Inbound Marketing Automation is the Prizewinner
I watched a movie the other night called The Prize Winner of Defiance with Julianne Moore as the heroine, Evelyn Ryan, and Woody Harrelson as her alcoholic husband, Kelly.
It’s based on a book by Evelyn’s daughter, Terry Ryan, about how her mother supported her family by entering and winning advertising competitions back in the 50s.
It’s a good movie – worth seeing. But while watching it, I couldn’t help pondering how these competitions worked from a marketing point of view. The makers of B2C products back in the 50s understood that the best people to market their wares were the very people they hoped would buy them. Who could be better at understanding the issues faced by a prospect than the prospect herself? No sexism here – the entrants in these competitions were almost exclusively women and the products they touted were mostly aimed at women.
It’s a brilliant strategy but is there a way to replicate it for a B2B company using Inbound Marketing Automation? How would I, for example, persuade my next prospect to write and then sing a jingle about how wonderful life is now that she’s using Gossamar?
It dawned on me that we tend to think of Inbound replacing Outbound today because modern techniques are superior to older ones, right? But we sometimes get it very wrong. Witness Claude Hopkins who back in 1929 wrote his now famous little book called, Scientific Advertising. Its less than 60 pages are still the authority on how to write ad headings, illustrations, copy, the call to action, and most importantly, how to test it all. And about 20 years later along came these competitions. Just as I still refer to Claude’s book when creating a Landing Page, is there a way we could enlist the aid of our prospects to market our goods and services by running a competition?
Competitions motivate people to do things that they would ordinarily not do: sell more, work harder or more efficiently, or help you market your goods and services more effectively. To motivate people to do anything using a contest, we need to know:
1) The Rules – so that the competition can be run and judged fairly
2) The Goal – so that everyone knows what to do
3) The Prize – so everyone knows what the winner gets.
In a B2B setting, the key – more so than the prize – is the peer recognition the winner basks in. Winning a prize is all very well (and if you’re a poor housewife in Defiance, it may be all that puts milk on the table), but being acknowledged as a winner is much nicer. And being applauded by the other contestants for being the winner is even better. Look how well the Oscars works.
But, can we make this work for B2B companies?
Facebook’s Likes and Google +’s Plus 1s are a form of contest. The more you rack up these prospect awards, the more valuable your product/service/company appears to be to its prospects. Do they work for B2Bs? Usually not. This one kicks off the list only because it’s being done right now, albeit mostly by B2Cs, and even then, it seems only to work if the company bribes people to vote for its product: “Like us, and we’ll give you a free sample…”
But that was just a warm up. Returning to my list of what we need to know to run a competition, the rules are usually standard and easy to compile. The goal is your desired result – the entry which is judged as the winner will supply you with a “perfect” example of this result: a jingle, a slogan, or a business case or success story if you need more content. And the prize can be just about anything. Obviously valuable prizes attract more entrants, thereby raising the standard of competition to produce a better result. But the prize, to be perceived as having real value to the participant, must also elevate his or her position in their social and peer group standings. We must announce the winner in a public way, in the public spaces where our prospects hang out. We must ensure that the winner is warmed by the glow of peer recognition for as long as possible.
Applying this to Gossamar; we could hold a competition to find the marketer who can produce the best Case Study on switching from Marketing 1.0 to Inbound Marketing Automation. That would be our competition’s goal. We could award a prize of money, a dinner for two anywhere in your home city, or a vacation trip, say. And our rules will state that we’ll announce the winner in his or hometown newspapers, trade journals, marketing associations and, of course, in every social media platform we have access to. And we’d include YouTube clips of the hero receiving her prize, her memorable acceptance speech, etc., not forgetting to plug the hero’s Case Study organization while we’re at it. And in all of this, we’d stress the winner’s words and views because they are more likely to resonate with their peers than our own attempts. We’d be using one of our ideal prospect personas to promote our concept to other personas, right?
I’m not entirely sold on the concept for Gossamar, however. We ourselves might just be the best people to write this Case Study. When a technology is so new that its adoption curve is still below the knee of broad acceptance, the people who understand it best are the priesthood pitching it. We need more clients to have switched to Inbound Marketing Automation before their peers will understand and believe their stories. So a competition for a more established product/service may make more sense.
It could also be that the idea is flawed in the same way that the 50s competitions were. I don’t know what that was, but something must not have worked the way it was supposed to, or I suspect that these competitions would still be with us.
What do you think – could a competition work for you? I’d appreciate a comment below.
Bit-by-Bit # 57, from Eric.
