B2B Content Marketing for Your Sales Force

Hi, and welcome to today's Biznology digital marketing webinar. I'm Tim Peter, one of the authors at Biznology. I'm the president of Tim Peter and Associates, an e-commerce and digital marketing consultancy building brands and businesses via the social, local, mobile web. My award-winning work over the last 15 years for companies like Wyndham Worldwide, Charles Schwab, and others has generated billions of dollars in online revenue. Today you'll be hearing from Mike Moran who will present B2B Content Marketing for Your Sales Force. But before we start, we need to recognize our sponsors. BarnRaisers, a full-service digital and social media solutions company that builds brands using proven relationship principles and ROI. Yagelamp empowers companies to amplify their social media content by leveraging employees, partners, and resellers. And you can try Gankalamp for free today. Garrus Digital, a full-service digital strategy firm that reaches deeper into the conversation than any other agency anywhere. And Tim Peter and Associates, digital marketing leadership to help you succeed in a rapidly changing world. As we wait for more attendees to join, let me review the format of our webinar. Our Biznology webinars last just 30 minutes, so you can easily fit them into your busy schedule. We record each webinar, and we'll email you that link later this week. During Mike's presentation, you can use GoToWebinar to ask a question. That orange arrow shown on screen opens and closes your controls. If you have a question, simply type it into the box labeled Questions at any time during the event and press the Send button.

I will ask—

I will select a few questions at the end of our webinar and pose them to Mike. While we're waiting for the last few attendees to join, I'd like to remind you that the Biznology monthly newsletter and daily articles are available for free at biznology.com. So if you're not already a subscriber, we hope that you'll sign up now. Thanks again to all of you for spending 30 minutes with us. We know how valuable your time is, so let's introduce today's speaker. Mike Moran is the founder of Biznology, a well-known expert in all things digital marketing, and a senior strategist at Converseon, a leading social consultancy. Mike is the co-author of Search Engine Marketing Inc., now available in its 3rd edition, and the sole author of Do It Wrong Quickly: How the Web Changes the Old Marketing Rules. Mike is a veteran of IBM, managing groups in IBM.com for 8 years and retiring from the company in 2008 as a distinguished engineer. So if you've ever struggled with how to bridge the gap between marketing and sales, this is definitely the webinar for you. Mike, take it away.

Thanks a lot, Tim. So one of the things that we find as we do a lot of work with companies who have a division between their sales and their marketing teams is that it's almost like the joke that Winston Churchill made about England and the United States, that it was 2 countries divided by a common language. And that's what seems to happen with sales and marketing. Both sales and marketing are trying to sell people. They're trying to target the right people and persuade them to go through the process of making a sale. That's the goal of both groups. Groups, and they need to work together. But working together is sometimes difficult because marketers are used to dealing with groups of customers, and sales is used to dealing with individual customers. And it makes sense why that's true. And so what happens is that they've built up their own language about how they do things. But if we can figure out how to bring that language together, how to coordinate the way sales and marketing can work together, by doing so, we have the opportunity to have the information that we gather through the process help sales, and also to have sales help marketing. And a lot of times in companies, we have marketing and sales at each other's throats rather than helping each other along the way. You'll often see situations where marketing complains that they're providing all sorts of great content, they're providing all sorts of brand awareness and sales just isn't closing these people. You'll hear the reverse where sales is complaining about the quality of the leads that's being sent from marketing and that marketing sends anybody that they can just grab along the web and they don't really understand how to qualify someone. They don't understand when someone is actually a good customer for their business. And so you hear a lot of these complaints and some of it has to do with the fact that Both marketing and sales believe that they understand who should be buying the product. And so one of the ways to bring marketing and sales together is to have them have a common process for understanding who the audience is. And there are a lot of very expensive and complicated ways to do this. I mean, there's market research, which has a, you know, can have an awful high price tag sometimes. You can also do all sorts of other kinds of research. You can interview your entire sales team and have them keep copious records of every interaction they have. There's nothing wrong with any of these approaches. But what we want to do is kind of to boil them down to their essence. We want to think about thinking like a reporter. So if you could answer all of these questions about your clients, whether they're your existing clients, whether they're your prospects, whether it's the market you're already strong in or one that you want to move towards, you would really have the information that both sales and marketing would need to know their customers. And so these are the very simple kinds of questions. So they're the reporter questions, right? The ones that we've always learned about how to tell a story, how to really explain something. And so what we want to do is we want to apply them to when clients interact with us, when they contact us. And you can think of contact in a very broad way. So we're not talking about merely when they pick up the phone and talk to us. We want to include contact to mean things like when they click through on one of our emails that we send them, or when they somehow search and come to our website. Anytime that they actually come into contact with us or with our marketing message, that's what we mean by contact. And so we want to know who's contacting us, what are they contacting us about, why are they contacting us, when are they contacting us, where are they contacting us from, and how are they contacting us. Now, just looking at that list, it's kind of a broad set of questions, and you could probably imagine a number of different ways that you could answer any of those questions. I mean, if we say when are they contacting us, you could say 2:30 PM. You could also say on a weekend, or you could also say during the summer, and any of those might be right. So depending on what kind of business you have, any of those might be a reasonable answer. So what we want to do is we want to answer these questions in the context of what's important for the business. So in order to do that, Tim, your moderator, and I came up with this diagram, so because all good consultants have to have a consulting framework, and so here's how we think about it. We want to be very specific about what the answers are. So the answers to who questions are about the person, the individual. The why questions are about their motivation, and these are things that are quite long-lasting, right? These are—

this is—

you can kind of think of this as your purpose. So what are the things that you really, really care about? What has to do with your need at the moment. What is the reason for your contact us? When, as we talked about already, is time, and there can be lots of ways that you can answer that question. Same is true for where. Where could have to do with where you're located geographically. It could also mean that you're coming from a certain type of location. It could be that you have a certain kind of business that is coming as opposed to a different kind. So if we look at these and we look at how, which is what kind of capabilities that you bring to it. So are you contacting us on your phone, or are you contacting us on your computer, or how are you doing this, right? So all of these things could be good answers to questions because it would help us know how to respond when people contact us. Now if we look at the intersections, Between these questions, we get some other interesting things, right? So the need and the motivation might give you the purpose. The person and the motivation might give you the passion, right? The capabilities in the person might give you the style. So you can look and see all of these different intersection points. So if it's hard for you to answer the questions that are in the inner circle, you can probably try and answer the questions in the outer circle. And it could be that for different kinds of businesses and for different amounts of information that you have about your customers, you might find that answering some of the questions from the inside and some of the questions from the outside might be easier or harder for you. And so the idea is for you to try to be as expansive as you can as you try to answer these questions, to try to really understand not only who the customer is that's coming to you But kind of what situation they're in when they're coming to you. And if we move a little further down this path, one of the things that we found is that the ones in black are a little bit more fixed, more permanent. These are things that probably don't change about your customer from week to week or month to month or even from year to year sometimes. And the closer they are to the person area, the more fixed they are, the longer they last. But as we look at the ones on the bottom, the ones in orange, we see that they are more fluid. And the closer we get to when, to time, the more fluid they are. So the less likely they are to persist. And so you can think of what we see on the top as being the client's persona. So this is— so everybody understands in marketing what a persona is by now. But what's happening is we're trying to be really clear about what kinds of things belong in a persona. You've also probably heard of the buyer's journey or the client journey. And we want to be clear about what kinds of things belong there. Often we have in the client's journey things like the need. We have some element of time because we go step by step. But one of the things we haven't always had in our client journeys is where they're coming from, kind of what their situation is when they're doing this. Is this something that's happening on mobile? Is this something that's happening by them calling us on the phone? And those are going to be different kinds of information that we're going to want to use based on what it is that they're doing, what situation they're in. And so we want to kind of think of expanding the client persona and the client journey. If you haven't incorporated all these elements into your persona and your journeys, then you might want to think about having a more expansive view so that you're really capturing all the different elements that help you produce content that's persuasive. So if we think about personas, there's a lot of things that could be in a persona. So this is kind of the classic way that people would define personas. And here's an example of a persona where you give them a name. You kind of identify things about them. And we think all these things are important. And the classically derived personas are really good. We think that if you think about it in terms of the contact circle, that you might find yourself answering more questions about your personas than maybe you were before. The other thing that will start to happen to you, and this is a good thing, is you'll start to realize you don't know the answers to all these questions. And so one of the things that Tim and I have always found a little bit flabby about personas is they tend to be developed by having a bunch of smart people sit around the table and give opinions. Well, you know, in my experience, our customers are like this. Well, yeah, that's a kind of customer. And that's all useful and maybe not a bad place to start, but what we think is more important is to actually develop these personas based on data, based on actual interactions that you've had. And when you start doing that as a marketer, well, suddenly you find yourself needing to talk to the sales team, and this is a good thing. And so a lot of your data can be collected by working with the sales team. And as you do so, you're also going to find that there's a lot of data that you need to collect about what the interactions are of these people when they come to your website, when they interact with you in social media, when they're using some of the content marketing and other properties that you have online. And so if you start to move from kind of opinion-based personas to data-based personas, you're going to suddenly find a lot more strength in the way that you understand your customers, ways that you didn't understand them before. The other thing that you'll start to figure out is you'll start to figure out that different personas need different content. As you really focus on the analytics that we've talked about before, you're going to see that you don't just want analytics that will allow you to understand your client better, although that's really important, but you're also going to want to have analytics that says, well, what kind of content tends to move people. Different personas are going to be moved by different content. And so one of the things that you might want to understand is that if you think in the classic B2B content marketing terms, let's just pick 3 different kinds of content. So most B2B companies have white papers and/or some equivalent where what they're doing is they're actually giving you a much deeper explanation of how a particular product or solution or service works. And so it's really for people who understand the technology a little bit more than others, or understand the specialty of whatever you do a little bit more than others. A case study, on the other hand, usually shows some kind of business application to a problem. It usually shows how you've taken a solution or a product or a service And you've implemented it with a real client, and you understand what their situation is. You understand what problem they had. You show how your solution actually corrects that problem and actually makes the business better. And then what you do is you, you often show some kinds of tangible results. And so you can imagine that white papers and case studies might talk about the same kind of problem and solution, but they're going to do it in different ways. Product specs, on the other hand, are deeper dives into exactly what the features are of your product or service. And so you might look at this and say, boy, I wonder if different personas are interested in different kinds of content. So think about how that would work, right? Is it possible that Sherwin is more interested in a white paper and product specs than a case study. It could be true that that persona is actually more interested in that, but the power for this really starts to happen when you start to collect up the metrics that show you which kinds of content online have been resulting in people moving from step to step in the buyer's journey. Then what you start to see, or which And then what you start to see is for different personas, there's different kinds of content that's persuasive. Why wouldn't you now start asking salespeople to categorize their prospects as marketing personas? Because right now salespeople usually look at sales segments. They look at different segments of the market. They might be looking at firmographics of the company, but they may not be looking at the certain personas that they have within each client prospect so that they don't understand which one might be interested in different kinds of content. Now, as you start to see that certain kinds of content is more persuasive to certain personas, why wouldn't you suggest those specific pieces of content to salespeople to work with the individual people that they see fit certain personas in their customer relationship management system. You can do the same thing for the buyer's journey, the client journey. So you look at what is the particular marketing journey that you think they are going on, and so marketers call this the buyer's journey, and can you categorize where different sales prospects are? Do you know, for example, that the sales team in their CRM system would be able to identify which part of the buyer's journey someone's in? Now, how would they do that? Well, they might do it by— because they are very close to the situation and they are in the sales mode with this client, so they might know that they're in the comparison stage where they're trying to figure out whether they're going to buy from you or buying from a competitor. Or they might say, no, they're much earlier. They're in that learn process where they know they have a problem, but they're still trying to figure out what their options are. Now, all of these things are possible. But what's really interesting is that if you've done your content marketing according to the buyer's journey, you're going to start to understand which content seems to move people from step to step in the buyer's journey, and so you'll start to know which content is working. So just like for personas, you'll know in the buyer's journey which content is working and which isn't. Wouldn't it make sense for you to then be suggesting to the salespeople for different clients that are in different stages of the buyer's journey Here's content that has moved people from step to step online. You might want to email a link to this content to your client because you're trying to get them to move from the learn step to the compare step. Now, a simpler way of doing this, rather than asking the salespeople to figure out where they are in the buyer's journey, is to actually set up the buyer's journey so it corresponds to your sales funnel. Your CRM system already probably requires your salespeople to categorize where in the sales funnel the prospect is. So why not figure out how you're going to identify and map the buyer's journey onto your sales funnel? Because when you do that, you suddenly can unlock all of the metrics from your content marketing online that tell you which content is working to move people from step to step. You will automatically know which step each person is in the buyer's journey that the salespeople are working with. And in fact, CRM systems surface the content that seems to be working online as an opportunity for that salesperson to share with their prospects offline. Now, as you understand what the most persuasive content is, you might realize that, hey, there's certain content that seems to work at different stages. Just as we found before that there might be different content that seems to work for different personas. And so as we're doing that, what we're going to do is we're going to then start to merge them. We will start to understand that there's different content that works best for different personas within a certain stage of the buyer's journey. And so you'll start to use those 2 factors of what kind of persona they have And salespeople might be thinking of these as sales segments, or they might be thinking of them as job roles, or they might be thinking of them in other ways. But if we can help salespeople to connect how they're segmenting customers with how the persona segments customers, right, we might need to bring industry into it. There's all sorts of ways of combining personas with sales segments so that we can start to map one to the other. And if we do the same thing with the buyer's journey in the sales funnel, then we're going to suddenly have a situation where all the metrics they were collecting online in content marketing can start to be used for the sales system. And you can see, here's an example where we're suggesting a certain white paper to a certain person that's in a certain stage of the buying cycle. And this is something that you can do automatically from the system because you know which content is working And which is not. So the question is, how do you do this? Right? This is really what the next step is for you. So the first thing for you to do is to understand that the right content is not a one-size-fits-all event. You need to have the right content for the right step of the client journey or stage of the sales funnel, however way you want to think about it, and for the right persona or market segment, whatever way you want to think about that. And by understanding how you're going to do that, by first aligning the terminology between sales and marketing and making sure that sales is being consulted as they put together these personas, to make sure that marketing information about which content is working, which isn't, is being shared with sales. By bringing sales and marketing much closer together, both in how their processes work, how they organize the way people walk through the sales journey, That's how you're going to get the metrics that let you share the content in sales so that what you learn in marketing is then useful in sales. That's all I've got, Tim.

Thanks, Mike. I'm sure our attendees have a much stronger idea of how to keep score of which marketing materials are working, but you didn't answer every question. I've got a couple of good questions from our audience teed up for you. And I'd like to remind our audience that it's not too late to ask your own questions by typing it into the questions box in your GoToWebinar controls. Before we get to the questions, I'd like to let you know that Mike is now offering a video course on content marketing through his website. The internet has now reduced distribution costs to nearly zero, so content marketing is really within reach of even the most budget-challenged companies. All you need to do is understand how to identify your audience, Learn their content needs and meet them, which is actually what this course on content marketing will do for you. Learn how to reach your audience with quality content that won't break the bank. Go to bit.ly/cmcourse2 for more info. We are about to start firing questions at Mike, but we need to thank our sponsors once again. Barnraisers, a full-service digital and social media solutions company that builds brands using proven relationship principles and ROI. GaggleAmp empowers companies to amplify their social media content by leveraging employees, partners, and resellers. And you can try GaggleAmp for free today. Garrus Digital, a full-service digital strategy firm that reaches deeper into the conversation than any other agency anywhere. And Tim Peter and Associates, digital marketing leadership to help you succeed in a rapidly changing world. You know, our first question, Mike, as you went through the material, we got a question about, are there some key metrics that marketing folks can use to help develop those data-based personas you talked about?

I think there are. I think that when you think about the way that personas are typically developed, where a bunch of people are sitting around the table saying, I think they're interested in this, I think this is the way they are, if you can start to identify particular kinds of conversations that you're interested in, that you think your clients are interested in, that you think key personas would be interested in, you can do a couple things. You can start to use those words to examine what searches people are putting in. So what are the search keywords that people are entering? You can do this on looking at words that are being entered into Google. You can also do this on your own website search facility. I mean, we've had a lot of success helping clients to mine their website search so that they see what kinds of words customers are putting in to their own site because they think those things are actually there. You can further take those words and you can do social media listening. So you can look at, for example, how to identify themes in the conversation that helps you start to see what things are more interesting to people than others. There's other kinds of analytics where you can look at those conversations and actually identify what kind of intent people have, or what kinds of things are more persuasive to them. Are they more interested in examples or the big picture? Are they more interested in case studies than white papers? So all those kinds of things can help you build up the persona, right? It's not just the reverse. It isn't just figure out the persona, and then let me just try some content on them. You can actually use the content to help you figure out what kind of persona people have, right? It can go both ways.

That's great, Mike. Any tips you can provide on how marketing folks can get their salespeople on board with this approach?

Yeah, there's a few things that I recommend. There's, um, one of the things is to Help them understand that you are a resource for them, that the content that you have can be very valuable. So I think what's happened over the last few years is that that salespeople, you know, have grown up in a world where the content that people have from marketing was kind of like limited to marketing collateral. So it might be stuff that you know they got some kind of one sheet on the product that they handed out to clients, or you know they they. And those are things that were— they knew they had to give the clients, but they also knew it wasn't terribly persuasive. It had nothing to do with— they were handing the same thing to everybody no matter where they were in the client journey, and they weren't really thinking of marketing as a resource for persuasion.

What—

the way marketers can really help salespeople to understand how they can be helpful is to show them the array of content that they already have that they've been using to try to attract the right people to the site. Then they can say, hey, look, you can use this content at the right moment with people that are in the sales cycle, and you can kind of look at this content, get familiar with it, and you'll start to develop some favorites of which things you think really tell the story well, and you'll decide what the right things are to show. And so that's a way of getting them interested And it's also a way of getting feedback from them, because if you start doing this and you find that salespeople say, hey, you know what, you know, I love that you have all this great stuff, but none of it's really working for me, you can actually go along on sales calls and try and see what's happening. What is it that they're looking for? What kinds of content is missing? Ask the salespeople, what are the gaps? What's the kind of content you'd love to have? What do you think would be very persuasive that we're not giving them now? And so by being open to salespeople really being the experts of how to persuade each of these individual people, you can come back with ideas for how to improve the content.

That's great. We have time for just one last question. Can you talk about a book or resource or something where you can point folks on how to best create a persona checklist?

I'm not sure if there's a book that I'm familiar with, but one of the things that that I found for personas. I think there's a lot of good material out on the MarketingProfs website. I've seen some good treatments of personas. I've seen a lot of good work from Jared Spool in his work. Also some stuff from the Nielsen Norman Group. So there's a bunch of good areas where people talk about how you use personas. And the ones that I'm talking about tend to be fairly rigorous in the way that they go about collecting the data. And so those, I think, would be the 3 best web-based resources for trying to get your arms around this. But I'm not sure if I've seen a book about it.

Great. Well, that's really all the time we have for today, I'm afraid. Thanks to Mike for these great ideas, and thanks so much especially to our audience for your participation and your questions. If any of you had questions that we did not have time to answer, you can email your questions to madeline@mikemoran.com, and she'll be sure to get them to Mike for an answer. Later this week, we'll send you all a link to the recording of this webinar to listen to again and to share with others. We also invite you to mark your calendars For our next Biznology webinar, Why Your Website Matters and How to Make It Matter More with Andrew Skolkind, scheduled for 11:00 AM US Eastern Time on July 28th. We hope to see everybody back here then. Until then, bye everybody.