Distilled Learnings

I've been reading over my posts on this blog as well as posts from the Tier 1 blogging friends who I invited to the SAP Marketing Community event, including, Seth Godin, Jeff Nolan, Ze Frank, David Armano, Laura Fitton, David Scott, Zoli Erdos and Dennis Howlett. Nothing invigorates my mind and motivates more than debating with great thinkers. Out of these debates come more cystallized ideas to help my own business run better.  So in as short as space as I can, here's what I've been thinking about...

1. Great content, not great gimmicks is the cornerstone for great marketing success and content must be personalized for the individual who is seeking out your content.  As I've said before content sets the context for any experience your customer will have with you.
2. Make it free, make it easy to share, and unleash it to the world - the whole point is to drive conversation, so putting your content behind deep walls of registration actually hurts your marketing as opposed to helping.  Yeah, I know. "but we need to capture reg data to meet our demand gen objectives" says your DG team.  Yes. I know, but there are right ways to reg and wrong ways to reg.  Do it right, Do it light!
3. For B2B technology companies, viral marketing is an empowering form of marketing but please lets be careful about how and when its done. Lets be intelligent about it eh?  Pick and choose your biological marketing battles.
4. Develop and implement an easy to use attitudinal segmentation scheme... why?  Because in a hihgly competitive, highly commoditized market (such as enterprise software) companies can't afford to spend time talking to folks who just won't buy.  An attitudinal segmentation enables you to identify the high priority segments and members of those segments who you should go after as well as identify those segments to stay away from because they won't yield returns. Attitudinal segmentation, along with buyer personas enable you to truly create a personalized experience based on not only what the buyer does in an org but how is organization buys. Critical!!
5. Be customer centric. Yeah, you've heard me discuss this ad nauseum but I think now is the time to really focus on customer centricity. Why now?  Because we are in an economic downturn and companies need a loyal, loud and large groups of core customers that they can rely on during good times but especially in bad.  (hint: you can use this base to jump into adjacent markets more easily) You can only really do this if you put the customer at the center of everything you do.  Look, its simple, you market to your customers to drive conversation.  Heck markets are conversations.  Those conversations develop into relationships. Those relationships in turn develop into brand affinity - you know, that irrational loyalty for a brand?  I see it the face of Apple customers. Need a B2B example?  Talk to some SAP customers, Heck, talk to some SFDC customers.  In both sets you will see that core.  Why do you need brand affinity. Because!   Because affinity drive revenue.
6. To become customer centric think Employees First.  This is a shameless plug for Danny Meyer's Book, Setting the Table.  But, if you really want to build a customer-centric organization, don't start with Customer initiatives, Start by training and attracting talent that is customer centric to begin with.  That get the notion of putting the customer in the center of what they do, whether its software development, marketing or serving up a great martini.
7. Customers deserve great experiences from their suppliers in fact, its a critical competitive differentiator, yet so few companies actually spend the time to design, develop and deliver great experiences - over the web, on the phone, in person.   Whose your Chief Customer Officer?
8. Innovation - stop thinking its just about your products. If you are not co-innovating with your customers and partners on product, process and institutional innovation then you are missing a chance to be great.

I'll put my soapbox away now.