If, by now, you are persuaded that culture change is essential to transform your marketing to outside-in marketing, you might be wondering what can get in the way of that culture change. Next we talk about the five most common barriers. Luckily, just being aware of these barriers can be enough to overcome them. It’s when they sneak up on you that they are most dangerous.
For example, one of the first things James did when he was editor in chief of ibm.com was to change the style guide from something an ad copy writer might endorse to something an editor would love. One of the key changes was a simple word replacement. He replaced the word copy in the style guide with content. Why? Well, copy has a connotation of ad copy, and he wanted the IBM writers to think about their creations in more sophisticated terms than an advertising copywriter uses. James wanted them to think and write like journalists because he knew that it is more effective to the self-directed audience than when they think like advertisers.
The problem, however, is that big data is smarter than all of the people in the room, including the executives. Nowhere is that more true than when it comes to content marketing.
Instruct them. Many executives do not realize how much data is out there and what can be done with it. They’ve grown accustomed to marketing being a land of opinion, so why shouldn’t they trust their own? Bring in an outside speaker to teach the C-suite that the world has changed. Leave them articles from the Harvard Business Review. Give them this book! Don’t assume that they know how the world has changed. Expose them to the change, and you might be pleasantly surprised at how they adapt.
Tell them. Most people need stories to help them change their approach. When you provide more information, you make people more learned, but when you tell a story, you move them to act. Tell them a story about how we listened to the data and it worked. Give them a case study that illuminates best practices. Make sure that you communicate in terms of money whenever possible because they might just let increased sales trump their opinion.
Show them. For some executives, there is nothing more persuasive than letting them know that their competitors are beating them to the punch. If you can show how competitors are already using big data in their content marketing, few executives will not rise to that bait. Just make sure that you have your facts straight because if your competitors aren’t doing it yet, that is not a fact you want to call attention to.
Challenge them. If all else fails, you can follow their instructions to the letter, as you usually do, but with one twist: Conduct an A/B test with their version and with another version. If they win, let it go.
But if they lose, challenge them with the results. It won’t be a comfortable meeting, but very few executives relish the prospect of you testing everything they tell you to do. Usually this tactic ends meddling in short order.
Executives generally are rather smart—that’s how they got the job. Don’t be too intimidated to show them the better way. You’re not wrong about this one, and they need to get the message. If they are as smart as they think they are, they will realize that we don’t want to act on anyone’s opinion—except our customers’.
The approach we lay out for collecting customer opinion at scale leads to better results than any single opinion, no matter how experienced and smart it might be. Those smart opinions are just the first thing to test and not the last word on what to do. When you start consistently doing what your customers want, it’s amazing how quickly you’ll start to look like a genius.
Barrier 1: Brand Building Is Valued More Than Customer Building
One of the objections we often hear from brand marketers is that outside-in marketing is just a more sophisticated demand-generation engine but that it can’t help a company build brands. Think of how iconic brands such as Apple, Coca-Cola, or some of the P&G brands were built: Their companies created a visual language and told stories promoting the brand with that language. When we talk to brand managers, the idea of using primarily textbased media to build a visual language falls flat. It lacks the production values and the stunning visuals needed to raise awareness and brand lift.
Some of this criticism of outside-in marketing is warranted. You can’t paint a brand image with a search ad or a tweet. The simplifying principles on which the web was built (limited colors, fonts, and load times) make using the web alone for brand building an iffy proposition. But that’s changing. As the web becomes more and more visual with the rise of Pinterest, YouTube, and the addition of photos to just about everything, brand marketers have all the tools of brand building available online that they have always had offline. Regardless, building brands must take second place to actual sales when the two conflict.
In addition, the web is a transactional medium. People are self-directed in their information discovery. They want to complete tasks. Aside from YouTube videos, the information on the web is rarely passively consumed. The kind of brand management that led to Coke becoming one of the most valuable brands on the planet requires a degree of passivity. That’s why Coke still has a very large TV ad budget. An audience that just wants to lean back and let images wash over them is easier to influence. Coke also does a lot of outdoor advertising, focusing on putting its brand language in front of captive audiences.
Of course, there is still room for offline media for brand building. And perhaps it will continue to be the primary way brands are built. But that doesn’t mean outside-in marketing has no value in building brand awareness—especially in telling the stories that help audiences identify with brand language, online and offline.
The primary value of digital marketing for brand lift is in audience targeting. For example, consider a YouTube campaign that serves multiple versions of the same clever ad and measures the results. YouTube has analytics built in that measure video abandonment. If you have a well-designed YouTube channel, you can quickly test multiple versions of the ads to see which ones tend to be watched all the way through versus those that users click away from partway through.
Where does big data come into this? You can measure all kinds of things about videos that will help you get a sense of how effective they are to the target audience, including how often they are shared and by whom, how well they are reviewed, and what is the text analytics of the comments. Of course, you also have a plethora of search metrics and social media analysis
to analyze. All these data sets can be fed back into your campaign, and you can then buy the most appropriate air time and use the most effective ads within those buys.
Outside-in marketing is not merely a mechanism for learning more about the audience to build your brand. It is also a way to tell stories. For example, more and more all the time, audiences are using their tablets while they watch TV. With an integrated approach to TV and social media data, you can build hooks in the ads that encourage the audience to continue the story online. Perhaps your TV ad tells just the first bit of a story, but the other parts unfold on your YouTube channel.
More than anything else, the culture of avoiding digital media for brand building is hurting brands rather than helping them. Think of how so-called millennials, who grew up with the Internet, view a brand that is noticeably absent in critical conversations. One of James’ current jobs involves helping the IBM Cloud Computing digital team build a more outside-in website. Besides search optimization, one of the first things he did was look at Wikipedia to see how the IBM brand was represented in the Cloud Computing topic. To his horror, it was nonexistent. So he edited the topic to include IBM as a provider of cloud-based solutions and built a new topic to describe what these solutions were and how they were branded.
Brand managers might be nonplussed by efforts to shore up a Wikipedia page, which is almost entirely encyclopedic text. But our data suggested that the absence of IBM—the company that invented computing as a service (aka cloud)—was creating confusion in a large audience that depends on Wikipedia for answers to more basic questions. The overwhelming attitude among those surveyed was that IBM didn’t have cloud solutions because they were not listed on that page. For this audience, one of the best things IBM could do was to make sure they were present on Wikipedia. And we can tell similar stories for IBM’s presence on the first page of search engines for the words and phrases the target audiences use to find the information they need.
Somehow companies need to transform the culture of devaluing digital content for brand building. It certainly can’t be the only tactic a brand manager uses. But if you ignore it, you will fail, especially in the age of the hyper-digital audience.
Barrier 2: Marketing Is Stuck in Advertising
To be effective, outside-in marketing must shake the stereotype of advertising, which requires the marketing organization to act more like an editorial department and less like an advertising department.
For example, one of the first things James did when he was editor in chief of ibm.com was to change the style guide from something an ad copy writer might endorse to something an editor would love. One of the key changes was a simple word replacement. He replaced the word copy in the style guide with content. Why? Well, copy has a connotation of ad copy, and he wanted the IBM writers to think about their creations in more sophisticated terms than an advertising copywriter uses. James wanted them to think and write like journalists because he knew that it is more effective to the self-directed audience than when they think like advertisers.
After he published the style guide, a communications manager teased James by asking why he built something for a role that did not exist. “Don’t you know that marketers are not writers. They just hire agencies to write their copy? If you want something written internally, talk to communications,” he said. It never occurred to James that the communications manager was right until after he had built the style guide. Just about every department in IBM lauded him for the accomplishment, except marketing, in part because it challenged them to grow beyond their comfort zones. Ultimately, it worked out because marketing soon started hiring in-house writers to craft the articles traditionally
written either in the communications department or in an agency. But the legacy of advertising is hard to shake.
written either in the communications department or in an agency. But the legacy of advertising is hard to shake.
Barrier 3: Marketing Must Be Separated from Public Relations
Once the roles within digital marketing demonstrate the outside-in principles in their work, public relations (or communications) needs its own transformation to work with marketing. In content marketing, there is no need for a wall between editorial and advertising; when you are telling true stories about how your products or services help your clients achieve success, it is not advertising. In a true outside-in organization, communications and marketing content producers work side by side to create content and promote their creations.
There is no greater need for this level of collaboration than in
social media business value
settings. A sound content marketing strategy involves training experts within your company to write blog posts or microblogs to help the audience understand how your experts help clients. It puts a human face on your company and provides ready stories for your target audience.
The management of this content often happens in communications, but more and more of this work is happening in marketing organizations, which communications people need to support. Getting these two traditionally siloed organizations to work together is a critical cultural transformation, and without it, content marketing will struggle.
Barrier 4: Marketing Is Beneath Us
Another common cultural barrier to outside-in marketing involves the communications organization. Communications professionals are essential to content marketing because they are central to promoting the content a company creates. But our experience suggests that they resist doing this work because it just feels dirty.
To the best of our knowledge, this is a remnant of the culture of journalism, from which most communications professionals stem. In journalism, the overarching ethos is the purity of the story. News organizations, for example, often talk about a wall between editorial and advertising. It is a cardinal sin to allow the content of a story to be influenced by an advertiser, so editorial departments are kept separate from the advertising departments.
Something like this division exists at many companies, where marketing is the analogue of the advertising and communications is the analogue of editorial. In this setting, working with marketing just doesn’t feel right, and communications people resist. Because content marketing demands collaboration between marketing and communications, it either breaks down this barrier or fails. If your communications department acts like they need a bath after their meeting with marketing, you must force them to work together, or your marketing will suffer.
Barrier 5: Executives Prefer Their Opinions to Data
In some organizations, this is the biggest barrier of them all. Too often, executives are accustomed to being the smartest people in the room. They have the most experience, the most strategic view, and the most information. Often, they truly are the smartest people in the room. In our experience, executives often have excellent judgment, too.
The problem, however, is that big data is smarter than all of the people in the room, including the executives. Nowhere is that more true than when it comes to content marketing.
In our experience, some executives tend to be the most concerned about the look and feel of assets. They will edit every piece of copy and will require eleventh-hour changes, all in the pursuit of perfection. In short, they will trust their gut rather than the social media data structure. They want everything they pay for to be perfect the first time. And that is the main cultural barrier to outside-in marketing. Executives need to trust the data to help them drive results faster. If they do not, the practitioners who work for them will be torn between working for results and working for perfectionistic executives.
In order to develop an outside-in culture, you have to have executive emphasis on datadriven marketing. That is step 1. Executives who buy into this concept can foster the cultural change needed.
But how do you get your executives forget their golden guts and rely on the data?Instruct them. Many executives do not realize how much data is out there and what can be done with it. They’ve grown accustomed to marketing being a land of opinion, so why shouldn’t they trust their own? Bring in an outside speaker to teach the C-suite that the world has changed. Leave them articles from the Harvard Business Review. Give them this book! Don’t assume that they know how the world has changed. Expose them to the change, and you might be pleasantly surprised at how they adapt.
Tell them. Most people need stories to help them change their approach. When you provide more information, you make people more learned, but when you tell a story, you move them to act. Tell them a story about how we listened to the data and it worked. Give them a case study that illuminates best practices. Make sure that you communicate in terms of money whenever possible because they might just let increased sales trump their opinion.
Show them. For some executives, there is nothing more persuasive than letting them know that their competitors are beating them to the punch. If you can show how competitors are already using big data in their content marketing, few executives will not rise to that bait. Just make sure that you have your facts straight because if your competitors aren’t doing it yet, that is not a fact you want to call attention to.
Challenge them. If all else fails, you can follow their instructions to the letter, as you usually do, but with one twist: Conduct an A/B test with their version and with another version. If they win, let it go.
But if they lose, challenge them with the results. It won’t be a comfortable meeting, but very few executives relish the prospect of you testing everything they tell you to do. Usually this tactic ends meddling in short order.
Executives generally are rather smart—that’s how they got the job. Don’t be too intimidated to show them the better way. You’re not wrong about this one, and they need to get the message. If they are as smart as they think they are, they will realize that we don’t want to act on anyone’s opinion—except our customers’.
The approach we lay out for collecting customer opinion at scale leads to better results than any single opinion, no matter how experienced and smart it might be. Those smart opinions are just the first thing to test and not the last word on what to do. When you start consistently doing what your customers want, it’s amazing how quickly you’ll start to look like a genius.
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