This Sunday, more than 111 million people will tune in to the big game – The Super Bowl –  to watch the 2011 football season come to an end. Many of them will be watching JUST for the commercials. However, over on YouTube, some of the ads have been leaked accidentally on purpose.

A REAL BARGAIN: 30 SECONDS FOR 4 $MILLION

While some companies are coughing up close to $4 million for 30 seconds of air time, international software provider Cincom Systems decided that the $7-8 million it would take to air its ad would be better spent invested in its products and services to help companies improve their bottom line. (Although we did spend $7.00 on this advertisement for a soft drinks and a large peanut butter, anchovies, jalapeño jelly fried veggie burger.)

IT’S NEVER TOO EARLY TO TRAIN

Cincom’s advertisement is a reminder to everyone that it’s never too early to train, strengthen and strategize to position your company to win your big game – and get that next big sale.

ANOTHER CINCOM FIRST

Since every other company is releasing their advertisements this week to try to get ahead of the pack and garner as much buzz as possible, Cincom wanted to get in on the act. So far, this is the first software company advertisement we’ve seen.

VIEW THE LEAKED, SUPER NOT-SO-SECRET VIDEO

Special thanks to Eric Nies, Marilyn Cox, Robyn Robinette-Johnson, Carey Hoffman, Carla Johnson, Ed Mack, Tom Rolf, Devin Meister and Liz Harter (AKA the Cincom Video Team of the Week).

B2B content producers are sales people who sell with concepts, words, illustrations; crafted together by a graphic designer. It is preparing the way for the salesperson to make his onsite visit with a prepared prospective buyer.

But the sad thing about it all is that the team of content producers and professional sales people fail 92% of the time to consistently create top and bottom line growth. That was the result of a study published by the Conference Executive Board in 2010. They reviewed 1,780 companies and only 143 had achieved sustained profitable growth from 1995 to 2008. 143 of 1,780 companies had the magic mixture.

Just 8%. Really?

What we need is a new way to turn content into magic, that like the Indian scout goes ahead to prepare the way for the sales team. We need to depart from traditional marketing.

Clearly it is not working.

We need to innovate around sales and marketing practices that impact decision making upstream from the sales cycle. We need to provide content and early stage selling that helps customers make good decisions about how to reach their aspirations and to overcome their challenges—even if you lose the sale, your reputation will grow. You are the people who help buyers make good decisions instead of selling them snake oil.

Use the total experience from distributing useful, well crafted content to making the onsite visit all helpful to the buyer. Then we will begin to reshape customer understanding of their own needs. Targeted, provocative communications that challenge customer assumptions about their own business growth. Create impact rather than just activity.

What happens in the buyer’s world?

Once we challenge a buyer’s old assumptions, the buyer will convene a group to hear about the new reality. You can be sure that at least one person will see a way of hanging on to the old way or that will come up with a different way of resolving the situation that we recommended. Challenges will surface. Those at risk will fight. The decision drags on.

Those of us on the outside seldom get the view of what is happening on the inside, but we know the likely scenario. Again content marketers need to help the sales team keep the buyer focused on the new reality and on the impact of success or failure.

Content marketing is anticipatory and longitudinal.

Times past are gone when the marketing department could prepare an campaign, a brochure and a few data sheets. Now traditional marketers need to produce a huge array of content to meet what are really foreseeable situations. We have to anticipate these expected challenges.

We have to be ready for a long siege that keeps the buyer engaged throughout a buying cycle that is months long and treacherous with politics.

We have to be out in the marketplace with social content so we remain an important voice in the entire conversation. It is not good enough to have a blog that touches the social conversation. We have to comment on other relevant content posted on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook … on the blogs our buyers publish … on the articles in the online trade media. We have to be everywhere or someone who outsmarts us will slip through and steal the sale we worked so hard to win.

So Content Marketing Institute assembled their list of the top 20 women generating great content to show some might female writers. I might add that Joe  and CMI have done an excellent job at putting the spotlight on women leading the way as serious influencers and contributors to the content marketing institute. Content handled this way is an important factor in improving customer experience.

As a sample, here are 5 of their top 20 (in alpha order):

Ardath Albee (@ardath421): Ardath is the E.F. Hutton of B2B marketing: When she talks, people listen. Her blog and Twitter stream are among the most influential in her category.

Leslie Bradshaw (@LeslieBradshaw): Leslie runs data visualization firm JESS3, which has produced some of the most shared content of the entire social web. Ever. Her “More Seats” column for the Forbes Blog highlights women in tech.

Deirdre Breakenridge (@dbreakenridge): Deirdre is proof that PR and content marketing are kindred spirits. She’s omnipresent across her blog, Twitter, webinars, social Q&A sites, and more.

Jennifer Cisney (@kodakCB): Jennifer runs Kodak’s blog and social media presence. She’s also a prominent speaker at industry events. Anyone who follows Kodak marketing knows it takes smarts and swagger to succeed. She’s got both.

April Dunford (@aprildunford): April’s probably the least “classic” content marketer on this list, but her RocketWatcher blog might just be the smartest, most interesting marketing-related content on the blogosphere.

As marketing content developers we should keep in mind how our content impacts trust and credibility with prospects, clients, employees and suppliers. Words are important. Buyers are absorbing content from all sorts of places. They evaluate emotionally and rationally if our promises sound true or too good to be true. When we accomplish trust and credibility, our marketing content will drive business.

• TRUST means that your marketing content conveys that you will work to make the buyer successful.
• CREDIBILITY comes when your actions follow through with what you promised.

Done well, this will lead to a positive customer experience—one where customers will tell others that they love being associated with your company. Given the openness of social networks, such advocates for your company will spread the word and your reputation as a valuable resource instead of just another vendor.

Keep in mind, however, that B2B buyers can spot a fake from a mile off. They have seen and heard it all a thousand times. They stand alert. False promises can bankrupt your brand. Fake sincerity and you will die by your words. Instead, a sincere commitment based on a deep understanding of your buyers’ aspirations and concerns will enhance your reputation as a trusted adviser.

Parity is broken.

Differentiation is established.

Experience is positive.

Avoid jargon and bells and whistles. Such language always sounds fake and unreliable and communicate you are more interested in selling your solution than in helping the buyer to be successful. Use simple, direct words that clearly communicate what you do and how you create economic value. Use customer testimonials and industry analyst reports to validate your promises. Never slam your competitors. Do what you promise and don’t over-promise. Provide links to your social network profiles. Comment on other blogs. Make it personally relevant wherever you can.

Keep all your marketing content contextually relevant to your buyer personas. The key is to focus on the needs and wants of the customer. Contextual content marketing drives business because it builds credibility and trust. Credibility occurs when buyers understand you have the knowhow and credentials to support your brand promise.  Trust happens when buyers believe you. They will buy from you when they are convinced that you can really help them. That’s when your content will drive more business.

In 2007, Joe Pulizzi launched a content marketing service called Junta42. Recently this was renamed Content Marketing Institute. CMI runs Content World, a huge educational event with the next one occurring in Columbus, OH, on September 4-6, 2012. They also publish a magazine: Chief Content Officer.

CMI’s philosophy is that content marketing must include strategic planning, content creation, distribution, and metrics for multiple stages of the buying cycle to multiple customer personas. In my view, that means a complete content marketing strategy would incorporate inbound marketing principles, but it would also take a more holistic approach to meeting a business’s overall marketing goals.

Developing and implementing a
marketing content strategy is today
the single most critical task
that B2B marketers must master.

Content has always been “king of the hill”.

The power of unique, quality content has been self-evident as a way of capturing audiences with continuity programming. One of the earliest examples of content marketing came in 1895 when John Deere published The Furrow magazine—a magazine still being published today.

Procter & Gamble created its own radio soap opera production subsidiary in 1940, and produced the first network television soap opera in 1950. P&G Productions created 20 soap operas on radio and television, becoming a pioneer in producing award-winning daytime serials like As The World Turns and Guiding Light, which ended in September 2009 after 72 years.  P&G brand marketers were unbeatable because they understood the need to produce their own content to drive business.

So what is different about content marketing today?

The production of content exploded as the Internet became a viable way to reach audiences. For too long, however, the content on websites was not much more than online versions of printed brochures. Customers ditched the approach by ignoring such content. Company-centric content gradually gave way to customer-relevant content—what we call contextual content. Such content has to be well-written and designed, but most important; it has to be relevant to specific buyer segments. It has to be about customer needs rather than product features and benefits.

You simply cannot afford to market the old way—with branded messages that are watered down into creative taglines that hardly any potential customer could give a hoot about you.

Your customers are in control.

We live in a world where buyers want to make up their own mind about what they need. When buyers have problems that need solutions, they will go on the Internet and read about their problem until they are satisfied that they know how solve their situation. They do this without ever talking to one of your salespeople. If you are not in the online dialogue while they are learning, you will not be in the final list of companies they choose to explore in face-to-face meetings. This is true whether they plan to buy a new fire engine or CRM software or business continuity insurance.

Content is today’s path to marketing success.

The raw fact is that B2B marketing is now a content publishing business.  Buyers demand content. Search engines demand content. Marketers must demonstrate through content how we understand our buyer’s needs and how we have developed solutions that are a perfect match to the issues they are trying to resolve.

Today, every marketer must learn what academia insisted on for as long as there have been professors teaching at colleges:

Publish or Perish.

What does it mean to think like a publisher?

When I was editor of a trade magazine for retail merchandisers, we met every day to plan the next issue of the magazine. We visited stores. We talked with retailers. We met with the people advertising in the magazine. We knew the industry and where to find stories that would help these retailers drive more business with better merchandising solutions. We had an editorial calendar so advertisers could plan their ad schedules around the content we would be publishing. The passion everyday was to publish the best content serving our industry.

In the 1980’s, the marketing agency I founded with two partners, produced recipe books for P&G that were unique to each household – coupons personalized to the households’ previous redemption patterns. For Butler Manufacturing, a provider of steel buildings and metal roof systems, we produced a quarterly magazine, Building Profit,  that ran for nearly 10 years.

Today, at Cincom Systems, CEO Tom Nies is constantly producing content to teach and inspire employees to better serve our clients. Marketing publishes eBooks and an animated video that help Chief Sales Officers find new ways to improve how they sell complex products as a major element of the Cincom Acquire software brand. We also publish an award winning bi-weekly online magazine called Expert Access—with over 125,000 subscribers and a weekly one-hour radio program on a local station where we interview business leaders to provide stories that motivate or inform listeners on how to do their jobs better.

What it means for marketers to become publishers is to have the same commitment for producing outstanding content that a magazine publisher has for developing articles that are useful to subscribers. Your buyers are looking for content that is relevant to the issues they face every day at work. You can build a powerful relationship by helping them with their issues and helping them to more smartly buy solutions to their problems or their aspirations.

An efficiency and transaction mindset is driving many industries including airlines into a churn-based business model that is tough to escape from.

In 2012 many businesses will need to step up their efforts to make better use of internal systems that are not integrated to CRM, analytics and customer service systems so they can deliver higher quality customer experiences immediately.  Integrating these systems together and making the quality of data and intelligence a priority will increase the quality of customer experience delivered.

 With these thoughts in mind, here are several customer experience predictions for 2012:

•  By combining quality monitoring, analytics and social media, many companies get a true assessment of the customer experience they are delivering for the first time.  2012 is going to be about measuring and improving the quality of customer experience first, increasing the speed and efficiency of interactions second.  Quality monitoring is going to get beyond just measuring activity-based and high-end customer satisfaction metrics.  Behavioral analytics, real-time feedback from social networks , integrated to sentiment analysis will give customer experience and customer service managers instant visibility into how effective their strategies and programs are.  For many, it will be the first true reading of customer satisfaction and quality of customer experience.

•  Consistency of customer response across all channels gets measured, monetized, and rewarded internally and externally.  One of the quickest ways to increase the quality of customer experience is to make responses identical, synchronized and complete across all channels.  Surprisingly, according to Forrester in a recent study, 90% of companies can’t do this.  Customers however expect this to be like a dial-tone in their interactions with you and your company.  In 2012, there is going to be a much stronger focus on this area, with more measurement, monetization (through upsell and cross-sell) and greater spending on this than ever before.  The bottom line is that delivering a consistent response across all channels is no longer optional, it’s required.  2012 will show how companies who did the hard work of making this happen end the year with higher gross margins, retention rates and customer satisfaction scores.

• Knowledge management and the use of configuration and constraint engines to streamline its use in Web self-service and agent-based applications goes mobile, accelerating across all channels.  Having real-time access to the knowledgebase of their companies further increases the quality of customer interaction and experience for service reps, driving up quality monitoring scores in the process.  Smartphone and tablet integration via Android and Apple iOS will begin to provide richer data sets and greater analytics application performance, giving customer service much greater ability to respond in real-time regardless of location or time.

• Using social media and online communities, customers will make it known which channels they are most and least likely to use for service and support – the migration between channels will be more fluid than ever before.  Using analytics, data mining and real-time quality monitoring is going to be essential for customer experience and customer service teams to stay on top of.

• Customer experience becomes more dependent on ongoing content development, management and personalization than ever before.   No longer will customers be satisfied with only a quarterly or bi-yearly update on what’s going on in the user communities they are members of.  It’s an always-on, real-time world right now and the companies who deliver a consistently high quality stream of content will emerge from 2012 with more profitable customers than they began with due to their focus on this area.

• Big Data, Hadoop and MapReduce will deliver on the promises of greater customer insight and intelligence through advanced data mining and business intelligence.  The insights gained from these initiatives will be a strong catalyst of change in many companies  stalled in their CEM strategies today due to lack of legacy data integration and analytics.   This is one area where quality will become king in 2012, as companies quit being satisfied with simple data integration and start pushing for higher quality of data analysis and predictive modeling.  Integrating Big Data with sentiment analysis and customer satisfaction data will yield insights many customer service, marketing and executive management teams are lacking today.

For over 4 decades (my how time flies), I have helped many global companies and small companies grow their businesses. One of my beliefs is that I have always worked to keep marketing and sales aligned. Marketing should enable sales. Marketing should be tightly linked to generating revenue. Otherwise, why do it at all?

Marketing and selling involve a complex set of personal communications intended to result in a transaction. There are no cookie cutter solutions. This is hard work, especially in a struggling economy.

Your  brand is your story for how you create value for customer (not for yourself; no features and functions). Wherever this can demonstrate real economic value for the customer, success will go up.

Two Teams Climbing the Same Hill — Together

Marketing and sales must collaborate on driving revenue. Stay focused on the revenue objective. Activities that do not work toward revenue generation are wasteful. This takes incredible concentration to do the right things and just the right things.

Your competitive advantage is how you uniquely help customers. You illustrate this by showing how you did this for other customers and intrigue the rest of customers to want the same gains.

Never Fill Your Marketing Box with Features and Functions; Better to Leave it Empty

This needs to drive revenue, without bogging down in trivia. Sell the hope and vision. Sell the new reality with imagination instead of what your product does. The part where you show what your product does and how it does it comes later in the buying process. Give it away too early and the prospect no longer needs a dialogue with you. They then move on to competitors and push everyone into a parity where they can negotiate with you on price rather than on the economic value you best can provide.

Learn from Mistakes.

We recently did a mailer with 3 waffer seals (one on each side of the mailer) … if I got this in the mail it would go in the garbage … who is going to take the time to slit open 3 wafer seals? It was a great mailer, totally ruined in the production process. Stay on top of the details. I blinked and did not catch this 3-seal thing and paid the price.

Minimize Fishing;Market to Known Prospects

Build a prospect database instead of running lead generation campaigns. Market and sell to this database. If it is built correctly, it will include all the companies in your selected markets and all the individuals at these companies who can influence the sale or make the buying decision. This eliminates waste. You spend your efforts on communicating how you provide exceptional value to the same decision makers and influencers non-stop. Repetition with creativity. Never bore them to death.

Marketing to this database is intended to gradually change attitudes about how they are now doing business and how they can more successfully do business with your product and/or service. Repeat your core message by using contextually-relevant creative ways to bring your brand story alive. Use every legal medium you can afford. But always, always tell a value story — one where you helped a client accomplish great things that other prospects will envy. This takes content to tell the story. Lots of content. Today, marketing is largely about producing relevant, powerful content in print, online, video, audio, games. You can probably skip the sandwich boards and Burma Shave signs, but use anything else.

Content is Currency; Be Strategic with What You Give Away

Control the amount of information you provide to prospects at each stage of their buying process; information is your leverage. Once you give it away, they no longer need you. They buyer will want data sheets or demonstrations or pricing, but do not give this type of information until you have the prospect wanting what you are selling. Keep painting the new reality with aspirational stories and with stories of how your past clients overcame barriers to their problems. Keep pulling them forward with customer success stories until they are ready to let you come into their company and work with you on building a success model based on their data.

Sales people need to do the work, make the calls and convert at each stage of the process so they can hand off to the next stage. Each stage has a purpose. Need to reveal intent to spend money with you. Marketing must provide the content that is appropriate to move the prospect forward to the next step in the selling process. As long as you can see movement toward this decision, you are winning. If forward movement does not occur with each conversation, you are losing. When forward movement stops, enter the people at the stalled company into a nurture campaign that maintains awareness and continues to paint the new reality until they are ready to sell.

Understand the Experience. Market the Experience.

Promoting the experience is a complex art, both for marketing and for sales. Make it real for others who have not yet gone through it. Paint the experience of a new reality. How can they believe your new technology can help them close sales faster and more profitably? Everyone says this, but if you have the facts to back up your claim, you can get prospects salivating to get the same results. Never rush to demo. Never rush to features and functions. First get prospects wanting the same kinds of gains that you provided to other customers.

As the number of highly active prospects in the sales funnel becomes smaller, then the one-to-one communications become more intense and more focused on how you can help that one company succeed. To communicate this, you need to do your homework and make sure you are solving the right problem and that this problem is important to their success.

It’s the Christmas shopping season — our first without Steve Jobs. Still,  what a perfect time to talk about Apple. It goes without saying that Apple is redefining and reshaping the retail experience via the company’s growing roster of stand-alone stores. But there’s something even bigger going on here, akin to how online show retailer Zappos.com is turning the traditional rules of e-commerce upside down.

The stores are unlike any other. White and bright. With some of the most beautifully designed hi-tech merchandise neatly displayed, screaming “come try me out.” Has there ever been a retail environment so tuned to the brand image?

The customer service is astounding. Within seconds, there is someone at your side to guide you to a solution just right for your needs. They know how to translate technology into value. You desperately want it all — the iPhone, the iPad, the iPod.

They help you pick out stuff just right for you and close the sale instantly while you are surrounded with gleaming “I wants” — run your credit card while you stand there (no long lines behind cash registers) so they can process more sales more quickly and move you on so efficiently that you find yourself outside the store with your new iApple stuff and you hardly know you were in the store.
Things once considered the dark side of Apple, such as tech support, are on the verge of becoming strategic assets, with the Apple Store’s geek-stocked Genius Bar able to tackle just about any issue or concern your have. And the process of planning that interaction is more akin to scheduling a haircut or spa treatment than calling those inaccessible tech-support lines.

Whether explicitly acknowledged or not, there’s an unmistakable “service is marketing” mantra pervading every aspect of the Apple Store. And that’s something every brand, even those not as shiny as Apple’s, can learn from. The opportunity to solve problems, find solutions and even address “the darn thing doesn’t work” emotional pain-points all lead to a higher impact-marketing and sales proposition.

While not every marketer has a Steve Jobs-inspired vision, every consumer-facing company has problems that can be converted into opportunities to inspire loyalty.

Customers are finding Apple on their own because Apple is reaching out to them with unique investments in the customer relationship.

If you visit Cincinnati, do not miss out on this fabulous customer experience — dinner prepared by American Chef of the Year, Todd Kelly.

Dinner at this magnificent restaurant in the Cincinnati Netherland Plaza Hotel is always exquisite. The dining ambiance is distinctive at this French Art Deco masterpiece and a National Historic Landmark that challenges the splendor of King Solomon’s Temple. The hotel was built in 1931 by Colonel William A. Starrett, whose previous projects included the Lincoln Memorial and the Empire State Building.

And that is before you even get to taste the work of Chef Todd Kelly, recently names the Chef of the Year by the American Culinary Institute. Dining at Chef Kelly’s restaurants throughout the hotel, but most specially in Orchids, is an experience that anyone will remember for a long time.

Content Marketing at its Best

Marketing the experience at Orchids at Palm Court is being done with the same technique many marketers use today: content marketing. Produce content that communicates your value proposition. Content that helps prospective customers to understand their problems or aspirations and demonstrates that you have the solutions.

In this case, the content  is just as elegant as Beef Shabu-Shabu with Vermicelli, Galette and Dried Mushroom Broth. A 176-page Chef’s Cookbook that reveals how Chef Kelly prepares 65 of his most popular menu items. The cookbook subtly reinforces the Hilton brand, with it’s logo gracefully placed on every page of the book. The history of the restaurant and how Todd Kelly became such an iconic chef are stories that pull the reader into the book. Photos range from the chef at work  meticulously preparing a plate, to photos of him with his family — reinforcing his expertise but at the same time make him approachable. The book will no doubt be the cornerstone of Hilton’s marketing — an example of where the marketing pays for itself with book sales.

I went to his book signing at Joseph Beth Book Store where he gave a great talk about how his brother (also a chef) got him into the restaurant business. Like most chefs he moved around a bit, family in tow. He told us how competing for the American Culinary Federation’s Chef of the Year was a lot like competing for Iron Chef on the Food Network. He talked about the year-long preparation for producing the cookbook, co-authored by Courtney Tsitouris. How they had to down-size recipes to feed a restaurant to feeding a family. These book tours are not selling the new cookbook. They are selling the entire Hilton organization.

He earned the title by competing against three other chefs from around the  country in a one-hour competition making  four dishes  using a secret ingredient.: Red Snapper.  Kelly and his team,  Derek Bush and Tom Groves, both Hilton employees,  made four snapper dishes: Marinated red snapper with orange-miso aioli, lychees, daikon sprouts, sea spears and chili oil; Steamed red snapper with purple artichoke and dungeness crab salad with brown butter nage; Crispy red snapper with porcini mushrooms, foie gras, Delfina potatoes and verjus sauce; and Red snapper “en papillote” with Madras curry vinaigrette, Vidalia onions, tzatziki and tart apple salad. These and many more recipes plus are in the new cookbook.

Chef Kelly is totally centered on his food and the experience his customers have when they enter his restaurant. Customer experience comes first. Then the acolades fall in line. Right here in River City we are blessed with a lot of great restaurants. Orchids at Palm Court, however, sits in a special place: Number 1.