My time has been taken up with 4 major activities:

1. Building out a team of senior level B2B marketing professionals that crosses channel marketing, solutions marketing, marketing communications, analyst relations, competitive intelligence and services marketing.
2. Working on messaging and positioning
3. Providing an expert point of view to the broader population of marketing folks at the company who haven’t marketed to enterprises and/or CIO’s previously
4. Working on a content marketing strategy and plan

I’ve been sitting on a handful of posts wondering if I should change the focus of this blog and in the end I decided not to. I am going to focus on topics I think are relevant to startup marketers, with maybe the occasional big company B2B post thrown in just for laughs. So many of the principles of prepping a marketing and launching a product are the same across big and small companies, I think there is still a lot for me to say (and frankly, I can’t predict what I’ll be working on a year from now).

I am also a bit overwhelmed by the amount of email I’ve gotten in the past couple of months from folks that read this blog and missed it while I was busy doing other things. Thanks so much for your notes (you know who you are) – it’s good to know that when you stop, someone notices.

Stay tuned.

Related posts:

1. Back from a Blogging Break

Note: You may need to click through to the site to view this if you are viewing this in email or a reader.

Have a great holiday!

Inspired by the Cranky PM’s World’s Most Generic Product Management Interview series

This post was created using bitstrips - a service from a cool Canadian startup I met last summer and probably the most fun hour I’ve spent online in the past week

Related posts:

1. Rocket Watcher a Top Product Management Blog
2. VC Pitch Template
3. Guy Kawasaki, Alltop and Why Twitter Makes me Cooler than You

Donovan Group Inc. (DGI), a multimedia communications company, released the fourth installment of its “Tweep in Profile” audio podcast highlighting members of the Twitter Community.   This month, DGI profiles April Dunford (@aprildunford) Vice-President of Marketing at Solarsoft, which provides manufacturing intelligence and ERP solutions to mid-market manufacturers.

“In this segment April offers Social Media tactics, personal experience tie-ins and predictions for 2011″, says Andy Donovan, president, Donovan Group Inc.  “After following her for several months and learning from her posts, I am absolutely thrilled to have April on the program to round out 2010″, adds Donovan.

He’s thrilled! I’m thrilled! How thrilling!!  Click here to have a listen to my awe-inspiring Canadian accent and access the past episodes of their Tweep in Profile series.

Communitech’s Entrepreneur Week Videos

Also, if you just can’t get enough of that hand-flapping goodness, here’s a video of me doing my thing at last month’s Communitech’s Entrepreneur Week.  You can also view video of the other sessions.  If you are a startup looking for some good advice, this is a great set of videos to watch.

MarketingProf’s Content Marketing Crash Course

Lastly in the “upcoming” category, I will be one of the presenters for the MarketingProfs Content Marketing Crash Course.  My topic is one of my all time favorites, Storytelling for Business.  I’m in amazing company in this course – other presenters include Brian Solis, C. C. Chapman, Jay Baer, Ardath Albee, Joe Pulizzi and others.  It’s a who’s who of content marketing folks and in my opinion well worth the $595 price tag for 17 on-demand classes (how I got in there is anyone’s guess). Click here to learn more.

Related posts:

1. I’m the #1 PM Blogger!
2. Trafcom News Podcast: Product Management and Social Media
3. MeshU – What Would You Like to Learn?

Lately I’ve been speaking and writing a lot about the changing nature of marketing.  For this talk I am going to focus on how the landscape for marketing is changing, and how Product Marketing is emerging as more important than it’s ever been.   This is a talk I’ve been dying to give to an audience of product people so I’m really excited that I finally get to do it.

If, unlike me, you won’t be taking a 5 hour flight to spend the weekend in Amsterdam, don’t worry, I’ll be posting the slides here in all of their glory for folks to enjoy.

If you haven’t registered already, you should do it now because it’s going to be GREAT.

But wait, that’s not all!!

I’ll also be speaking at Communitech’s annual Entrepreneur Week in Waterloo on November 10th.  Communitech is a not for profit organization that is dedicated to supporting technology startups on the Waterloo area.  The is the 5th year that they have run Entrepreneur Week and every year it gets bigger and more impressive.  It’s a unique gathering of founders, startup types, VC’s and Angel Investors. Click here for more information and to register. I’m going to be giving a talk on Startup Marketing, specifically on the different types of marketing that startups can do at different stages of their growth.  It should be a great conference so if you haven’t registered you should do so right now!

Related posts:

1. Upcoming: MeshMarketing and ProductCamp
2. ProductCamp NYC
3. See me, hear me (in video and podcasts)

I recently gave up my consulting business to work for a company (more on that in another post) and decided to give myself a break from blogging for a few weeks to see how it felt and decide whether or not I should continue to invest in it now that it isn’t an integral part of my day to day work.

Here’s what I’ve learned after a month-long blogging break:

Blogging takes up a lot of my time – I never thought I spent that much time blogging until I stopped. About 3 times a week I found myself jotting down notes for potential blog posts but frankly the work involved in getting up to speed in a new job meant I didn’t have the time to craft a post that seemed meaty enough to publish.

Blogging helps me clarify things – Like talking to a friend about something you’ve been thinking about, the act of putting together a post, forces me to take things I’ve been working on and lay them together in a more structured way than I do at work.  It’s helped me clarify my own thinking around complicated topics like positioning and messaging. That in turn, makes it easier for me to explain those concepts to folks that don’t have a marketing background (which as any marketer knows, is a big part of the job).

I’ve learned a lot from the folks that comment here – When you talk to your friend about something that you’ve been thinking about, sometimes she agrees with you and sometimes she says “What are you nuts!?”  Similarly, I’ve learned a lot from the reactions and comments in this blog.  Heck, even the lack of comments is instructional.  I’ve learned what works and what doesn’t work when you are trying to describe certain marketing concepts and that has made me a better communicator.

So I’ve decided to keep going on this blog.  I’ll likely do 1 post a week instead of 2 but will make those a bit meatier and more practical now that I’m back to being a hands-on VP Marketing rather than a marketer doling out advice.  I’ve got a good post on metrics that I will publish tomorrow so please come back and read it and let me know what you think.    And as always, if you have any other feedback, feel free to be yourself in the comments 

Related posts:

1. Back from a Break
2. Come See Me in Calgary (or Join the Webcast)
3. I’m the #1 PM Blogger!

I’ve been fielding a lot of questions from startups about how you figure out what customers really want vs. the “nice to have” stuff.  This process of “Customer Discovery” as Steve Blank calls it is something that a lot of founders I’ve spoken with don’t have a lot of experience with.  I had an email exchange recently with Tim Johnson talking about my favorite question: “So What?” I like to have marketers use it on themselves but Tim related an example of how he uses it in customer engagements.  It was a great example and I asked him to write it up in the post below.  Although his examples are around trying to close deals, I think they apply equally well to an early stage startup that is trying to get at the root of what’s really important in a solution vs. the nice to have stuff.  What I also like about this story is how it illustrates how customers may talk about “brand” characteristics as being important (we like company X because they are “fun”) when what they really mean is something much more tangible (company X’s products work with what I’ve already invested in). Read on…

If you want to cut to the chase or destroy all the hubris around a conversation with a customer, the absolutely most effective question you can ask is, “So what?” A softer version is “Why is that important?” The customer will either tell you why it’s a key decision criteria or they will admit that it just sounded nice to have or they didn’t need it in the first place.

The company I was at in the late 90’s had software in the PeopleSoft box and I was managing the relationship with them as well as the business around it. At my first meeting with PeopleSoft they introduced me to the VP of Supply Chain for Dow Corning – their first customer in the manufacturing segment. The room was lined with those iconic fun, homey PeopleSoft posters claiming, “We work in your world.” I was new to the segment and asked the Dow VP why he had chosen PeopleSoft when SAP cut their teeth in the manufacturing space. He said, “Because they’re fun.” My immediate reply was, “So what?” He told me that the SAP guys were arrogant and immediately told him his processes were broken and they were going to implement best practices to fix his business. He asked the SAP rep, Tell me, how many miles of fibre optic cable SAP manufactured last month?” The PeopleSoft guys, he went on, were friendly and asked him what they needed to do to their software to complement his existing processes and ensure his success.

In one question, I got a clear explanation of the value of the relationship he had with his key vendor. PeopleSoft may have been fun to work with but the real value was a company willing to adapt to his needs and treat him with the respect he was due. My relationship with him and with PeopleSoft going forward was predicated on that knowledge.

More recently, I was interviewing a customer for a success story. He told me that in one pass of my software, he was able to reduce his annual storage costs by 20%. I was ecstatic until I did a little math to find that translated to less than a thousand dollars. Suspecting something deeper, I asked, “So what?” He went into a core dump of how his bonus was mostly based on service levels, which he hadn’t been meeting lately. Because my product cleared out so much junk from his network, he was able to hit his backup and restore windows with ease AND lower their cost of storage. He didn’t really care about saving the company 300 bucks, he cared about getting his bonus back. My case study changed from saving money to business continuity planning and meeting service levels – a much more compelling message than the meaningless and monotonous “lowering TCO.”

Your goal in any customer conversation is to get the real heart of the matter: to separate the fly specks from the black pepper, as my Dad often says.  ”So what?”, ” Who cares?” or “Why is that important?” will get you to the honest answers that you need to create effective messaging and sales tools.

If you enjoyed that, you should subscribe!  You can sign up for email updates, subscribe via RSS or follow me on Twitter.

Related posts:

1. Should You Teach Your Customers How to Buy?
2. Is Facebook’s Zuckerberg Right? Sometimes Listening to Your Customers is “Stupid.”
3. 4 Ways to Send Customers a Valentine

I decided to gather 4 of the smartest Content Marketing folks I could think of together and submitted the panel that I would have liked to have seen last time around.  Amazingly, they all agreed.  Here’s the lineup:

Jay Baer – Social Media Strategy consultant and the author of the Convince and Convert blog.
Valeria Maltoni – Director of Strategy at Powered Inc. And author of the Conversation Agent blog.
David Meerman Scott – Author of several books including the marketing classic The New Rules of Marketing and PR and the author of the Web Ink Now blog.
Joe Pulizzi – founder of Junta 42 and The Content Marketing Institute, and author of Get Content, Get Customers.

If you’d like to hear what these folks have to say as much as I would, PLEASE CLICK HERE TO VOTE FOR THIS SESSION.  You’ll need to register to give it the thumbs up (it’s painless, trust me) and feel free to leave a comment over there that might encourage other folks to vote too.  Thanks so much!!

Related posts:

1. Presentation Skills: Lessons Learned from SXSW
2. 6 Steps to Better Content Marketing
3. Content Marketing and “Trusted Advisors”

Related posts:

1. I’m the #1 PM Blogger!
2. How to Establish a Solid Marketing Foundation
3. See me, hear me (in video and podcasts)

In their rush to churn out content in support of product launches, many start-ups fail to strategically address their content requirements. As a result, they struggle to nurture prospects throughout a buying process that can extend for many months.

Let’s say you produce only a white paper or brochure. What are your prospects supposed to do next? It’s highly unlikely they’re going to call in their order after reading a single piece of information from your company – especially if your product costs thousands of dollars.

Your potential customers need many questions answered along the path to purchase and your content needs to provide the right answers at the right time. By adopting best practices around content marketing, you’ll establish a solid foundation for marketing your offering and engaging prospects throughout the buying cycle.

Step 1: Understand your prospects’ concerns and preferences. Before you develop any content, conduct research to understand what your ideal customers care about and how they go about making a buying decision. Hopefully you uncovered this while performing the market research that helped shape your offering. If so, you will have found that buyers don’t want to hear about your product at the beginning of the buying cycle. Instead, they want to understand industry trends, options for addressing the challenges they face, and recommended best practices and approaches. Later on they’ll want to know the ins and outs of your offering, how it compares to the competition, and how other companies have used it successfully.

You also want to find out what content types prospective customers prefer at each stage in the buying cycle. For example, a business decision maker might prefer a combination of in-depth information and quick summaries, while a technical evaluator may be looking for detailed information about your offering and a demo. The user might prefer high-level information accompanied by trial software. The key is to gauge whether or not there’s a pattern around these preferences so you can develop your content accordingly.

Step 2: Identify 2-3 major themes. Once you figure out the top issues keeping your prospects awake at night, plan your content for the year around those themes. This will give you a solid framework for producing content, and help you stay disciplined and focused in your content production efforts. Instead of just working down the checklist of collateral types, you can plan content that will attract and engage prospects.

Step 3: Interview SMEs. Take the time to get a brain dump on everything your subject matter experts know around the themes you’ve identified, moving beyond details of your offering to consider all the angles that might concern your prospects. Cover everything from industry trends and best practices, concerns of each buyer involved in the purchase process, options for addressing the issues, and the role your solution plays. Don’t forget to interview partners, beta customers, board members, and industry experts. You want to gather as much information from as many channels as possible to create this foundation document. With this in place, you’ll be able to identify where your company’s expertise intersects with your prospects’ concerns so you can focus on the sweet spot.

Step 4: Develop a content plan. Now you’re ready to start mapping out the issues you need to cover and the various content formats you need to produce. Ideally, before launching your product and any marketing campaigns, you’ll produce content that answers your prospects’ major concerns at each stage of the buying cycle. Pull from the foundation document you created as a jumping-off point.

I know it can feel daunting to produce all of this content, so keep in mind these tips:

1. Write a series of short articles or blog posts that you eventually fold into a white paper or eBook.
2. As you interview subject matter experts to create your foundation document, record the discussion as audio or video and post bite-size snippets on your site.
3. If one of your executive presents at a conference, record the presentation and post it to your site.
4. Record a customer’s success as a video or audio that you post on your site; you can always write an in-depth case study down the line.
5. Dissect your white papers or eBooks into standalone pieces, such as a list of 10 best practices or a checklist of considerations when evaluating possible solutions.
6. Consider aggregating and curating relevant content from third-party sources to create an information-rich hub that attracts and engages prospective buyers; HiveFire offers software (http://www.getcurata.com/) that helps you do this.

Stephanie Tilton is a content-marketing consultant who helps B2B companies craft content that engages prospects and customers, nurtures leads, and advances the buying cycle. You can follow her on Twitter @StephanieTilton or read more of her posts on Savvy B2B Marketing.

Related posts:

1. Inbound Marketing and Product Marketing
2. Selling vs. Buying: A Marketing Wake-up Call
3. Is Your Marketing Content Worth Receiving?

1/  Clearly define what you want to communicate – The goal of any great infographic is to tell a story.  Numbers are just numbers, a great infographic can tell a story with the numbers in a way a simple graph can’t.  Make sure you start with that goal in mind.

2/  Pick a type that matches your topic/data – There are a lot of different types of Infographics out there including timelines, maps, process diagrams, statistical, and more (the oldie but a goodie Periodic Table of Visualization Methods will give you an idea of just how many options you have).  Here’s an example that blends a timeline with data and (cheeky) graphics:

3/  Keep it simple (and reasonably small) – By definition you are trying to make the complex simple through the use of a graphic.  Beware of trying to do too much with a single picture.  For example, Lokesh Dhakar developed this infographic to help people understand what the differences were between espresso coffee drinks:

Espresso Infographic

The result is clean and easy to understand.  Contrast that with the often cited Web Trend Map, which although interesting to look at, in my opinion is way too complex to really be useful:

4/  Color and Typography matter a lot – Make sure that the colors and the typeface are appropriate for what you are trying to say and work with your branding.  Here’s an example of an infographic with Starbucks and McDonald’s that makes use of their respective corporate colors:

Infographics Marketing Starbucks McDonalds

5/  Have a call to action -  If you’ve done your job right you’ve educated folks and gotten them engaged, now what?  Make sure you include links to where they can learn more or if they are ready to take action, tell them how they can do so.

Further Reading:

There are a crop of blogs focused on the Infographic in all its forms including:

• Information is Beautiful
• Infographics News
• Cool Infographics
• Infosthetics
• Flowing Data

Also Edward Tufte has written the book on this stuff (several in fact).

The Infographics flickr pool is also full of inspiration.

Hey, you made it all the way to the end! You should subscribe!  You can sign up for email updates, subscribe via RSS or follow me on Twitter.

Related posts:

1. Infographics – The Lindsay Lohan of Content?
2. 5 Not Obvious Reasons Product Marketers Should Twitter
3. Marketing is Dead (long live product marketing)