The Challenge is Filters, Not Overload

We tend to think we live in a age of information overload.

Yes, we do. But we have for over a hundred years. Information overload is not the problem.

Clay Shirky nailed this with a talk called It’s Not Information Overload. It’s Filter Failure.

The filters we developed have failed, and we need to build new filters- socially, and as marketing departments for our companies.

And not just for our current content levels, but for the massive increases in content we will be creating over the next few years as marketing becomes the primary sales communication channel and needs to engage in the specialized conversations once managed entirely by sales.

Library Marketing To the Rescue

Doug Kessler has a great post on content marketing and managing this process:

Library Marketing: The Next Big Challenge For Content Marketing

And I agree. I think this is the most important initiative for B2B marketing over the next 5-10 years and it is incredibly complicated and new ground for everyone.

Libraries are one of the most powerful filtering mechanisms invented. We usually think of them as aggregators, and not filters, but this is limiting and can lead to the wrong implementation of the concept online.

Think about your average visit to a library or bookstore – do you feel overwhelmed or empowered?

Most people, I think, feel empowered.

How much content is advertised in a library? Provided in your face? Very little. How much is controlled? Very little. They’ve put a user-directed filtering system in place that we understand and trust, and it makes our journey enjoyable. Also, physical constraints ensure limited content per topic, and the economics of publishing result in a base level of quality.

In the case of online libraries and bookstores, social mediation provides the filters- best seller lists, reviews, ratings, recency and lists. When I access my local library online I have Amazon open in another window, and correlate the information between the two. Amazon is my filter.

Is The Entire Internet Your Library?

Another aspect of your library strategy is considering what the actual library is. A large part of the content journey your prospect takes is outside of your website, and you need to consider that. Zappos has a great Twitter summary page that brings part of that outside journey into their website. You can help your prospects by helping them with that journey and facilitating it as best you can. This can be linking out of your site, bringing reflections of the outside world in (Zappos), or participating in social media to make your library content a dynamic conversation.

The Best Filter is Your Prospect – Empower That

You will only understand your buyer personas so much, and, in the end, that’s an average. Some already know you, some don’t; some are visionaries, some are risk-averse conservatives and some are experts, some are beginners.

This means that the most important filter is your prospect’s choice. So when implementing your library marketing strategy, think user-directed filtering, not company-controlled presentation. That’s not to say you don’t present- that is a value add activity, and core to lead nurturing- but you don’t do so exclusively. Give up some control, and empower your user to allow him to add his value to your interaction.

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Who Should We Market To

Marketers often talk about who we need to market to, and how we should be market-driven, customer-driven, buyer-centric, and at all costs avoid being product driven.

However, there is a danger here. It doesn’t consider the the question of who we can effectively market to.

Say you’ve done all the modern marketing activities perfectly- you have a buyer, a problem, a need, and a market. Now I’m going to do the unthinkable and suggest that maybe you should NOT market to this buyer.

Why? Because he’s not obsessed.

Seth Godin, in this TED video, makes a good case that markets develop around otaku, a Japanese term for an obsessed audience, and if you can’t find an obsessed core, then the chances of building a big market are limited.

“Hot sauce has otaku, mustard doesn’t”, and that’s why there are thousands of hot sauces and 4 or 5 mustards according to Seth Godin in the above talk.

This is not a concept we embrace often in B2B marketing- that people might be excited about what we are offering. But the truth is, lots of people are, and in many cases we might do well targeting those pockets of obsession, even if they aren’t our direct target.

In a new market, you need to consider who is obsessed and what impact this will have on your ability to spread your message.

Early Market Otaku

In Crossing the Chasm, the obsessed are the visionaries who are interested in frameworks because they have a need that isn’t common to a market- indeed, the market isn’t developed yet- and their only path is a framework. Indeed, I’ve met many potential customers building their own solutions not realizing a solution built for another market is a perfect fit for their requirements. And when presented with the solution they often think the vendor is exaggerating.

If a visionary is looking for a framework to create his vision, this requires content that explains how technology can be applied to creating a solution. This is not product-centric, but rather solution-centric- you are messaging to the audiences interest in applying technology to solve a problem. The business problem is accepted and the buyer’s problem is how to solve the business problem. The most successful business Intelligence vendors excelled at this, weaving both the business problem and the solution problem messages together to answer both questions for different audiences.

This is the holy grail of the early-market: the rare risk taker who will embrace and sponsor a new technology to feed his obsession.

Your Visionaries May Not Be Who You Expect

If you want to make a sale early in a market, you need a visionary- an obsessed person desperately wanting a solution. This often is, contrary to popular thought, IT leadership. They are tasked with maintaining information systems for competitive advantage and they love solving business problems. They often see the need before business does and they are obsessed with the general concept of solving business problems with IT.

In the early markets I’ve been in, about half of the early sales have been to obsessed IT managers looking for ways to help their business. Either they were replacing a system, or fixing a problem that they were given responsibility for and had a discretionary budget for. They sold the business leadership on the merit of looking at a new solution, often against significant initial business reluctance or indifference.

Economic Buyers Are Not Usually Thought Leaders

What are some of the other centers of obsessions that we can build a marketplace around?

In many complex B2B markets those that are obsessed are the thought leaders. It’s almost a given that some level of obsession is what produces thought leaders. Some are professional obsessors- the journalists, analysts and marketers (hopefully) that are obsessed with finding meaningful patterns of need and value. Others are obsessed only in their own key fields like accounting, governance, product design, and quality, but still offer recommendations to buyers.

The challenge with thought leaders is that they are often not buyers, or even users. Indeed, it’s rare that economic buyers are thought leaders- they are too busy being management leaders.
So this type of marketing is more removed from the sale. It’s awareness marketing, and attempting to bridge awareness from an interested group to a currently disinterested or unaware group.

Indeed, with leads and sales you may be able to create equivalent excitement in thought leaders and buyers, but thought leaders spread ideas, buyers generally do not, and buying feels a lot less risky when you seem surrounded by an idea from multiple sources.

If you are not explicitly marketing to thought leaders, you may knocking at the door of an empty home.

There is a possible pain and need, but nobody has been talking about it and without any immediate familiarity with your message, there are a lot of other pressing issues to crowd out the issue you’ve so artfully raised with your economic buyer. He’s not emotionally able to buy in to your message, and he’s not going to talk about what you just communicated to him.

Regarding obsession at the economic buyer level, there are some exceptions. Executives are obsessed with data and knowledge that improves their ability to manage- hence the meteoritic rise of CRM and business intelligence solutions in general. But even that field was driven by an incredible amount of activity in the business thought leadership of consultancies and vendors.

The good news for marketers is that many markets are overflowing with thought leaders and their problems, and no solutions are directed at them. They sit there befuddled by all the noise they hear from vendors that doesn’t speak to their passion and needs. This creates great opportunities for penetrating the noise in a market and getting your message heard in a compelling manner.

Standard “It Depends” Disclaimers Still Apply

In some markets you focus entirely at the economic buyer-level. You get the meeting, he hears you out, and he passes you on to his thought leadership team for evaluation and due diligence. Selling to VITO (very important top officer) at it’s best. But this isn’t most markets, especially early ones. You need to test whether you have that access to the buyer AND his passion if you are targeting him. If not, go lower, tickle the centers of obsession, and have them bubble you up to the buyer-level you ultimately need sponsorship from.

Two Key Factors for Obsession-Driven Marketing

If a market is created by spreading an idea, you have two variables to consider: how good the idea is, and how obsessed the audience will be with the idea.

Some good ideas can’t connect with an obsessed group, and there is no way to make the idea much better. Then this will probably be a tough market to grow.

But if there is an obsessed group near your markets, addressing thought leaders allows you to tap into the potential obsession that surrounds your market.

And that’s it- two simple factors for thought leader marketing strategy. Next comes execution- where to find and how to message thought leaders.

Where to Find Thought Leaders?

Blogs disproportionally influence thought leaders. You don’t see people posting “Hey check out this whitepaper” on websites and in conversations. They are posting links to blogs. Look at Twitter- are they posting links to the front page of vendors sites? No, they are posting links to blogs that talk about a business problem, a vendor, or even the vendor talking about the business problem.

And as mentioned earlier, your technical buyer is often your thought leader in a business solution market. Having implemented solutions for other business areas, IT leadership can be obsessive about the value to doing something similar for a similar business problem. And if there are not enough obsessive, well-heard business thought leaders in the business, press or analyst community, this may be a good channel for your message.

How to Message Thought Leaders

Direct, formal messages will invariably be weaker coming from a vendor. Due to historical communication channel constraints, vendors felt they had to share all their information at once.

The Secret of Being Boring is to Say Everything – Voltaire

Like a good short story, the best bits are the bits that are missing and engage the concern and interest of the reader.

So, to effectively message thought leaders, you need to break your message up into shorter, singular pieces that discuss a concept, but don’t teach it.

Compare the following two themes:

“Interesting ways that ERP can change organizational behaviour”
vs.
“How ERP Drives Improvements in Organizational Behaviour”

I would be partial to click on the first title, but would be hesitant to click on the second.

Traditional marketing channels don’t really allow the possibility to communicate in an interesting way. Too much generic information needs to be presented in a communication channel of limited size, and most of the formats are already stigmatized as vapid and meaningless vendor self-promotion as a result.

Blogs offer a great opportunity here. Blogs are informal, personal opinions that allow a wide variety of styles, but that emphasizes short, interesting and concise pieces.

Blogs also allow a stream of content over time that fits buying cycles and allows an expansion of content.

White papers that launch from the blog and keep a similar focus (2-4 pages, valuable, interesting content) also offer great value.

Finally, to message to thought leaders and other audiences marketing needs to drastically reinvent their website and collateral architecture to support a massive increase in specialized content that can be found by the each unique audience.

But you can start with a blog, and get a lot of value from it immediately. Also, a blog will often suggest a good content architecture as more more content emerges- something you won’t be able to plan upfront effectively (blog posts are great tests of content).

So, the suggestion is start with blogs and whitepapers written in a similar single-theme manner, and then use the feedback from that to evolve a content architecture.

While marketing is resource limited and we can’t market to everyone who may influence our market, thought leader personas should be front and center with economic buyer personas in almost any new, complex market. In later markets, thought leaders become a critical additional channel to reach and gain mindshare in your buyers.

So maybe give your traditional Economic Buyer Persona’s a break for a few days, and start developing some Thought Leader Personas.

And consider subscribing to this blog to get our followup posts on marketing content-architecture and how to test your content-architecture over the next few weeks.

Malcolm Gladwell on spaghetti sauce | Video on TED.com http://bit.ly/9K6Amd

A great video on how testing uncovered hidden diversity that 20 to 30 years of asking questions didn’t and led to the creation of extra-chunky spaghetti sauce.

Another interesting example from the video- creating one coffee roast for a group would test an average of 60/100. Segmenting the group into 4 and creating their ideal coffee would test an average of 75 or 78/100.

The practical result?

According to Gladwell, “the difference between coffee that makes you wince, and coffee that makes you deliriously happy”. The same process taking into account diversity led to a product that was fantastic compared to a product that was bland and distasteful.

Bottom line- seeking universal principles can give you something no one cares for and severely undermines opportunities for success. Testing and segmentation provide the means for radically improving your performance.

This has been well proven in all kinds of business, where even slight change in operating model can segment a market quickly by making one segment happier. However, much of this segmentation happens by chance as vendors evolve accidentally in different directions.

Product marketing and marketing, if they can harness this principle, can also shift buyer responses from wincing to deliriously happy.

(Note: this post was originally titled ‘Are You Serving Extra Chunky Products and Messages?’)