Social networks are re-writing the rules of what best practices in marketing are. Listening is in, shouting is out. Targeting is in; carpet bombing via e-mail is out.
Responsiveness is the new black and trust is the new currency.
Brands are laid bare in front of millions daily. It doesn’t take long for just one customer to make a major statement about how they feel about a brand and make a major impact on sales too. Using Facebook, Twitter, Friendfeed, blogs or YouTube, customers can make their voice heard immediately. United Airlines’ wake-up call last year is a case in point as is the recent controversy Southwest Airlines faced.
So Many Social Networks and So Little Time
With so many powerful social networking platforms, applications and tools available why are marketers still not getting to their lead generation and sales goals?
Why do companies who have such a strong passion for their customers lose their way to delivering exceptional experiences?
Why does their sales collateral promise so much and at times fail to deliver?
Because product marketing, product management and marketing teams fall into the trap of believing you have to inundate the prospect with features, in-depth data and tons of documents to prove you know what you’re doing. Carpet bombing prospect’s in-boxes with e-mails to send the message you know what you are doing is ironically proving fatal.
Why? Because you and I respect people so much more when they listen to us and talk with us instead of talking at us. Too much technology marketing, specifically in software, talks at the prospect, instead of with them. That is the heart of the potential of social networks – to engage and talk with prospects instead of at them. And it takes hard work to make relationships count. You can’t earn sales through a deluge of content; it has to come from being genuinely interested in helping a prospect over a major problem.
The First Step: Find the Passion of your Company
There are dozens of excellent software applications out there for managing lead generation and follow-up but unless it reflects the soul – the passion of a company – it is meaningless. What makes all these lead generation apps really work? It amplifies, projects, makes more visible the passion a company has for owning a problem prospects and customers have.
No software application can compensate for a company that has not decided what it is passionate about.
But for those companies who have chosen a mission – a vision of what problem they will own for any prospect or customer – then lead generation becomes real for them. Companies struggling to produce leads may not have a software problem; they may have a passion problem. Defining that passion for service will go a long way to finding good leads, not those captured through attrition from lists. How much more powerful passion is for solving a problem over just endlessly listing off features and data. Passion puts all that intelligence into motion and makes it relevant.
Lessons Learned
Social networks and the customer immediacy they provide make it imperative that marketing focus on what they have a passion for and what a company can deliver in terms of products and services. From that vantage point consider these lessons learned:
Sales collateral, both in-print and online, must have a very clear customer it is aimed at. Surprisingly so much is produced aimed at the “enterprise buyer of IT solutions”. I have never met anyone who called themselves that. Get real and if you can’t define the customer, consider cancelling the collateral.
Urgency to own the customer’s pain now and provide a proven solution. Marketers who are making social networks generate leads get this and get their company’s passion for owning the problem out loud and clear. Features matrices don’t come close; re-think that strategy and go own a problem to gain leads and sales.
What is the collateral’s goal and how does it fit into the marketing strategy? An excellent question to ask when there are many, many open projects in a marketing department and there seems to be little shared messaging. Collateral, both online and offline needs to resonate the passion a company has to serve. It has to be so strong that there is no doubt your company intends to be the global leader in solving the problems and pains you target.
Answers the question of how your products and services are different and proven. Differentiating at the benefits level, not at the speeds and feeds or features level is critical. What odes your company’s passion make it especially good at? That is the most powerful differentiator there is.
Does your collateral teach or preach?
Go after teaching, and share your insight and intelligence freely as a company to gain thought leadership over time. Your company will get what it gives when it comes to sharing insight, intelligence and knowledge. Blog regularly. Give away insights from studies free. Be open. All of these tie back to a passion to own a customers’ problem.
Is your collateral evangelist-compatible?
Consider that if you are selling a complex system or service that your sales cycles often involve dozens of people in a variety of roles.
Is your collateral designed to make it easy for those championing you inside a company to carry forward what makes you unique?
Can the online collateral move quickly through social networks?
These are all relevant questions to this point and to evaluate your collateral on.
Design to Inspire and Educate.
The simplicity and clean layouts of social networks are the result of years of usability testing in some cases. Make sure your offline and online collateral reflects these design criteria.
Bottom line:
Social networks are making companies confront what they really stand for and what they are the most passionate about. It’s best to start thinking about these issues and make your collateral all coordinate to what your company truly stands for. Owning a problem and being passionate about it will generate far more leads than any other strategy.
Courtesy – Louis Columbus
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