PUT MESSAGING DIFFERENCES ASIDE.
Sales: “I couldn’t use the PowerPoint deck that marketing gave me. It just wasn’t relevant to the conversation I wanted to have with my customer, so I just created my own.”
Marketing: “How can we deliver a clear, compelling and consistent message when sales professionals and executives just change the story for every customer conversation?”
Does this sound familiar? It should. It happens in some shape or form … every day.
In Marketing Sherpa’s 2012 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report, CMOs rated multichannel messaging as the most effective tactic for increasing engagement. The authors of the study go on to say that “when your targets receive the same message from you via multiple channels, you create a consistent and engaging experience.”
What does an engaged audience mean to your business? It’s an audience that is saying, “Tell me more.” It means that your message is initiating conversations with potential customers.
IS THAT SOMETHING YOUR CUSTOMER WOULD SAY?
In business-to-consumer (B2C) marketing, the buyer is typically also the end user. However, in business-to-business (B2B) marketing, the buyer is usually not the end user. The purchasing process is much more complex, involving more departments, more audiences, more decision-makers. Is this why B2B messaging often sounds more elaborate, like in this example from this recent Inc. magazine article?
When Apple prepared to launch the iPad in 2010, it very quickly became clear that Apple understood one of the key elements of messaging – consistency. From every platform, consumers and retailers consistently heard that Apple’s newest piece of technology was “magical and revolutionary,” building a perception of a product to which no other could compare.
Here’s how Apple got it right:
TECHO-OPTIMISM AND THE MODERN MARKETER
In his TED Talk last year, Paul Gilding, author and advocate for action on climate change and sustainability, stunned his audience of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs with the suggestion that the days of infinite optimism over technology are over. He postulated that unquestioning trust in technology is risky due to the “optimism bias” that leads innovators to erroneously believe that there is nothing that can’t be solved through more and better technology.
Although Gilding was speaking of issues facing the planet's ecosystem, his point that reliance on technology, to the exclusion of other problem-solving efforts, can be extrapolated to the art and science of marketing.
