KERN has a unique perspective on why so many organizations are struggling with creating highly effective content and proving the return on investment on content.
We believe in the psychology of marketing. When it comes to people who are making decisions, it’s a given that we need the best audience intelligence to even attempt to create effective content. However, knowing the audience and what they are thinking, feeling, experiencing, expecting and considering isn’t the only necessary ingredient to highly effective content strategy, creation and activation.
Jonathan Haidt, author of The Happiness Hypothesis, uses the metaphor of an elephant and a rider to illustrate the logical and emotive decision struggle within our minds.
In Haidt’s metaphor, “the rider represents our rational side, also known as the reflective or conscious system. It’s the part of you that deliberates and analyzes and looks into the future. The elephant depicts our brain’s emotional side. It’s the part of you that is instinctive, that feels pain and pleasure.”
While the rider can direct the elephant, or the logical brain can direct the emotional or irrational brain, should the elephant really want to go in a different direction, the rider is powerless to control it. Simply put, your logical or rational brain cannot control your emotional brain.
According to Dan and Chip Heath, authors of Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard, “Change is easy when elephants and riders move together.”
The key to effective change is getting the elephant and the rider moving together.
The Heaths write, “Changes often fail because the Rider simply can’t keep the
CHAPTER 9
NEXT EVOLUTION DEMAND GENERATION
CONTENT STRATEGIES
Elephant on the road long enough to reach the destination. The Elephant’s hunger for instant gratification is the opposite of the Rider’s strength, which is the ability to think long-term, to plan, to think beyond the moment (all those things that your pet can’t do). To make progress toward a goal, whether it’s noble or crass, requires the energy and drive of the Elephant.”
Personal value trumps business value
Does the rider (logic/reason) or the elephant (emotion) have greater impact on B-to-B commercial outcomes? In a CEB/Motista study, when considering a business-to-business buying decision, personal value was perceived as having nearly double the value of business value.
Personal values (importance: 42.6%)
• Professional benefits (e.g., career advancement)
• Social benefits (e.g., popularity)
• Emotional benefits (e.g., confidence)
• Self-image benefits (e.g., pride)
Business values (importance: 21.4%)
• Functional benefits
• Business outcomes
This is another example of how the “What’s in it for me?” dynamic helps shape the decision-making process of organizations. So, while the rider would like to direct the elephant to make the logical business decision, the elephant has other things on his mind, such as professional benefits, that will come with moving forward. Will he become more popular or respected if the group makes this decision? Will he feel good about himself and feel better about his decision regardless of the business value? In other words, the elephant is asking, “What’s in it for me?”
To differentiate the value proposition, we must disrupt the buyer’s thinking.
The insights from the CEB study is: “Marketing can help change customer behavior by teaching customers their current criteria set may be flawed, full of risk and costs that have been underappreciated.”
What are the different levels of effectiveness of the messages being conveyed to your audience? Have you considered that content can be categorized into a hierarchy of effectiveness?
The Hierarchy of Effective Content
CEB goes on to break down the hierarchy of content effectiveness into these five categories:
1. General information: At the beginning of this document, we discussed how the world is different today than it was a very short 20 years ago.
Since all of our readers already know this, and we are just referencing it, this would be considered general information.
2. Accepted information: We then discussed best-practice demand generation for our audience of CMOs and marketing leaders who are aware of best-practice demand generation. We consider this to be accepted information.
3. Thought leadership: The section covered where we feel enterprise marketers are falling short. Because we offered our unique perspectives and insights, we would consider this to be thought leadership.
4. Insight: From our research and study of Patrick Spenner’s work and our own insights and philosophy on group buying, we have provided content that would qualify as “insight.”
5. Commercial insight: We would also like to add the word “actionable”
to this description because commercial insight is something that you can act on to further, enhance, optimize or better your commercial enterprise. Our entire presentation is something we consider to be commercial insight, as CMOs can immediately take action based on the insights provided here. CEB defines commercial insight as:
“Information that disrupts customers’ status quo by teaching something new about their business needs that leads to the supplier’s unique value.”
In order to direct the rider (appeal to the rational and logical part of the buying group members’ brain), and to motivate the elephant (appeal to the emotional, irrational, gratification part of the brain) and to shape the path (provide a way for both sides of the brain to get what they need or want), marketers are faced with a complex problem. Perhaps this is why so many organizations are struggling to create effective content.
According to the 2015 Forrester report Shift Focus To The Customer Life Cycle, it’s time to expand the focus of B-to-B engagement to the entire customer relationship, including loyalty and retention, which are not traditional priorities for B-to-B marketers.
In order to acquire net new customers, we attempt to steer them on the path to purchase. How can we expect to gain a greater share of wallet of our key strategic accounts, or our customer-centric best accounts, if we fail to consider the path to passion?
KERN developed The Modern Buyer’s 10-Stage Journey based on rapidly changing human behavior patterns that occurred as a result of the convergence of faster connection speeds on both mobile and home devices, the accelerated adoption of online searching and sharing and the proliferation of social networks and always-on communication abilities.
Some may consider it presumptuous to define all buyer journeys for all products or services into these 10 stages. So let us first state that this journey isn’t linear, and many of these stages can be traversed in seconds or together in groups. Also, some stages, such as Stage 7: Social Research, can take place at every stage.
The more complex the service or solution, such as in large B-to-B marketing endeavors, the longer the buyer’s journey or buy cycle will be.
When we consider the path to passion portion of the journey, we consider that in a B-to-B marketing environment, the marketing stages of engagement, growth, retention, nurturing, reward, loyalty and social involvement through advocacy and evangelism are often ignored or not even considered. We believe this is a gross omission and that this portion of the journey will garner increasing attention over the next few years.
Part of what we see as next evolution demand generation is for marketers to consider and embrace the entire customer lifecycle in a business-to-business environment. How can we create emotional loyalty and foster irrational brand preference in the moments that matter most, those in which our prospective customer is finally ready to purchase?
We believe we are on the cusp of a fundamental shift in marketers’ attention away from the path to purchase and toward the path to passion portion of the customer lifecycle. As B-to-B marketers are laser focused on the acquisition of net new customers, many are coming to the realization that revenue is being left on the table by ignoring the path to passion.
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B-TO-B COMPANIES ARE NOT IMMUNE TO
THE AGE OF THE CUSTOMER
Embrace the complete B-to-B customer lifecycle
• Next evolution demand generation
How do we blend lead generation activities with elements of traditional advertising to build awareness while creating demand by leveraging innovations in technology?
• Audience intelligence
How can we better understand our audience so that we may provide relevantly compelling content and messages aligned to their buyer’s journey?
• Technology
How can we use technology to address marketing problems and challenges?
• Conversion and optimization
How do we make it easy for prospects to find the solutions they want and make it simple for them to purchase while we continuously test, learn and optimize the conversion process?
• Customer experience
How do we delight business customers through our welcome, activation and performance at every touchpoint to encourage brand affinity and loyalty?
• Customer centricity
How do we identify our most valuable customers and leverage that knowledge to source new customers with the same attributes?
• Customer value
How do we cross-sell and up-sell to businesses to maximize customer value through increased share of wallet and increased retention?
• Customer nurturing
How can we foster the development of the customer relationship by nurturing customers with regular communications to meet their needs through the customer lifecycle stages?
With insights derived from observing behavior across the entire lifecycle, especially among group buying members, we also receive the benefits that come from considering, planning and executing on a complete B-to-B customer lifecycle strategy.
Organizations must activate marketing through channels. Never before have marketers had so many channels from which to choose. Herein lies the challenge: how can marketers predict which channels are likely to have the greatest impact, especially for those challenged with limited budgets?
What media mix is most likely to be most effective and efficient, considering that our audience has expanded to include the generational segment of Millennials?
That’s the million-dollar question.
Choosing from contextual targeting, behavioral targeting, programmatic display, Facebook Exchange, content syndication, site retargeting, social graph targeting, native advertising, online video, paid social, search retargeting, e-mail, search engine marketing, look-alike modeling, television, trade shows/events, direct mail, specialty, radio, out-of-home, print and alternative, not to mention organic search, social and public relations and publicity, is near the top of marketing’s most daunting tasks.
Everyone’s talking about digital, yet in-person events are still the most effective tactic, according to the Content Marketing Institute’s 2015 survey. Respondents indicate the effectiveness of many B-to-B tactics and in-person events (69%) came in ahead of webinars/webcasts (64%), videos (60%), blogs (60%) and case studies (58%).
And when we looked at where B-to-B marketing spend is occurring in 2015, Forrester and Direct Marketing News (2015) confirm that a significantly higher share of spend (14%) is occurring at in-person trade shows, conferences and events. Digital advertising/marketing was second (10%), followed by content marketing, website and direct marketing (all tied at 9%).
Mobile must be the major concern for all organizations, as evidenced by the insight from the CMO survey from McKinsey, Fuqua School of Business and the AMA, which shows that marketing spend on mobile is expected to triple within the next three years.
When that same survey examined the marketing spend of companies as a percentage of annual company revenues, it was revealed that 8.3% of company revenues is spent on marketing. This study included both B-to-C and B-to-B marketers. It has been our experience that, in B-to-B organizations, spend is averaging around 5% of annual revenue.