Toyota implemented what was called the Five Why Strategy to determine cause and effect.  The idea was in order to get to the actual root of a problem, management repeated the question Why? after a response.  By utilizing this strategy, the cause of the problem can typically be diagnosed after five responses.

In marketing, the Why Strategy can help determine the reason a program did not meet its objectives or in identifying the cause of a customer issue.

Here’s an example of how the Why Exercise helps get to the heart of a problem:

Issue:  The Sales ROI on an email campaign was 5%, 10% shy of the goal.

1. Why?
The campaign costs were higher than budgeted.

2.  Why?
The email needed to be sent twice.

3.  Why?
The first email click-through rate was less than 5%.

4.  Why?
The original email was transmitted with a poorly written Subject Line.

5.  Why?
The email was not properly tested because the process and procedure was not followed.

This may be an oversimplified example, but, you get the idea of how asking Why? can help you dig deeper to uncover the heart of a problem. This strategy is useful in managing throughout the year, not only during review cycles.  Try it in your next marketing meeting and have your team include the Why Strategy as a regular part of analyzing marketing program performance. 

(Due to confidential and proprietary content, the graphic is not included in this blog. The graphic can be viewed at one of the two links below. )

In Eloqua‘s blog on the recent graphic, Joe Chernov compared the complexities of Social Media to that of the auto industry and its vast ecosystem.   Even if Social Media is as complicated as other businesses making that comparison doesn’t mean that Social Media isn’t complicated. And for most of us, who are not experienced digital marketers, Social Media IS complicated.  Yes, there is an almost endless amount of free Social Media white papers, ebooks, webinars and blogs to help get educated.  It still takes a lot of time to understand every platform and tool, their differences and then to decide which ones are the right ones to support the marketing plan.

Do we need to learn all the tools inside and out to be successful at Social Media? I don’t think so. Deciding which tools to use in Social Media is like other marketing decisions we make.  We start with goals and objectives, focus on the products that will help to achieve them and ignore the rest.  Buddy Media’s graphic depicts 28 categories and almost every Social Media platform and tool available. That doesn’t mean every one of those tools or even a fraction is needed to support our marketing needs.

And if Social Media is like other businesses, a time will come in the not too distant future when there will be a consolidation of companies and integration of products and features.

What do you think?

Resources:

Social Media isn’t “Ludicrously Complicated” Business Is, by Joe Chernov, It’s All About Revenue, Eloqua blog

This INSANE Graphic Shows How Ludicrously Complicated Social Media Marketing Is Now, by Charlie Minato, Business Insider blog

Here are a few lessons from Jim Joseph’s book that I think can help you to create a great B2B brand experience with your customer.

DEFINE THE BRAND

Every business, big or small, should take the time to formally define its brand. To define your brand, answer these questions; What does your brand stand for?  What is it that the brand promises to deliver? How is it unique? How important is your product to a business.  In other words, what business problem does it solve?  Once defined, everything about your business should support the brand from the marketing plan down to details like a customer return policy.  Communicate the brand vision throughout your organization.

MAP THE TOUCH-POINTS

In the past, marketers looked at typical touch-points like newspapers, magazines and other media that a target subscribed. Today, a customer might learn about a product in a Group discussion on LinkedIn or other community sites so, it is a good exercise to map out all touch-points a customer might engage with your product including social media.  For many B2B businesses, a touch-point includes a partner like a service or maintenance contractor.  Make sure to look at your customer engagement model from beginning to end.

BE CONSISTENT

It’s important that a business creates a consistent brand experience for customers across every touch-point, like marketing messages, advertising, website, collateral, social media, sales channels, customer service support and even how customers are greeted in the office lobby.  Consistency creates and reinforces the brand and unique position that you want customers to know and recognize.  Jim Joseph states, a consistent brand experience builds loyalty and can justify price points (low or high) in the consumer market. This is also true in the B2B market.  IBM is a great example of a truly consistent B2B brand experience. IBM’s ability to consistently deliver on its promise in myriad industry sectors has earned the company brand accolades. (Davis Brand Capital)

VOICE OF THE CUSTOMER

Serve the needs and wants of the customer in every marketing and business decision.  Become the customer and question if what you are doing or considering doing will help your customer meet her business goals.  Learn as much as you can about your customers so you can understand their problems and then deliver solutions.  Many customer touch-points are not under the marketing umbrella (like sales or engineering) so, everyone in the organization must be a customer advocate.

SPEND EFFECTIVELY & MEASURE RESULTS

Align your marketing budget with desired results.  Allocate the marketing budget to the prioritized goals for each customer touch-point.  A strong brand requires care and feeding.  Monitoring the brand and ensuring it remains relevant and compelling is an ongoing process.

Resources:

The Experience Effect, by Jim Joseph

IBM’s “Smarter” Brand#1 on Davis Brand Capital 25, Unbound Edition (meaningful dialogue), Davis Brand Capital, by Bryan K. Oekel

Ranking the brands… www.rankingthebrands.com

Building a powerful B2B Brand, Circle Research by Andrew Dalglish

A common challenge we marketers confront is keeping a laser-sharp focus.  We may do this some of the time or even most of the time, but, to maintain focus requires awareness and conscious action. I’m not talking about loosing short-term focus because of office distractions like incoming emails, phone calls, or text messages. Although, those are interruptions we need to address because they break our concentration and ability to get our day-to-day work done. I’m talking about maintaining a long-term focus on our goals.

Here are some useful tips I find helpful to keep my focus.

#1 SET ACHIEVABLE GOALS

It’s better to do a few things well.  Don’t sign up for something you know you cannot possibly accomplish given the resources or timeframe. Break down larger goals into smaller chunks. You will feel less overwhelmed and more in control and able to keep your focus.

#2 MAP IT OUT 

Now that you know where you want to go, determine what you need to do to achieve the goals.  Determine the programs, actions, tasks, owners, contingencies and timelines that map to a specific goal.  Make it Visual. Put this information into a project plan tool or excel spreadsheet.

#3 REVIEW YOUR PROGRESS 

Review your goals to plan often. Are you on track? If you’re not, figure out what you need to get back. Ask yourself often if what you’re doing is contributing to achieving those goals you set.  If it’s not, stop doing it. A quick review of progress at the end of each day and a detailed weekly review process will help you stay focused on your plan and goals.

#4 ENVISION SUCCESS

What will it look like when you achieve your goals?  Visualize your success and the path you’ll take to get there.  Athletes do this all of the time to get them ready for a big competition. This exercise will help to focus your mental energy in the right places.

#5 MIX IT UP

Once in a while, kill the routine.  Doing things differently can be reinvigorating and gets the creative juices flowing. You’ll be better able to focus on your work and goals when you feel energized.

#6 CELEBRATE

Celebrate the small successes as well as the big ones with your team. Talk about what you did that resulted in success and how to keep it going.

Do you have any tips you’d like to share that help you remain focused?

How to Ensure a Successful Consulting Engagement

The success of the consultant and the project depends on how well the organization defines the project scope and budget, and determines work requirements and desired qualities and experience of the consultant.  Answer these project questions once it’s determined help is needed.  The answers will serve as the basis to develop the RFP (Request for Proposal) and help to ensure a successful engagement and outcome.

1.  What are your needs and desired results?  What do you want the consultant to accomplish? What defines a successful project outcome for your organization? Be specific.

2.  What is your available budget?  Set a range which provides flexibility for unforeseen changes to the scope that might occur during the project. 

3.  What is your desired timeframe to complete the project?  The deadline may be determined by a new product launch or an industry event.  A completion date provides a goal to work towards, benchmark and measure the project’s progress.

4.  What are the work requirements? Does the consultant work on-site, off-site or a combination? Is it a full-time or part-time position? How many hours per week does the project require?

5.  What are your expectations for communications and updates from your consultant during the project?  What method do you prefer, email, phone or other?  How often do you want to talk or meet?  It is important that your organization set expectations and discuss communications preferences with the consultant before the project begins.

6.  What is your organization looking for in a consultant?  Put a list together of the key skills, qualifications and experience that you believe are important for the project’s success. Include what you think will make them a good fit with your company’s culture and work style. These criteria will provide guidance as you go through the proposal and selection process for a consultant.   

Have you hired a marketing consultant?  What was your experience?

I decided to repurpose my most popular blog article, Using Social Media to Generate New Product Ideas and Innovations to develop a PowerPoint presentation.  The presentation will be included as a video blog post, on SlideShare, my LinkedIn profile, the353group website and on YouTube.  Here’s how to do it.

Steps to Turn a Blog Article into a Presentation

Step One:  Find some really nice photography to capture the main ideas of the original blog article for the PowerPoint slides.  If you are ok with text-only, build your slides with the pictures, include text, save it as a PowerPoint Slide Show (PPS file) and you are ready to upload the deck to SlideShare and LinkedIn.

I recommend taking a few additional steps and add audio to the presentation. Audio adds personality and a richness to the presentation that far surpasses text-only and I believe that most viewers prefer to experience an audio-visual presentation. A mere 1.3M videos are viewed in an Internet minute (according to Intel’s recent In an Internet Minute infographic) so you can get some great visibility and traffic by turning that blog into video and uploading it to YouTube, the number 2 search engine after Google. If you decide to use audio with your slides, follow these next steps and consider lessons learned.

Step Two:  Script the presentation for narration.  The original blog post can be used to develop content for the script.

Step Three:  Narrate the slides.  This is a difficult task that should be routine but isn’t.  For me, it turned into a day and a half of fighting with my Mac, PowerPoint and the recording of the narration.

Lessons Learned

1. If you use a Mac, find a Windows PC to narrate your PowerPoint slides. Unless you know the iMovie application and can turn the PowerPoint into a movie, go find a PC. I have since moved my PowerPoint to the Windows PC to narrate and turn into a video file format.

Here’s why.  When using a Mac to record narration in PowerPoint, the Record Narration option in SlideShow randomly and without reason stops recording on a slide.  This occurrence has nothing to do with the individual slide itself.  If you attempt to go back and re-record the narration, the recording may stop on a different slide than it had during the previous recording.  This is a problem that other Mac users have experienced when attempting PowerPoint narration and there isn’t a good fix.

2. When using a Windows PC to narrate the PowerPoint, go to Record Show and with your script in hand, narrate your slides.  There are some very good YouTube videos that can walk you through the narration process step-by-step like, How to Record Narration for a PowerPoint Presentation For Dummies.

3. After you save the narrated PowerPoint file, save it in Windows Media Video format or .wmv file. How do you do that?  If you have Office 2010, you can convert the PowerPoint file by saving the file as a .wmv file.  That’s it.   If you don’t have Office 2010 or do not want to use the .wmv file format, you will need to use a third party utility to convert your file to another format (.avi, .mov, etc).

Once the file is converted, it can be uploaded  to YouTube, vimeo and to SlideShare Pro (for video) and LinkedIn via SlideShare.

Repurposing content provides an opportunity to share your knowledge and expertise on other social media platforms and to reach more customers.  It’s a great way to make the most of your content.

For the last fifty years, these 4Ps have been ruling the marketing world but, business marketers have always been doing things differently than our consumer colleagues. The 4Ps model was never a good fit for B2B because business to business sales processes are complex, many are typically involved in the decision-making and products tend to be more sophisticated, very different from the consumer world.

Today, a lot is being written about finding better models for both consumer and business marketing. For B2B marketers, this is an opportunity to define a unique model that works and better fits business marketing than the traditional 4Ps. Why do we even need a model?  Models help marketers put context around the most common challenges we face and provide a framework to address complex business issues.

I recently came across a new model that was proposed by Solutions Insights a marketing consulting firm located in the Boston area. They provide consulting services promoting a customer-solutions focused business model. The model Solutions Insights proposes is appropriately named OVER; O = Offering, V = Value, E = Experience and R = Relationship.  

Below is Solutions Insights chart defining OVER and comparing it to the 4Ps:

Solutions Insights OVER model comparison to 4Ps

 I think it’s a pretty good one for B2B marketers. What do you think?

Resources:

The 4Ps Are Out, The 4 E’s Are In, by Brian Fetherstonhaugh, Ogilvy and Mather


The True 4Ps of Marketing for B2B CEOs, by Michelangelo Celli

Solutions Marketing:  The four Ps are OVER, by Solutions Insights

You may favor an intuitive decision-making style not a fact based style.  But, the question you need to ask is how can you make the best decisions for your business to achieve the most optimal outcome whatever your decision-making style?

Don’t get me wrong.  I do believe in intuition. It springs from our knowledge, skills, and expertise. Intuition may be the start of a great new product, improvement or customer service program. But unless you are the next Steve Jobs, you need to do more than run with your gut. Take it to the next level.

I advocate using research and facts to support your intuition. A lot of information is available that doesn’t cost anything except for the time it takes to do some digging to find it.  Look online for free information on markets, competitors, trends, and customers.  Use your intuition and follow it up with facts to achieve the greatest results.

Do you make decisions in your business based on your instincts?  Do you use research to back them up?

Resources:

Steve Jobs:  Did Going From the Gut Really Work?, Copernicus, The Marketing Frey Blog
Follow Your Instincts.  Improve Your Business.  Blog by Brown & Company
When It Comes to Marketing, Your Gut is Still Not Smarter than Your Head.  by Kevin Clancy and Peter Krieg
How Do You Make Your Decision More Data Driven Rather Than Gut Instinct, by Charles Feltman

1.  The coach hires a staff that compliments his style and addresses areas where he is weakest.  The best leaders know they don’t know everything and find managers whose skills fill those gaps.

2.  The coach recruits players that believe in his vision and have the right mix of talent and skills to fill the position. The recruit may not be able to fill the position 100% on day one but, the coach sees the ability and desire for growth.

3. Everyone knows the contribution they make to the team and works together to achieve team goals.  There may be stand-out performers but, they recognize they can’t do it alone.  Winning requires every player on the team.  

4.  Individual performance is elevated because coaches focus on developing a player’s strengths.  After all, those strengths are the reason he was recruited.  

5.  Practice, practice, and then practice some more.  I worked for someone who told me that he always over prepared because there was nothing worse than finding yourself in front of an important customer or your boss under prepared. He anticipated questions, objections and various scenarios and prepared responses for them.

6.  Play Your Game with Flawless Execution.  Play to your strengths and what you do best.  If you’ve prepared, your execution will be flawless.

7.  Believe You’re a Winner.  If you believe in yourself, your talents and that you can win, you will do everything in your power to make that a reality.

8.  It Ain’t Over Until It’s Over.  How many times has a team come back from a ten point half-time deficit to win the game.  Too many to count. Fight the battle.  Don’t throw the towel in before the game is over.

How to Be a Great Marketer in the Eyes of the CEO and CFO

It isn’t enough to show charts and graphs of how many more visitors viewed a website in a month, or downloaded a new white paper or dropped their card in a bowl at a trade show. A better way to measure marketing performance is to measure its impact on buying behavior during the sales cycle. When measuring performance, marketing must determine whether their activities resulted in moving a prospective customer closer to becoming a buying customer.

B2B sales cycles are typically more complex than B2C cycles. More decision makers are involved in the buying process and from initial contact to actual purchase the cycle itself is longer.  Different marketing programs touch customers at various stages during the sales cycle, making it difficult and even inaccurate to credit a single marketing activity as being responsible for the buyer’s decision to purchase. For this reason, marketing needs to look at its programs, activities and campaigns holistically and measure the impact each has on moving the prospect into the next stage of the sales cycle.

Where Do You Start?

Begin by understanding your company’s sales cycle and gain a clear understanding of what your prospective buyer needs at each stage. Look at your current marketing programs and activities. These should map to the prospective buyers’ needs at each of the stages in the sales cycle. If they don’t, consider whether these activities are contributing to your organization’s objectives. If not,  drop them from your marketing plan. You may need to consider new activities that better align with your company’s objectives, sales cycle and prospective buyers’ needs.

Next, assign values to each program based on the importance of the desired outcome along the sales cycle. Certain activities are tied to more critical outcomes and therefore should be given a higher value. You now have metrics to measure and can evaluate how effective a marketing program or activity was at eliciting the desired outcome in the sales cycle and if they contributed to generating additional sales.

Is the Marketing Program Profitable? 

Once you have measured and quantified how these activities contributed to generating revenues you must determine if they did so profitably.  Calculate the ROI.  Start with a simple P/L statement.

1. On the Revenue side, include the dollar contributions that the program made to sales and multiply this number by your average gross margin to calculate the gross profit from marketing’s contributions to sales.
2. On the expense side, total all marketing program expenses and include staff time and any other resources that contributed directly to the program.
3. Subtract the total program expenses from the gross profit to determine the ROI of the program.

For more details, download the ebook, Definitive Guide to Marketing Metrics and Analytics, by Marketo which provides excellent real business examples for calculating Marketing ROI.

Be a Revenue and Profit Generator

With the start of a new quarter, now is a good time to review your marketing programs and goals.  Consider if these line up with your organization’s overall objectives.  Determine if you have the right metrics in place to measure effectiveness and impact during the sales cycle. Choose the tools to measure results. Decide how often to measure and adjust your activities.

When marketers develop programs that align with prospective buyers’ needs during the sales cycle, measure program effectiveness (incremental sales contribution) and calculate program profitability (ROI), it demonstrates to leadership that marketing is a contributor to the growth of the organization and not just another cost center.

Resources:

Definitive Guide to Marketing Metrics and Analytics, Marketo (ebook)
Digital Body Language, Chapter 9, Can you Finally Measure Marketing Effectiveness? by Steven Woods, eloqua ebook 

Many companies have Social Media strategies and plans in place.  Many still don’t. And it isn’t only small businesses. Even some large companies don’t have Social Media in their marketing play books. Social Media is the great unknown and risky unchartered waters for many businesses. They avoid any efforts to develop a program, instead watching Social Media from the sideline.  If this describes how Social Media is viewed at your company, maybe it’s time to learn to crawl before you run.

Consider trying one Social Media platform first.  Don’t wait to develop a comprehensive Social Media strategy and campaign. Having said that, it is important to have goals in mind and what you’d like to accomplish.  An initial goal may be as simple as creating a Twitter account and following leaders or competitors in your industry everyday for the next three months. Remember that your actions should be consistent with your brand and target audience messaging, no matter how high of a level you decide to initially participate in Social Media.

The Best Platform for a B2B to Start Social Media Activities

If you are a B2B, LinkedIn is a great choice to test the Social Media waters. This is the professional business networking platform.

Start by completing a LinkedIn Company Profile page.  You can add information, accessible to all LinkedIn’s 150 million members, about your organization including your logo, products and services, current promotions and job openings .  With a company page, once you have followers you can start a conversation and engage with them. LinkedIn members follow what matters to them professionally and to their business.

Next, build your company’s LinkedIn presence by identifying members within your company to join industry groups related to your business like customers’, partners’ and competitors’ groups.  Being a part of these groups is really where your business can benefit.  If this is a first time participating in a group, take some time to listen and get a pulse on the conversations of the group.  Establish your authority and expertise in these groups by becoming an active participant sharing useful information and starting discussions with the group. Another benefit of participating in groups is the opportunity to hear what customers are thinking about your product, your competitors and what is trending in the industry.

Increase your LinkedIn presence further by creating your own industry group. I like the HP and Intel group, Small Biz Nation that features good discussions on relevant topics for small businesses like the discussion on Techniques to Stay Connected to Your Customers. Another group I like is the American Express Business Knowledge Share with discussion topics ranging from Social Media and online marketing tips to How Participating in LinkedIn Groups Can Help Your Business.

The costs of not participating in Social Media are too great.  You don’t have to watch Social Media from the sideline.  Pick a platform and get started.

At one time in my career, I was a data security product marketing manager and made the mistake of being stuck in a belief.  It was very early on in the data security market, (late 90′s), and we were marketing enterprise-grade security firewalls.  These firewalls were designed for large networks, expensive and required technical expertise to implement and manage.  This worked fine for large enterprises but, not for small/medium size businesses (SMBs).  Back then SMBs were the next big growth market for data security products.

Taking the advice of very knowledgeable security gurus, I wasn’t willing to compromise the level of security that large firewalls provided in order to move down market.  I was stuck in the belief that the new firewall designed for SMBs would not provide adequate security.  The truth was that the new firewall did provide good security and SMBs needed a security solution.  The large, expensive, complex enterprise firewall was not it.  Fortunately, after many heated discussions with those in favor of the new firewall, we included it in our security offering. It wasn’t enterprise grade but, it met the needs of the SMBs on price, technical simplicity and security.  The small firewall was a successful addition to our product offering.

Many times, you don’t even realize you are stuck in a belief or idea that is keeping you from seeing an opportunity clearly.  We need to remind ourselves often to remain open to new ideas, not be too quick to judge them and allow them the time to be considered so we don’t miss out on those opportunities for growth.

Here are a few key changes worth highlighting:

1.  Cover Photo – The cover photo takes up a large amount of space spanning the entire page.  Here you should choose a photo that supports your brand.  It is important to know that Facebook Covers may not display calls to action or references to Facebook Like or sales promotions, pricing or website URLs.

2.  Left Side Navigation – The navigation for page apps has moved to the right and below the cover photo with thumbnail photos above the text link.  Four of these apps are above the fold and one is default for Photos.  So, three of these four you can choice your apps. Pick your most important three. Unfortunately, this limits visibility for custom apps; contests, promotions, coupons, games, etc. since the default landing page for all users will be the Timeline page.  Users will need to click through to find additional apps.

3.  Messages – Messages can now be sent privately by users vs. posting on the public wall for all to see.  This can be a benefit if you don’t want certain comments visible.  You’ll need to determine a process internally to actively and timely respond to the Messages.  For some businesses, this may create a burden.  Try testing it for a few weeks to monitor the number of messages sent and your organization’s ability to manage it.

4.  Timeline Bar – To the right of the cover photo is a new timeline bar that allows users to view a brand’s history over the years.  It’s a great opportunity to highlight your favorite posts by you and your fans.

5.  Pinning – This feature will allow you to pin an important feature story, promotion or event and post it at the top of the timeline for seven days.

6.  Star a Story – You can also star a post to grab attention and highlight a story on your timeline.  When you star a story, it will expand the full width of the page.

The New Facebook Pages Brand Timeline by hearsay social.

Resources:

Introducing New Facebook Pages, Facebook website
Learn About Facebook Pages, Facebook video
How to Use Facebook Timeline for Brand Pages: New Feature Details, Josh Constine, Technology Writer, TechCrunch
Timeline for Brands:  How to Prepare for Your Company’s New Facebook Page, Jim Belosic, CEO Short Stack on Mashable
Facebook Timeline for Brands, the Complete Guide,  Christine Erikson on Mashable

For a new business with a unique product, sharing this basic yet key company information with potential customers is even more critical to build trust and a relationship with customers.

While this may seem pretty obvious to most of us, sometimes smaller organizations and start-ups feel the need and want to be different starting with the website.  For this organization, they have a unique, creative and non-traditional approach to funding charities.  Their website design and content reflects those attributes.  But, the important point is not to get so caught up in being creative or non-traditional that you forget about why you have a website in the first place, to provide information and to connect with your customer.

On this organization’s website, there is no tab or section that tells the story of how or why the organization got started, who the founders are or what is the mission.  A Join button is located on the home page that immediately opens to a window requesting customer contact information to join. There is no landing page to tell the customer why do business with them or in this case ‘join’ their cause. And because this organization has a new model in charity giving, it is important for potential customers to clearly understand how the giving of donations works, what is expected of them and what if any are the costs should be explained on the site before the call to action to join.

Understanding where customers are in the sales process and providing the right content for each stage in the sales cycle is also critical.  If you don’t provide the appropriate information, customers that are not yet ready to buy will leave.  Don’t ask for the sale too soon.  You’ve got to build trust first.

Start with the website. For the majority, it is still the first place they go to learn about a company.  Be creative in design and marketing on your website but, also include the information that customers need and want to know, who you are, what you are about and why they should do business with you.

People remember a good story.  Every business has one. If you think you don’t, take some time to remember why you started your business. What is your vision? What does your business stand for? What are your core values?  What do you want to be known for?  What are your customer successes?

By creating your story and consistently telling it again and again, your business develops a persona that customers identify. Story telling isn’t new.  In this day of sound bites, tag lines, and elevator pitches, telling a story may seem a bit long winded.  But, an effective narrative can tell a memorable story that has impact and matters more to your customers than advertising jargon.  Be truthful and authentic in your story and customers will develop trust in you and belief that you will deliver on your promise.

For the B2B Company:  A Great Story Can Rise Above the Noise

For B2B companies, customer successes are a great way to tell a story. How did your company help solve a problem for your customer or your industry? What did you do that sets you apart from the rest?  An employee success story can confirm your core values with customers and serve as a guide to employees in their decision making and interactions with customers to ensure consistent customer experiences.

Best Media to Tell Your Story

The best media to use when telling your story is always the one that most effectively reaches your customers and best fits your story.  Video is an important part of Cisco’s product offering so, it isn’t surprising that Cisco uses video for its story-telling and launched the Cisco YouTube channel in September 2011. Video is a powerful way for companies of any size, not only the largest, to reach and engage with customers as an alternative to standard text.

Businesses don’t make buying decisions.  People inside businesses make decisions.  Make the connection with them through your story.

Resources:

Name that Brand Story… by Rob Marsh, www.brandstoryonline.com
The Power of a Good Brand Story, Mark Thomson, the BrandChannel
The Importance of Story-Telling in Lead Nurturing,  Jeff Ogdon, Fearless Competitor
Are You Telling Your Brand Story, Steve Woodruff , Small Business Branding
Strategy:  Story’s More Powerful than the Brand, Tom Peters, You Tube