Modern medicine is evidence-based. The adoption of evidence-based medicine saw our lifespans double in the space of 50 years. That’s a remarkable achievement.

Sadly, evidence is missing in modern marketing practices. We rarely see any marketing discussion mention anything about significance, confounding variables, or correlation versus causation. Most blog and social media recommendations are anecdotal evidence masquerading as statistics. Overall, there is a disturbing lack of anything that one could fairly call evidence in recommending any particular marketing practice.

This becomes apparent when you start asking some simple questions about “statistically” justified marketing recommendations.

1. Are these numbers for B2B or B2C?

2. What is the impact of brand and market Leadership on these numbers?

3. What is the impact of fashionable trends on these numbers?

4. What is the sample size?

5. What is the breakdown by industry? Company size?

At this point, you are probably not getting your emails answered or your phone calls returned.

Some of these questions and related concepts have obvious ramifications- brand leaders are usually older, more mature, have larger budgets, and are more likely to optimize existing processes. So…any numbers hinting at a best practice and revenue growth needs to control for brand and market leadership. And any recommendation needs to be prefaced by “it depends”.

Generally, any statement like ’65% of best-in-class companies use X and grew an average of 20% more year over year then non-best-in-class companies’ is meaningless, or should be treated as meaningless without access to the support data and methods used. Without decent evidence and analysis there is absolutely no reason to make ANY kind of inference here between the use of X and growth. And even given that data and where there is a strong causal effect, there is the important question of whether the principle is applicable to other industries, markets, or business models.

In medicine, there is a very cool organization called The Cochrane Collaboration which aims to improve health care by providing systemic reviews of the quality of evidence being used to propose and select treatments- i.e. which studies are good, and which suck. Even in esteemed scientific circles peer-reviewed journals aren’t enough, and The Cochrane Collaboration aims to raise the bar by provide systemic evaluation of the quality of studies and the quality of how they are published. Is the data available? Can the study be repeated? These are other markers of quality are emphasized and graded.

Evidence-based medicine had doubled our lifespans. Would evidence-based marketing double our revenues? Is it even possible with so many confounding variables at play in the business world?

Test-Driven Marketing has been published in the October 2010 Pragmatic Marketing newsletter!

Pragmatic Marketing October 2010 Newsletter- Is Sales Becoming Marketing Tech Support?

Have a look and let me know what you think.

If you like this article, consider reading a few of our other marketing strategy posts:

When Being Customer Driven is Dangerous

The Dark Matter of Selling: The Missing 90% of the Sales Process

Please Stop Generic Enterprise Marketing!

and my personal favourite

Can Subject Matter Experts Destroy Your Company?

And please say hi-  leave some comments and if you liked what you’ve read subscribe to the Test-Driven Marketing RSS feed and follow @weerdlogic on Twitter.

Oh, and there is also a new Test-Driven Marketing LinkedIn
Group

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.

The Dawn of the Hyper-Literate Society

In Why Marketing is Becoming Like Software Development we discussed how marketing was becoming Test-driven and Agile, driven by the demands of the Internet business environment.

The basic reason for this was that the Internet has created hyper-literacy in buyers, radically changing the sales process in ways companies have been very slow to respond to.

Much like how the printed word extended the reach of general information to the masses, the Internet has extended the reach of specialized information to the masses. Literacy has been replaced by hyper-literacy, and this has radically influenced many of our institutions and behaviours. Patients know almost as much about their illnesses as their doctors, dieters are reading primary research on nutrition and arguing about causation versus correlation on diet websites. And buyers in B2B marketplaces are driving sales people crazy.

This raises the question- how much are sales and marketing changing? Will sales still matter?

New Channels of Communication Change The Game

Sales used to be the primary conduit for the customer to learn about a product or solution. There were essentially no other channels. A few brochures and white papers would be produced, but that was only in support of the sales interaction- that collateral wasn’t meant to sell, and never fit that closely to the customer’s specific reality. And this was the necessity based on reality- to do it any other way would have required the sales team dropping a file cabinet off at a customers site.

As a result, marketing wasn’t that important. Couldn’t be that important. Marketing worked on lead generation and trade shows because that was the best they could do through the limited customer communication channels available to them. Brochures were background value-add to the sales process, but often unread due to their being so generic.

That has changed, and companies are just starting to get it. The Internet has opened up many other channels for the customer to get information, and provides an encyclopedia of knowledge that allows him to find it.

When you hear about about “buying cycles” replacing “sales cycles” in sales strategy, this isn’t just an improved understanding of purchasing psychology. It’s something that has been enabled by a fundamental change in the environment.

Customers buy on their own terms because they can. And as a result, marketing has become far more important then it was 10 years ago, and the role of sales has changed – or should have changed- dramatically.

Marketing Has Become a Larger Part of Selling

The result of the Internet channel dominating the sales conversation (especially when we, the vendor aren’t present) means that Marketing has to become a much larger part of sales.

To do so, Marketing must do two essential things- support the Internet customer communication channel, and measure that channel through analytics.

Marketing Needs to Generate Content That Sells Rather then Supports Selling

Why? Again because the customer is consuming this information on his own via the Internet. If you aren’t providing it, someone else will.

This content also needs to be more specific and relevant to the buyer. There is no sales team present to interpret and communicate a deeper message- this is your chance to get your message through. Traditionally marketing content was marginally relevant due to no delivery channel to the customer (reference the awkward file cabinet point above) and a resulting generic message. That channel is now there, and better yet, it allows content to be filtered for the customer. It may be a huge virtual filing cabinet, but search engines and other technology allow the customer to quickly find what appeals to him, leaving him feeling like he’s reading a nice little on-demand magazine.

The Content Must Fit the Customer Need, No Interpreter Needed

Another challenge is that your sales team isn’t there to interpret the content or get feedback from the customer regarding the content. So, the content must be a near exact fit for the customer, necessitating a much different type of marketing collateral then has been previously the norm. This is the most significant challenge of the online marketing environment, and brings us to our next topic.

Marketing Needs to Do Lead Nurturing

Lead nurturing use to be clearly a sales function. It requires a soft touch, an understanding of the customer, and solution selling to present the information in a meaningful and manageable way.

This fails today for two reasons, one traditional and one purely a result of the modern marketing reality.

The Economics of a Sale Are Becoming More Challenging

A 30% cost of sale can’t be supported by most companies. It’s as simple as that. You can’t spend enough time with the customer to help with his education, and that means he’s on his own more often.

The Customer is On The Internet While You Are Busy Doing Other Things

The customer isn’t paused until the next sales meeting, waiting to be feted and wowed by your solution selling greatness. That’s now a small channel to his mind. He’s on the Internet, researching, browsing your website, browsing your competitors websites.

10 years ago the Internet was 4 years old from a business perspective and there wasn’t much content. The Internet was a small channel to the customer, smaller then the sales engagement.

5 years ago the Internet was 9 years old. There was some content, but it was still classic corporate brochureware. However, blogs were starting to take off, and more print industry articles and insights were available on the web. An expectation of useful information started to blossom in customers, and almost all of our customers were now active Internet users.

Today, the internet is 14 from a business perspective. It’s got attitude, and it thinks it knows everything. It doesn’t but it’s getting really close- at least outside of B2B marketing.

The expectation of content from people who use the Internet is now extremely high. It’s the first stop for information.

Marketing Needs to Do Analytics

The other side effect of the customer pursuing information on the Internet is that you aren’t there to interpret the customer reaction. Broader, deeper content is being put out to the Internet so the customer finds his knowledge from you, but what is his reaction?

That’s why analytics are essential. Without it, you are flying blind.

Online content allows you to measure your audience’s response and gain critical insight into customer outlook and behaviour. Five years ago this may not have been so certain- poorer content and a uncertainty if your buyers were represented in your website traffic made measurement hard.

Marketing Needs to Go Where The Customers Are, And Where They Are Listening

The Internet being the dominant channel of communication to customers clearly explains why there is now an exploding market of marketing automation vendors. Your customers are online, doing research, and becoming experts- your sales channel can’t compete. You can talk to them for an hour a week, but the Internet is there for them 7×24. They want to find answers, and they aren’t waiting for you.

This changes the value and purpose of content radically.

Is Sales Becoming Marketing Technical Support?

10 years ago content had to be presented face-to-face to customers because there were no other viable channels of communication.

Now, most content needs to be presented indirectly through the Internet because it is the most prevalent channel of communication. This also means that content (and marketing) end up doing more of the selling.

What does this mean for sales? Are they destined to become technical support for automated marketing efforts?

Not likely. Some radically new very early markets may be beyond effective marketing reach. And in all non-trivial markets relationships are still central to any sales or buying process, . In fact, properly managed, sales can focus on more value-add activities in marketing-sold markets, handling more accounts and driving more business. In most cases, the early soft touches guiding prospecting and lead nurturing need human contact. The flow of marketing content to the prospect needs guidance and filtering based on human contact. Facilitation, problem discovery, solution mapping- sales is becoming a lot more about consulting and project management. But the fact remains- that beast called the Internet is sitting there, humming away 7×24, always ready to hop in as a sales advisor to your hyper-literate prospect whether you participate or not. There is no stopping it, and this change in marketing is becoming a necessity, not a choice.

Software development is influencing marketing a lot these days with the emergence of Agile Marketing and Test-Driven Marketing- Agile and Test-Driven concepts being two concepts that have dominated software development for the last 5 years.

The reason is not a fad crossing over, but rather a more fascinating and powerful phenomena. As the Internet has become pervasive in our lives Marketing has become testable, much like software, as well as more impactful due to the amount of reading buyers now do during the buying cycle.

Agile software development embraces change and measurement, allowing responses to “market” signals that are leading indicators of failure. Signals include early customer feedback, early robustness feedback from automated tests, and ongoing feedback from regression testing, which captures failures due to the landscape changing.

But so what, you might ask? Marketing has become testable. Whoop-de-do. I’ve been marketing for twenty years, and we’ve done just fine without testing.

My answer? Marketing mostly sucked from a customer perspective. And this was effective and professional because there wasn’t much other option. Marketing wasn’t sales, and sales was the group responsible for strongly targeting messages to buyers. Marketing was background support. Marketing didn’t have access to the customer mind, by message or by volume of content (diversity in customers makes available volume of content critical for targeted messaging), and as a result marketing was largely product focused.

That’s no longer the case. Where sales was once needed to deliver targeted content, buyers now look for the content themselves online. And if they don’t find yours, they’ll find someone else’s. Last generation marketing that was background to the targeted sales message is now leading in the foreground, and landing with a awkward thunk.

In the new marketing environment, we need marketing to work well or we’ll fail. The Internet has changed how we sell, and marketing does a lot more of the selling because that’s where the customers are- at their computers researching their own needs. Selling has become buying facilitation, and if marketing doesn’t step up and do more of this type of selling with relevant targeted messaging, failure is almost unavoidable.

The other massive influence in the new marketing environment is that we can now measure if marketing is working. Considering that we now need marketing to work, that is very good thing.

Inbound marketing, Internet lead generation and Pay-Per-Click advertising (PPC) all test marketing through conversion rates on multiple website goals such as newsletter signup, RSS subscription, Facebook fans, white-paper downloads, requests for a demo, successful multiple touches, purchases, and so on. There are literally hundreds of amazing measurements and tests that can be applied- either on existing data or on data created from intentional tests.

This is enabling marketing to be test-driven, and in complex markets, it’s providing the tools for marketing to become agile. This is exactly what happened in software- the focus on feedback from customers and tests enabled software development to become agile. Indeed, the concept of Agile Software Development was somewhat meaningless until the feedback mechanisms were there.

Marketing has become like software. You run it, test it, and it either works or it doesn’t.

The bottom line is that today we must sell with marketing, and we can now measure our marketing. These two incredibly strong influences have combined in a way that will fundamentally change the entire business world.

And that means we can start applying some of the same processes- agile responses to market signals, testing for user adoption, testing for relevance, and actually building our marketing collateral so that it is in fact testable.

If you think marketing automation and automated lead nurturing are a fad, you better have lots of brand equity to ride on. Because if you don’t, you are not going to be able to build it in this brave new world.

For more on this topic, I recommend checking out some of the new wave of marketing automation vendors- Marketo, Manitcore, Eloqua , MarketBright or Hubspot, as well as the Analytics vendors such as Google Analytics, Yahoo Analytics, and Omniture and see what they are saying.

And if you are convinced and want more details, or unconvinced but open to the possibility, subscribe to this blog via the Test-Driven Marketing RSS Feed or subscribe with the simple email subscription form over there on the right sidebar. Our next post, Is Sales Becoming Marketing Technical Support?, goes deeper into the changing roles of Sales and Marketing.