solution-sell’ and never evolve to the next level. Regardless of the number of installations and customer success stories, these organizations may never ‘publicly package’ an individual success – no matter how many times it is or can be repeated. Every implementation is a custom and potentially ‘one-off’ implementation. This is not to say that behind the scenes, these organizations aren’t using reusable or repeatable code for subsequent like-kind implementations but that is not advertised. The perceived value is strictly domain expertise.

Other software vendors evolve their solution-sale to a Level 2 – that is, they sell the value of domain expertise with emphasis on one or more customer references. These organizations may advertise “speed to implementation” by using reusable or repeatable code while also emphasizing personalization and customization. (Note: Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), Java, .Net Framework are examples of architectures and developer tools that are based on concepts of reusable services and code. Note: I chose links that can explain these terms to the non-technical individual - see other links below for more information.) The solution is typically demonstrable in some form – perhaps even as simple as a reference customer site visit. Many of these types of providers are “boutiques” typically specializing in selected segments or solutions. As with Level 1 providers/integrators, many of these organizations stay at Level 2.

Many enterprise software providers have tried to move to Level 3 with mixed success. The benefit of a ‘solution template’ is that it sends a strong message regarding domain expertise – Wow…this vendor has done this so many times!! . Typically, the template offers anywhere between 60-80% “standardized code” with the ability to customize. There are many reference customers to showcase, collateral, success stories, demonstrable ROI’s and a packaged demonstration and some technical documentation. In many cases, the template is not supported per se because of the amount of customization that is typically done by the customer or a 3^rd party developer.

Level 4 solutions are what I call ‘out-of-the-box’ applications that offer extensive documentation, training, upgrades, enhancements, domain expertise, many reference customers, collateral, success stories, on-going support, demonstrable ROI and a packaged demonstration for many different scenarios.

Deliberately evolving from a Level 1 or 2 solution providers to a Level 4 provider means that the initial implementations must keep repeatability, market opportunity and mass appeal in mind when writing initial requirements and code. This means that initial implementations will take longer vis-à-vis a ‘one-off’ implementation, using the first few charter customers as alpha/beta testers. Some providers encourage this by offering special discounts, royalties, special considerations, etc.

Bottom line is that a solution is not necessarily an ‘application’, nor does it ever need to be. What level a provider achieves or maintains can be different than another provider and both strategies can succeed. I have found that some technology is conducive to being ‘packaged’ as a ‘repeat performance’ while other technologies are not.

Some interesting links

http://hoskinator.blogspot.com/2006/06/10-tips-on-writing-reusable-code.html

http://searchsoa.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid26_gci968206,00.html

http://www.streetdirectory.com/travel_guide/148379/programming/repeatable_code___a_step_up_from_reusable_code.html

Choosing Initial Segments and How Many...

In reviewing my postings, I realized that I didn’t elaborate on how to choose what initial segments to target and how many. This is a very important topic because making the wrong decisions can lead to failure. I recall one organization I worked with – the CEO explaining how he had launched a solutions focus by identifying 27 different solutions across who knows how many segments. The company couldn’t afford to execute to that and so it was not a surprise when the organization moved back to a horizontal focus.

For many enterprise software companies, hiring industry domain expertise means adding additional personnel. If your organization continues to maintain a horizontal play as well as a focus on industry segmentation, industry managers don’t replace product marketing managers. This means that you need to keep the investment in industry sales and marketing to a minimum in the initial stages. Strong recommendation: chose 1-3 industries to start and no more. Establish a beachhead first…focus on that for 2-3 years, then move forward.

The best approach to identify what initial segments you want to address is to analyze (using the 80-20 rule – not analysis paralysis) your current customer base to identify the top 1-3 segments that historically have been a natural fit for your product or solution. These should be your first choices for replication since already having customers in these solution areas (let's call them "charter customers") provides an opportunity for your organization to “reference sell” . An analysis should also consider the economic growth of your chosen industry over the next 18 to 36 months, including projected IT growth rates, potential industry consolidation, industry initiatives, recent legislation/regulations as well as the number of prospects, average deal size and what market share you believe you can win. Recommendation: quantify the market opportunity and your organization's projected revenue opportunity as best you can.

Here are some links that may be of interest on some of the topics discussed above...

http://www.referenceselling.com/

http://www.customerthink.com/blog/how_social_media_wont_revolutionize_reference_selling

http://relationshipeconomics.net/blog/reference-selling/

http://www.svpg.com/charter-customer-programs/

I believe that talking about the evolution of solutions in the next posting now makes sense.....