Starting a personal blog is one of the best marketing educations a person can get. The journey of a new blog to readership is marketing in its raw essence, the experience of which will make almost any person a better marketer.

The Inner World And Growth of a New Blogger

The silence of a crowded market makes you feel invisible.

You have a constant pull to sell out and republish common, boring, rehashed content that creates emotional rather then intellectual connections. I.e. it’s daring and hard to be original and authentic.

One piece of content is celebrated, the next two completely ignored even though you thought they were better.

You realize too late that a bad title killed your articles uptake.

You try harder, and what you thought was a good title is completely ignored.

You start to recognized your own authentic and inauthentic voices and become embarrassed for some of your prior work.

You finally become comfortable blogging, a feeling similar to when you’re at a party for 30 minutes and finally relax and join the flow.

You become too comfortable, and confuse your readership with content that doesn’t follow your theme. It’s self-indulgent or chases trends.

You recognize that trying too hard shows, and you go back to being quietly authentic.

You realize promotion is 50% of your effort per post.

You realize that promotion is a mistake, and that participation is 50% of your effort per post.

Twitter finally starts making sense to you. An epiphany strikes, and you realize that Twitter is like any market, just much faster. Authenticity, personality, focus, adding value, visibility, relationships are all core.

You realize that face-to-face connections are 50x more powerful then online connections. You start to realize that most top-bloggers are also top conference attendees and top conference presenters.

You realize that constant effort, strong focus on a theme, and lots of persistence are what make things happen- ripples, not splashes. Or drips if your prefer Seth Godin’s description.

You realize that you need to grind it out inch by inch, not try for the hail mary pass.

You realize that your new blog relationships are in fact soft-partnerships. People recognize when you help others, and in turn, help you.

And, ultimately, all this is in your bones because it was your credibility, your reputation, and your ego on the line.

You are now a way better marketer then you were six months ago.

Should you trust a blogless marketer? Of course. Maybe they have more important and valuable things to do, or they just don’t care for it. However, it’s worth taking into account, as one experience among many, what a blog means to a person’s marketing intuition and outlook.

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There was a post yesterday by Seth Godin on testing and how B2B marketers often avoid the early testing work that can save so much money later:

“Business to business marketing is almost always better if you treat it like direct marketing. ”

and

“Get it right for ten people before you rush around scaling up to a thousand. It’s far less romantic than spending money at the start, but it’s the reliable, proven way to get to scale if you care enough to do the work.”

You can read the full post here- Getting to scale: direct marketing vs. mass market thinking.

Testing is a common theme today- analytics, metrics and data-driven activities are exploding in popularity- but adoption is  slow. Marketers simply don’t take the time to test.

Data-Driven Marketing, a new book on data-driven marketing by Mark Jeffery, spends a lot of time on the challenge of getting to a data-driven marketing process, with the first two chapters being about why it’s not being done and how to overcome that:

Chapter 1: The Marketing Divide- Why 80 Percent of Companies Don’t Make Data-Driven Marketing Decisions- And Those Who Do Are the Leaders

Chapter 2: Where Do You Start? Overcoming the Five Obstacles to Data-Driven Marketing

In chapter 2, when discussing starting with small experiments to test campaigns before rolling out, Jeffery says:

“Although the majority of marketers are aware of this approach, my research shows that the vast majority of marketing organizations, almost 70 percent, do not use experiments to pilot test marketing campaigns relative to a control group. Why? The answer is that most marketing organizations’ reward systems are based on activities, not results”

This is what Pragmatic Marketing calls “list based marketing” and actively tries to change with their excellent Effective Product Marketing seminar.

In Chapter 2 Data-Driven Marketing lists 5 specific obstacles:

1. Getting started

2. Causality

3. Lack of Data

4. Resources and Tools

5. People and Change

Jeffery’s core recommendation? Start small and use wins to driven recognition of value and garner more focus and investment in data-driven activities. Also, find and partner with like-minded people to gain more influence. He also makes the important point that planning for testing and measurability early on allows you to structure your campaigns for those goals without a significant increase in cost.

Avinash Kaushik, Googles Analytics Evangelist,  identifies similar issues in the world of web analytics:

“You’ll find that data or tool are not your problem, it really is your company culture (both in terms of using data or getting your site tech teams to do things to give you data)” from How to Choose a Web Analytics Tool: A Radical Alternative

And Avinash has a good post on Seven Steps to Creating a Data Driven Decision Making Culture. where he talks about making the data easily relevant to the needs of stakeholders and showing specific wins in those areas.

Taking the direct marketing practice of testing to other areas is compelling. David Ogilvy, in Ogilvy on Advertising, published 1985, spends a lot of time talking about testing and what advertising can learn from direct marketing. Reading this book suggests that much of the success of Ogilvy’s advertising business flowed from a strong product marketing mindset (knowledge of the product and customer) and a strong testing ethos- things that weren’t traditional in advertising at the time.

In short, everyone agrees they need to be more data-driven, barriers to getting there are largely cultural, and small wins are the way to shift the culture and gather the focus required to scale the resources and infrastructure needed to effectively get there.

And if you are having trouble getting momentum even towards getting analytics support even towards a small win? Maybe you can’t get access to that data?

Consider using external analytical infrastructure- tools like Hubspot’s website grader, the Compete website for competitive information (Keep Your Enemies Closer), and Alexa for website traffic information. Also, Google is more powerful the you think. Use Advanced Google search methods to analyze your site for inbound links (link:<yoursite.com>) and help you search your and competitors sites (site:<site.com>) to look for trends and statistics.

People have an expert problem. When faced with an expert, they become dumb.

So when you place a subject matter expert in the middle of your company or group, does your group become smarter or dumber?

A bit of both, depending on the personality of the subject matter expert and the personality of the people in your group. How much of each could make the difference between a killer, high flying team tearing up a market, and a passive group of automatons parroting the status quo- people who broadcast rather then communicate.

Studies have shown that the critical thinking parts of the brain crater when faced with an expert. There is a host of supporting evidence and studies, often highlighted by the strange things people do when prompted by an expert. Like the nurse who famously put ear drops in the r.ear of a patient at the doctors written command.

Experts Not Always Trustworthy

To make matters worse, consider the recent Time article on experts, their studies, and their tendency to be wrong:

Experts and Studies: Not Always Trustworthy

The nutshell- we tend to follow experts who tend to be wrong due to the complexity of the world.

This raises an interesting question- we want to be market driven, and the key to that is market knowledge which we often get from subject matter experts.

The Challenge

Herein lies the challenge.

Now, in many cases we have a simple product, need, and market. A SME tightens things up, makes our prose a bit better, helps us know the customer better to create better relationships and empathy. Success!

Sadly, in my many years in the B2B enterprise software world I’ve never run into that. More often then not I’ve seen customers shaking their heads annoyed with our lack of a clue.

I remember one job at an apparel company where the vendor kept bringing in product development experts from an aerospace company. These were experts in experience, but not in mind. They could do nothing but try to apply airplane configuration management theories and practices to clothing development. It almost killed the seven figure deal.

And this is reality. You may end up with an aerospace expert, but apparel customers. The above scenario also played out in electronics, medical devices, and pharma. Early aerospace experts who were experts in experience, not mind, creating massive damage from what should have been a massive success.

It can be even more devious then that- simply taking an expert in the end user problems can drown out our understanding of the management problem- the clash between user personas and buyer personas. Take CRM- the user wants a faster, easier job and the manager wants business insight through operational dashboards.

You have the right industry, the right expert, the right solution, but the wrong understanding of the buyer and you have no clue that this is what’s killing lead generation and sales cycle progress.

In fact, early customers created a legion of ABC experts, and those experts can blunt both the voice of other industry experts but also the CREATION of those experts, because they weren’t certain of their instincts and didn’t pursue the signals they were seeing in their market contacts.

Now imagine promotion of the early experts with their industry wins, and you know have petrified your organizations learning and agility top to bottom.

The Solution

The solution? There are a few key steps to overcoming the expert problem.

First, if you get a real subject matter expert, make sure you get the best of the best- sharp, creative and able to think outside of the box. An expert in experience AND mind. This allows him to communicate his knowledge in a manner relevant to the team members and customers that knowledge is being shared with. Hire a master of “it depends”, who asks clarifying questions and creates the knowledge that the situation demands. Hire someone who never gives the same answer twice, and never answers which asking his own questions first.

This is critical to give actionable knowledge to your team (relevant and applicable to their needs), but also to teach them the thinking behind the knowledge. This helps mitigate the expert problem because they are getting knowledge + context, which enables them to apply their growing knowledge in a flexible, and hence relevant, manner to their activities.

This is also important because opening up new markets means become deeper experts in multiple aspects of the business, users, and buyers, across various industries.

The second key is having enough expert minds (as opposed to specific expert knowledge) across your organization. Market knowledge linchpins who understand the expert problem and work aggressively to overcome it, always learning and always becoming the expert themselves. Placing these throughout your organization you ensure the movement of actionable knowledge and ensure your company is always communicating, never broadcasting.

To make a soccer/football analogy, these are your Xavis, Schneiders and Iniesta’s- the creative midfielders who are always learning and creating knew knowledge and plans in an ever changing landscape.