From the PartnerOn Team

“No one ever got fired for buying Cisco” is one of my favorite business quotes. Better Marketing delves into the concept of fear-based marketing and how to effectively use it:

“When using fear-based marketing, it’s best to promote the negative consequences of not using the product than to show the positive outcomes of using it. Marketing in this capacity should not overreach or promote horrific consequences unless a strong position has been established (i.e the “Smoking Kills” campaigns). Be sure to show groups of people and togetherness in fear-based marketing so as to speak to the primal urge to seek comfort in difficult and scary situations.” 

But if you flip the coin on my favorite quote you will also find an element of comfort in the message: if you choose a Cisco product, you are ensured job security. I would argue that combining both fear and comfort into B2B marketing is an even more effective sales tool.

I once had the unique opportunity to use fear to sell a B2B solution. I was in a meeting with the review team who had already selected our service, and the director who was giving the final go-ahead. The salesperson assigned to the account was with me, so they could walk through everything one more time. After the director kept us waiting for 40 minutes in the conference room, she came in and promptly said, “I am thinking about going with this competitor,” who happened to be named after a dinosaur. That was all she said. I was surprised she had us travel to this meeting just to tell us that. As I thought about how to respond, I decided I didn’t want to waste my time explaining point by point why our company was better. 

So, closed my laptop, stood up, and said. “We are the leaders in the industry (and named the top five vendors in the industry who use us), if you want to tell your bosses you chose a company named for a dinosaur over us, go right ahead”. And I walked out to the dismay of everyone, including my salesperson. A week later we had the deal. 

At that moment I provided the director all that she needed, fear of choosing wrong, and comfort in knowing other top vendors use us as well. 

Applying this to our content marketing strategy means we need to think about how to gently express the fear, and then apply the comfort.  For example, would you rather have a channel enablement solution that has 5% usage or 40% usage? By showing 40% engagement rates we offer comfort to potential buyers knowing that others receive high value.  

The reality is we spend a lot of time thinking about awareness in our content marketing, but what is really needed? It is to comfort the fear of choosing wrong. What information can a buyer fall back on to defend a decision that leads to your product? Cyber security solutions have an easy and difficult time with this. The baseline for cyber security is fear of being compromised, but they too need to focus heavily on comfort.  

Let’s look at some of the article titles from PartnerOn that performed the best.

“Don’t let AI Security Risks out weight the benefits”  – The title invokes fear and resolution.

“Hacker Hunting and Built-in Protections” – Similarly, this invokes fear and leads to a resolution that will bring comfort. 

“Thales and Google Cloud taking charge of solving the complexities of your data in the cloud” – While this one is less about fear, it does evoke comfort and provides a resolution to a challenge we all face.

Here are some recommendations for how I would structure messaging around content:

1. Provide information that both addresses a concern and helps solve the problem, such as, “Hybrid work can be challenging, but these five steps will help improve productivity”.
2. Offer recordings or webinars that address the fear. Today we will listen to what keeps top CIOs up at night, and how they ended those sleepless nights.
3. Often B2B sales require meetings. Offer a counseling session: “Share with us your concerns around Hybrid Work, and we can develop the right solution together.” This should lead to an online or 1:1 meeting.

The challenge is consistently sharing so that the morning after the CIO’s sleepless night, your content is right in front of them, grabbing their attention, speaking to their fears, and comforting them with a solution. All you need to do is stay consistent and follow the path, and you will earn the win.

Want to gain comfort in your content marketing program Contact us at sales@contentmx.com 

I had a conversation in the middle of the lockdown, with a president of a large B2B marketing firm, during which we discussed the future of B2B marketing and sales. The debate centered around if we will ever go back to large events again. My thought was that the longer the pandemic went on, the larger the demand for in-person events would grow.  

I based my reasoning on a few of my general thoughts on human behaviors:

1. The more you tell me I can’t do something, the more I want to do it.
2. While travel is never easy, it is actually productive.
3. People like to have well-designed formal opportunities to engage with each other, especially those of us who tend to be a bit awkward or introverted. 

We also spoke about how buyer behaviors have been affected. Overall the data has pointed us to the idea of purchase by committee, which has created the need for a way to take everyone on the journey together. This requires easy access to different content that will help answer the questions of the committee.  

The behavior of the people in these situations, I would argue, requires the following: 

1. Easy sharing of relevant content to help answer the questions
2. Online conversations, or social media interactions with the leader of the buying committee to help define the needs and outline the potential questions from others (there is always the person on the call who will challenge the solution).
3. Then a virtual meeting with the committee that is designed to answer the questions (even though content is accessible online, people don’t always want to read, they want to listen and challenge the premise with someone online).

As B2B marketers and sellers, we need to learn how to juggle the many different approaches to the buying process our customers and prospects take. Carl Jung described it best: 

“…people either derive energy from relating to others or from internal thoughts. They also tend to gather information in different ways, either by focusing on data, or by intuitively seeing the big picture. They express themselves in different ways, either with a focus on rational thinking, or on feelings and values. And they also have tendencies to make decisions rapidly with planning and organization, or to be more spontaneous and pressure-prompted. Using the Myers Briggs Type Indicator and other assessments, these dichotomies can be measured to indicate type preferences  –Working Resources

Here are some things to always think about: 

1. Education comes first. The buyers who tend to be rational thinkers by focusing on data will seek out content to answer their needs, while the big picture people will look at the total sum of the content and make a decision based on intuition and values.

2. Get involved. Go to the industry events and get involved with the audience, meet as many people as you can, and have meaningful conversations. The face-to-face opportunities will support the need of those buyers who need to have a trusted, personal connection with the seller.

3. Flexible awareness. The final step to many of the purchases will be that moment when you will have a call with all the different buyers on the committee.  As marketers and sellers we need to be flexible, and be able to identify the needs of each person in the meeting.   

The truth is, the effects of Covid, like a pendulum swinging, will continue to impact our B2B marketing and sales for quite some time.  But I believe we will settle into a more integrated style of marketing and selling with a mix of in-person events and online meetings, and of course, a lot of content to support every step of the way.

There is a secret map found deep in the data provided by the ContentMX content marketplaces.  Only PartnerOn provides unparalleled access to these secrets.  The starting point? Understanding the path the content takes.

In order to grow your business and understand who both your partners and end-users are, you probably find yourself firing at a moving target. But what if there was a way for vendors and partners alike to gain a deeper understanding of both partners and consumers? What would you want want to learn? ContentMX content marketplaces offer a unique view into the behaviors of the technology marketplace. Take a look at just some of the pieces of the puzzle that we have access to…

Every month PartnerOn creates:

• Over 25,000 consumer clicks
• Over 1,600 social MQL’s
• Over 6.5 million impressions

Through consumption patterns we can see that businesses are looking to learn more about:

• Moving to the cloud
• Hybrid Work 
• Hybrid cloud
• Cloud Security
• Multi-cloud
• Data and CRM
• AI
• Devices

Based on our partner profiling we know that the clients they serve are In multiple industries:

• Manufacturing
• Farming
• Medical
• Financial Services
• Education
• Government

The engagement numbers grow every month, as more companies in the channel discover the value of one destination for all the marketing content to grow their business. Additionally, companies are saving dollars on paid marketing services by using a free service from PartnerOn, all while maintaining the same level of privacy for their data. 

Content consumption from our marketplaces provides members of the channel, suppliers, and vendors a single source of information about the interest of the consumers, the needs of the partners, and the response to different types of content. PartnerOn blindly aggregates the data around consumption of content at all levels. Providing the answers needed to continue to support a market. 

We can then see what types of engagement lead to new sales. Was it…

• Registering for an assessment? 
• Engaging with a white paper, or a case study?  
• Attending a webinar?

By looking at content consumption users can draw lines that connect content to closing a deal. And while the buying process may not be linear, partners can see what components help the buying process move along.

Our insights grow every month while keeping all the information private.  Join one or all of our content marketplaces, and learn more by clicking here. 

At ContentMX we continue to review the data to not only understand topics of interest, but to also understand what type of content drives the interest. 

One of our content marketplaces boasts over 2800 users who have published over 12,000 pieces of content to over 400,000 prospects in January alone.

The content originated from top suppliers such as Microsoft, Cisco, Red Hat, Intel, HPE, Lenovo, and many others.  

Our reports are able to help us tell the story of what the consumers engage in. The first chart shows us what type of content was shared by the users of our application in January.

The second chart helps us understand, what content created the most reactions, or MQL’s.

Let’s look at two types of content and how they compare in the two graphs. In the first graph you can see that solution briefs are 17.9% of the content shared by our users. In the second graph you can see that the majority of the social media reactions came from social briefs (38.8%).  If we look at infographics we can see that they are the second most popular item to share by our users, but only 7.9% of the reactions came from those posts. Clearly there is a disconnect between the perceived need and the actual interest.  

If we think about the analysis and how it compares to the scatter graphs of the buyers then we can understand why the solution brief would be so popular. It becomes the start of the dialogue, and is relevant for all the parties who are engaged in the decision making process. The promotional and branding materials become relevant for the executives. They use this information to help trigger which organizations to present against the solution briefs, while white papers and analyst reports help validate the solutions about to be selected.  

The analysis is just the beginning. As we continue to evolve, add new features and offer co-selling and lead sharing services between suppliers and their partners, we will be able to help track the content to a marketing qualified lead and to sales qualified lead. Thereby helping convert content engagement into a shared opportunity.

As the largest content marketplace for the channel, we are among the very few organizations who can recognize how content is engaged with through the entire sales channel. Allowing suppliers who work with ContentMX a very unique view that crosses over many vendors, partners and different consumers.

The PartnerOn Marketplaces are one of the largest publishers of technology content in the world, communicating to over 10,000 partners, who in turn help create over 10 million impressions and over 70,000 consumer clicks every month. Each click is a new potential business opportunity. 

The publishing engine not only creates reach, but offers unique data insights for both partners and suppliers alike. The story the data tells is one of interest, engagement and market predictions. For example, a study of 1,000 partners from one of our Content Marketplaces compares partners to consumer interests.  This first chart shows content selected and published by partners. 

This chart demonstrates that this select group of partners are most interested in content from Palo Alto Networks, followed by Red Hat, IBM Cloud and Dell. 

We can then overlay that data with what the consumers engaged with and we can see a slightly different story.

While Palo Alto, Red Hat, Dell, and IBM are still in the top four, the percentages get a lot closer, and Dell and IBM Cloud have traded places.  We have similar studies from other marketplaces where we have seen a clear interest in content about hybrid work. This demonstrates what we predict is the long tail reaction to Covid.  

As the PartnerOn audience continues to grow, content will start to focus on unique industries and challenges faced by target audiences. From this we plan on building a model to help suppliers and vendors focus their marketing efforts. 

While publishing data is not new, the idea of being able to easily parse seller and consumer data together is a unique opportunity that only PartnerOn Content Marketplaces can offer. Become part of our content marketplace today, as either a user or provider of content, and be part of the future.