Prospect Nurturing

Again, this is a bread-and-butter strategy for selling to businesses in a B2B scenario. I'll use my role with Silverpop as an example here. My job as an evangelist is two-pronged: the first part involves counseling and mentoring digital marketers in-person, and helping them tackle their most difficult issues. On that front, I see approximately 100 customers annually. The other half of my role is more scale-oriented. Beyond one-to-one thought leadership, I have the task of writing three to four blog posts each quarter, doing about 50 speaking engagements a year, and developing various whitepapers, tip sheets, and authored articles each year. It's a bit like a professor's gig in the sense that it's “publish or die.”

We've proven pretty effective at scaling this across our entire organization. There were less than 10 blog contributors when I joined in 2011. That number exceeds 25 today, and we put out 300 to 400 posts annually with all kinds of perspectives. We also deliver more than 20 whitepapers each year, which average 10 to 12 pages and represent a significantly deep dive on a specific topic.

So why do so many people across our organization take the two to three hours required to write an insightful blog post, that often? For the simple reason that all that content powers the conversation between Silverpop and our customers—both existing and prospective. Our deep library on all topics related to digital marketing allows our sales team to share strategy in support of specific product-oriented conversations. If someone wants to understand how behavioral marketing fits with a loyalty program, there are no fewer than four or five blog posts on that topic from the prior year.

We also undertake primary research to support our customers' and prospects' need to understand how to benchmark their existing programs. Whether that's our annual Email Benchmark Report or the recent global research on Best Friend Brands (see Chapter 15), these are key content items that serve the absolutely critical role of educating our customers in exchange for them sharing more specific details about their marketing needs.

This type of multimonth or multiyear orchestration is a hallmark of almost every successful B2B brand, and, to put an execution-level fine point on it, I'll refer back to the previous chapter's discussion about scoring user behaviors. When broken down to their smallest component parts, you can and should score each piece of content—blog post, whitepaper, tip sheet, and so forth—separately. When you combine and map these scores over time, they provide an excellent view of who's most interested in your solution. There are very few tactics better at guiding a high-velocity sales team in how to deploy their resources against an always-shifting pipeline of prospects.

Although I've focused deeply on our own B2B thinking around lead nurturing, I know many consumer-facing brands who apply many of the same tactics to derive an “engagement” score as opposed to a “propensity-to-buy” score. By understanding which customers are regularly opening their emails, repeatedly viewing high-value SKUs, and interacting with lifestyle-oriented content, they're able to build highly active segments and equally inactive segments.

Often, it's critical to monitor the inactive customers in B2C because high-volume senders seek to keep their email reputation clean at the Internet Service Provider (ISP) level. Most progressive retailers have either a manual or automated version of list cleanup that concentrates their efforts on those who have opened or clicked in the last 9 to 12 months. To ignore inactive users and continue to blast away almost always leads to deliverability pain. This is why understanding who isn't consuming your content can be just as important as knowing who is. For an even deeper dive on dealing with inactive users—or disinterested recipients as I call them—see Chapter 12.

Retention/Loyalty

Although the specific types of content may not change radically across each of these disciplines (white papers, blog posts, etc.), the focus of each must represent the specific phase the customer is in. When thinking through customer retention and loyalty, the best marketers I know are seeking to deepen both the product and the emotional connection between the user and the solution they're using. Beyond features and efficiency, this is the time to inspire your customers to be better at their jobs—to be promoted more often or to enjoy their own success more deeply.

For example, think about all the small business-related content that's created by accounting brands as large as Intuit or as niche as my friends Steve Bristol and Allan Branch's business, LessAccounting. Both brands understand that accounting is a relatively unwelcome task for every small business owner and they seek to reduce the stress via better software. The difference in the big-company version of the offering (QuickBooks) is a software-level feature race, but the niche version of the offering (LessAccounting) is more focused on “making accounting suck less.” Both solve the business problem, but I'll give you two guesses which brand engenders more passion and dedication. Yep it's the nimble, irreverent brand that empathizes with its user base and seeks to alleviate the annoyance of the task.

This is also a perfect time to reaffirm your customers' choice of your product or service, and to begin a dialogue about them contributing content that will further turbocharge your marketing efforts. Reaching out to request community participation or app reviews, or asking satisfied customers to take reference calls from prospects in their industry are all great ways to leverage your satisfied customers into another positive content moment.

If you're really hitting on all cylinders, you'll want a very proactive case study function that builds a library of content you can share with both customers and other key audiences like the press and analyst firms. You should be prepared to produce and author the content yourself to ensure it works best for your objectives. In addition, most customers simply will not have time to dedicate to a noncore activity like this. If you're a prospective buyer and can read a case study of a satisfied customer in a similar industry, you'll be able to complete much of the presales work very quickly.

It's also important to engage your existing audience in advocate-level interactions across social media. Make it easy for them to tweet quotes from whitepapers with embedded social sharing links. This “social proof” is a critical aspect in almost every buyer's decision-making process. One of the fundamental reasons we attend technology conferences is to understand what and how our industry is thinking about a specific issue. If you can approximate that same peer dynamic via social media, you'll be operating at a very high level.

Postpurchase Content

Finally, let's focus on an ultraspecific version of targeted content that has come to market in the last 12 to 18 months, and it's almost exclusively a consumer-facing strategy. I first saw this tactic employed by one of our customers in an attempt to solve a very specific business problem that's a symptom of being a mainly online retailer of high-end sporting goods.

The company had a few retail outlets, and they clearly understood that many of their products depended on expertise delivered by a highly trained, experienced in-store rep. When it came to fitting ski boots appropriately, that in-person experience conveyed all the important details like how the boot should and shouldn't feel, correct fit, and suggested binding settings. Because the retailer was very good at web-based commerce in general, they found themselves selling an increasing number of these rather expensive ski boots via e-commerce.

But what started as a great thing for revenue turned into a returns issue over time. People were buying $300 to $400 ski boots, trying them on in their living rooms, and thinking they were the worst-fitting thing they'd ever placed on their feet. If you've ever been skiing, you know how utterly uncomfortable ski boots are right until the moment you point your skis down the hill. Right then, all the engineering is obvious and a great midmarket boot can make a huge difference in how much you enjoy a day of skiing.

To mitigate this returns issue, the retailer developed an ultraspecific two-touch postpurchase email campaign with a fully automated program based on a specific set of SKUs. The audience was anyone who had bought a pair of boots. Figure 6.1 shows what the first message looks like.

This simple recognition of a purchase, along with links to a fitting guide and more onsite content, went a very long way in reinforcing a high-dollar purchase in the buyer's fragile postpurchase, prereturn moment. Returns slowed down almost immediately, and the brand took advantage of the moment brilliantly.

Once they were confident they'd addressed the buyer's concerns with a well-executed multitouch campaign, they decided to test a cross-sell offer that looked like the one shown in Figure 6.2.

And guess what? These postpurchase campaigns were among the most interactive emails they'd sent in months. Open rates were above 58 percent and the click-to-open rate was 45 percent—both incredibly strong numbers for a high-volume ecommerce retailer. The key here was clearly understanding a buyer's postpurchase mentality, and developing an effective multitouch campaign to reinforce that critical moment. Beyond supporting that single purchase, you can imagine the long-term customer satisfaction of buyers who are confident their favorite brand is personally vested in their happiness.

So Whose Job Is It?

Although it sounds easy on paper, great content strategy often requires many organizations—both brand new startups and fully established companies—to rethink roles. Your average sales pro probably isn't going to comprehend the subtlety required to architect this conversation, but on the other side of the spectrum, your 23-year-old social media manager isn't going to know your product and market cold. The key is to hire and train at least one marketing employee specifically to focus on content. Some days this means they'll create the content (think managing your company's Twitter presence); other days they'll lead others in the organization to create meaningful content in their areas of expertise.

So why isn't content just another marketing function we can assign to whoever's least busy? Because nowadays, this is how we first meet our customers. If you run a small shop in any city, would you scream at every person who walked through the door to buy something now? Managing a more subtle conversation that begins with you adding value, and one that supports the buyer's journey, has quickly become the norm. You're going to need to architect every step in that process—from a great welcome message to a free or low-cost trial designed to prove your value without enterprise-level investment, all the way through great postpurchase support. Leaving this to chance is a great way to find yourself struggling to stay in business 12 to 18 months from now.

Conclusion

The key takeaway when thinking about content is that this is your new form of customer acquisition. The best news is that it's nowhere near as expensive as the acquisition channels of the past—specifically TV advertising or an enterprise sales force. The worst news is that it's a new competency that you'd better solve for quickly before a smaller, faster competitor figures it out. Beyond the pure acquisition aspects, great content builds and supports highly personalized relationships that lead to more revenue per customer and higher buyer satisfaction over time.

Great content strategy isn't rocket science, but neither is it easy for just any company to execute. Developing your competency in this area of marketing will pay big dividends in the next 18 to 24 months as almost every buyer's expectation is raised beyond just a simple transaction. The personal and informational relationship you build with your buyers will determine how quickly and how often they choose your product or service.

Don't miss this opportunity because it requires you to think slightly differently. Think of it as an all-new moment in the marketing spectrum where you might be able to grab some market share from a larger competitor—or at least improve the quality of your current relationships.