B2B marketing lessons from Jon Stewart
By Linda Forrest
Comedian/talk show host Jon Stewart recently established his Bartlett’s entry in his closing speech at the Rally to Restore Sanity when he said “If we amplify everything, we hear nothing.” We as B2B marketers can take good counsel in the core message of this quote, even if his intention was to calm the political diaspora in the increasingly bipartisan U.S., something quite removed from our day-to-day activities.
At its simplest, this quote, when assessed in a marketing context, signals the great importance of two things: 1. strategy and 2. messaging and positioning. The lessons that can be learned on both fronts can have significant impact on your bottom line.
On the strategy front, if you bombard the market on all channels with little concern for which modes of communication are most effective for which types of messages and in which formats, your marketing effort is less likely to be successful than if you target your efforts around specific activities that have been proven effective. It’s this last point that highlights the importance of measuring the efficacy of your marketing activities; if you don’t measure the impact of your actions, how do you know if they’re effective or not?
With the advent of new media, and its ongoing widespread adoption, B2B companies need to keep in mind the importance of strategy as they contemplate and deploy marketing messages using novel channels. Just because a channel like Facebook exists doesn’t mean that it’s right for your market insofar as being an effective marketing channel. There’s a lot of hooplah around social media; many people and organizations get swept up in the hype and engage on these channels without doing the proper analysis up front. We’ve written about the perils of leaping before you look with new media. New does not mean better. More does not mean better. If these marketing activities are not appropriate for your business, then select others that are. Evaluation of all of the channels available to you and then selection of the most effective – and those that will offer the most compelling ROI – is essential to marketing success.
As businesses build and maintain profile in their respective marketplaces, they need to be clear about what they’re bringing to the table. You cannot be all things to all people, or, in Stewart’s words, amplify everything. Rather, your messaging and your positioning in the market needs to be clear, the customer pain that you’re solving well communicated and your market-facing messages, whether on so-called new or traditional media channels, consistent.
As evidenced by how much people are talking about Stewart’s speech, words matter. Select them carefully and communicate clearly. Your business will benefit from your judicious choice of both the language you use to promote your company and the channels on which you communicate those messages.
