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It’s amaz­ing how often I hear some­thing to the effect of “No one reads copy these days.” Now, of course, being a pro­fes­sional B2B copy­writer by trade, you might expect me to have a hang up about copy. I also encounter the related belief that we are all writ­ers. I write. You write. It’s stuff we all learnt at school. How hard can it be?

Today, it’s all about the pictures

We are a more visual cul­ture than ever before. Each of us spends seri­ous qual­ity time in front of one screen or another every sin­gle day. Over the years, adver­tis­ing has become more visual and less wordy. Online video is still grow­ing expo­nen­tially. And mil­lions of peo­ple restrict their thoughts to bursts of 140 char­ac­ters or less.

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Image cour­tesy of http://www.adpulp.com/gamification_se/

There is a grow­ing opin­ion in the dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing com­mu­nity that the con­struc­tion of the social layer of the web is now com­plete, espe­cially with the dom­i­nance of Face­book. The next phase will move from estab­lish­ing social con­nec­tions to the devel­op­ment of game dynam­ics that encour­age long-term brand engage­ment and loyalty.

It’s cer­tainly easy to see how game the­ory has already been applied in con­sumer mar­ket­ing e.g. building-up points on FourSquare to get a free cof­fee at Star­bucks. But, the big ques­tion is how will it work for B2B?

Per­sonas – the fic­tional char­ac­ters cre­ated to help bring tar­get cus­tomers to life – are now pretty much ubiq­ui­tous in mar­ket­ing depart­ments and their agen­cies. They are used to more accu­rately depict var­i­ous cus­tomer seg­ments, giv­ing a firmer foun­da­tion on which to address customers.

You can see why. Where at one time our tar­get might be described as:

• IT direc­tor in an enterprise-sized business
• Located in EMEA with mul­ti­ple offices
• Cur­rently using tra­di­tional tele­phony across all sites
• Their cur­rent con­tract is due to expire in the next 12 months
• Etc

Now we have:

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Win­ning new busi­ness is always tough (and get­ting tougher). All that work, all that effort for the pitch, and you finally win! Then the work begins for real and it all becomes a blur of dead­lines, deliv­er­ables and more long nights.

And there’s no praise if you fal­ter in your tracks, fail to deliver and find your new client head­ing back to his pre­vi­ous agency or to the close run num­ber two… who said life was ever meant to be easy?

Win­ning is impor­tant but keep­ing a client happy over a sus­tained period of time is much more demand­ing and, unlike pitch­ing, con­ducted in the real world of blood, sweat and tears.

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I was speak­ing at a B2B mar­ket­ing event the other day about mobile. For many of us it’s a very hot topic. What amazed me at the event, how­ever, was how few peo­ple in the room are actively con­sid­er­ing mobile mar­ket­ing for their organ­i­sa­tions. And, more impor­tantly, how mobile could form an inte­gral part of their cus­tomer engage­ment strat­egy. For me the biggest prob­lem seems to be a per­cep­tion gap between what mar­keters think and the actual mobile usage amongst their B2B tar­get audi­ences.

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IMHO from the old­est boy in media

Men­tion the term SLA (Ser­vice Level Agree­ment) in the world of adver­tis­ing and people’s eyes will glaze over and their minds turn to lunch (or the after work trip to the pub).

Years of expe­ri­ence have taught me what keeps clients loyal and pub­lish­ers deliv­er­ing that extra bit that turns a good plan into an excel­lent plan: a belief that suc­cess­ful rela­tion­ships are built on foun­da­tions of trans­parency, hon­esty and a mutual effort to succeed.

In my first blog post, I’ll address the very real need for the media pro­fes­sional to build and main­tain SLAs with their key sup­pli­ers.

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The final pre­sen­ta­tion at last week’s Social Media Hud­dle was from Xabier Ormaz­a­bal. He’s Senior Man­ager, Prod­uct Mar­ket­ing over at Salesforce.com. His 25 minute slot was filled with a huge amount of insight and action­able advice. Here’s a quick sum­mary of the points I took from it.

Salesforce.com build their social media strat­egy around three pil­lars of online com­mu­nity. Seems like a pretty straight for­ward model:

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• First ensure that your cor­po­rate site and other owned web prop­er­ties are work­ing hard for you. Focus on build­ing engage­ment through knowl­edge shar­ing, user groups, blogs and ideas sharing.

A year is a long time in social media. We held our first Social Media Hud­dle in Autumn 2009. Dur­ing the ses­sion, atten­dees learnt how Dell, IBM, Juniper and Salesforce.com were all using social media to drive mar­ket­ing success.

To see how social media has moved on, this year we’re host­ing a new hud­dle at the Ban­ner offices. In this information-packed after­noon, mar­keters will hear from senior tech­nol­ogy mar­keters and ven­dors about how they’re using social media to drive prov­able suc­cess for their brands in 2010 and beyond.

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At the Hud­dle you’ll discover:

• How to get the most from the avail­able media options

Look­ing back on my youth, I used to pride myself on my abil­ity to remem­ber all of my friends’ tele­phone num­bers and every uni­ver­sity lec­ture that I had over the course of a week. Now, such feats of mem­ory are no longer required of my brain – my mobile devices and online ser­vices remem­ber and man­age these tasks for me.


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With search engines charg­ing for clicks and not impres­sions and typ­i­cally being con­sid­ered a direct response chan­nel, you may be for­given to think that there’s lit­tle need to opti­mise for click-through rate (CTR). How­ever, since CTR is the major­ity fac­tor to deter­mine the so-called qual­ity score, which impacts the cost-per-click (CPC), this will affect the suc­cess of the cam­paign; regard­less of if objec­tives are sales, leads or traffic.

Why are search engines doing this? The adverts CTR is an impor­tant sig­nal of “qual­ity” for search engines. The logic is that if the advert matches the users query, they will click it. There­fore the higher the CTR, the more rel­e­vant the advert is assumed to be. And of course, since the search engines charge adver­tis­ers per click, their rev­enue increases.

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