Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about how product simulations fit into the emerging trend of custom content marketing. Where is the line between content (focused on presenting issues and providing solutions) and product promotional material?
Browsing Posts in product simulation marketing
In BtoB Magazine‘s most recent issue (Aug 16, 2010), there are three articles by Sean Callahan on the B2B marketing trend of developing custom content: (a) “Commited to custom”, (b) “Custom programs getting larger portions of budgets”, and (c) “Makino retools marketing program with custom content”.
The gist of ‘custom content’ seems to mean information for industry professionals that is expected to be vendor-neutral, information about news or techniques that are outside of traditional sales materials that promote a company’s products. However, in the third article, Makino clearly demonstrates that there may not be a clear line between custom content and promotional material:
We’re using content to drive engagement and develop discussions with our customers and prospects, and we’re doing that in a way that shows how our premium products and high technology can help drive their business’ success, performance, and profitability,” [Mark] Rentschler [Markino's marketing manager] said.
I had been collecting links and interesting posts about experiential marketing as it relates to product simulation, as I think about developing an e-book or white paper about product simulation advertising/product simulation marketing. I figured I would post the links and stuff I’ve collected, to get feedback and keep the info in a central place. My overall point is how well product simulations can fit into traditional (and new!) forms of experiential marketing.
So this post is a series of a few fragments. continue reading…
In “How Catchy is Your Content?“, Ardath Albee (‘Marketing Interactions’) does a nice job of presenting and discussing a few metrics one can apply to content for B2B marketing (really to anything), to ensure the content gets the right reception. She calls the metrics “Catch Factors” (catchy!). She defines “Catch Factors” as “the preferences and aversions that form a prospect’s gut reaction to your content and communications” and lists five of them as:
- Urgency: Does it apply to a business problem they have now?
- Impact: is your information on a topic critical to their professional success?
- Effort: how much energy do they have to expend to access and understand it?
- Reputation: what’s their immediate perception of your company?
- Intent: what will they think you want from them?
Read her article for details, but I think she’s got a succinct, useful list. My observation is that if a manufacturer makes a marketing piece that uses a simulation of its product that shows how to solve a relevant business problem, it can nail four of the five (#4, Reputation, is more of a big picture item, but also #3 depends on how accessible the manufacturer makes the operation of the simulated product).
Admittedly, a pretty bizarre title, but it comes (late at night) from me seeing a juxtaposition of Seth Godin’s “A sad truth about most traditional b2b marketing” a few days ago and Adam Singer’s (Online Marketing Blog) “Thinking Critically About Web Video.”
I struggle often with the question about why product simulations/demos are not yet a popular marketing tool, while the marketing world is crowing about the effectiveness of videos (which seems to me one or more steps away from an engaging product experience.
In “Study finds customer engagement hard to measure,” B-to-B Magazine’s Kate Maddox posts some high-level findings from a recent study from Forbes Insights about measuring customer engagement.
“Customer engagement is a top priority for CMOs, but many companies are struggling to implement strategies and measure customer engagement, according to a new study from Forbes Insights and George P. Johnson.”
A majority (67%) of marketers polled view customer engagement as very important, but a good percentage feel their companies do a fair or poor job engaging their audiences. They view retention, sales, and revenue per customer as key metrics for customer engagement.
I hypothesize that “product engagement” — using tools and methods to present products in a more interactive and engaging way, such as via product simulation marketing — would be a big contributing factor to overall customer engagement. Furthermore, it may be easier to measure product engagement because of the direct relationship between what is presented and how the viewer/customer interacts with it.
I just saw this interesting post that excerpts “Stories that Sell”, but Casey Hibbard, or “The Power of Success Story Marketing.” The gist of this excerpt is that “[w]e [customers] trust what others say much more than what a business itself says,” and that presenting customer experiences as case studies is a more effective marketing tool than almost anything the company writes about itself. While “most of us don’t truly believe the benefits espoused by companies–unless they are verified by other trusted sources,” the author continues with the zippy line “[j]ust about everyone else is more credible than the business itself.”
I would agree that good customer stories provide compelling evidence that the the product or service has been delivered successfully to meet the needs of similar buyers. However, it can be difficult to get good customer stories that align completely with what the company presents. Buyers buy products and services to solve their own need–the buyer may accept a vendor’s argument about solving a peripheral issue for the buyer, but they buyer may not be willing in terms of cost or time to help the vendor prove it.
I believe that context-appropriate simulations can be similar to a case study when it shows how a mock customer, in this case, the viewer, can solve a problem that we hope is relevant to the customer. If we can align our presented problems (contexts) with the problems that viewers face, we in effect put viewers into their own case studies.
“Products don’t function on their own”
I love this quotation because it zeroes in on the problem I have with most types of advertising on the web — show a picture, write some specs, maybe even a short video. While the latter is getting to the idea that demonstrating function is important, I think that simulations presented in real-world contexts show the interaction between the operator and the product. Allowing the viewer to drive the operation further puts the product ‘in the prospect’s hands’, which all good salespeople know is the ultimate sales pitch. Directly following this quote is another gem: “People encounter challenges to overcome, become heroes, find solutions, and ultimately triumph.” What better way than to show how the prospects themselves can solve that burning issue.
In a section entitled “Education: Show, Don’t Tell”, the author identifies that “as much as [marketers and business owners] detail how their products and services work for users, there’s often a gap between those descriptions and readers’ understanding of how they will actually work in their environments–all the more so when the products or services are complex.” The conclusion? Another point for the right kind of simulation: “you have to show readers what you’re talking about, descriptively and in context, rather than just telling them that your product or service accomplishes this or that.”
Then the author turns to some important numbers:
A survey by KnowledgeStorm (www.knowledgestorm.com) and MarketingSherpa (www.marketingsherpa.com) shed light on the role of case studies, particularly in IT purchase decisions. The survey, with results published in How Technology Marketers Meet Buyers’ Appetite for Content, asked nearly 4,000 B2B marketers, and technology and business professionals, what buyers want and what marketers deliver. The survey revealed that buyers expect you to educate them. In fact, 84 percent said they want content that educates them and expect vendors to provide it.
Awesome. Now I have to talk with my clients to help me prove my hypothesis completely (won’t that make a great customer case study? 
).
Nice post by David Dodd of Marketing Interactions, entitled “Does Your Content Marketing Make You Different?“.
Leading off with “Being recognized as unique, different and desirable is what every company strives to achieve to stand out in their marketplace”, David describes how our mentality as vendors still often makes us think that our customers will believe what we ourselves think is different about us. However, the reality is almost the opposite: the more we try to stand out with distinctive phrases or pitches, the more we end up inadvertently sounding exactly like our competitors.
I take from this lesson that we need to keep things pointing back at our product, and illustrating what is distinctive about our product, tying any general statements back to specifics on the product (or service), rather than vague terms that all our competitors use to describe their products as well.
This discussion is timely for me because I am in the midst of a web site redesign, and while I’m sure I’ll be making some mistakes, I am trying to practice what I preach. In the process of developing content for my web site, I continually run into the trap of thinking “why don’t I put in something about us being the experts, and how we really focus on superior customer support/service.” Clearly I need to convey these points, but the trap is that if I describe it in those terms, or keep things too much in the clouds, I am really sounding like everyone else. Of course we are experts at something (would we say that we are just mediocre in whatever we choose to do?), and of course we’re going to say that we strive to make our customers happy. Again, things we need to convey in specific terms, because we’re not giving our prospects anything tangibly different from our competitors (who are always better funded, better looking, better connected, better staffed, etc.). David captures this thought nicely in the following:
Sadly, what we promise isn’t always what the prospect wants. Or we’re up at the 30,000 foot view so our messaging doesn’t have any immediate impact that’s easy for the prospect to hone in on.
I don’t think this means we should be all-consumed with product descriptions; rather, we need to focus on what the problem our customers are facing are, and how our solution/product addresses those issues. Also, like I talked about in my last post (“Short but sweet…it’s not about the benefits, but your product“), we definitely need to keep the product front-and-center. That’s where product simulation can come in, especially when we present our products in the context of solving relevant customer problems.
Certainly we can define a set of problems that our product addresses, and possibly miss some applications — essentially, we can be over-specific. However, we have to ask ourselves which is worse: whether we miss our prospective buyers because we are too specific in our message, or we miss our prospective buyers because we don’t rise above the noise (our competitors).
The best answer, of course, is the way my wife typically presents these questions: neither . In all seriousness, I think it comes down to how strong our brand is to get us to the table. If our brand is strong in this product category, then we may already above the noise. However, if we are unknown or weak, our products may be overlooked, and therefore we need to demonstrate how well we understand the problems our customers are facing in specific situations. We have found situations in which simulation training for one company so much identifies the right problem, they are so compelling, that the pieces are being used by the company’s competitors for training by association. We’ve talked with the competitors and they are certainly aware they’re risking directing people away from themselves!
David’s post reports from a recent IDG survey that buyers say the find relevant content only about 42% of the time, meaning most of the time, buyers are not finding relevant content about what they’re looking for. I think we can increase our content marketing relevancy by illustrating how the product solves specific buyer situations. Of course this goes hand-in-hand with understanding who are buyers are (through buyer personas, as David Meerman Scott advocates).
Dave J. posted a blog entry Feb 12th on B2Blog entitled “Proof it’s not about the benefits, but your product“. Of course the title is sarcastic, but he makes several great points in regard to putting the product in front of people.
Citing Anne Holland’s “Which Test Won“, Dave points out that the study showed a higher response rate if the picture of the product was the main element, presumably compared with emphasizing the benefits. While rife with assumptions about what is being advertised and what has preceded the display, he has some very quotable quotations that are directly relevant to product simulation marketing. For example, “while an awareness of the customer’s use of your product is important, repeating what they know…obscures the real information they want.”
I don’t think anyone would say to just stick a picture of the product in the ad without the appropriate context, but clearly when people are interested in a product, they want to see how it looks and how it works. No great leap, especially for expensive, large, or complex equipment.
If I were to take a guess, and I don’t think it takes a great leap to get there, but I would assume that the viewer is already somewhat familiar with the class of products that might appear in that ad. So the context has already been set, to some degree.
I can only imagine what the response rate would be if they advertised that one could “try it out” right there. I would love to be involved with a manufacturer who was savvy enough to recognize how important this kind of testing is. Sadly, I still am looking for one. I think product simulations are still in the state of interest from visionary marketers and early adopters, who don’t see the need to prove it because they are already believers.
I came across the term “engagement marketing” recently through Twitter (hey, it even has a Wikpedia page, maybe something I can create for product sim marketing once I figure out what to say!). Through Wikipedia, then I saw an entry for “experiential marketing“.
Of course anyone could have made up those pages, but the materials seem somewhat credible and they gave me some interesting directions to consider in the proper placement of product simulation marketing. The ‘experiential marketing’ term came closest, with the opening phrase/definition “Experiential Marketing is the art of creating an experience where the hoped-for result is an emotional connection to a person, brand, product or idea.” Sounds like a winner.
A thought struck me while reading the engagement marketing entry. It talked about a two-way conversation, but when I think about simulation, it sounds awfully one-way–the prospect uses the simulation to explore the product and its uses. Since simulation would be great for aligning a context and desired feature set between the prospect and the product (something I indirectly referred to in an earlier post about using context to create a compelling call-for-action), it occurred to me that the advertisement or presentation ought to do a bit of ‘push’ marketing by offering the prospect I way to find out when new things happen related to what the prospect is interested in. There’s nothing earth-shattering here, this is done all the time — the checkbox that says “send me more news and info about related stuff”. However, having the prospect engaged in simulated product use contexts may be able to help the prospect get information he or she really wants, not just the email blast about any new product from that manufacturer. If the ad/presentation can identify features of the prospect’s context, for example, what stage they are at in the buying cycle, what elements of the products are most relevant to the prospect, and other stuff, the manufacturer can send the prospect very relevant information on new products, or changes to existing products.
For example, if I am looking at new cars and honing in certain features, it behooves the manufacturer to send me information (opt-in, of course) about new cars that share those features. Something to help the shopper make sense of all the specs.
Again, nothing hugely new in concept, but simulation could let us be more precise about the information we send back (the other way in the conversation, from manufacturer to prospect), and could even identify why the new information is relevant. A true personal shopper that is learning what is important to the prospect. Hence the prospect would feel that the manufacturer is being more helpful rather than simply trying to sell more of its stuff.
