Putting Marketing on Steroids

As economic recovery seems like an increasingly realistic prospect, business leaders are now talking about how to grasp opportunity and meet the imminent new competitive landscape.

According to Harvard Business Review blogger, Dick Patton, the answer might be performance enhancers found in supplementing the traditional 4Ps of the marketing mix. Patton suggests four key areas:

• Responsibility marketing
• Organizational leadership
• Insights about customers
• Digital marketing

Check out the full article here.

New Report Points to the Possible Saturation of Corporate Blogging

The University of Massachusetts Center for Marketing Research  just released a study of the Fortune 500 corporations and their use of social media. It indicates that the level of corporate blogging seems to have flat-lined while other social media platforms, especially Twitter, are still being adopted rapidly.

Among the Fortune 500 companies, 22% have a public blog that has been posted to within the 12 months. That’s up just 6% from a 2008 study.

The top 100 companies (20%) on the list represent 39% of the 108 blogs.

The level of interactivity each blog allowed was also reviewed — 90% percent of the Fortune 500 blogs take comments, have RSS feeds and take subscriptions.

When you look at Twitter usage the numbers show dramatically adoption. Of the 108 blogs, 93 (86%) are linked directly to a corporate Twitter account, a more than 300% increase over the 2008 study.

Of companies on the 2009 Fortune 500, 173 (35%) have a Twitter account with a post within the past 30 days. Of these companies, four of the top five corporations consistently post on their Twitter accounts. 

Podcasting and video are on the rise also. 19% of the 2009 Fortune 500 use podcasting (up from 16%) and 31% are using video on their blog sites (up from 21%).

So what does this indicate? Perhaps it points to the difficulty of maintaining a meaningful blog in a public company, which has to contend with so many regulations and legal  concerns. It’s pretty hard to sustain an authentic voice when everything must be reviewed by the legal department.

Maybe the increasing use of Twitter indicates a recognition that it is easier to push 1-line statements through legal review than a full-page commentary.  And really, does the world need another blog?

Over the last 10 years in running Hyperactive, I have been amazed at how few companies have a marketing plan before we begin working with them. The reality is that successful marketing for any organizations invariably starts with a marketing plan, a blueprint for action.

As budgets get tightened, a marketing plan is critical to prioritize and select the best promotion opportunities. And it can directly impact the bottom line. Research shows that companies with a marketing plan can create a 24 to 30 percent improvement in sales compared with those with no plan.

You don’t have to wait until the beginning of a calendar or fiscal year to develop a marketing plan. But developing a plan is something that many companies tend to think of when they are heading into a new year.  So in honour of the coming new year, I thought I’d provide some considerations for your 2010 B2B marketing plan.

Is there a new market you need to pursue?

• Database development
• Contact strategy
• Promotional plan
• Public relations/media coverage

Are there new marketing tactics to consider?

• Blogging
• Microblogging (Twitter)
• Search engine optimization
• Social network participation (Facebook, LinkedIn)
• Email marketing
• Social media monitoring & outreach
• Pay per click
• Video marketing
• Social media advertising

Is there a different way to do things?

• Partnership stategy
• Referral sources
• Outsourcing marketing tactics
• Pay only for what you use
• Farm a new or different field
• Improve customer response process

These are just a few considerations as you consider what you need to do differently or better in the new year – just designed to get you thinking.

“Modern” sales tax to help Ontario business

Ontario Minister of Revenue John Wilkinson spoke at a Mississauga Board of Trade event on the impending Harmonized Sales Tax (Bill 218), which was successfully passed by the legislature following its third reading yesterday.

“There are two things people absolutely hate – taxes and change,” he joked as he began his address, first discussing the changed economic climate that has created a new environment for doing business and the need to modernize the Canadian tax system to follow suit.

“With the new HST tax, we’re going to assist people where we tax the consumption of wealth more, and we tax the creation of wealth less… that’s what progressive modern economies do in the 21^st century.” 

Canada and the United States are the only two developed countries in the world that do not do that. But Canada is changing in order to give business a competitive advantage. According to Minister Wilkinson, HST will make our products priced more competitively both on the world stage and here in Canada, an important consideration as Canadian businesses re-examine their focus on trade with the United States.

Minister Wilkinson also spoke of upcoming tax cuts being introduced in 2010 for both capital and small business tax. All good news for business.

Check out the Ontario Ministry of Revenue website for more information:
www.rev.gov.on.ca/en/index.html

Branding Aligns With Personal Development

I spent the weekend at a personal development conference for business owners. The entire experience was motivating and uplifting – a great way to conclude a challenging year.

The final speaker of the weekend was Darren Hardy, Publisher of Success Magazine, who spoke of holding “big audacious” goals for your business and your life. And he outlined the principles of success that he has seen in all the entrepreneurs, politicians and celebrities that he has interviewed over the years.

While Hardy spoke of the success principles in the context of an entrepreneur or business owner developing and becoming a better leader for their business, I thought the topic and Hardy’s inspirational nuggets had dramatic parallels to B2B marketing and branding.

• “Your outcomes in business and in life is how the world is responding to you.” True, for us personally. But also true of our brands – when we have an exceptional product, with a complete package of customer service, delivery and ongoing development, the market responds positively. When you sacrifice one core element in order to save money or because you don’t think it is important, it will sacrifice some level of success for your product.
• “Who you are speaks so loud, I can’t hear what you’re saying.” It doesn’t matter what you say about your product or service. What matters is your customers’ experience of it. That is your true brand.
• “Consistency wins every time.” It’s true. The way your customers experience your company, product or service, should be the same every single time.

Very simple branding lessons, wrapped up in human success factors.

Pondering a Future Without Oil

Jeff Rubin

At the Innovators Alliance event on Wednesday evening, dinner concluded with a presentation by the controversial economist and author of Why Your World is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller.  Jeff Rubin outlined his philosphy that the rising cost of oil, tied to its diminishing availability, is going to create a decline in globalization and a return to a more local economy.

Pointing to the slowly improving economy, he suggested that oil prices will skyrocket as demand increases again. He proposed scenarios of what our world would be like then and where prosperity and business growth will shift to. He kept the audience contemplating what a world without international trade, long distance driving and cheap products will look like. It was a somewhat mind-stopping proposition.

But in a room of 50+ successful entrepreneurs, Jeff Rubin’s message also got the creativity flowing. As he spoke of the coming changes, Jeff suggested that this would mean revitalized local agriculture, increasing local demand for steel, improved mass transit, and strengthened local communities. These changes spell opportunity for the entrepreneurial types.

What’s the big deal?

There are many challenges in marketing a company’s products and services. Generating leads. Making marketing more measurable. Understanding the complex decision-making roles. Developing the right business leads. Pre-qualifying leads that come from marketing activities.

But there is one core challenge that may be the biggest issue in marketing: Defining the core differentiator.  We see it over and over in the early stages of work with a company. Ask them how they are different and they stumble.

Apparently the challenge of defining your differentiator is ubiquitous.

In speaking to the members of Innovators Alliance on Wednesday evening, Ontario Minister of Economic Development and Trade, Sandra Pupatello, said the biggest problem she sees in Ontario business owners, is knowing how to really set the company’s products and services apart and how they are different.

As Pupatello put it: What the big deal about your product or service? Figure it out and solve perhaps the biggest challenge you’ll ever resolve.

Bright Future for Ontario? So says Pupatello

Sandra Pupatello, Ontario Minister of Economic Development and Trade, speaks informally with an exclusive gathering of entrepreneurs from Innovators Alliance

Last night I was at the Innovators Alliance Evening with Innovators event. The exclusive evening event started with a presentation and dialogue by the Ontario Minister of Economic Development and Trade, Sandra Pupatello. She put a positive spin on Ontario’s economy, pointing to the latest statistics showing that:

• Ontario is the 7th largest economic jurisdiction in North America, behind mostly US states.
• The province has $560 billion in GDP
• Ontario is double the GDP of the next largest province – Quebec is $301.5 billion and Alberta is $291 billion
• The population in Ontario is 420 million
• 62 percent of Ontario’s workforce holds post-secondary education.

That was the positive spin.

In the open discussion, when Innovators Alliance members asked questions from the audience, Pupatello was open about some of the challenges in servicing the needs of business from within government. When asked about the Second Career funding strategy by the president of Trios College, she spoke of how the program ran out of funding in an unprecedented three months and how she pushed for another $78 million in funding in the last quarter to service the needs of the 40,000+ people who were still waiting for help. When Stewart McLaren, president of Almac Industrial Systems, asked about the creation of a nuclear cluster in Canada, Pupatella spoke about how the base of energy in Ontario is 50 percent nuclear, but questioned whether the province was going to be buying their own, with the recent bid process. And when asked about how to get the attention of government for innovative energy conservation products, she spoke of Ontario as being the largest energy users in Canada because of the province’s industrial base and how important conservation is. Apprximately 15 percent of the member companies represented were in the business of alternative energy supply or energy management.

Pupatello offered to help individual entrepreneurs in the room access resources and support they had asked about. And the consensus from members I spoke to was that she was definitely a different kind of leader than they had seen in the Ministry before. Perhaps that points to a positive future for Ontario business.

2010 Outlook: #4 – 4. Marketing Will Be über-Connected

Harvard Business Publishing released a piece early in November that identified the companies that are the most uber-connected workplaces in North America. See the report here. Most were places with open access and use of social media.

How does that impact on B2B marketing? With the evolution of wikis, blogs, microblogs and corporate social networks, organizations have an unprecedented opportunity to connect on multiple levels with their customers, constituents, partners and staff. By connecting at multiple points, they foster a sense of connectedness and openness. They can improve problem-solving or ensure cross-cultural collaboration. The challenge will be to maximize connections and collaboration, a time-consuming process, without making the process to automated or irrelevant.

2010 Outlook: #3 – Customer Focus will Rule Marketing Strategy

The understanding of what customers really need and how to connect with them will be the hottest need for B2B marketers in 2010.

The Institute for the Study of Business Markets recently released their B-to-B Marketing Trends 2010 report in which the number one issue on the minds of B2B leaders is how to develop approaches and methods to better understand what customers really need, beyond what they can say or articulate and then, using that knowledge, how to develop opportunities to create real value.

What does that mean for Canadian marketers? In developing your company’s 2010 marketing strategy, focus on establishing ways to connect with customers in meaningful ways and finding effective ways to capture and use the information from those customer interactions.