Musings of a Marketing Maven

Finally there’s a practical resource for people who want the best of both worlds: what’s worth keeping from traditional marketing, combined with the benefits of the emerging Marketing 2.0 toolkit. Thanks to IBM’s Sandy Carter, there’s now a great resource for B2B marketing strategists and practitioners, The New Language of Marketing 2.0. I definitely recommend it.

‘ANGELS’ Framework for Energizing Markets

Her book lays out a comprehensive planning and execution framework for “energizing markets,” based on practices that Carter and her team at IBM have honed while marketing SOA and WebSphere on a global basis.

She calls it “ANGELS,” a cutesy acronym for her success formula:

• A: Analyze the market to ensure you’re starting from a solid understanding of your best opportunities around the world, and that your planned offerings will be a good match to the market’s needs and your organizational capabilities.
• N: Nail the strategy – make sure your business strategy, value proposition, business model, value chain focus, etc., are all aligned and reinforce each other – and allow you to deliver the promised benefits of your value prop.
• G: Go to Market – develop a solid and cohesive GTM plan, integrating the global business needs but adapted for local requirements and channels; make sure you’ve got the optimal mix of traditional and new media (including social media) tactics to meet the business objectives for your marketing funnel and sales pipeline. Plan and execute an integrated GTM campaign end-to-end – and don’t neglect your market influencers.
• E: Energize your channels and community – make sure you’ve got the right reach and coverage for your identified target market segments. Be sure to develop programs and resources that will satisfy the needs and wants of the channels and communities that are part of your market ecosystem, whether those communities include online groups, professional associations, universities, etc. Ensure you provide the right “enablement” to activate your partners so they can achieve their business and professional goals. Make it fun and profitable for them to do business with and through you.
• L: Leads and revenue – make sure you have an effective funnel management system and revenue engine, closely aligned with the sales function (and its pipeline management processes). Ideally, set up mechanisms that enable you to track and optimize tactics while the campaign is in flight, thanks to what the author calls “in-process metrics.” (She describes some of IBM’s best practices, based on the marketing automation platform and metrics system used by IBM Cognos.)
• S: Scream – leverage the technology at your disposal, but don’t forget to “wear your passion on your sleeve.” Share your excitement and your passion for the marketplace, new trends and opportunities with your customers, influencers and partners. In “screaming,” shift from broadcast to dialogue mode (even if that seems like an oxymoron).

In the course of describing this framework, the author shares a number of IBM’s own case studies, as well as high-level views of their own planning tools and approaches. This alone makes the book well worth the price!