B2B marketers and communicators I talk to are worried about their IT department. On the one hand, they know the useful role IT plays in many different ways to enable the company and to keep things on track with respect to compliance, security and so on. On the other hand, they see IT’s push for standardization across systems as something that stands in firmly in the way of keeping up with competitive, up-to-date marketing practices. And they’re right – the traditional IT department agenda and processes do present challenges for doing a good job as a B2B marketer.
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Do your customers believe you?
Why B2B customers aren’t buying your sales pitch – and what to do about it Continue reading
We’ve had a “Voice of Customer” program for 10 years – is that good?
The book “The Death of Propaganda – B2B Buyer Behavior Has Changed. Now it’s Your Turn.” co-authored by me, Michael Best and David Hoskin, talks about three concepts that are absolutely vital for B2B marketers to grasp: Voice of the Company; Voice of the Industry; and Voice of Customer. Communicating with all three of these voices is mandatory if you want to fully address the needs of the new breed of B2B buyer.
Experienced marketers may feel a little confused about our use of the already established term “Voice of Customer”. Voice of the Customer is a term that has traditionally been used to describe special programs for involving customers in core corporate activities such as product development and the design of customer-facing functions. Such activities usually involve inviting key accounts or a cross-section of customers to special, offline events where they can provide direct input and feedback to management.
Today, this type of Voice of Customer program is basically a dinosaur. A relic. An outdated idea that was only ever useful as a far-too-small plaster on a gaping wound in the way businesses were interacting with their markets. Enlightened B2B marketers now look past this type of program to get customer input on customers’ terms rather than those of the company.
So, for the purposes of our Three Voices strategic model, we took over the old terminology and gave it a make-over, re-positioning “Voice of Customer” as the all-important conversations going on between B2B prospects and buyers about which solutions, and which brands, should be on their short lists. We recommend our B2B clients to have their ears firmly to the ground wherever such conversations are taking place – both online and offline – and to be ready to respond to salient topics and opportunities as they surface. “The Death of Propaganda” has much more to say on the subject, and I’ll try to make the new direction of Voice of Customer as a term even clearer in posts to follow.
Voice of Company – what is it and why is it important?
Essentially, the concept of Voice of Company is what companies are doing today – communicating messages about products, services, events and so on from the standpoint of the company. When B2B buyers encounter these messages on your website or in corporate marketing materials, they are entirely aware that these messages have been crafted by the company itself. So the viewer of such messages is at once on guard – wary of being manipulated by someone who so clearly wants to make a sale, do a deal, make some profit. It’s like a mousetrap with the mouse gingerly circling the cheese, expecting at any moment to be crushed by the snap of a deadly wire blade.
Don’t get me wrong. Voice of Company has its rightful place in the B2B buyer’s new world. Here’s where the company can provide useful information that makes the product’s features and benefits, specifications and model numbers clear in order to encourage and facilitate purchasing. B2B buyers like to be able to access such information. But that’s pretty much where it stops. For sophisticated and increasingly skeptical audiences, the rest of the verbal and visual decoration just doesn’t have the impact it used to. Not at a conscious level, at least.
Leveraging Voice of Industry in your B2B communication strategy
If you’ve read my earlier post on Voice of Industry – what is it and why is it important? you now understand what the concept is basically about: figuring out how your company’s marketing and communications messages can be delivered in a more engaging way via industry channels that carry more credibility than your corporate website or marketing materials.
Imagine the following scenario. An HR manager for a company you would really like to have on your client list is cruising her favorite industry news and resource sites. She’s looking for a solution just like the one you provide. And no, she didn’t go to your company’s website as a starting point for her search. Instead, her initial aim is to gather broad knowledge about the latest solutions, their advantages and disadvantages – before visiting the websites or calling the salespeople of a few select vendors whose solutions look the most promising. In particular, she is exploring those industry news and resource sites to get hints, tips and recommendations from experts or users. Not to hear propaganda-like messages from someone or something focused on making a sale (i.e. your company).
This is where your Voice of the Industry strategy comes into play. For many B2B vendors, the best strategy is also the most challenging (and rewarding). And that involves going one step further than merely trying to place your company’s content on existing industry news and resource sites. Own and operate the site yourself!
So what might a company-owned and operated Voice of the Industry site look like? To start with, it has its own name. For example, a manufacturer of commercial life rafts could call its Voice of the Industry site something like “Which Life Raft?” (okay, not a great name, but no one’s paying me for this). The highly successful trading bank Saxo Bank, for example, owns and operates a site called Tradingfloor.com, which bears the fine print signature “powered by Saxo Bank”. Monthly visits to the site number in the tens of thousands.
Back to our life raft example. Which Life Raft? could be a shipping industry-specific site containing articles, videos, guest columns and similar designed to help shipowners navigate the world of life rafts. From a wide variety of sources both internal and external to the manufacturer itself. Topics could include trends, technical developments, products, maintenance and service. In contrast to the relaxed dialog you expect in a Voice of the Customer (social network) context, content is polished and well presented. Articles have been professionally edited. Opinions presented are those of industry experts, some of whom may be, for example, R&D employees from within the company. Other of whom come from outside the company – adding extra credibility given their arms-length status. There are interviews, some of which could be in the form of audio and/or video podcasts.
Which Life Raft? is entirely managed by the manufacturer itself. Which means, quite simply, that despite there being a great deal of input from sources external to the company, the manufacturer gets to choose which content gets pride of place. Such as articles that might support the need for the manufacturer’s own products, for example. Or videos where the manufacturer’s products appear, although the video itself is about a relatively unrelated event.
The aim is, of course, to build a massive audience of people who visit your site on a regular basis either as members, via search engines or as the result of a shared link. That’s why you should also plan to fuel the site with membership drives in many of your other marketing and communication activities – and why your Voice of the Industry site really does need to have a regular newsletter that strengthens the relationship between the site and its visitors.
The degree to which your company’s brand and products appear on such a site and whether this level of visible presence is appropriate will depend on the type of product or service you offer. As long as you don’t try to hide completely! Saxo Bank has chosen to appear with an almost equal amount of branding present on both its Voice of the Industry content site (www.tradingfloor.com) and its company website (www.saxobank.com). The essential difference is what content goes where is to be found in the way Saxo Bank makes its messages more useful, usable and enjoyable on tradingfloor.com than on its corporate website.
A Voice of the Industry site of this nature is a highly useful tool for persuading the new breed of B2B buyer. Perhaps the key reason is its greater credibility than propaganda-like company materials. But there’s another upside for B2B companies, one which has to be experienced to be fully appreciated. And that’s the effect on the culture of the company itself. Owning and operating such a site seems to open the minds of both management and employees to new possibilities. It creates new partnerships between the company and, for example, external industry experts. And it involves the company in a mission that helps to promote the industry as a whole – which is good for everybody. So what are you waiting for? Oh, for your IT department to approve the project? Good luck with that.
Is your company culture closed to the new breed of B2B buyers?
In previous posts, I’ve talked a lot about the way B2B buyers have become increasingly skeptical of corporate marketing and communications messages – and the move B2B vendors need to make away from ‘propaganda’ toward ‘dialog’. And I’ve used words like ‘honesty’, ‘openness’ and ‘sharing’ to describe the atmosphere that needs to underpin this dialog. I have also discussed the fact that there are many conversations going on about your industry and your own products, services and corporation to which you are not even invited. Which means, like being at a cocktail reception, you need to have something valuable to say every time or people will drift off to find another conversation partner.
All this has significant implications for the style in which B2B marketers and communicators approach their audiences. And frankly, not many of the corporations I advise are ready for words like ‘honesty’, ‘openness’ and ‘sharing’! The company propaganda machine is still busily churning out carefully crafted statements and slogans designed to impress and dazzle B2B buyers into making a purchase. Allowing prospects and customers to engage in a more open and frank manner with the company, admitting mistakes or just saying ‘thanks’ for an idea created in a public forum lies far from the typical corporate mindset.
The first to change corporate culture to match rapidly evolving markets were, of course, B2C or B2B+B2C companies. That’s not to say that there are many of them that have gone the whole way to becoming Honest Jim, your regular next-door neighbor in their style. But there is a noticeably greater degree of openness and straight talking in Steve Jobs’ product introductions or the philanthropic participation of Google employees in the good of the communities in which they live.
Many of my (adopted) home country of Denmark’s finest medium-to-large sized companies were born with an engineering background. And while engineers in the R&D department can be so relaxed and open that it has some of my marketing director clients tearing their hair out, once they make it to top management, something seems to change. They get awfully protective of their knowledge and their ‘serious’ corporate image.
The new breed of B2B buyers do care about the cultural attitude displayed by their vendors. And believe me, they will increasingly support companies that show they are able to participate in industry conversations without hiding behind a stiff and lifeless corporate mask.
What does your own company’s culture say to today’s B2B buyers?
Voice of Industry – what is it and why is it important?
“Voice of Industry” is originally a term Michael Best, David Hoskin, Thomas Webster and I invented as an umbrella description for a company’s communication activities whenever the company deploys industry-level messaging rather than pushing its products and services in more traditional, direct ways. While we may have come up with the term itself as a descriptor, the phenomenon of Voice of Industry is already a well established part of the new breed of B2B buyer’s information-gathering practices.
A great example is to be found in the myriad of industry-specific or technology-specific sites out there today. In my own work, I like to tap into sites like Food Navigator, Science Daily or TechCrunch, reading the information they present on their websites and/or checking their regular newsletters or bulletins as they arrive in my email.
Here I get access to information that, while it may have been initiated by a company, a somewhat biased trade journalist or an analyst keen on getting his or her name in lights, has a greater degree of credibility than a company website where I know that every piece of information has been produced in an effort to sell to me or someone like me. The publisher is generally not a manufacturer, but an information-oriented party such as a magazine publisher, a research company, an academic institution or similar. Or perhaps an industry professional such as Vancouver-based Twitch Image’s Mitch Joel or myself, for that matter, who actually do have a product or service to sell in appropriate contexts, but are genuinely interested in sharing their domain knowledge with others.
The extra credibility offered by releasing the company’s messages in a Voice of Industry context is important in today’s B2B buying process. And it needs to be an integral part of your B2B marketing and communication efforts. As you start using the term “Voice of Industry” internally, you’ll find others rapidly adopt the idea, helping to smooth the way to a new approach to your customers and prospects.
Commonly mispelled English words
Did you notice the one in the title? Felt good to find it, didn’t it? Continue reading
The three ‘Voices’ of B2B marketing and communication
I’m going to talk about three concepts that form the pillars of the Three Voices™ strategic framework described in “The Death of Propaganda – B2B Buyer Behavior Has Changed. Now it’s Your Turn.” and which I believe are important for B2B marketers to grasp: Voice of Company; Voice of Industry; and Voice of Customer. All three of these concepts are mandatory if you want to fully address the needs of the new breed of B2B buyer.
I’ll briefly explain what each of these ‘Voices’ is and what role it should play in your work.
Three Voices Strategy™, in essence, is a stakeholder engagement model created by Eye for Image that stretches across all of a company’s audiences. It rests on three original concepts that are vital for B2B marketers and communicators to grasp: Voice of Company; Voice of Industry; and Voice of Customer.
The basic idea of Three Voices Strategy™ is probably best described on a paper napkin in less than ten minutes. That’s because the principles underlying it are relatively simple and can be communicated by drawing three circles, each representing one of the Voices as below.
The circle on the left represents the Voice of Company. We use this as an umbrella term for messages and materials created by a manufacturer or service provider to describe its offerings to prospective customers. In today’s world of B2B marketing and communications, Voice of Company is also the home of corporate propaganda. The key strategic direction in this arena, as far as Three Voices Strategy is concerned, should be to reduce or eliminate propaganda-like messages and become a more credible entity that is seen to help prospects and customers to determine the solution that best fits their needs.
Now let’s turn our attention to the circle on the right called Voice of Customer. We use Voice of Customer as a term to describe the peer-to-peer conversations going on between B2B buyers, discussing and recommending, or recommending against, specific solutions and products, well before the manufacturer is consulted. Here’s where all the action is, where the big changes in B2B buyer behavior have taken place, and where companies need to actively listen and respond if they are to match their marketing efforts to the new realities of B2B buying processes.
Of course, historically “Voice of the Customer” (VOC) has been a term used to describe special programs for involving customers in core corporate activities such as product development and the design of customer-facing functions. Today however, we hear from our clients that this concept is fast becoming outdated, its practices have become too costly and its outcomes insufficient. In fact, these programs were a stop-gap measure that was only ever useful as a far-too-small plaster on a gaping wound in the way businesses were interacting with their customers. Enlightened B2B marketers now look past traditional Voice of the Customer programs to get customer input on the customer’s terms rather than those of the company.
If Voice of Company is where most B2B companies are focused on today, and Voice of Customer is where they, in fact, should be focusing their attention, then the middle circle, Voice of Industry, should be seen as the bridge companies need to use to close the gap.
By Voice of Industry, we mean the activities where the company seeks to influence its market and enhance its brand by discussing industry-level matters instead of directly pushing its own offerings. Typically, Voice of Industry activities encompass paid media (paying to place industry-level content on other companies’ media), earned media (being seen as a valuable content partner on, for example, an independent industry news site), and the all-important owned media (you own a content platform prospects and customers use to help them make decisions). A recent example of an owned-media Voice of Industry activity is A.P. Moller-Maersk’s “Let’s change the way we think about shipping” site, which encourages the container shipping industry to effect beneficial changes for a more viable future.
Simply put, the ultimate goal of a properly implemented Three Voices Strategy is to move from the company telling prospects and customers “We’re great!” to having these audiences telling each other “They’re great!”. To get there, you need to build Voice of Industry activities, move from propaganda to credibility, and shift from being a salesperson to the role of customer advocate.