Why B2B Marketers Should Care About "Couch Tracking"

In their new book, Absolute Value:  What Really Influences Customers in the Age of (Nearly) Perfect Information, Itamar Simonson and Emanuel Rosen contend that several long-standing and widely-accepted principles of marketing are becoming less relevant in today's competitive environment. For example:

• Brand names and brand perceptions are becoming less powerful, and they are playing a reduced role in the customer decision-making process.
• Customer loyalty is declining. A customer's past experiences with a brand are having less and less impact on the customer's future buying decisions.
• Product positioning is less effective than it used to be, and marketers' attempts to shape people's preferences with traditional "persuasive" marketing techniques are becoming pointless in many markets.

Simonson and Rosen argue that an abundance of high-quality information about products and services is driving a fundamental shift in how consumers make buying decisions. When potential buyers can easily access credible information (such as expert opinions, customer reviews, and price comparison sites), they rely less on general brand perceptions and their past experiences with a brand's products and services, and they are less influenced by traditional marketing techniques and messages.

This wealth of "objective" information makes it easier for potential buyers to judge the absolute value of products or services and make more "rational" buying decisions.

For obvious reasons, Absolute Value has created quite a stir in the marketing community. I'll provide my view on the brand, loyalty, and positioning topics in future posts. In this post, I want to discuss another concept in the book that has significant implications for B2B marketers.

Simonson and Rosen identified three "new" consumer decision-making patterns that are assuming greater importance in today's information-rich environment. They called one of these patterns couch tracking. The basic idea of couch tracking is that because information is now so easily accessible, potential buyers are constantly consuming information about products or product categories that interest them.

In the book, Simonson and Rosen used couch tracking to describe the behavior of consumers, but the idea also applies to business buyers. In B2B, couch tracking means that business buyers are "always" accessing information about business issues and products or services that attract their interest.

The problem is, this consumption of information does not necessarily mean that the potential buyers are actively considering a potential purchase, but it's easy to misread the signals. Most of the traditional models of the B2B buying process focus on what happens after a potential buyer becomes aware of a need or a business issue that should be addressed. In the traditional models, this awareness triggers an active buying process that usually starts with information gathering.

Simonson and Rosen contend that couch tracking can turn the traditional buying process on its head because potential buyers are gathering and consuming information long before they are ready to seriously consider buying something.

Couch tracking has several important implications for the practice of B2B demand generation. Most importantly, it elevates the importance of developing and publishing high-quality marketing content. Couch trackers will form a powerful first impression of a company based on the content they consume, even when they aren't actually considering a purchase and have no immediate plans to begin a buying process. The important point is, if and when a potential buyer begins an active buying process, that first impression plays an important role in determining which potential vendors are given serious consideration.

Compelling, high-quality content has the potential to create what psychologists call a halo effect. A halo effect can be defined as a cognitive bias in which we "transfer" our perceptions regarding one quality of a person or an organization to other qualities or attributes of that person or organization. In other words, if we perceive that a company is good at "A," we will tend to perceive that the company is also good at "B" and "C."

A halo effect significantly increases the "weight" we give to first impressions. Therefore, if a potential buyer is favorably impressed by the content you publish, he or she will transfer that favorable impression to other attributes of your company and your products or services, even before he or she has "hard" evidence to support a judgement.

The potential for creating halo effects with couch trackers is just one more reason why compelling content is so critical to effective B2B demand generation.

What Marketers Can Learn From the Gartner Hype Cycle

Academic researchers and business analysts have been studying the adoption of new technology for at least the past fifty years. One of the most well-respected models of technology adoption is the diffusion of innovations theory that was developed by Everett Rogers in the early 1960's. Rogers' model is the source of the now-familiar terms early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards.

In the mid-1990's, the analyst firm Gartner, Inc. developed another model to describe the adoption of new technologies. Gartner called their model the hype cycle, and it's become a popular way to depict the technology adoption life cycle. Gartner regularly publishes hype cycles for various categories of technologies, and I find them always interesting and occasionally provocative. The diagram below shows the components of the Gartner hype cycle.

As this diagram illustrates, there are five phases in the Gartner hype cycle.

• Technology Trigger - when a new technology is launched
• Peak of Inflated Expectations - when the expectations for a technology (driven by several forms of hype) far exceed what the technology can reasonable deliver
• Trough of Disillusionment - when the unrealistic expectations aren't met, some users and supporters abandon the new technology entirely
• Slope of Enlightenment - when the realistic benefits of the new technology begin to appear, and users begin to apply the technology to achieve those benefits
• Plateau of Productivity - when the realistic benefits of the technology become widely apparent, and there is mainstream adoption in the market

The Gartner hype cycle is designed to provide one perspective of technology adoption, but I suggest that it also applies to other types of innovations, including new marketing strategies and techniques. That's because the hype cycle is really a description of how we as humans respond to new things that promise to change our status quo for the better.

It's easy to see the hype cycle at work in marketing. When a new marketing strategy or technique appears that seems to promise significant benefits, the marketing community often responds with great excitement. The "shiny new object" becomes the topic du jour for articles, blog posts, webinars, conference sessions, and even full-length books. As the hype machine kicks in, it becomes almost impossible not to overestimate the benefits that the new strategy or technique will provide. Almost as important, the hype inevitably overstates how easy it is to realize those benefits.

Enticed by the exaggerated benefits, we rush to acquire and/or implement the new strategy or technique only to find that it doesn't deliver the benefits we expected. After a while, we may even decide that our shiny new object is essentially worthless and abandon it entirely.

If we get past this point, we may begin to develop a more realistic set of expectations regarding the benefits that the strategy or technique can deliver and, just as important, a better understanding of what we must do in order to realize those benefits. Finally, as we become increasingly proficient with the strategy or technique, it becomes increasingly productive, and we begin to gain the (realistic) benefits we came to expect.

So, what can marketers learn from the Gartner hype cycle? First, be careful not to overestimate the benefits that a new marketing strategy or technique will provide. There are simply no silver bullets in the practice of marketing. As a human being, you probably won't be able to completely avoid inflated expectations, but make your best efforts to resist the hype.

Second, when a new strategy or technique fails to meet your initial expectations, don't be too quick to declare it a complete failure. Recognize that your initial expectations were probably exaggerated, and make an objective evaluation of what benefits you can reasonably expect the strategy or technique to provide. This is also when you need to develop a clear and accurate picture of what you will need to do to reap those benefits.

Some marketing strategies and techniques are nothing more than fads, and they should be dropped at the earliest opportunity. In most cases, however, the initial disappointment results from unrealistic expectations regarding both the significance of the benefits and the work you'll need to do to realize them.

One Way to Make Feeding the Content Beast Easier

Other than lack of time, the biggest challenge now facing B2B content marketers is producing enough content, according to the latest content marketing survey by the Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs.

The volume of content required for effective B2B marketing has increased dramatically over the past few years in part because publishing new content frequently is important for improving search engine rankings. More significantly, though, companies must produce more content because of the need to make marketing messages more relevant for potential buyers. To improve relevance, marketers are increasingly using two best practices:

• They are creating buyer personas and developing content that is tailored to address the particular needs and interests of each persona. This increases what I call personal relevance.
• They are developing content that is specifically designed for each stage of the buying process, which increases what I call situational relevance.

This approach can be extremely powerful and effective, but it can also turn content development into an overwhelming job for many companies. For example, suppose that you've created four buyer personas and that you use the traditional four-stage buying process (Awareness-Interest-Consideration-Decision). This scenario would literally require 16 unique content assets to fully implement a persona-specific/stage-specific content marketing strategy, as illustrated by the following table.

While there is no "easy" button for content development, there are some steps you can take to make the job more manageable. One important step is to ask how much customization is really required to achieve the necessary level of relevance.

For example, the reality is that you probably would not need 16 distinct content assets to have an effective marketing program in the circumstances described above. If you take a close look at your buyer personas, you would probably find that they have similar interests, concerns, and information needs when they are in the early stages of the buying process. In many cases, the need for content that is customized for each buyer persona increases as potential buyers move through the buying process.

What this means is that you can often use one early-stage content asset to "cover" multiple buyer personas without incurring a significant loss of relevance. The table below shows how this approach could be used to reduce the number of assets needed for an effective content marketing program. In this example, the number of required assets goes from 16 to 11, which represents a 31% reduction in the number of assets needed.

The above example is for illustration purposes only. There's no universal rule that predicts how much streamlining this approach will enable you to achieve. Your business circumstances will dictate how much streamlining is possible, and you should only streamline if you can maintain a high level of relevance. But, if you can lower your content requirements by even 20% or so, that will make feeding the content beast easier.

The State of "Enterprise-Level" Content Marketing

LookBookHQ and Oracle Eloqua recently published the findings of their Eloqua Community State of Content Marketing Survey 2014. This was a survey of the Oracle Eloqua "community," which I believe means users of Oracle Eloqua's marketing automation software.

The Oracle Eloqua software is an "enterprise-level" B2B marketing automation solution, so many of the respondents to this survey were affiliated with larger organizations. For example, 66% of the respondents work at companies with more than 500 employees. Fifty-one percent of the respondents had annual marketing budgets of more than $500,000, and 38% had annual marketing budgets of more than $1 million. These survey findings are interesting because they reflect the attitudes and practices of sophisticated marketing organizations that should be more "advanced" than average firms when it comes to content marketing.

Here's a brief summary of some of the findings.

Content Objectives

The top four objectives for content marketing identified by survey respondents were:

• Demand/lead generation (88%)
• Lead nurturing (66%)
• Brand awareness (58%)
• Sales enablement (51%)

My Take:  These results aren't really surprising, but they differ somewhat from the findings of the latest annual content marketing survey conducted by the Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs. In that survey, the top four content marketing objectives were brand awareness (82%), lead generation (74%), customer acquisition (71%), and thought leadership (68%).

Volume of Content Produced

Participants in the LookBookHQ/Oracle Eloqua survey were asked:  On average how much new content (excluding blog posts) is your company producing? Here's how the participants responded.

• Multiple assets per week (29%)
• One asset per week (13%)
• One asset every two weeks (20%)
• One asset per month (28%)
• One asset per quarter or less (7%)

My Take:  This is the first survey I've seen that quantifies the volume of content that marketers are producing. I was somewhat surprised that 42% of respondents said they are producing at least one new content asset per week. In my experience, that's an aggressive content development pace. I suspect that smaller companies are producing significantly less, if you don't include blog posts and social media updates.

Content Marketing Challenges

The single biggest content marketing challenge identified by survey respondents (24%) was "getting our target audience to engage with our content." However, 44% of respondents identified some aspect of content production as the biggest challenge. The specific challenges were as follows:

• Creating enough targeted content (23%)
• Creating enough content (16%)
• Creating content that helps our sales teams (5%)

My Take:  In the CMI/MarketingProfs survey discussed earlier, the top three content marketing challenges identified by respondents were lack of time (69%), producing enough content (55%), and producing the kind of content that engages (47%). So, the results from the LookBookHQ/Oracle Eloqua survey are quite similar to the CMI/MarketingProfs findings. To me, these findings make the point that producing enough quality content is not easy, even for relatively large organizations with substantial marketing budgets.

Other Interesting Findings

• Blogging is a mainstream marketing activity. Thirty-nine percent of survey respondents said they publish at least six posts per month.
• Seventy-five percent of respondents said they are repurposing content assets at least two times (59% said 2-5 times).

The Vital Importance of "Unrealistic" Thinking

In 1960, Theodore Levitt wrote a landmark article for the Harvard Business Review titled, "Marketing Myopia." When it was republished in 2004, HBR editors said the article, "introduced the most influential marketing idea of the past half century."

In a quintessential passage in the article, Levitt explained the decline of railroads in terms that have become part of the fabric of business:

"The railroads did not stop growing because the need for passenger and freight transportation declined. That grew. The railroads are in trouble today not because that need was filled by others (cars, trucks, airplanes, and even telephones), but because it was not filled by the railroads themselves. They let others take customers away from them because they assumed themselves to be in the railroad business rather than in the transportation business."

In essence, Levitt argued that railroads fell into decline because they remained tied to their past, while technological and other developments gave customers more effective ways to meet their transportation needs.

The tendency to stick with what's worked in the past even while the competitive environment is changing is one of the biggest dangers facing leaders of all types of business organizations. As Don Peppers wrote in a recent article at LinkedIn:

"We develop our habits, our work patterns, our routines, and we adapt those habits and routines to an ever-changing competitive and technological environment. Over time, we go to greater and greater lengths to preserve our traditional routines, until pretty soon we're crossing an entire ocean just to be able to do things the way we've always done them . . . The problem is that the more we simply make minimal accommodations to deal with a radically changed environment (even if the change was gradual), the more fragile we become . . ."

The most effective way to combat this dangerous tendency is to periodically analyze the competitive environment and fundamental business issues from the perspective of a new business. In other words, you need to step away from your existing strategies and practices and ask:  What would we do if we were starting our company from scratch in today's market environment? What would we do to maximize our chances of success given current market conditions?

For example, how would you answer questions like these if you were starting with a clean slate?:

• What products or services should we offer?
• What kinds of customers should we seek to serve?
• In what geographic markets should we compete?
• How should we structure our operations?
• How should we build our brand?
• How should we market our products or services?

Thinking this way can be difficult because it doesn't come naturally to most of us. Plus, some people will question the value of this approach because it's inherently unrealistic. No existing business ever works with a truly clean slate; it always has resources, processes, and values that define what the business is and limit the actions it can take.

Nevertheless, this "unrealistic" way of thinking is vitally important because:

• It brings vulnerabilities to the surface and makes them visible. If there are significant differences between your current strategies and practices and those you would use if you were starting from scratch, those differences likely constitute competitive weaknesses.
• It will frequently reveal the importance of adopting and implementing new business or marketing strategies, and thus provide the impetus for making difficult changes.

One final word. In every company, someone must be responsible for performing this kind of "unrealistic" analysis, and in my view, that "someone" should be marketing. Marketers should be particularly well-suited to play this role because they are primarily responsible for identifying the needs of customers and prospects and for understanding the dynamics of the competitive environment, which is precisely what is required to make this "what-if" analysis productive.

Why the Direct Approach in Lead Generation Isn't Always Best

The conventional wisdom among B2B marketing and sales professionals is that the fastest and surest route to a closed sale is to identify and create engagement with the economic buyer - the individual who can actually make the decision to purchase your product or service. This perspective usually leads marketers and salespeople to focus their lead generation efforts on C-level executives. As marketers, we create content and design lead generation programs for CxO's. As salespeople, we try to get in front of high-level executives whenever we can.

As it turns out, however, taking a direct approach to the presumptive decision maker/economic buyer may not be the best lead generation strategy, at least if your company sells complex and/or expensive products or services. To start with, significant buying decisions are rarely made by a single individual. Buying by committee is now the norm, and while an individual executive may still have the authority to sign-off on a proposed purchase, the de facto buying decision is usually made by a group.

There's also a more subtle, but equally important, reason why the direct approach may not be best, and it relates to how senior executives make important business decisions. Research by CEB has shown that when decision makers (the people who actually sign the contract) are evaluating prospective purchases, the single most important criteria is widespread support for the proposed supplier/solution across the organization. In other words, what the decision maker really wants to know is that a proposed purchase has the strong backing of his or her team. Therefore, the real key to winning over the economic buyer is to win the support of the key buying influences.

While consensus buying is not a new phenomenon, it has now become the norm because senior decision makers recognize that stakeholder buy-in is critical for the successful implementation of most significant new initiatives.

For marketers, the emergence of consensus buying has three major implications. First, it makes it critical for marketers to identify all of the members of the "buying group" and understand what their interests and concerns are relating to your proposed solution.

Second, it means that marketing must develop content resources that speak to the needs and concerns of all the stakeholders who will influence the purchase decision. Both marketing and sales are responsible for creating engagement with all of the significant buying influences.

Finally, the emergence of consensus buying means that marketers should not target lead generation campaigns too narrowly. We now know that targeted, more relevant lead generation programs are more effective than the "spray and pray" campaigns of the past. At the same time, however, you shouldn't exclude influencers from your lead generation programs even if you have a good idea of who the ultimate decision maker will be. The likelihood is, you'll need those influencers to close the deal, and some of them could become your strongest advocates.

Why You Need Both Short-Term and Long-Term Marketing

All business leaders face two fundamental demands. They must execute their current business activities well enough to win success in today's competitive marketplace, while at the same time adapting their strategy to meet tomorrow's competitive challenges. As Jack Welch, the former Chairman and CEO of GE, once said, "You've got to eat while you dream. You've got to deliver on short-term commitments, while you develop a long-range strategy and vision and execute it."

Marketing leaders face this same business challenge. To build a well-tuned demand generation system that will produce consistent and growing revenues, marketers (and sales leaders for that matter) must simultaneously focus on both the short term and the long term.

Managing marketing efforts to deliver both short-term and long-term results is similar to the military doctrine of fighting close and deep at the same time. In military science, fighting close and deep means that you engage the enemy forces directly in front of you (fighting close), while simultaneously attacking the enemy's rear echelon forces (fighting deep). The basic idea is to weaken the rear echelon forces before they get to the front lines.

Some of you may be wondering what military doctrine has to do with B2B demand generation. Quite a bit, actually, especially for companies with long and complex demand generation cycles. In these circumstances, maximizing demand generation results requires marketing programs that cover the full depth of the demand generation arena. In other words, companies with high-performing demand generation systems engage both long-term and short-term prospects simultaneously.

From a marketing perspective, a complete demand generation system will include the five types of customer-facing programs shown in the diagram below.

The important thing to remember is that these programs impact revenues over different time horizons. At one end of the spectrum, sales enablement programs provide content and tools that support sales reps as they work with short-term sales opportunities. At the other extreme, reputation-building programs are designed to build brand awareness and credibility that will impact revenues over a longer time frame. The principal objective of reputation-building programs is to lay the foundation for your lead acquisition efforts.

Lead acquisition and lead nurturing usually produce an impact on revenue in a more intermediate time frame, and marketing to existing customers can produce both short-term and long-term results.

During the past few years, a great deal of attention has been given to the role of marketing in acquiring and nurturing leads. One reason for this attention is that, with today's marketing technology tools, it's relatively easy to connect these marketing activities to revenues and thus demonstrate the value of marketing.

Lead acquisition and lead nurturing are obviously important marketing functions, but so are the other types of marketing programs. It takes all of these programs to create a demand generation system that will deliver revenue growth in both the short-term and the long-term.