I was doing my rounds, checking out the usual marketing blogs the other day, and found an interesting article on Robert Middleton’s site Action Plan Marketing about what he called intellectual firepower. Basically he talks about how in order to be successful you have to put in the work. This is all really easy to agree with; I’ve always been a fan of hard work. The truth of the matter is that lately I feel that many marketers out there are just plain lazy. What can be done about this? Read on…

It really starts with motivation. Before even trying to develop intellectual firepower, you have to genuinely want to improve yourself. If you’re just trying to motivate yourself, then you should already know which buttons need to be pushed. However, if you’re a manager, tyring to motivate a team or specific members of a team, you’ll need to really understand what motivates them both professionally and personally. Once you and/or your team is at the point of genuine motivation, then you can begin to arm yourself with intellectual firepower. How do you do this…

Back in school, you’re given homework. Why should it be any different at work. Give your employees reading assignments, and spend some time addressing new marketing ideas and emerging concepts. I think that most businesses merely exist with no real emphasis on growth, development, or innovation. Of course, the CEO’s of the world are looking for growth, but what about the average employee? Find some way to arm your employees with knowledge, and show them that their development is important to the future of your business. Then maybe you’ll see some real effort. Motivate and then educate.

Of course, developing intellectual firepower is about more than just reading. You have to put in the work. This means that management has to be approachable, and flexible. Listen to what your employees tell you and take it into consideration. Reward good ideas, and encourage everyone to bring their A game to work. I could go on and on, but you get what I’m saying.

What do you do to develop intellectual firepower? Let me know in the comments below or email me privately at edwardviator@evil-marketer.com.

Everyone likes to think that they understand their customers, but how many of us really try to completely understand the customers mindset? Every year, Beloit College puts together a “mindset list” describing the thoughts and mindset of their incoming freshmen class. Why would they do this? So that their professors will be able to discuss their topics with relevance, and avoid references and language that the students may not understand. You can see the latest mindset list here.

Companies have gathered “relevant” information about customers for decades, often looking at purchasing behavior, income, demographic information, and so on. But how many have actually looked at the mindset of their customers? Probably not enough. I think it’s a good exercise for every business to put together a mindset list for their customers. With today’s social media options, it’s easier than ever to interact with customers (and for customers to interact with each other). In order to have relevant messages for these people, you need to understand them and speak their language.

Sounds great, but how do you gather this information? The traditional method is to use surveys to gather information. However, I think that if you talk to the people that interact the most with clients, you will find some surprising information. If you have store locations, talk to your cashiers or whatever. If you’re a business to business operation, talk to your sales people or account managers. Listen to what they have to say, and put together a mindset list for your customers. You may be surprised at what you find.

I was going over some data at the marketing charts website and was kind of surprised to see a report stating that business to business companies don’t have much of a social media presence. I read the report, and it got me thinking. What could these companies accomplish with social media, and how should they use it to their advantage? It seems we (as marketers) focus alot on business to consumer social media marketing, especially when it comes to Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube, and maybe that’s the major problem. So I’d like to discuss some ways that business to business companies can use social media to their advantage. Let’s start by discussing…

Top barriers to social media for business to business companies

According to the report, there are 4 main reasons why b2b companies don’t focus as much on online marketing. Here we go…

1. Insufficient personnel to maintain - It’s not surprising that this is number 1. So many companies have downsized, and they are continuing to do so (HP just let go of a ton of people the other day). However, why do you need to hire more people to do this? Here’s what I think. I would solicit blog entries from employees and offer some sort of reward for entries that are picked. Wow, pretty simple. Every one of your employees should have a presence on LinkedIn. If not for the company, then for their own good. Encourage them to post and answer questions. Now you have a social media presence and you didn’t even have to hire anyone.
2. Lack of organizational knowledge - I’m not sure what they mean by “organizational” knowledge, but I think that if you don’t know something you need to go and figure it out. There are a ton of online resources to find out more about online marketing. There are tons of books out there. If you don’t have time to research them yourself, then pick a different career. To think, these guys call themselves marketers. You should always make time to educate yourself.
3. Preference for traditional marketing - Let me say something here (like you have a choice). I prefer traditional marketing. And yet, I still engage in online and social media marketing. Why? Because I see the advantages, and also because a marketer needs to use any and all weapons at his or her disposal. If you aren’t using social media, you’re leaving a big weapon in the armory collecting dust. There’s no reason for that.
4. Perceived irrelevance to their field - Bottom line: you have to go where your customers go. This is 2010, take a deep breath and say it with me now, twenty-ten, soon to be eleven. People go online to find information. When you go fishing, you probably go to the lake where there are tons of fish. Why is marketing any different. Sure you’re dealing with a company, but that company is made up of individuals. And individuals like to go online to educate themselves. If you have a presence online and provide relevant information, then those individuals will find you. That’s called marketing.

What can b2b companies do to take advantage of social media

1. Start a blog - We’ve talked about it before. People go online to find information. Provide useful information to people and they will find you (and your company). Provide information on all aspects of your industry and your business. Like I said before, solicit entries from your co-workers (you’ll be surprised at all of the great ideas and talent that you have on board). If you can become an industry expert, then you can’t help but increase your brand awareness… and your profits.
2. Get on LinkedIn - People go to Facebook to interact with friends, relax, and play games, and all that good stuff. People get on LinkedIn to interact with other professionals, and to learn. You and every one of your co-workers should have a presence on LinkedIn. You should spend time asking and answering questions, linking up with other professionals in your industry, and basically becoming a part of the community.
3. Be one of the few - The fact that not many b2b companies are using social media means that the ones that do are ahead of the game. Going back to the fishing analogy, if you’re the only one at the lake, you’re going to catch alot of fish. Get started, stop making excuses and do it. Your competition will hate you, but your customers and prospects will love you.

What do you guys think? How can b2b companies take advantage of social media? What other obstacles do they need to overcome?

Everyone’s got to start somewhere, and no one becomes an expert overnight. Attending an excellent business school is a great place to start, but as they say, there’s no substitute for experience. In my career as a marketer so far I’ve had tons of experience both good and bad, so let me share what I’ve learned with you…

1. Be patient: I’ve talked about this before. Patience is a trait that every marketer needs to develop in order to be successful. Marketing is all about controlling variables, and sometimes it takes time to see the effects of your work. You need to have the patience (and the guts) to “stay the course”, and see if you’ve made a good decision or a bad one.

2. Begin with mutual respect: Treat everyone with respect. Not just the people ahead of you on the food chain, not just your co-workers, or your customers. You need to treat everyone you meet with respect.  Besides, if they fail to live up to that respect, you can always change your mind later ;-D.

3. Cover your a**: If you don’t know what I mean, you will soon enough. Always make copies of your work, and keep track of everything you work on. Don’t be anyone’s fall guy.

4. Understand your target market: Don’t assume that everyone is like you. Just because you feel that a product or an approach won’t work, doesn’t mean that it will fail. First, you need to understand your target market, and approach your decisions from their point of view. Yes, you should trust your instincts, but you need to also take your personal feelings out of a situation.

5. Learn, not just from your mistakes, but from others as well: You’re a smart person (you are visiting my site afterall), and smart people learn from their mistakes. Everyone knows this already. You need to also focus on mistakes made by other people / companies, and make sure that you do not repeat them. This is why you should always stay on top of the latest developments in your industry, and in business in general.

6. Always get paid: This doesn’t mean that you should only work for money. Sometimes (like a good internship) the payment is experience, or good connections. The point is, you need to make sure you get something out of any effort you put in.

7. Don’t think you know everything: Pick up a marketing textbook from the 1980’s, and you’ll see that business has evolved. Don’t think that just because you have a diploma that you know all the current trends. You need to continue to learn and evolve. If you don’t you’re dead. We’ve talked about this before, and you know better.

8. Create value: Whatever you do, work hard. You may have just gotten a nice job, but if you don’t work hard at it, you’ll be refreshing your resume real quick. If you don’t have a job right now (hey join the club my friend) work hard at getting one, and create your own project (like I’ve done with this blog) to keep your tools sharp while you’re at it.

9. Don’t gossip: Be carefull what you say and who you say it to. You don’t know who’s listening, and talking behind someone’s back completely violates point number 2. If someone starts gossiping with you, just stay neutral and focus on your job.

10. Don’t panic: Everyone makes mistakes. When you’re just starting out, many times you’ll feel the urge to panic when a mistake has been made and will either throw your hands up and run to the boss, or will try to hide the problem. Don’t do this. Be honest with your boss, and come up with options to correct the problem. If they have a better idea, great, but don’t come up to them with a mess that you created, and expect to be bailed out.

Hey, I don’t know everything. You marketing vets out there post some more tips in the comments.

Wise words from one of my favorite bands (Rage Against the Machine), “know your enemy”. In marketing, you are competing with other companies, and even industries (look at how movie theaters compete against DVD, and television) for scarce money. In order to succeed, you need to arm yourself with all the knowledge you can about your competition. You need to know their strengths, weaknesses and strategies, so that you can develop your plan to defeat them. Great, so you already knew that. But how do you go about obtaining this information? Here are some quick tips for you…

1. List your direct and indirect competitors. How are you going to learn about your competition if you don’t even know who they are? As one of my old mentors (and good friend, you know who you are) would say, “make a list”. Don’t forget to include both direct (companies that provide similar products or services to yours) and indirect competitors (companies that provide products or services different from your own that satisfy the same need).

2. Pay them a visit. After you have your list, you should visit your competitors website and learn what you can. Not only will you learn about their products and / or services, you will also learn how they are marketing themselves, what they think of their own brand, and you will be able to get an idea of which type of customers they are targeting. You can also learn about their history, and the officers of the company. If there is a trade show, visit them and find out all you can. If they have a store, go in and patronize them. Find out what you can up close and in person. It’s important to do this early so that you will get a fresh impression of what type of business they run.

3. Dig a little deeper. Visit www.hoovers.com and check out their financials. If they are a publicly traded company, then there are tons of sources to go to get additional information. Go to www.dnb.com and check out a credit report. Remember those officers you learned about in the previous step? Google them and find out more about them. This will let you know a little bit more about how decisions are made at this company.

4. Set a date to follow-up. Like all marketing, competitive analysis is a process not a project (we’ll probably discuss this in detail in a future post). This means that you need to set up a follow-up date in your calendar so that you can go through the process again, and find out what’s changed. If you’re dealing with professionals, then your competition is looking at you just like you’re looking at them, and they’ll react to whatever strategy you’ve chosen to take them down. Do yourself a favor and stay vigilant.

Once you know all about your competition, you can use this information to find out what you can do better or differently than them. Develop your strategy and watch the competition suffer. We’ll talk more about how to take these suckers out in the future.

Hey, I’m not an expert on competitive analysis, so if any of you readers have anything to share, let me know in the comments, or email me at edwardviator@evil-marketer.com

When I was a kid, I couldn’t wait to get out of school. I didn’t dislike education, but I just felt that I should be doing things rather than learning about things; I was anxious to put my limited knowledge to use. However, now that I’m older, I understand that in order to be successful, I need to continue to learn and educate myself. Doing things is great, but it’s even better to do them the right way. You probably know what I’m talking about. I mean, here you are spending your spare time reading a marketing blog (thank you for visiting, by the way). In order to successfully learn, you need to understand the process, and find out how you can move on to the next phase as efficiently as possible. I’ll attempt to outline this process below…

1. Unconscious Incompetence: Basically, you don’t know what you don’t know. In this phase, you are doing things, and failing, but you don’t understand why. You don’t know what you’re problem is, and therefore have no idea how to fix it. Let’s use hitting in baseball as an example. You really want to hit the ball, but keep missing, and you have no idea why.

2. Conscious Incompetence: In this phase you know what you need to get better at, but still can’t manage to do it properly. Looking at our baseball example, you’ve hired a trainer, you’re reading some books, and you’ve identified why you can’t hit the ball. You’re working to correct the problem, and have some limited success, but you fail more often than you succeed. This is where practice comes in handy.

3. Conscious Competence: In this step you can succeed, but have to focus hard. When you step up to the plate, you have to think about it and make sure that you’re stance is perfect, you make sure to keep your eye on the ball, that you have proper follow-up, etc. It’s like a checklist in your mind. You have to manually check things off, and focus on doing things the proper way. You can be successful, but it’s not easy.

4. Unconscious Competence: This is where we all want to be. In the final phase, you are successful and don’t even have to think about it. You instinctively know where to put your feet, you know how to swing, and you keep your eye on the ball with no problem. This enables you to think about other aspects of the game (where you want to hit the ball, how to effectively move that base runner over, focus on specific pitches, etc). In order to get to this point, you need to understand what mistakes you were making before, understand how to correct those mistakes, and then practice.

So what does this have to do with marketing? Everything. We are living in an age where new technology and new techniques are being created daily. Customer mindsets are changing, the tools we use are changing, the rules themselves are changing. Learning is crucial to your success as a marketer. Don’t get frustrated because you fail. Push through those hard times and find out what you are failing at, and why. Then learn how to correct the problem, and focus hard on what you need to do. Before long, you will be able to move on to other aspects of business, and then others, becoming an expert and building on your knowledge.

Agree / Disagree? Let me know in the comments.