Allocating Your Marketing Budget. New HRmarketer E-Book Provides Guidance.

HRmarketer released a new e-book! It's titled The Right Mix: A B2B Marketing Allocation Guide for 2011 (no registration required - just download it).

A lot of things change in marketing from year-to-year.

The buying process isn't one of them.

The buying process - or purchase continuum - refers to the stages people progress through from problem recognition (awareness) to the purchase of a product or service.

And contrary to some of the jokes I hear, human resource professionals are people............. so yes, they also go through this buying process when evaluating and purchasing new HR products.

There are many variations but the one we will use as the model is:

Awareness | Interest | Information Search & Evaluation | Purchase |Post Purchase Evaluation

It is the one guaranteed constant in marketing. It does not change and as a marketer you can take great comfort in knowing that.

What's not so comforting is deciding how to allocate your marketing budget. This is quite complex and changes all the time. This decision used to be fairly simple because we had fewer options.

Then came the Internet.

Then came social media.

The number of marketing tactics has exploded. But our budgets, as a percent of revenue, have remained the same at best.

And herein lies the challenge. Less money, more spending options.

So how do we select the right marketing tactics? And once we’ve made our selections, how do we decide what amount of money and resources to dedicate to each of those tactics?

That’s the focus of the new e-book: The Right Mix: A B2B Marketing Allocation Guide for 2011.

And how does all this tie into the buying process?

When deciding which tactics fit into your marketing plan and how much money and resources to allocate to each, it helps to understand what part of the buying process the tactic impacts.

This is really interesting stuff.

You cannot force people to change their behavior and quickly jump from awareness to purchase. But you can facilitate behavior change by building awareness, informing and educating, and establishing trust and credibility. This leads to meaningful conversations and, eventually, sales.

Most marketing fails because of bottlenecks that occur along the purchasing process. We call this the “clogged artery” effect. And most bottlenecks occur because of inadequate funding of marketing tactics that support the flow of buyers along the buying process.

We touch on a lot of other related subjects in the e-book. The chapters are:

• The Marketing Process
• The Buying Process
• The B2B Buyer vs. B2C Buyer
• Common B2B Marketing Tactics and Their Roles in the Buying Process
  
• The Right Mix: Putting it All Together
• Don’t Over-Analyze!

Download it today. You can also watch this brief video introduction of the e-book.



I can promise you one thing - this e-book will get you thinking. And that's the intent.

Enjoy!

Post by HRmarketer CEO Mark Willaman. Join Mark on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Distractions just... well, distract me!!

I was speaking to someone recently who consults on getting your life back. I don’t mean from the brink of self-destruction, but from being absolutely and totally overwhelmed with the business of your day. Emails, phone calls, mail (yes the old fashioned kind), texts, twitter, blog feeds, news feeds, people walking in your door, beepers, instant messages, meeting reminders….. GAHHH – stop!

I find that often I see so much information that I know will provide me with great information, help me to build my knowledge around a certain topic (mainly HR and the various plethora of topics therein AND Social Media and marketing) and to help me understand what I should know. White papers, research papers, blogs, publications, eNewsletters, surveys, opinions and oh so much. How do you handle the onslaught of the information? Coming at me from so many different ways.

But there are ways to handle being overwhelmed –

1/ TweetDeck is great for handling the “noise and news” of Twitter.

2/ Getting a feed from the business wire services every morning to my selected topics of press releases.

3/ RSS feeds for all of my fav blogs.

4/ Google Alerts (of course)

5/ Closing out my inbox for 1 hour a day to try to focus on those jobs that need more than 2 minutes to do.

6/ Blocking off time in my calendar.

7/ Closing my door – tight!

8/ There must be more but I am too distracted to think of them (this blog took 4 days to write)

Every 6 months or so, HRmarketer.com organizes an event in the Boston area for C-level leaders of HCM providers, and it is hosted at various companies in the area. We bring in a presentation that will help this group of people to get better at their jobs – to make them better C-Levellers and leaders. Our next event on March 22^nd will have speaker Paul Burton, author of “Surfing the Tsunami! Tips for Staying in Command of your Day”. He will come and spend 1 ½ hours with the group and help them to 1/ Distinguish between activity and productivity and focusing on productive behaviors. 2/ Increasing high-touch activities rather than hard touch activities. 3/ Learning effective ways to guide people versus direct them.

Help me ride that Tsunami Paul - I am going to be listening.

I know I am not standing on this island all alone on this one – there are many of you out there – I have seen you - the ones with the crazed, frazzled looks on their faces. You are out there.