Another great article in Harvard Business Publishing, this one about leadership. It’s a good read for any executive: “Don’t Let Your Strength Become Your Weakness.”

The article made me think in marketing terms, as I tend to do. Companies must be careful that their marketing strengths are not taken to the extreme—until they become weaknesses.

Here’s what I mean:

• One of your strengths is the ability to focus on your target market. But don’t wear blinders that cause you to miss opportunities elsewhere.
• One of your strengths is nimbleness, the ability to quickly adjust to changing market conditions. But don’t lose your ability to stick to a plan you know is right.
• One of your strengths is marketing analysis and measurement. But don’t ignore the benefits of creative inspiration.

HubSpot is a company that offers a platform to manage “inbound marketing” efforts. Inbound as opposed to outbound, which means prospects contact you rather than you reaching out to them. Most inbound marketing is online marketing: search engines, links from blogs, and other social media.

I’m writing not to promote HubSpot—although I have recommended them to clients—but to use one of their videos as an example of effective video marketing. This one compares outbound tactic marketing tactics such as cold calling and direct mail to inbound tactics managed and measured by the HubSpot platform.

An entire value proposition presented in less then three minutes. Entertaining and memorable. (You might recognize the tune from Alanis Morissette.)

And it’s ethical … but only if you’re plagiarizing your company’s own content. Here’s what I mean: if you create good content, re-use it.

• Split a white paper into a number of blog entries
• Re-purpose a brochure as a web page
• Take a video of a company executive speaking at an industry event and put it on your Web site

Re-using good content not only saves time, it helps you maintain consistency in your company’s message and brand.

Below is an example. I wrote the following paragraph for a client white paper about marketing planning during the late stages of an economic downturn:

The important question during a downturn isn’t whether or not the economy will recover. It will; it always does. What’s important to ask is whether your company will be in position to surge as the economy begins to grow. To a large degree, the level of your success will depend on your marketing efforts and capabilities—what you have done during the downturn and what you put in place now to win business during the recovery.

This one paragraph has since appeared in a white paper, a promotional email, an article written by a company executive, a presentation script, and a marketing planning kit.

Okay, so maybe the headline to this article “Plagiarism Saves Time” is a shameless hook, but the point remains the same. And I couldn’t use the tired cliche about “not re-inventing the wheel.”

Social media such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Blogs and YouTube can help provide links and content that improve SEO rankings. Social media also can get your company name out there to build brand awareness and visibility. And there are some metrics you can measure with social media: subscribers to your blog or the number of comments on a blog entry, the views of a video, your company fans on Facebook, etc.

But the real business benefit of social media is something called “likeability.” Social media offers your business an opportunity to showcase its people, rather than just its product or services. And in any business, people prefer to buy from people they like. If you use social media to help foster positive relationships, and your fans and followers begin to like you, they will be more inclined to do business with you.

They will like you because you are helpful to them, providing useful and relevant information. They will like you because you can show them a human personality-a face in a video, an opinion in a blog entry, a commitment to a green cause on your Facebook page-that a standard Web site cannot. These softer, social touches can go a long way when potential customers, who have many choices, are deciding which company they want to do business with.

It’s probably unrealistic to get rid of all your bullet points in PowerPoint, but the idea is to make your slides more visual and less text-heavy. The presenter speaks the words, the screen reinforces the key points using visuals, the audience understands and remembers.

PowerPoint is one of the most abused pieces of software. And giving a good presentation is a skill that must be practiced and mastered. Don’t just take my word for it. Here’s a couple of good articles from CIO Magazine:

• About what makes Steve Jobs a greater presenter (although he doesn’t use PowerPoint).
• Examples of PowerPoint “Trainwrecks” - some of the worst slides ever created.

One reason why the slides of presentations often are weak is that they are created to do double duty: first as the visual support for a live presentation, and second as a handout (i.e. outline)  given to the audience. Keeping these two functions separate can help a presenter create more visually supportive slides for a presentation. It’s more work to create both visual aids and an outline, but your audience will be better served—and you’ll be more effective as a presenter.

Dear Dave:

My company is considering using a cold call campaign to help generate leads. But it seems that everyone is so busy and also using Caller ID, and no one answers their phone these days. Can cold calling still work?

Signed,

In the Dark about Cold Calling

Dear In the Dark:

The name alone gives me the chills and I can’t say I look forward to receiving many cold calls. That said, cold calling still has a place in an integrated marketing strategy that includes multiple ways to touch your prospects.

Two important elements of success for cold calling: call on the right people and have something relevant to say.

Rather than purchase a list of names and phone numbers, use a list that already has relevance to your business and offerings. A good place to start is with an attendee list of an event where you are an exhibitor or sponsor. Or if you partner with companies that offer complimentary solutions to yours, consider trading lists with them. This way, the person you are calling may already be experiencing the business problem you’re offering to solve—and you have a natural opening. “We’ll both be at …” or “You already work with Company X, one of our partners.”

Next, rather than thinking of trying to sell someone your product or solution, simply try to begin a relevant conversation. If you get your target on the phone, offer insight about industry trends or how companies similar to the one you’re calling on are solving specific business problems. If you get voice mail, leave a brief and insightful message. You’re not going to sell anything on a single cold call, but you might be able to begin a nurturing business relationship that will lead to dividends down the road.

For Klein Marketing, I’m Dave

What is your company doing to prepare for the economic recovery? Klein Marketing recently worked with GlobalSpec, an engineering search engine and media company, to develop a white paper encouraging its customers and prospects to take action now. Waiting too long can put you behind competitors.

From the white paper …

The important question during a downturn isn’t whether or not the economy will recover-it will; it always does. The important question is whether your company will be in position to surge when the economy begins to grow again. To a large degree, the level of your success will depend on your marketing efforts and capabilities: what you have done during the downturn and what you put in place now to win business during the recovery. You will need to make strategic decisions about choosing new media, entering new markets, and positioning products.

Success will also depend on the timing of your efforts. Now is the time to establish marketing plans for the recovery-formulate strategies, design campaigns, make media choices, justify expenditures-so you are ready to go with an approved marketing plan when your company’s budgets open up and you have marketing funds to invest.

The white paper will be promoted via email to all of GlobalSpec’s customers and prospects. It will be featured in an article in their monthly Marketing Maven newsletter, and posted to the company’s blog. Link to white paper.

You should be well underway with developing a marketing budget and plan for 2010. If you wait much longer, your marketing efforts will be delayed and you could miss out on a strong start to a new year.

Consider what typically goes into a marketing cycle:

1. Establish marketing strategy
2. Identify marketing objectives
3. Define target audience
4. Research media options
5. Conceive campaigns
6. Calculate costs
7. Craft messaging
8. Gain executive endorsement and marketing funds
9. Execute campaigns
10. Measure effectiveness
11. Refine tactics

That’s a lot of work. And steps 1-8 all need to be completed before you gain any market presence.

Build Your Marketing Budget

We all know budgets can shift at any time, but you need to establish a marketing budget for 2010 to be used as a guide for your initial investments. Many managers struggle with developing a marketing budget because there is no single right way to do it.

Here are three methods that can work:

• Use the current year’s budget as a guideline and adjust up or down based on changes in strategy and results of last year’s programs.
• Allocate a percentage of expected revenue to marketing. This percentage can vary widely, depending on how well established you are in your target markets and whether you are planning to go after new markets or customer segments. Typical B2B marketing budgets are often between 4-8% of revenue. Model several different revenue scenarios, such as best case, likely case and worst case, and build a marketing plan for each scenario.
• Build your budget from the ground up based on your marketing strategy and objectives. This is the hardest route to go, yet also the purest. It also delivers a budget that is way above what you will actually spend. You’ll have to make intelligent decisions about where to cut.

I sound like a broken record (not that anyone still has records) when I endlessly implore companies to focus their marketing on a few core initiatives where they have the greatest chance of success.

For any manager having trouble focusing, I recommend this recent article in Harvard Business Publishing: “The Key to Effectiveness? Focus” — and in particular this passage:

One of the tough truths of management is that we all have trouble making choices. While older and supposedly wiser, we still often act like kids in the candy store who want everything. So we go after too many markets and too many demographics with too many products.

One of the reasons some companies lack focus is because they lack the courage and culture to make difficult choices. Managers pride themselves on multi-tasking; fiddling with smart phones during meetings is accepted practice, almost a badge signifying the user’s importance. And there’s a daring feel to the concept of throwing a horde of ideas out there and waiting to find out what sticks, or juggling a bunch of balls and seeing which ones stay up. Until it all crashes.

There are very few success stories from the ranks of companies spreading themselves too thin or trying to be all things to all customers. There are plenty of success stories from companies that focus.

Most companies engage in some form of email marketing, with e-newsletters at the top of the list. But too often companies start out with a bang and end with a whimper.

The e-newsletter momentum often lasts for six months or a year. Then the schedule starts to slip. There’s nothing fresh to write about. The people managing the e-newsletter have other, more pressing demands on their time. The e-newsletter was a group effort of the marketing department and no single person is accountable.

And so the e-newsletter slowly dies.

What’s the best thing to do? Start over.

It’s smart to do a quick autopsy on the dead e-newsletter, but I’ve already described what happens in almost every case: lack of fresh content, lack of accountability, lack of project management. Often these symptoms come back to lack of a marketing objective, which is the first question to address when starting over. Here are others:

1. What is the main objective of having an e-newsletter? Is it to educate your audience, raise brand awareness, generate leads and sales, establish your organization as an industry leader? You likely have more than one objective. Prioritize them. This will guide all other decisions.
2. Is an e-newsletter the best way to achieve your objectives? There are other ways to communicate with your audience. You can write a blog and feed it your audience via RSS or email. You can distribute a printed newsletter. You can simply update your Web site (if your audience regularly visits). You can record podcasts. Which tactic will best meet your objectives?
3. How often will you publish your e-newsletter? This is where many companies fail. They set an aggressive publishing schedule and then can’t meet it. There is no single right answer to the frequency question. Stick to what you say you will do, and deliver only information your audience is interested in. It’s better to start modest and grow strong than to be aggressive and later limp away.
4. Do you have the resources to generate content and produce the e-newsletter? Someone has to be in charge of the e-newsletter. The best candidate is an editor who can create content, find content, and wring content out of people in your organization who have expertise or knowledge that’s of interest to your audience. The e-newsletter manager must develop an editorial schedule; conduct an editorial meeting to kick off each e-newsletter cycle; and manage the production, lists, sending and tracking.

Did your old e-newsletter die? Grieve not, but learn from your mistakes. You can have a new e-newsletter. A better one.