If you are an avid reader of The B2B Lead, you know that we are all about targeted marketing, specifically targeted lead generation. And I have said before that having a targeted blog can support lead generation better because it is focused on a specific audience so targeted messaging will resonate better. I recently created a mission statement for The B2B Lead to help focus our blogs to topics most relevant to our customers and prospects as well as in line with our in house expertise. Our mission is to share B2B Marketing best practice ideas and tips with our customers and prospects - enabling them to drive the most ROI possible from their lead generation initiatives.

There are lots of good examples of good mission statements out there that have driven a company to success. Southwest began as the low cost airline; every decision they made came back to that mission. Herb Kelleher would not have implemented any new program unless it helped Southwest to be THE low cost airline. It seems to have worked. Southwest does have a new mission statement these days and is the driving factor that helps keep them successful even when most other airlines are failing.

Once I created the mission statement I was able to sit down and create a list of more focused topics. This helps keep our whole team of bloggers on task and hopefully will help us to create more relevant content to help our fellow B2B Marketers drive increased results from their lead generation initiatives.

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Continuing your relationship with your current customers is always a challenge. In today’s online world there are many more options for B2B Marketers to stay connected to their customers like through social networks and online communities. At ReachForce, we decided to mix a little old school with some new school and start a book club with a twist. Instead of meeting at a local coffee shop to discuss the book, we will be discussing it here on The B2B Lead. If you are a ReachForce customer, you should expect to receive our first book soon, if not already. If you are not a customer, click here for an online discount.

Our first book is The Marketing Gurus - Lessons from the Best Marketing Books of all Time. It is a “best of” collection of Marketing books from the past 15 years. Each week, Leigh Anne and I will share our perspectives to get the conversation started but will rely on you to join in to share your thoughts, opinions and ideas. We will begin the conversation next week in order to give everyone a little time to get started. Next week we’ll be reading and chatting about chapters 1 & 2.

Happy reading!

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When I was in college (far too many years ago) we learned about the 4 P’s of Marketing. Of course, in just the last few years, we’ve seen a major shift in thinking about the 3rd P – promotion. We no longer accept the notion that 2% returns on direct mail or 0% responses from print advertising are smart Marketing. Instead, we are laser targeting our messages to audiences and using social marketing to build a following of like minded customers.

With increasing interest in the power of communities, we now have the 6 C’s of Social Influence Marketing thanks to Dave Friedman, president of the central region for Avenue A | Razorfish. In today’s post, I’ve shared some of Friedman’s very timely advice on making social marketing and communities work.

You see, I’ve had some very interesting discussions of late on how to design and “position” a community. It boils down to “can you really design and position a community or will the community itself determine what it becomes?” We’ve decided to let the BreakingPoint community define itself. Stay tuned for the big launch announcement and see how this works for us.

In the mean time, here is what Friedman has to say courtesy of Chief Marketer Report.

1.Content: Access to valuable tools and content is a key factor in a consumer’s decision to interact with a brand. Regardless of their goals, brands need to think about customizing bite-sized, portable content or experiences for their most prominent target segments—content that their “friends” would be proud to display, share, or support.

Sound familiar? This was the focus of The B2B Lead – snack size educational nuggets.

2.Customization: Users crave the ability to customize, post and share content. On social networks like MySpace or Facebook, users define themselves through their personalized profile pages and the elements that they choose to display. Marketers need to empower consumers to express themselves.

3.Community: The adage “build it and they will come” is not applicable here. To build community within social media campaigns, brands need to achieve several things: Give users a reason to interact with your brand frequently by providing unique content, value or engagement. Let your content travel by distributing it across widgets and other mechanisms beyond your Web site.

Get the rest of the 6 Cs Or, check out Joseph Jaffe’s version at www.jaffejuice.com.

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So, I’ve been asked to speak at the upcoming MarketingProfs Business-to-Business Forum. The topic – “Webinars in a Web 2.0 World.” At first, I thought: Wow, how do you make Webinars interesting to a marketing audience today with social media and viral marketing all the rage?

I mean, there hasn’t been much innovation happening with Webinars. They seem to be moderately effective at driving revenue but actual attendance rates have been dropping overall with the emergence of more immediate forms of education such as Video tutorials and podcasts. However, they are more effective, in my experience, than simply relying on a Podcast or a pre-recorded tutorial. Not actually sure why that would be the case?

And, then I thought about how we were using Webinars as a community building tool at NetQoS. Perhaps the attendees haven’t thought about webinars as a community building opportunity? In my experience, it seems that most Marketers are using a “hit and run” approach to Webinars. They pour tons of money into recruiting an audience and paying Webex to broadcast the event. Then, they grumble when only 40% of the registrants actually show up. And, finally, they turn over the attendee list to Sales for followup.

What a waste! If you are going to pour so much time and effort into attracting an audience of like-minds to attend your event, why not funnel those potential prospects into a Community where they can find educational content in a variety of formats and begin to build a relationship with them? That’s the only real way to make Webinars pay off in the long run.

I’ll be sharing the techniques we used at NetQoS to do just that at the MarketingProfs conference. The event will also focus on topics like B2B lead generation, conversion, retention, ROI and measurement, new technologies, integrated marketing - and much more. If that interests you, I recommend you sign up to attend. They are even throwing in a new research report on “BtoB Sales Lead Generation: Integration of Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 Media. Register and it is yours for free.

See ya in Boston in June.

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Marketing’s number one job should be lead generation with measurable impact to top-line revenue, right? I bet that’s what most CEOs and Sales Executives would say. So why do other departments still think of us as the ones who order the t-shirts and go to cool events? And these are the nice comments made, ask a few sales guys what they think of marketing and I’m sure you’ll get a variety of not so nice answers.

According to the CMO Council, 38% of CMOs say that aligning and integrating sales and marketing is a top priority this year. But, only 30% have a clear process or program to make this priority a reality. I think the real question here is - why is it only a priority for 38%?

For Marketing to have a clear impact on revenue, they must be aligned with Sales. I believe there are three important factors for healthy Marketing and Sales alignment:

1. Marketing’s goals (and bonuses) are tied to the same goals as Sales – e.g. bookings and new customers acquired
2. Clear definition of a lead and when leads should be passed to Sales
3. A closed loop process that allows Sales teams to push leads not ready for Sales back to Marketing for ongoing nurture programs.

When Sales and Marketing share the same goals, they have to work together. Neither will be successful if they do not communicate openly and collaborate to reach their goals. The breakdown typically starts with the definition if a lead. With Sales constantly asking for more leads, it is no wonder that many Marketers are forced to get new contacts any way they can (website registrations, event attendees or just buying a list) and then just throw them over the wall to Sales. More is better, right? Not necessarily in this case. Instead, Marketers should warm all new contacts through an email, direct mail or webinar campaign to gauge their “sales readiness”. This enables Sales to focus on only the warm/hot leads while Marketing continues to educate those that aren’t ready to buy just yet. Through this process Marketing should also be able to weed out companies and contacts that are not a fit for the business allowing for more productivity and efficiency on your sales team.

The ideal scenario is to build a funnel together with Sales and define the stages of it and the specific hand-off point of a lead – a unified funnel is the ONLY approach to creating a win-win for the business.

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User group conferences are expensive and time consuming but are the best way to have your customers network with each other and for you to get real face time with them to update them on new products and features and gather input on where you should be headed next. I was speaking with a colleague about her user group conference. She has managed them in the past but wanted a better way to stay connected with customers after the conference. Her boss wanted her to create an online community because social media is so hot right now. However, an online community didn’t seem like a right fit because her customers wanted real answers for executives not just responses from whoever in client services happened to be monitoring the discussion boards that day.

I recommended that she continues to hold events throughout the year but to instead make them virtual. As part of the goody bags at the user group conference she could give everyone a web cam. Then, once a quarter, she could organize a live virtual conference on Skype (if Oprah can get housewives to use it, you can get executives to). Users may not be able to interact with each other as much, but an executive could be on hand to make announcements and answer questions. Now I am a firm believer in pushing your message through as many media as possible because everyone’s preferences are different. After the live web conference, she could turn the highlights into a webcast for those who couldn’t make it and send a newsletter with updates as well. That way people can digest the information in their own way.

The point here is that no matter what you do to stay in touch with your customers, do something. We learn in school the importance of keeping our current customers, “It is easier to keep a current customer than to gain a new one.” Somewhere along the way acquiring new business became the focus and we forgot that our current customers are our gold.

As a footnote, I have not executed a campaign such as this one. This was truly an idea I had in the moment when my colleague told me about her dilemma. I would love to hear from anyone out there who has done something similar!

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Now this has some really exciting possibilities. And, a low, low price tag. Check out Flogos, floating ads and messages generated by re-purposed artificial snow machines. The machines can pop one Flogo out every 15 seconds, flooding the air with foamy peace signs or whatever shape a client desires. Renting the machine for a day starts out at a cost of about $2,500.

Even better, it’s environmentally friendly as the material is derived from plants.

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While I’ve been deep in debate about Twitter as an effective B2B marketing or community building tool, one Twitter user just used it to save his life. According to CNN:

“Buck, a graduate student from the University of California-Berkeley, was in Mahalla, Egypt, covering an anti-government protest when he and his translator Mohammed Maree were arrested April 10. On his way to the police station, Buck took out his cell phone and sent a message to his friends and contacts using the micro-blogging site Twitter. The message only had one word. “Arrested.”

Within seconds, colleagues in the United States and his blogger-friends in Egypt — the same ones who had taught him the tool only a week earlier — were alerted he was being held. “

Amazing.

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As a long time B2B Marketer I know I typically have to “touch” a lead 5 to 6 times before they become a prospect in my sales funnel. With that in mind, I am using multiple tactics to get suspects to raise their hand. I have a feeling direct mail is on the comeback so we are about to give it a try again. Yes, it’s still expensive and postage rates are still going up but with email boxes being filled up with spam, suspects may be more likely to act if we can figure out how to stand out in the crowd.

As Marketers, when we start to build out a campaign we spend time on the WHAT we are going to deliver, the HOW we are going to deliver our message and the WHEN the program is going to go out but when it comes to the WHO, we haven’t had many options. Our choices were either an in-house database (how old and accurate is this data really?) or to rent data from a title-based list broker. And do we know who these people are or how these names were really acquired?

So as we get ready to build out a direct mail program I’m reminded of a tragic story one of our customers told us. They had a total budget of $100,000 for a direct mail campaign. This was going to be the program of the quarter and they were very anxious to get it out the door so the responders would start rolling in. Of their total budget, they spent $5,000 on the WHO they were trying to reach. The rest of the money went to creating an elaborate piece with “exactly the right messaging”, an attractive call to action and web components for tracking. They felt good about the program and believed the number of responses would justify the cost. They dropped the piece, then waited and waited and waited. Not only did they not get the overwhelming number of responses, they only got one. Now that’s one expensive lead if you ask me.

Obviously when creating a direct mail campaign we need to create a compelling piece with a strong call to action. But the WHO is where a lot of B2B Marketers go wrong. The most successful campaigns, direct mail or otherwise, are those that are targeted at the right people in the right companies. So how do you decide what the right WHO looks like? Here’s what I’m doing –

To find the right businesses, I go straight to my sales pipeline and recent customer wins. I’m looking for where we are winning and what kinds of companies are moving through the funnel the fastest. Then I build out an initial database of other companies that match this profile. Now that I’ve identified the right companies to go after, I’m just left with finding the right contacts for my message. Lucky me, we’re in the business of building custom role based contact databases for lead generation initiatives. So I use our own role-based contact discovery service to find the right decision makers within those target companies. By paying a little more attention to WHO I’m targeting, I feel confident my upcoming direct mail campaign is going to deliver.

Just in case you’re wondering, the person who was responsible for the $100K campaign lost their job. And the person that took their place now uses ReachForce to help keep their job.

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Written by guest blogger, Kyle Flaherty of www.engageinpr.com

Messaging is critical to how you communicate your benefits and your product to your audience. Your messaging follows you throughout your communication and no place is it more applicable than your main website. This is the spot where your prospects must make a fairly immediate decision whether to stick around and gather some more info (and hopefully make a purchase). When you find the proper messaging you will ultimately be able to provide customers, partners, media, analysts and even internal owners your core value proposition:

• Who are you?
• What do you stand for today?
• Tomorrow?
• How do you explain your main benefits?

Your first step to consistent and powerful messaging is to have your internal and external constituents answer the above questions. If done properly you’ll have a tremendous amount of data. In a recent scenario at my last gig, we were able to gather information from more than 1,500 survey responses from users, partners, executives and investors. Often you simply comb through all the data and make various hypothesis based on a thorough scrub of the data. It is great to have so much data, but with too much data comes the fear that we won’t be able to get to the core of what people actually thought of the company and its solution. Also, we would need hundreds of hours to sort through it all properly.

One thing we have noticed as we sifted through data were the patterns in the answers that were receiving. The ability to quickly view these patterns is critical to discovering how your audience views your company and your product, thus starting to form the messaging that will most resonate with prospects. The most simple and effective way for you to visualize the patterns of your data is to create a tag cloud. A tag cloud will help represent the words that appear the most; the larger the font the more that word appeared in the results. Very quickly you will see if your prospects will respond more to particular words and phrases. Fortunately there is the ability to automate tagclouds using tools such as TagCrowd, which allow you to input data and create a tag cloud; this could be a URL, a file or just paste in the text to be visualized. It then gives you options for how many tags to show, ignore common words (‘and’, ‘the’, etc), grouping of similar words (innovate, innovation, innovating) and whether you want to show the amount of times each word appears. You can then grab the HTML or take a screen grab and you have a great visual way to demonstrate data.

Reviewing these tag clouds is highly effective and can lead you to terrific conversations about your company and your final messaging…which of course is the goal. But the power of the tag cloud goes beyond simply helping to create the proper messaging. Use it to visualize what each of the pages of your site actually say about you, critical for SEO/SEM, but also to determine if you are actually saying what you mean to say. It can be surprising to find out that not only are the words you are using on your homepage not resonating directly with your prospects, but often we are using hypocritical verbiage. The same can be done for any marketing campaign you are gearing up to drive leads. Just remember you may not be saying what you think you’re saying.

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