I was going to start this blog entry with a lyrical reminder of the way things used to be in b2b marketing, but the problems faced by all of us b2b marketers today aren’t going to be solved by reinventing the past (who learns from history anyway? ).

The reason for the potentially nostalgic opener was that the subject giving me cause to put virtual pen to virtual paper is photography and imagery in modern b2b communications.

The key issue is that now that we have huge databases of photography and imagery available online, generally for a very modest outlay, both the cost and speed of production of many elements of marketing communication have been drastically reduced.

Why is that not a good thing?

Well it is, in that it has allowed both more marketing to be delivered for the same money and has allowed smaller organisations with smaller budgets to achieve a massive hike in the professionalism of their output (subject to the quality of design input!).

I do have a couple of problems with it though.

Firstly the ‘volatility’ of individual markets and economies has meant that, in the UK at least, most b2b marketers have seen resources in terms of both people and budgets seriously reduced in the last decade.

This has caused many organisations to accept great ‘holes’ in their strategy where the resources just aren’t available to undertake ‘necessary’ strategic tasks (e.g.  earlier blog entries on research, data, and face to face marketing)

Secondly there has been a highly noticeable homogenisation of all b2b output that is threatening the professionalism, impact and brand effect of all communications.

What is this modern scourge?

It is the very pretty, smiling lady with the modern headset – an image used on hundreds of websites, mailers, brochures and pull up banners.

It is the endless shots of business meetings comprising mainly American models trying to look like sad/busy/ecstatic/etc. business people.

It is the endless hi tech montages (with single colour themes for logo matching!)

Now don’t get me wrong we were one of the first to use these facilities and many a small client has had a ‘high gloss’ given to their output.

But a company’s brand and image are their main ‘face’ in the marketplace and when all companies start to look the same we, as marketers, are in trouble.

Unfortunately the solution isn’t easy - we need to recreate that strange thing called a photographic/imagery budget - and in these austere times we all know how hard that is going to be.

Is it really necessary??  - well how can we spend so much time and effort trying to persuade jaded business audiences that our total product/service offering is truly unique and then say it’s ok to look just the same as everybody else……………………

I have extremely fond memories of visiting and organising stands on behalf of customers in the early part of my career, when budgets meant that creativity was to the fore and on stand hospitality was hugely alcoholic in nature.

Those heady days are long gone (mostly!) and for the last twenty years there seems to have been a steady decline in both the size and number of b2b exhibitions.

The exhibition industry has done its best, with the addition of conferences and seminars to attract specific visitor groups, but my informal research amongst exhibitors suggests that certainly in the area of attracting new customers these events can rarely be justified in terms of ROI.

As marketing budgets have come under increasing scrutiny over the years I have witnessed average stand size reduce further and further, with more and more companies having to make the best of the horrible (sorry Octanorm) small shell scheme spaces (so maybe there is something of the vicious circle going on here?).

Having said that, with a bit of effort even a shell scheme can be tarted up!

Non attendance has become less of a boardroom issue and many large exhibitions have either disappeared or reduced their frequency.

“It’s more of an issue for people to justify time out of the office these days” was often voiced even back in the nineties, so I guess it comes down to the value of face to face interactions with potential suppliers/customers/partners.

And this is where I think the nub of the problem lies.

As marketers we are constantly trying to improve the measurability of our programmes and campaigns and there is something about face to face that defies measurability.

Yes we can measure numbers on stand, ‘enquiries’ and engagers in a sales cycle, but getting to the heart of the ‘value add’ that face to face can bring remains somewhat elusive.

I just get the feeling that, for all our cyber space alternatives, if we abandon exhibitions and their like, or even feel that face to face is somehow less important these days, we might be missing an important trick……………………

Most of us have come to terms with living under the huge all pervading shadow of Google and its complex algorithms that decide how easily a web site can be found against various search terms.

However, I’ve noticed more and more sites at the top of page 1 (certainly in Omnisity’s chosen space) that have two common attributes:

Firstly, a confusing and ‘down market’ design (Yes I know it’s a huge value judgement, but I thought it sounded better than ‘cheap looking’) with too many words on the home page to be inviting to read.

Secondly, when I do try to read the copy I find it difficult to understand where it is being pitched and, at times, what is being sold.

With a bit more investigation I found the companies to be much smaller than I expected given their Google ranking.

It wasn’t until I spoke to our in house SEO specialist, who seemed to regard the sites as shining examples of what SEO can achieve if you are single minded about it, that I understood that both design and content ‘should’ be secondary to SEO multiple keyword and deep linked ‘info’ pages if one wanted to hit top spot.

Whilst we definitely want to be found by prospective customers, I struggle to see the point of sacrificing both design and clarity/simplicity of content.

Is this a case where it’s better not to be number one?

For us I am sure that’s the case, and I’m left wondering whether SEO will go the same way as motivational research in the 50’s and 60’s.

We shall have to wait and see…………………………………………………….

This charming and very direct exposition ( the title of this blog entry ) on how to make web and direct business communications successful was first given to me by a client working in telecommunications. I only found out later that most of his money had been made in online porn, which may explain how he came to this particular viewpoint.

The point, though, was that I had never heard something that summed up so neatly the needs of b2b marketing generally.

We all know how powerful well researched, well written, professionally produced case studies can be, especially if they exemplify the differentiated value adds (what makes us better than the competition) that we need to push at the market.

Unfortunately as marketers we can rarely apply the energy, resources and budget to create either the volume or quality of case studies we would like.

But then this principle applies to so many elements of content, from video to business white papers and ‘guru’ enhanced events.

Will we ever achieve a seismic shift in board level attitudes to resourcing these issues – in the short term, I doubt it. The current trend for increasing levels of measurement against projects means that the content needs to be included in hard-nosed business development programmes where budgets and justifications are generally tight anyway.

Now don’t get me wrong, we are strong advocates in omnisity for results lead marketing with demonstrably measurable outcomes, the problem is that due to the economic shocks in the last decade most marketers seem to be working with budgets that are less than 50% of what they need.

We recently worked on a web site that was designed to help a client break into a new and difficult to access market. We created an information repository and between ourselves and the client (with the client doing a lot of hours!) managed to pull together some tremendous content in terms of both quantity and quality.

We had no money left for the SEO we wanted to do so our strategy relied on outbound email campaigns to drive traffic.

Fortunately something strange and wonderful happened – very quickly the site climbed the Google rankings and within three months was on page one for all targeted search terms.

How did we do it? We didn’t !!

The volume and quality of content meant that the site was the most useful for users against the search terms.

Maybe we need to re-evaluate how we measure content…………………………………

(I’ll talk about the potentially disastrous effects single minded SEO can have another time?)

What do you do when you’re not allowed to undertake proactive, direct methods to sell to a target audience. Direct Mail, email and telemarketing are our standard stock in trade when wanting to generate leads and sales opportunities.

This came up recently for a customer of ours wanting to sell into the NHS.

Now I wish I could say that I came up with the solution myself but on this occasion the client came up with the solution (my only excuse is the solution was found before I knew the problem existed so no, I am not losing my touch!)

The basic strategy was to produce a large information repository on the web with multiple downloadable documents. The information was geared around anything that an NHS manager might need in order to effectively plan and implement a project that involved our clients products and services.

The types of information involved were everything from relevant case studies to NHS best practice guidelines and initiatives. Helpful tips and useful samples of relevant specs were included.

The client’s products and brand were secondary and only available if visitors chose to navigate to them.

And did it work…………….?

Within days the site had soared up the relevant Google rankings and now sits nicely in the top three of page one.

With hundreds of unique visitors spending significant amounts of time on the site it has so far exceeded all expectations.

And yes, the enquiries have been steadily increasing and suffice it to say the exercise has achieved an ROI that has put a smile on even the FD’s face.

I wonder if the client who told me he is “not going to do any more marketing until sales pick up” reads this blog…………………

Oh for those heady days when I was doing my marketing degree, learning and practising all those research techniques and advanced statistical analyses.

From the outset I quickly discovered that generic bought in reports were as far as most organisations were prepared to go as there were always ‘more important things’ to spend budgets on.

These days, we find only one in ten clients is prepared to undertake anything other than ‘quick and dirty’ informal research. The perennial problem of getting budget has been exacerbated by the real concern that because markets change so fast, anything that delays market entry is to be avoided like the plague.

Having said that, and I do think the concern is valid, so far when we have undertaken real research it seems to have allowed us to gain greater penetration more quickly, or at least we don’t seem to have missed any boats.

The good news is twofold…………………

Firstly, we have been able to access funding (especially for our Midlands clients) that has offset the costs involved quite substantially.

Secondly we have developed an exciting (and fortunately very successful) programme that combines research with sales opportunity generation -  both our customers and their prospects seem to like it!

It’s taken a while to develop fully, but those customers who have implemented it are very happy.

We’re in the middle of the latest one so I’ll let you know how it goes.

Oh and by the way if you need arguments to try and justify a research budget just mention the PR benefits (Journalists love it when you give them ‘facts’ rather than the usual corporate puffery) and also you needn’t struggle with what subject matter to use for prospect events for a while.

Nice to have some positive news………………

Over recent years most of us in b2b marketing have needed to buy data from external sources of one kind or another. I suppose it depends on your expectations, but generally I’ve been disappointed with the results. Nobody seems to have the exact data with the right job functions that I want. So the first compromise is made because I rarely have the budget to buy multiple lists and combine them and the list I end up buying is the best I can find.

Oh by the way, how nonsensical is it that we marketeers generally find it nigh on impossible to get boards to sanction data as a separate line in marketing budgets, yet a high quality database of our chosen market is almost universally recognised as the most powerful tool a marketer can have!

It’s hard to blame the data houses for the lack of b2b ‘quality’ when in difficult times we buy next to nothing and in the good times we are extremely price sensitive (How much per record?!!!). I guess it comes back to the lack of segmented budget and a lack of understanding of data’s role in b2b marketing at board level.

So what can we do to change the situation?

I guess the next time the MD praises us for a successful campaign we could respond with “it could have been even better if we’d had more money to invest in the data” but that doesn’t sound likely to even a hardened data addict like me. Maybe we need to set aside time to actively educate anyone at board level who will listen (yes I know the list of subjects will be long but at least we can make a start!).

Whilst we are waiting for this to take effect we will have to fall back on our traditional standbys that have always served us well, namely building in data augmentation and cleaning processes into any campaign they can be tyre levered into. This is something that we have had to become very good at in recent years with research projects, events, and lead generation programmes all made to work harder to achieve data objectives as well as the more ‘overt’ ones.

Whatever happened to the days when marketing was considered an investment……………….still at least we know that data will give us a solid ROI. I wonder, maybe if I sidle up to the MD at the golf day……………………………