Break Free B2B Marketing: Sofia O’Malley of Dell Outlet on Creating a Global B2B & B2C Marketing Team

Okay, marketers, here’s your content marketing challenge for the day. Your target audience includes the following:

• Small business owners
• Gamers
• Teachers
• Lifestyle bloggers
• Young professionals/Entrepreneurs

All you have to do is come up with messaging that will resonate with each of these groups, while repurposing as much content as possible for maximum efficiency. Some of these segments are B2B, some are B2C, and some ride the line between the two, so plan accordingly.  Oh, and while you’re at it, we need versions of your content for multiple regions around the world. So make sure your Super Bowl metaphors are converted into World Cup references. If you can get your head around this monumental task — well, you’re probably Sofia O’Malley, Global Marketing Director at Dell Outlet*. For the past three years, Sofia has worked with a team of talented marketers worldwide to turn Dell Outlet into a powerhouse brand.  We caught up with Sofia at B2BMX in February, at which Dell Outlet’s influencer content was a finalist for a Killer Content Award. The conversation covered everything from the difference between B2B and B2C messaging to the importance of purpose-driven marketing. You can watch the full video and subscribe to the podcast below. Read on for highlights from the interview.

B2B Marketing Interview with Sofia O’Malley

1:06 From managing a cyber cafe to leading a global marketing team 2:33 Adapting messaging for B2B and B2C 4:00 Messaging and branding for refurbished electronics 7:00 Using technology to test and refine messaging 10:15 Marketing with a purpose 14:30 Adapting marketing for multiple geographic regions 18:00 How to structure global marketing teams 20:15 Mapping the customer journey to offer better customer experiences 24:36 New opportunities in digital marketing 27:00 Break Free: Going from good to great Susan: So okay, you manage a very unique product or service offering, I should say. And you have got two distinct audiences. You really are B2B as well as B2C.  Can you talk about how you divide up your marketing programs? Sophia: You know, I think when you look at our customer base, there is a unifying element that is common across both subsets. And I think that's the problem, right? It is a technology need, whether you're a consumer or a big corporation or a small business, you have that underlying need that you want to have access to high quality technology, and you want to be able to go with a partner that you know will stand behind the offerings.  Susan: Okay, great. Is there anything that you would counsel marketers on, who are trying to test their messaging? Sophia I will say we utilized some technology when it came to messaging, the high level message is still there and relevant, but when we do individual communication, we utilize certain technology to really offer more of a personalized message tailored to that party or curated to a particular audience at a given point in time.  One of the things that we have done that has been very successful is utilizing technology to overlay emotional messaging. That was really insightful because throughout the journey, we learned that there are people out there who are reward driven. So for example, instead of messaging you “Hey, Susan, come and take a look at my product.” I will maybe say something like “Hello Susan, come and reward yourself with a gaming system.” Because we have information that we know that maybe you like gaming and you’re a reward-driven person. So that has been super exciting. I know it's not accessible to a lot of people, right? But I think that's one of the areas that for me has worked really well. And we love to be able to do it. Susan: Okay, so even something as subtle for marketers who don't have larger tools, even testing — AB testing one or two words — as you said, reward yourself is far different than, you know, come and check out the speeds and feeds.  Sophia: Absolutely, it goes a long way into understanding like the audiences I think. It’s really important to have an understanding of who that consumer is. You know who your target is. Because in that way you'll narrow it down, especially if you're not using AI to do the heavy lifting. And if you don't have the volumes to be able to conduct this kind of testing at scale, and see impact, I think if you're on the smaller side, AB testing is the way to go. But you have to kind of help that process by really zeroing in on what audience is to be more effective. Susan: Right, what do you see as being the biggest difference in terms of global marketing? Is LATAM completely different than other regions, for example? Sophia: Well tricky question, because there are a lot of commonalities. But I think the key is really to have a consistent strategy. I think that needs to be scalable. And then where we start to see a little bit more difference is on the tactics.  So when you think about implementation of go to market, I think you really have to be cognizant of what is unique to each market. What’s the consumer behavior? Or what’s the consumer expectation within a given market or appetite for a type of execution.  So when I think, in Latin America, there are still challenges when it comes to maturity on the technology front. I think there is evolution and there is a lot more appetite for people too, more comfort level in people utilizing the internet for big ticket purchase items than there was maybe like 15-10 years ago. It continues to evolve. But I think still having that local presence and introduction in your creative and in your assets of local holidays or local events or big sporting events that might not necessarily be that big within the North American market.  For instance, in the US we're all about our regular holidays like the Super Bowl, whereas Latin America is very passionate about soccer. So it's a matter of balancing the tactics and being contextually relevant for the audience. But overarching, your message and your brand promise should be consistent. Susan: Okay, so for some of our viewers who are struggling with or even thinking about how to structure a global marketing team, can you talk about how you structure your team to actually address those contextually relevant needs?  Sophia: Absolutely. So one key area that is super important is to be able to have in-region geographically-placed leaders ready for each of my regions. So for example, for the North American market, I need to have someone in the US, right? For Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ), I need to have someone in the APJ region to be able to effectively not only be co-located with our sales teams, but also be very much aware of the environment and the key nuances that are needed to effectively drive marketing in a region.  And I will say the other big element is the right partnerships, which I know might be challenging, especially if you're on the smaller side, but we typically try to identify partnerships with local agencies or agencies that have local presence. Because of the same objectives, we want to make sure that we are having the best or most recent information that is impacting that market. And if you work with a centralized team outside of the region, that might be a challenge. So yeah, I will say when I looked at the structure, that's key.  The other big factor for us is to still be able to drive economies of scale — and it's a fine balance — it requires ongoing effort because you always want to drive efficiencies, right? So I'm always thinking about what kind of  parts of the business will we scale and share, such as when it comes to content, when it comes to asset creation, when it comes to even older areas of the business which are more focused on the merchandising and execution. How will I utilize maybe an asset that was originally created for the US market, for instance, and scale it? Right. So there is always thought of that. But that doesn't — and I don't believe it will ever — replace having that regional expertise. Stay tuned to the TopRank Marketing Blog and subscribe to our YouTube channel for more Break Free B2B interviews. Here's a sample of the series so far:

• Break Free B2B Marketing: Julie Brown on Proving the EBIT of Your Marketing
• Break Free B2B Marketing: Mark Bornstein on Digital Experience
• Break Free B2B Marketing: Sruthi Kumar on Creating Memorable Experiences
• Break Free B2B Series: Hal Werner on the Intersection of Marketing Creativity and Analytics
• Break Free B2B Series: Adi Bachar-Reske on Taking the Lead in the Evolution of B2B Content Marketing

*Dell Outlet is a TopRank Marketing client.

The post Break Free B2B Marketing: Sofia O’Malley of Dell Outlet on Creating a Global B2B & B2C Marketing Team appeared first on Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®.

Always On Influence: Short Term vs. Long Term for Success During a Crisis

The focus of Always On Influence for B2B brands is to establish and maintain relationships with business influencers through content co-creation, engagement and various types of activations that create and reinforce brand thought leadership. In fact, those strong relationships with industry experts create value for driving marketing performance across the entire customer lifecycle from awareness, to purchase to advocacy. There are many of examples of B2B brands implementing ongoing influencer programs and having impact. When the COVID-19 pandemic came along, many B2B marketers took a moment to evaluate whether their marketing programs were a fit, taking care not to sound tone deaf or too opportunistic. With the current movement about racial justice and equality, even more considerations are at hand with all social channels rich with messages about social change and little with commercial intent. In the current social media environment, where do social media influencers play a role for B2B brands? Many companies that view influencer marketing primarily as a form of advertising or solely as a way to generate leads, have put their programs on pause as they did with PPC, display, social ads and other forms of advertising. Other B2B companies have pivoted their marketing and realigned where credible experts could play a role in helping the brand authentically communicate key narratives whether they be best practices for working at home or collaborating on ways the brand can support equality.

Effective B2B influence activation is about connecting the right influencer with the right content and audience whether times are bullish or uncertain.

In the current environment, a B2B brand with strong connections to influencers with a known voice for equality have an opportunity to co-create content for customers in search of answers. Of course, companies looking at their influencers and not finding many or any people of color should seriously think about diversity and their influencer program. When B2B brands look only at the short term with influencer marketing, they're not always practicing the best of the discipline which is Always On and focused on strengthening the brand and influencer relationship as well as the quality, reach and business outcomes of their marketing. Another key part of Always On influencer programs is the continued effort to identify, qualify and engage new influencers.

A long term, relationship focused and results driven influencer program is a tremendous asset to a B2B brand that wants to be trusted, capable of exerting influence in the market and seen as a thought leader.

Of course some companies haven't evolved in their sophistication about influencer engagement and have no choice but to pause their influencer marketing efforts because they'd come across as too focused on lead gen and sales, which isn't a good look during a pandemic or a global social movement. B2B marketers that understand both the value of content collaboration and audience activation as well as how relationships with industry experts can drive thought leadership, accelerate key message distribution and credibility during challenging times, adjust their influencer programs accordingly. This is the benefit of long term vs. short term thinking when it comes to B2B influencer marketing. I think it's useful for marketing leaders to remember that the premise behind influencer marketing in B2B is that influencers add authenticity, credibility, trust, reach and engagement to brand content. When is it more important for a brand to have greater authenticity, credibility, trust, reach and engagement than during a crisis? Activating the right influencers in the right way can accomplish exactly that. These are unique times with unique opportunities. Pausing marketing to evaluate the situation and pivot to be more meaningful, trusted and effective for what customers actually care about makes sense. Dismissing marketing altogether as a cost center to be cut is not only short term thinking, but it damages the very mechanism B2B brands need to sustain and succeed during challenging times.

The post Always On Influence: Short Term vs. Long Term for Success During a Crisis appeared first on Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®.

B2B Marketing News: C-Suite B2B Content Consumption Study, Twitter’s Scheduled Tweets, Instagram’s Double Stories, & YouTube’s New Chapters

Twitter now lets you schedule tweets from its web app Marketers looking for alternatives to how they schedule tweets now have the option to do so directly within Twitter itself. Twitter's rollout of what had been solely a test feature that began in November also includes the ability to save draft tweets, the firm has announced. The Verge Would People Rather Watch an Ad or Share Their Email Address? U.S. consumers prefer watching an ad over offering up their email address, with nearly 75 percent saying that they would choose a 30 second ad in exchange for free content, while only 25.4 percent said that they would rather disclose their email information, according to newly-released report data. MarketingProfs TikTok sees 10x surge in April with in-app revenue of $78M With a tenfold increase in April in-app revenue hitting the $78 million mark, video-sharing social networking platform TikTok overtook YouTube for non-game app spending for the month, according to recently-released research data. Mobile Marketer Email Flies: Engagement Rises By 200% During COVID-19 Pandemic Email marketing has met increasingly-engaged audiences during the pandemic, with engagement rates up some 200 percent according to new report data. The study also found that Google Ads and paid social climbed by some 52 percent, while paid search has seen a drop of 44 percent. MediaPost Record digital ad revenue preceded slowest quarter in a decade, IAB finds A record $125 billion U.S. digital ad revenue during 2019 was followed by the slowest quarter in 10 years, according to recently-released study data from the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB). Mobile ad spending now accounts for 70 percent of all digital ad spend, the report also notes. Marketing Dive YouTube's new Chapters feature lets you jump to a specific section of a video Digital marketers have a new tool for YouTube video content, as the Google-owned firm has rolled out YouTube Chapters — an optional smart indexing feature that splits videos into parts to make finding certain information within a video easier. CNET Instagram is Testing a Double-Story Stories Feed with Some Users Facebook-owned Instagram's popular Stories feature has been expanded to show twice the number of Stories at once, as part of a test that also included new methods for switching between Stories, the firm recently announced. Social Media Today Consumers want social ads to show return to normalcy, study says More consumers want brands to place greater focus on helping foster a return towards normalcy than how to stay safe during the pandemic, especially among those in the U.S., according to recently-released global survey data. Mobile Marketer Facebook Adds Option to Send Marketing Emails via Pages App Facebook has been testing a new feature that lets marketers keep a contact database in Facebook and create email campaigns to be sent directly from the platform, including the ability to upload email lists via spreadsheets, the social media giant has announced. Social Media Today Does Your B2B Content Target an Active Audience? Tuesdays and Wednesdays at 10:00 a.m. and noon are the top B2B content consumption days and times among executive corporate level B2B buyers, according to recently-release survey data from NetLine. MarketingCharts ON THE LIGHTER SIDE: A lighthearted look at “brands on TikTok” by Marketoonist Tom Fishburne — Marketoonist Reconstructing a lost NES game from 30-year-old source code disks — Game History TOPRANK MARKETING & CLIENTS IN THE NEWS:

• Lee Odden — The Marketing Book Podcast - Lee Odden: Authors in Quarantine Getting Cocktails — The Marketing Book Podcast
• SAP — What SAP did digitally to address the COVID-19 climate — CMOAustralia
• TopRank Marketing — Top 25 Influencer Marketing Agencies to Increase Your Brand Awareness — Kevin Payne
• Lee Odden — Break Free of Boring B2B with Influential Content Experiences — SEMrush
• LinkedIn — LinkedIn has a new CEO. Here are 30 power players and rising stars helping him lead the company — Business Insider
• Lee Odden — Top 10 Digital Marketing Articles of this Week: 29th May 2020 — Page Traffic Buzz
• TopRank Marketing — Top 60 Best Digital Marketing Websites and Blogs — Plerdy
• Lee Odden — 5 Hours of Content Marketing — SEMrush

Have you come across your own top B2B content marketing or digital advertising stories from the past week of news? Please let us know in the comments below. Thanks for taking the time to join us, and we hope you'll return again next Friday for more of the most relevant B2B and digital marketing industry news. In the meantime, you can follow us at @toprank on Twitter for even more timely daily news. Also, don't miss the full video summary on our TopRank Marketing TV YouTube Channel.

Marketers: We Can Do Better Than Words with Action

The post Marketers: We Can Do Better Than Words with Action appeared first on Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®.

5 Ways To Inspire Your Marketing With Gratitude

How does gratitude help us become better marketers and in our professional and personal lives? The world B2B marketers face today is rife with a variety of new and unexpected challenges, and meeting these often daunting twists and turns head-on with a mega-dose of gratitude creates not only better marketing, but also makes us stronger and more compassionate. To inspire your own marketing process let’s explore five examples of infusing the power of gratitude into your work efforts, from five memorable people.

1 — Infuse the Goodness of Fred Rogers in Your Marketing

via GIPHY “Try your best to make goodness attractive. That’s one of the toughest assignments you’ll ever be given,” Fred Rogers once said in an observation that applies especially well to the best marketing efforts. Bringing goodness in any of its many forms to our marketing efforts is a worthwhile pursuit, as work can only benefit when authenticity is incorporated — a characteristic that goodness has in spades. With goodness comes the gratitude that can bring our marketing to newfound levels of authenticity, and which provides us a way to reach out and thank the people in our professional and personal lives who help us daily and who have made it possible to get to where we are today. “Anyone who has ever been able to sustain good work has had at least one person — and often many — who have believed in him or her. We just don’t get to be competent human beings without a lot of different investments from others,” Rogers also wisely observed. Whether it’s through leaving a recommendation on as associate’s LinkedIn (client) profile, taking the time to write an email expressing your gratitude, or recording a video or audio message of thanks, letting the important people in your life know that you are grateful for them is an investment that pays dividends on many levels — not only in marketing. [bctt tweet="“Try your best to make goodness attractive. That’s one of the toughest assignments you’ll ever be given.” — Fred Rogers @FredRogersCtr" username="toprank"]

2 — Get Grand Ambitions and Aim For The Stars With Burnett & Ogilvy

via GIPHY “When you reach for the stars, you may not quite get one, but you won’t come up with a handful of mud either,” marketing stalwart Leo Burnett was famously quoted as saying in David Ogilvy's Ogilvy on Advertising, encouraging us to strive for the astonishing with our marketing rather than the mundane. Part of gratitude is realizing that not every effort will succeed, and recognizing and embracing the fact that you’ve gone beyond the safest run-of-the-mill solutions when we reach for our own marketing stars. [bctt tweet="“When you reach for the stars, you may not quite get one, but you won’t come up with a handful of mud either.” — Leo Burnett" username="toprank"]

3 — Keep Every Day's Canvas Fresh With Maya Angelou & Bob Ross

via GIPHY "This is a wonderful day. I've never seen this one before," poet Maya Angelou wrote in an observation that certainly has parallels in the marketing world. Our marketing efforts each present us the opportunity to create wonder and delight among our brand audiences, if we recognize the powerful potential of a blank campaign canvas, as I wrote about in "Content Marveling: Wonder and Astonishment in Marketing." Gratitude also involves being thankful for simply having another blank marketing canvas of opportunity, and envisioning your best work inspiring others — as is the very nature of best-answer content. Unforgettable marketing and best-answer marketing often go hand-in-hand, both filled with the kind of authenticity and genuine emotion that builds especially strong brand affinity. [bctt tweet="“People will forget what you said, but they will never forget how you made them feel.” — Maya Angelou" username="toprank"]

4 — Cultivate Marketing Authenticity  With Brené Brown

via GIPHY “Authenticity is a collection of choices that we have to make every day. It's about the choice to show up and be real. The choice to be honest. The choice to let our true selves be seen,” author Brené Brown has observed. Showing up and being real in our marketing can make it easier to produce work that we can truly be grateful for, not only for ourselves but for those we have helped by our creation of genuine content that’s true to ourselves and the mission of our brands. [bctt tweet="“Authenticity is a collection of choices that we have to make every day. It's about the choice to show up and be real. The choice to be honest. The choice to let our true selves be seen.” @BreneBrown" username="toprank"]

5 — Seek Empathy & Optimize Using Love With Ann Handley

via GIPHY “Empathy — like writing — isn't a gift. It's a discipline. It takes some intentional effort and diligence to develop enormous empathy so that you can apply it to your writing,” Ann Handley, speaker and chief content officer at MarketingProfs, has explained. Other pieces of life and business’ gratitude puzzle include empathy and even love. Marketing that delivers on these accounts is possible when you have them in mind from the very first step of a new project, no matter how small that initial forward motion may be. “Start with empathy. Continue with utility. Improve with analysis. Optimize with love,” Ann has wisely suggested — advice that will well-serve marketers looking to embrace gratitude. [bctt tweet="“Start with empathy. Continue with utility. Improve with analysis. Optimize with love.” — Ann Handley @MarketingProfs" username="toprank"]

Get Your Own Marketing Gratitude Groove On

via GIPHY Whether it's through infusing the goodness of Fred Rogers, aiming for the stars with Leo Burnett and David Ogilvy, looking anew at every day with Maya Angelou and Bob Ross, cultivating authenticity with Brené Brown, or seeking empathy with Ann Handley, your marketing efforts are poised to reach new levels of greatness if you take the time to consider the importance of gratitude in your work. If you're looking for professional B2B marketing services infused with gratitude, contact us and find out why firms from Abode and Dell to LinkedIn and 3M have chosen TopRank Marketing.

Break Free B2B Marketing: Julie Brown of Johnson Controls on Proving the EBIT of Your Marketing

For decades, marketers have measured success differently than the rest of the organization. We raise awareness, increase share of voice, generate impressions, deliver MQLs to sales.  Meanwhile, the success of the business itself is measured in....well, money. Revenue. Earnings before interest and taxes (EBIT).  But this disparity is changing as marketers are becoming more data-driven — and being increasingly accountable for their direct contribution to revenue. It’s not enough to show a return on investment; it’s not enough for marketing to not be a cost center. The marketing department needs to be a powerful engine for generating revenue. Our latest episode of Break Free features a marketer who is exceptional at generating value for her company, and proving that value to the bottom line. Julie Brown, Institutional Market Leader at Johnson Controls, is using data to flip marketing upside down. Instead of creating demand for the company’s products, she’s measuring the existing demand in her target audiences. Then she uses that data to advise the company on how to develop products that best suit their audiences’ needs. With the right reporting in place, Julie’s team is able to show exactly how much its efforts are contributing to Johnson Controls’ EBIT.  This was a fascinating interview about a side of marketing you don’t hear much about, and I’m grateful that Julie shared her expertise with me. And with all of you, of course. You can watch the video and check out the podcast version below, or scroll down for some highlights.

B2B Marketing Interview with Julie Brown

:58 Institutional marketing defined 1:57 Upstream marketing — where to play and how to win 5:08 Three big challenges in institutional marketing 7:18 Marketing as a revenue center 8:39 How do we get to the ‘why?’ 10:40 Staying centered on the customer 13:12 The next evolution of marketing 17:21 Can marketers predict revenue with certainty? 20:03 How leaders can reorganize teams around revenue 20:45 The revenue-focused marketing tech stack 22:04 Forming a “Voltron of Meeting Customer Needs” 24:00 Meeting the needs of the new B2B buying committee Josh:  So we were talking about upstream marketing. Can you explain that term for our listeners and what exactly that entails for your day-to-day? Julie: When we think of marketing at Johnson Controls, there's the old — I believe it goes back to Procter & Gamble — the concept of where to play and how to win. So upstream marketing is the “where to play.” Understanding customer needs, segmentation, targeting, product innovation. Once you've defined a new offering, then the “how to win” is how you connect with sales, whether you do account-based marketing, or you do content, lead generation. All of that is: Now I've got something, how do I get so the market is aware and purchases it or goes through their buying process? Josh:  So this is research to drive the right audience for our product or the right product for an audience, or a little bit of both? Julie: A little bit of both. It really starts with understanding what customer needs are, where are their pain points, and looking at what we do. And are there new and creative ways that we can help address those needs and pain points? Josh: It feels like in those verticals, you're in education and health care. You're going to have some pretty unique challenges to doing that research and to even executing on the marketing. What are you encountering? Julie: I'd say there's three big challenges that we're facing. One, the markets themselves are really in a state of flux. Healthcare continues to evolve and adjust, based on the outcomes for the Affordable Care Act, ObamaCare. We're watching demographic changes, so the youngest millennials might be a senior in college. So that's changing the demographics of who's in college, they're establishing families and so that's creating growth in K through 12. And you've got really persistent hard problems around security and active shooter that everyone's trying to figure out around a very, very hard problem. So that would be the first one. Probably not surprising to a lot of companies is how we use data and what the data is and how you align that around customer needs. There are lots of great opportunities, but some days, you work hard on what you've got and see how you can get it to come farther. And then the last one is this evolution of marketing from being something that participates as a function in a business to actually being a measured driver of growth that the business can count on. Julie: So, we look at our programs very much from a financial standpoint. So it's not good enough to just have ROI. I've got a couple of programs where we're looking for the EBIT, the actual earnings before interest and taxes that the program is going to contribute. It's not just how much revenue we track within marketing, things like clicks and opens and stuff like that, but the respect that comes to marketing comes when you can present the work you're doing in terms the CFO recognizes and understands. And those are the terms of business, not the terms of marketing. Josh: There's that whole idea historically that marketing is a cost center that you put money in and you get marketing out the other side. And that we're looking at trying to change that model to where you put marketing in and you get money out of the other side. Does that make sense? Julie: Absolutely, that's what we're driving towards and evolving towards every day. Julie: I think there's an evolution happening in marketing more broadly around, as you said, the validating what marketing's bringing to the table. And if you think about it, it creates a powerful opportunity for companies that are early movers, but we're not the first ones to go through this. If you think back to the late 1980s and early '90s and you looked at, manufacturing companies are like, you know what? We can probably do better. And brought in things like Six Sigma and Lean. And so now, companies — if you look at manufacturing in a company — they know pretty well, if they're going to expand a plant or if they're going to invest to build a new plant, the CEO of the company knows, how much it's going to cost, what the payoff is going to be and how long they have to wait for it. They know how much waste they can predict will come out of the system through continuous improvement every single year. You get to the late '90s and the early aughts they did the same thing with IT. The CFO sitting here going, it seems like I'm spending a whole lot of money with IT, not sure what I'm getting for it. Companies have gone through things with SAP and other IT transformation so that today they really have often a seat at the table as an engine for driving any B2B business. And again, the CEO and the CFO know, if we're going to invest in data centers, or roll out this new version of office, or new equipment. They know what productivity they're going to get. They know what risks they're avoiding by making that investment. What we see is that's coming to marketing. And what's encouraging about that is both from a manufacturing or an operational excellence standpoint, and IT — they adapted. They figured out how to start talking about what they did in financial terms that the CFO understands. And on the flip side, every company is looking to grow. A lot of companies don't look to marketing because they don't trust and respect marketing enough to deliver that. It's financial terms, it's EBIT, it's operational ROI, it's revenue, it's earnings per share. Those are the things that they understand and when marketing can say, listen, if you give me this much within this period of time, I'll deliver this much back. [bctt tweet="“It's EBIT, operational ROI, revenue, & earnings per share. When marketing can say, if you give me this much within this period of time, I'll deliver this much back.” — Julie Brown of @johnsoncontrols" username="toprank"] When you're president of a business, if you hire 200 more sales reps, you know what you're going to get. You know, whatever your cycle is. In 18 months they will be productive — 200 sales reps are going to drive this much revenue and this much profit. If for whatever reason you've got to take 50 out, you know it's going to be painful, but you understand what that pain is and you know about how big it's going to be. They don't know how to do that with marketing, and that's the opportunity. And doing that is what we're working really hard on. The flip side of it is, it's kind of the last function where you can get a big strategic competitive advantage. I mean, think about the companies who were early adopters of Six Sigma and manufacturing, they had huge systemic growth in the market and in their industry. Companies who are early adopters around that IT transformation got huge market share and transforming their business. The companies that can leverage marketing for growth have first-mover advantage available to them. It's just going to take marketing to explain in business terms — financial terms — how to be that player. Stay tuned to the TopRank Marketing Blog and subscribe to our YouTube channel for more Break Free B2B interviews. Here are a few interviews to whet your appetite:

• Break Free B2B Marketing: Mark Bornstein on Digital Experience

• Break Free B2B Marketing: Sruthi Kumar on Creating Memorable Experiences

• Break Free B2B Series: Hal Werner on the Intersection of Marketing Creativity and Analytics

• Break Free B2B Series: Adi Bachar-Reske on Taking the Lead in the Evolution of B2B Content Marketing

   

How Social Should the CMO Be? 3 Guidelines for Success

Senior executive social media participation is often associated with better leadership, brand transparency and helps build better connections with customers, employees, and investors. For most companies, the CMO is one of the most visible executives and as a public facing marketing role, there is an expectation that the chief marketing officer will be active on social networks. But how many tweets, likes, shares and stories is enough? It is tempting for senior marketing executives to hold themselves up in comparison to professional marketing influencers who spend virtually all of their time keynoting conferences, writing books and being interviewed by the media – aka “brandividuals”. A review of the latest list of the most influential CMOs will reveal a number of executives that have been able to achieve a unicorn-like duality of maintaining their organizational responsibilities as well as an active social media presence, but that is certainly not the norm. Many senior marketing executives and CMOs are still working out what an appropriate level of social engagement looks like. A commitment to being active on social networks is imperative, if not a practical function of marketing leadership. If faced with some uncertainty about how to find the right balance, CMOs and senior marketing executives can follow these three guidelines for meaningful and manageable social media success.

Set a goal: Be specific

There are myriad possibilities with social media but even the thought of that can paralyze one’s effort to start. Begin with a singular goal. What is one thing you hope to accomplish by being visible and connected on the social web? Focus on that one thing and even go so far as to make a goal statement articulating what you hope to accomplish and how you plan to achieve it. The goal might simply be to reinforce your thought leadership on a specific topic or it might be to make yourself available to customers, prospects and the media. Just decide and commit.

Curate: Be useful

Leverage a social monitoring tool like BuzzSumo, the search feature on Twitter or your normal digital news sources to find interesting articles, posts, videos and other kinds of content to share with your social network. Add some of your perspective to curated information that consistently follows the theme that supports your goal. Share your own content as well. Become the “best answer” for what it is you want to be known for by building thought leadership with useful curation plus insight.

Interact and instigate

Be engaging. Much of social media’s value is in engagement and exchanges of ideas with your community. Use a social media listening tool to surface mentions of your name, brand and social content. Interact, show appreciation for the behaviors and messages that align with your goal. Ask your community questions that would lead to discussion and conversation around topics that can lead to your messaging and social media goals. Listen for questions being asked where your helpful answer can help lead that person to a positive experience. Being specific in your goal, sharing useful content from other sources as well as from your brand and engaging with your community are three of the fundamental things a senior executive can do on social networks. Make these core activities part of a process and a daily habit. Identify the tools you’ll need and set up alerts so you can spend a small, consistent amount of time building your social presence on a regular basis. With a little planning and tools, you can accomplish important visibility, thought leadership and customer engagement goals in just a few minutes a day. A version of this post originally published here.