In my last post I wrote about Catalyst Directs’ belief in the integration of Sales and Marketing in order to move prospects through awareness to consideration and, ultimately, to the purchase decision.

 Another important aspect of this process is the development of relevant content—so that your customer is getting information that is in synch with where they are in their decision process.

 No Awareness

When there’s no awareness of you, your product or service, the first job is to create it. While DM is not known as an awareness medium, there are things you can do: create engaging and breakthrough dimensional mailings, PURLs, referral campaigns, guerilla campaigns and more. The one thing you have to achieve is answer your customer’s big question: What’s in it for me?

 Awareness

Once you’ve created a sense of who you are, what you stand for, promise and deliver, you can start providing your prospects with information that will help them build their business—and their confidence in you. This information can include articles in trade publications under your byline, white papers, industry and analyst reviews (provided by you), research reports (purchased, found or created by you), events and trade shows. You can provide information through follow-up mailings to your original target, as well as key influencers, PURLs, microsites  and telemarketing.

 Consideration

Now that you have begun to gain traction, you have entered a very critical stage in the relationship. Content can include webinars/seminars, relevant case studies and success stories, events, podcasts. The goal here is to not only stay on the radar, but stay on the radar with useful, relevant information that positions you as knowledgeable, on top of it, and the “go-to” choice.

 Lead

Now that you have the qualified lead, keep the communication focused on business-related offers. Now it’s time to put your closers to work. Don’t forget to update your microsite to reflect the ongoing status.

 Conversion

Don’t stop now—the real work is just starting. Continue building relationships with thank-you letters and customer feedback surveys. Now is the time to over deliver and start working toward those customer testimonials.

Is this the only process? Of course not, but it works. Contact me and I’ll show you how we’ve put it to work for our B2B clients.

I recently spoke with Ginger Conlon in the 1to1 Blog about how consumer behavior is changing, especially in the way customers communicate and interact with brands. Consumers are much more empowered. Increasingly they interact with businesses when, where, and how they want. Today, one of business’s greatest challenges is to keep up. 

There are four four areas that businesses should improve in to keep pace with customers’ changing expectations:

Why is it that within most companies “Marketing” and “Sales” are competing disciplines that seldom (if ever) work together? We don’t believe in it. We believe, and have proven, that when Marketing and Sales join forces they can move prospects through awareness to consideration and, ultimately to the purchase decision.

The first step is to recognize that the process is a continuum and not linear because prospects are constantly defining and redefining their own needs. They choose to embrace or discard the marketing or sales message on their own terms.  Consequently, Marketing must be increasingly relevant, preference-driven and channel-neutral and Sales must be adaptive to changing conditions.

This is accomplished through a complete understanding of the prospect’s purchase process, as well as the marketers’ own sales process. The target audience defines the purchase process, and the sales process is defined internally. Marketing must develop communication strategies that serve each master based on how people buy and how their own Sales team sells.

If, after an initial contact, it’s determined that the target is a prospect, but not yet ready to buy, then it’s important for Marketing to continue the nurturing process and allow Sales to focus on the next best opportunity.

This means that Marketing must appreciate the time and process involved by people and companies who make purchase decisions.  And Sales must appreciate that contacting the prospect once is not the end of the consideration cycle.

To learn more, contact me and I’ll be happy to show how this will work within your company.

I contributed to an article for last weeks’ DM News, titled “Adding Dimension to DM Success”. You can read the entire article here. For the right target, and the right product or service, nothing works like getting a “present” in the mail. We recommend a dimensional piece for a number of our clients, because the engagement level is so great. And most importantly, because they work. Here’s one we recently mailed for Weyerhaeuser. You can check it out in our portfolio

Donna DeClemente has a nice summary of a recent webinar: Forrester’s Five Year Interactive Marketing Forecast.

A taste:

• Search Marketing is expected to triple in 5 years to over $25 billion.
• Online Display ads will reach almost $14 billion. The ability to create rich media ads will help this growth.
• Email marketing spend will shift to integration which means that email will start to be more integrated with other mediums.
• Online video has the steepest growth curve of any of these channels because it has a very low adaption of around $450 million today. It’s an easy medium for marketers to understand and something that they’re familiar with. Interactive videos will also help see this medium grow.
• Emerging Media which Forrester defined as social media, mobile marketing and in-game advertising and states that social media is poised to have the most significant growth of these three elements. Social media is providing many marketers with a way to help get them interactive.

Time and again, general advertising and marketing communications agencies have invested, purchased, persuaded, cajoled their way into Web work – without ever really understanding it.

I remember one such example vividly: an agency director muscled his way into a meeting about a Web platform redesign and commandeered the first twenty minutes to highlight the many faults and problems with the client’s existing site. We sat patiently. At the end, the agency bigwig posed the killer question: “Who built this for you anyway? It’s horrible!” To which the client replied: “You did.”To be fair, that general agency exec was setup for a fall. After all, the birth of brands was in the late 1800s, and the birth of the agency came coincidentally with wider distribution of broadcast technologies such as print, radio, and television. It was a “setup” because the Internet is a narrowcast technology—not a broadcast one. While the birth of marketing came in broadcast form, the future clearly lies in new “narrow” ways of reaching customers.

Narrow markets demand narrow marketing

Concepts like the endless aisle, the long tail, the sudden and dramatic line extensions in even our oldest and most revered brands, and the general success of niche marketing on the Web, all tacitly suggest that a narrower approach to marketing will be more successful in this “more narrow” brand and product landscape.

Over the last 30 years or so, only one marketing discipline has been increasing focused on technologies that capture the power of narrowcasting: direct marketing. And while DM agencies have long focused on print/mail, telephone, and television, the rules they apply to their work are a strangely appropriate launching point for Internet success. They get it. They narrowcast. Auragen’s 12 years of experience confirm the best Web applications are built by …

• … matching customer information (e.g., Mary likes apples)
• … with the right content (…so we’ll show her apple recipes first…)
• … in the right display format (… in a format that fits her iPhone).

It’s the knowledge of Mary that helps us tune the offer appropriately and deliver the proper creative execution. You will immediately see how this approach echoes the most basic of rules in direct marketing:

1. focus first on the right list of prospects
2. ensure that you have the right offer for them and…
3. deliver it in a creative package that breaks through the clutter.

The approaches are the same, but for a long time we’ve worked on separate projects for separate objectives, with separate corporate clients.

No longer.

Direct marketing replaces general advertising

The promise of DM 2.0 is the promise of narrowcasting, for sure. But it’s also the promise of true and final integration of Internet initiatives into the marketing mix. But instead of waiting for general advertising to accept new media and direct into their fold, we realize now that the general advertising is an old approach with waning utility and reach. Instead, the promise of truly integrated direct marketing initiatives—spanning and leveraging all media types and formats—is the big opportunity for smart marketers.

Traditional direct marketing has finally merged with interactive services and the Internet. Expect to see integrated approaches and models that result in dramatically more targeted and more effective campaigns. Expect to see brands take on a far more personal and direct relationship with their prospects, members, and evangelists. Expect the brand experience to literally be delivered to customers on an individual basis. And expect this approach to define marketing communications for the next 50 years.