This is the third in my series of how the Imperatives of the Marketing Revoloution apply toBusiness-to-Business (B2B) marketing.  This imperative is titled "Let Go, Customers Control Your Brand." 

It could be said that this has been the case all along.  In reality, the customer's opinion of your company is always what has driven your brand.  The major difference is the level of communication from customer to customer versus vendor to customer has changed the game.  In the past, a strong marketing organization to influence the opinion of the market regarding their brand by controlling the message and the references and testimonials.  That is no longer the case...social marketing has ended any aspect of control by a vendor.  Now all of your references and realities are out there for the market to learn and understand.

So, how do you respond as a B2B Marketer?  The same way you need to respond to anything these days - with the truth.  What is important for you to do is make sure that the truth is good news.  So, what is important is for you to listen to prospects and customers needs and provide a solution with vision that addresses those needs.  Customers and prospects can articulate their issues and challenges (it's the rare customer that can provide feedback to the design of a product, however).  You need to apply creativity and innovation to addressing those issues and challenges.

The market will buy on message for a while.  There's a groundswell of evidence that many current b2b marketers are not realizing the vision of nurture marketing and lead scoring.  Customers are still buying but expect some lash back in the lead management arena soon.  Customers cannot keep up with the volume of content required for lead nurturing and this is preventing them from realizing the value that vendors have promised. I think it's similar to adding automation at the end of a manufacturing process but not setting up your materials and purchasing.   You can ramp marketing volume without setting up your whole marketing process to support the volume...but I digress. 

So, let's test this theory.  Will customers start to speak up about these issues (it means admitting struggles publicly so that part will be interesting)?  Will any of the "hot" lead management brands start to suffer from this lack of success? 

Here's a link to the previous posts -

1. Marketing Must be Accountable
2. The CMO as a Change Agent

B2B marketing is going through drastic changes with new information and new tools to support nurture or "drip" marketing.  The challenge, however, is the voracious appetite this creates for content in many forms and for many types of buyers.  How can we build and sustain a content engine?  Here's five steps and one bonus thought that should help.

Step 1 – Identify your “thought leadership” messages…what is unique, what is important about the value you provide your customers?

• Interactive Marketing Campaigns - Replace email blasts that don't work with campaigns that run continuously (24/7), serving up variable highly personalized content in the form of email messages, offers, inbound forms/surveys, microsites (PURLs), etc -- based on an individuals off and online behavior.
• Creative Control - Give Marketers an easy-to-use HTML designer that lets them create professional-quality marketing content for their online communication vehicles while protecting brand standards with templates and reusable content blocks.
• New Communication Devices (e.g., microsites, PURLs) - Reduce dependence on corporate web site team, and allow Marketers to create powerful "weblets" within a campaign to improve customer engagement outcomes
• Demand Generation - Provide controls to manage online marketing tactics or tools  that "sit outside" the 1:1 marketing campaign, but directly affect the outcomes such as search engine management, web analytics, web alerts, and banner ad management. 

When I graduated from college and entered the business world four years ago, I would've readily admitted that I didn't know much at all about corporate America. There were things I knew I didn't know, like how people managed to work in the same job for years. My experience, to that point, included various jobs that each lasted between four and six months. But, for the most part, I didn't know what I didn't know.

I didn't know that there were thousands of unique job titles in marketing that I could explore with my marketing degree, and I didn't know what those job titles were or meant. Marketing Research. Marketing Communications. Media and Public Relations. Marketing Campaigns. Inside Sales. Graphics. Web Content Management. Product Marketing. Event Management. (I like the sound of that last one...)

I also didn't know there would be applications and programs and software that would help me accomplish and organize my day-to-day work life, let alone that one of those software programs would fall under the marketing operations software umbrella. I definitely didn't know that I'd be working for a company that develops an industry leading product under that umbrella.

At Aprimo, we drink our own champagne. We develop and sell marketing operations software, and our marketing department uses it. I was introduced to "ARC," our internal implementation of the software, Aprimo Resource Center, on my first day. In those days, using ARC, meant researching, verifying and updating customer and prospect data in our database. Today, it means a hundred different things. I can't manage the planning and logistics of an event without it! I mean, I could. But I'd rather not.

When we're evaluating a new event, we use the proposal process. When we've decided to host or sponsor an event, we track the financial forecast, what we've committed to spend and what we've actually spent. When we need to make sure that ten team members are working efficiently on different aspects of an event, we use a workflow that sends reminders, captures completed work and approvals, and dynamically adjusts if the timeline changes or a new step is inserted. This is not simply project management, people!

I wonder... where do you find yourself today? Maybe, you're like me four years ago and are still trying to figure out what marketing operations software is. (If that's the case, I wonder how you stumbled across my blog...) Maybe you do know what you don't know, you know you need to learn more and find a solution that best fits your organization, but haven't done anything about it yet. Or maybe you're a perfect specimen of a marketer, with effective marketing operations software in place, and we could all learn a thing or two from you. So where do you find yourself and what do you know?