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Each issue of CMO Close-up features an interview with a CMO, as well as other marketing executives answering that issue's "Big Question."
This week's feature:
CMO Close-Up with Steve Liguori, executive director-global marketing at GE
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Finding the best collateral mix
Marketers must work with sales to determine their needs, then provide tools that meet them
Richard Karpinski
Story posted: January 19, 2009 - 6:01 am EDT
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The face of marketing collateral is changing, but savvy b2b marketers need to focus on the basics of getting their customers—not to mention their sales teams—the content they want in the formats they desire.
Seems easy enough, but marketers seldom put enough thought into their marketing collateral plans, according to analysts and content creation specialists.
For example, marketers should be doing regular reviews of their marketing assets to determine what content they have and what new needs have emerged, said IDC analyst Michael Gerard. Such a “content audit” should have a clear focus on what's needed at different stages of the buying cycle and by different customer types, Gerard said.
Next, marketers should focus their content development efforts on the gaps identified by this analysis, he said. “This is a significant departure from the historical view of "We need to produce five white papers this year' without regard for the exact target and type of content of those white papers,” Gerard said.
Similarly, marketers must keep the needs of the sales team in mind, aligning collateral directly to the sales process and sales activities, said Tim Riesterer, senior VP-strategic consulting and chief marketing officer for sales messaging firm Corporate Visions.
Working hand in hand, marketers and salespeople must “identify key moments of truth where messaging is needed to advance a deal and determine precisely, based on the selling scenario involved, what type of tool is needed to access and deliver that content,” said Riesterer, who has worked on sales collateral strategy with clients including ADP, IBM Corp. and MasterCard Inc.
When marketers focus on what sales teams really need, they end up building more content in Word and Outlook (two applications that can be used easily by sales teams) than in such print-focused tools as Quark Express, Riesterer said. Moreover, that content today looks less like traditional brochures than what Riesterer calls “conversation message objects”—things like white boards, word plays, minidramas and stories. Salespeople can use these items to create “a more powerful and compelling dialogue with customers,” Riesterer said.
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COLLATERAL CONSUMPTION
Further insight into b2b collateral needs comes from content strategy services company Eccolo Media, which fielded an online survey last August of 155 technology buyers, all of whom said they'd made or influenced a b2b technology decision in the last six months, asking specifically about how they consume marketing collateral.
Among the insights into the marketing collateral mix:
? White papers remain the most effective piece of marketing collateral, with 86% of respondents finding them moderately to highly influential in the purchasing decision.
? Product brochures and data sheets were the most frequently consumed collateral type, yet they were also most frequently ranked as the least influential.
? Somewhat surprisingly, the majority of respondents viewed digital content on the desktop rather than printing out the content.
? The majority of respondents (54%) used collateral for the first time in the presales cycle, before they'd spoken with a sales rep or had had any contact with the company.
Given these findings, a focus on optimizing content for online consumption appears paramount. Making content easy to read online not only meets technology buyers" preferences, it makes that content more likely to be distributed to others, said Lorie Loe, president of Eccolo Media.
“Making sure that all of your collateral is available digitally, and even preferring that over developing print collateral, is something you can do very well that will have an immediate impact,” Loe said. “It's far easier to share that way. We're finding that digital electronic collateral is highly viral, and you want to be able to take advantage of that. Make it easy to view, easy to download, easy to share.”
In the end, Loe said, it's all about having a collateral strategy. “When companies are thoughtful about content creation, they realize a number of benefits. First of all, they get to save some money and really leverage and amortize resources over a wider variety of collateral tools. We're also finding development cycles go down. When it's approached in a more mindful way, with a collateral plan over a certain time period, we find there's a lot less cycles to get that stuff going and revving ideas.”
Ultimately, it comes down to what IDC's Gerard calls an “often overlooked part of marketer's jobs”—sales enablement. According to Gerard: “Marketers need to improve their ability to get the right material to the right salesperson—and to the right customer—at the right time.” M
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