As I was reading Chapter 2, I kept thinking this is interesting but how can I apply this to my day job. As a B2B marketer, innovations in the cereal vertical don’t really translate to my job. Also, we have a whole other group dedicated to product development. The marketing department has some input in new products especially since we are the target audience but it is definitely not what I focus on day in and day out. I did find some useful information from Lateral Marketing that I felt I could translate to B2B. There are the 6 techniques for applying lateral marketing:

1. “Substitution consists of removing one or several elements of the product and changing it.
2. Combination consists of adding one or several elements to the product or service, maintaining the rest.
3. Inversion consists of saying the contrary or adding “no” to an element of the product or service.
4. Elimination consists of removing an element of the product or service.
5. Exaggeration consists of exaggerating upward or downward one more more elements of a product or service or imagining a perfect product or service.
6. Reordering consists of changing the order or sequence of one o more product or service elements.”

While the authors intended these ideas to be implemented in product development. I think these can be a place to start your creativity for your next marketing campaign or event. Combination is just another way of saying integrated marketing campaign. When it comes down to it these are really just ideas for differentiation, and don’t we all want to stand out from the crowd?

Do you have any examples of using one of these techniques, possibly unknowingly?

Be sure to check in next week for our posts on chapters 3-5.

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As I went back to Chapters 1 and 2, I immediately remembered what stood out most for me. Page 4. I hadn’t read Differentiate or Die, Survival In Our Era of Killer Competition by Jack Trout with Steve Rivkin. So this was all new stuff for me.

The summary started with out with some very interesting numbers on grocery store SKUs, interesting but not really applicable to my B2B Marketing job. I got to the next page (page 4) and this sentence jumped out at me. “Those that don’t stand out will get lost in the pack.”

I went on to read…”Indeed, companies must address differentiation in three key ways:

• If you ignore your uniqueness and try to be everything to everybody, you quickly undermine what makes you different.
• If you ignore changes in the market, your difference can become less important.
• If you stay in the shadow of the larger competitors and never establish your “differentness,” you will always be weak.”

Differentiate ourselves and highlight our uniqueness, we all get that I’m sure. But how? Here’s an example of how we “went different” to stand out. ReachForce business cards not only have the typical contact info. on them but they also include a few points that describe that person’s ROLE at ReachForce. This helped reinforce our role vs. title messaging and was a great conversation starter when meeting new people and exchanging cards.

Anyone have other cool “stand out” stories to share with the group? Or anything else from the first 2 book summaries that stood out for you?

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If you are an avid reader of The B2B Lead, you know that we are all about targeted marketing, specifically targeted lead generation. And I have said before that having a targeted blog can support lead generation better because it is focused on a specific audience so targeted messaging will resonate better. I recently created a mission statement for The B2B Lead to help focus our blogs to topics most relevant to our customers and prospects as well as in line with our in house expertise. Our mission is to share B2B Marketing best practice ideas and tips with our customers and prospects - enabling them to drive the most ROI possible from their lead generation initiatives.

There are lots of good examples of good mission statements out there that have driven a company to success. Southwest began as the low cost airline; every decision they made came back to that mission. Herb Kelleher would not have implemented any new program unless it helped Southwest to be THE low cost airline. It seems to have worked. Southwest does have a new mission statement these days and is the driving factor that helps keep them successful even when most other airlines are failing.

Once I created the mission statement I was able to sit down and create a list of more focused topics. This helps keep our whole team of bloggers on task and hopefully will help us to create more relevant content to help our fellow B2B Marketers drive increased results from their lead generation initiatives.

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When I was in college (far too many years ago) we learned about the 4 P’s of Marketing. Of course, in just the last few years, we’ve seen a major shift in thinking about the 3rd P – promotion. We no longer accept the notion that 2% returns on direct mail or 0% responses from print advertising are smart Marketing. Instead, we are laser targeting our messages to audiences and using social marketing to build a following of like minded customers.

With increasing interest in the power of communities, we now have the 6 C’s of Social Influence Marketing thanks to Dave Friedman, president of the central region for Avenue A | Razorfish. In today’s post, I’ve shared some of Friedman’s very timely advice on making social marketing and communities work.

You see, I’ve had some very interesting discussions of late on how to design and “position” a community. It boils down to “can you really design and position a community or will the community itself determine what it becomes?” We’ve decided to let the BreakingPoint community define itself. Stay tuned for the big launch announcement and see how this works for us.

In the mean time, here is what Friedman has to say courtesy of Chief Marketer Report.

1.Content: Access to valuable tools and content is a key factor in a consumer’s decision to interact with a brand. Regardless of their goals, brands need to think about customizing bite-sized, portable content or experiences for their most prominent target segments—content that their “friends” would be proud to display, share, or support.

Sound familiar? This was the focus of The B2B Lead – snack size educational nuggets.

2.Customization: Users crave the ability to customize, post and share content. On social networks like MySpace or Facebook, users define themselves through their personalized profile pages and the elements that they choose to display. Marketers need to empower consumers to express themselves.

3.Community: The adage “build it and they will come” is not applicable here. To build community within social media campaigns, brands need to achieve several things: Give users a reason to interact with your brand frequently by providing unique content, value or engagement. Let your content travel by distributing it across widgets and other mechanisms beyond your Web site.

Get the rest of the 6 Cs Or, check out Joseph Jaffe’s version at www.jaffejuice.com.

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Written by guest blogger, Kyle Flaherty of www.engageinpr.com

Messaging is critical to how you communicate your benefits and your product to your audience. Your messaging follows you throughout your communication and no place is it more applicable than your main website. This is the spot where your prospects must make a fairly immediate decision whether to stick around and gather some more info (and hopefully make a purchase). When you find the proper messaging you will ultimately be able to provide customers, partners, media, analysts and even internal owners your core value proposition:

• Who are you?
• What do you stand for today?
• Tomorrow?
• How do you explain your main benefits?

Your first step to consistent and powerful messaging is to have your internal and external constituents answer the above questions. If done properly you’ll have a tremendous amount of data. In a recent scenario at my last gig, we were able to gather information from more than 1,500 survey responses from users, partners, executives and investors. Often you simply comb through all the data and make various hypothesis based on a thorough scrub of the data. It is great to have so much data, but with too much data comes the fear that we won’t be able to get to the core of what people actually thought of the company and its solution. Also, we would need hundreds of hours to sort through it all properly.

One thing we have noticed as we sifted through data were the patterns in the answers that were receiving. The ability to quickly view these patterns is critical to discovering how your audience views your company and your product, thus starting to form the messaging that will most resonate with prospects. The most simple and effective way for you to visualize the patterns of your data is to create a tag cloud. A tag cloud will help represent the words that appear the most; the larger the font the more that word appeared in the results. Very quickly you will see if your prospects will respond more to particular words and phrases. Fortunately there is the ability to automate tagclouds using tools such as TagCrowd, which allow you to input data and create a tag cloud; this could be a URL, a file or just paste in the text to be visualized. It then gives you options for how many tags to show, ignore common words (‘and’, ‘the’, etc), grouping of similar words (innovate, innovation, innovating) and whether you want to show the amount of times each word appears. You can then grab the HTML or take a screen grab and you have a great visual way to demonstrate data.

Reviewing these tag clouds is highly effective and can lead you to terrific conversations about your company and your final messaging…which of course is the goal. But the power of the tag cloud goes beyond simply helping to create the proper messaging. Use it to visualize what each of the pages of your site actually say about you, critical for SEO/SEM, but also to determine if you are actually saying what you mean to say. It can be surprising to find out that not only are the words you are using on your homepage not resonating directly with your prospects, but often we are using hypocritical verbiage. The same can be done for any marketing campaign you are gearing up to drive leads. Just remember you may not be saying what you think you’re saying.

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I was cruising through my Google Reader (one of the best things I could have ever set up as a blogger) and stumbled upon a great post about blog writing on Diana Huff’s B2B MarCom Writer Blog. She suggests that bloggers have a beat just like journalists. If you are just starting your own corporate blog, this is a great tip to help you figure our what to write about. If you can define your “beat” then you will find yourself soaking up everything you see about those topics and inspiration will come more easily.

Also, if you are one of several contributors to your blog, each writer having a unique beat will help each author to be differentiated from the others.

I’ve always loved the saying “a jack of all trades is a master of none.” If you can really narrow your focus, you have a better chance of positioning yourself as an expert in that area which will increase the quality of your content and hopefully your readership.

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Are you a Stumbler? I must admit, I find myself neglecting family and friends for my nightly StumbleUpon fix.

For those of you scratching your head, StumbleUpon is–according to Wikipedia – a web browser plugin that allows its users to discover and rate webpages, photos, videos, and news articles. These webpages are typically presented when the user—known within the community as a Stumbler—clicks the “Stumble!” button on the browser’s toolbar. StumbleUpon chooses which new webpage to display based on the user’s ratings of previous pages, ratings by his/her friends, and by the ratings of users with similar interests. i.e. it is a recommendation system which uses peer and social networking principles.

And, for B2B Marketers, a StumbleUpon addiction could actually be a good one. Here are a few cool articles and tools I’ve found while Stumbling:

• KnowThis
• IA
• Internet Marketing Simple

And, a few of the more fun finds:

• Shipment of Fail
• Clean the Screen

Now for the really good part. Turns out Marketers can pay to have their sites featured or served up to Stumblers. It’s called Stumble Upon Advertising and it’s really powerful, especially if you have the type of product or service that seems to be most popular with the StumbleUpon crowd. For pennies per view, you can target an audience with your website or blog. StumbleUpon then brings users directly to the page you specify and they rate your site. It’s a great way to drive web traffic and leads.

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If you are a regular reader of The B2B Lead, you have probably noticed us all talking more about events and tradeshows than usual. This subject has been on our minds because we are today announcing a new data service offering for events called ReachForce Capture.

Our mission at ReachForce is to reduce the amount of waste in B2B marketing. Current marketing tactics, including direct mail, email, trade shows and search engine marketing, have conversion rates of 10% or less. We introduced ReachForce Discover and ReachForce Refresh to increase response rates for direct mail and email from the industry average of less than 3%. ReachForce Capture will enable marketers to convert more trade show contacts and increase trade show ROI.

ReachForce Capture enables you to turn your trade show scans/attendees into actionable leads. At a targeted trade show, most of the companies will be a right fit but the attendees may not be the right decision makers. By identifying the right person or decision making unit by their role within an organization, not just their title, ReachForce’s approach to contact discovery is unlike any other data provider. Targeting prospects based on their role in an organization increases marketing results and sales conversions, ultimately driving revenue.

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Stock photos are generally a great resource for high quality images that don’t have the high cost of a custom photo shoot. The problem is that you are not the only one with access to them. At ReachForce, we recently changed our whole look and feel and no longer use any stock photos of people. Boy am I glad we did. I was recently driving down the freeway and saw a billboard using the same stock photo as our old homepage banner. The worst part was, it was for a church. Shame on them for not even using their own members for their ad. And last week I opened up my alumni newsletter only to see another one of our old stock photos but this time it was photoshopped so one woman was wearing my school colors. With as much money as my alma mater (The University of Texas) has, I would think they could at least get some real alumni for a picture.

My recommendation is to use real people. Take photos at your user group conference or use your own employees. It is obvious when a stock photo is being used (especially if the reader has used it themselves!) If the quality isn’t perfect, that’s ok. It adds to the realism. And if you can’t get photos you like, an abstract image can convey meaning better than two people shaking hands.

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As B2B Marketers, we are constantly looking for new tactics and methods to reach new prospects. You may think that we have come a long way in recent years. After all, you can cheaply send thousands of emails. Anyone can come to your website to find out more about you. And more and more targeted trade shows are available. But are our current methods really working?

• Email – Industry Response rates vary from 1 to 3%
• Direct mail – Industry Response rates vary from 1 to 3%
• Events – Only 10% of trade show leads are followed up on by sales (SiriusDecisions)
• Online Marketing – Only 3% of web visitors fill out forms

Based on these numbers, B2B marketers are wrong 90% of the time and still get to keep their jobs! Wow, imagine if Accounting was wrong 90% of the time or if sales only hit 10% of their number, where would we be as B2B marketers? We, at ReachForce, get up and come to work every day to figure out ways to help marketers turn more suspects into prospects and more prospects into customers. In an effort to find new ways to get better marketing results, we are experimenting on ourselves using targeted lead generation, focusing on the right person at the right company. I am proud to say 70% of ReachForce customers have come through marketing.

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